Préposition Diglot Senior Member France aspectualpairs.wordp Joined 5115 days ago 186 posts - 283 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Swedish, Arabic (Levantine)
| Message 17 of 85 11 December 2010 at 12:09pm | IP Logged |
I'd eliminate aspects in Russian. In Arabic, I'd quite like to have only real vowels, and get rid of those ridiculous diacritics and silly case endings. And the bloody dual.
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Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian
| Message 18 of 85 11 December 2010 at 12:36pm | IP Logged |
One more thing: it would be nice if Italian marked all irregularly stressed syllables rather than only word-final ones.
Okay, two more things. The Japanese katakana ン and ソ are too similar to each other, in my opinion.
Edited by Levi on 11 December 2010 at 12:42pm
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getreallanguage Diglot Senior Member Argentina youtube.com/getreall Joined 5472 days ago 240 posts - 371 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian, Dutch
| Message 19 of 85 11 December 2010 at 1:50pm | IP Logged |
It's remarkable how many people mentioned English spelling. In my experience, English spelling is no picnic, but causes greater pains for native speakers than it ever does for learners of English as a foreign language. (I noticed that every person mentioning this aspect of English in this thread so far happened to be a native speaker.) Me, I quite like the Webster (American) spelling standard, and have gotten quite used to it.
If I may do a little guessing, I would guess my students (I teach English as a foreign language) would leave the spelling alone and eliminate the marking suffix from the third person singular verb.
As for me, honestly, I wouldn't change anything in any language. Even though I prefer the American standard, I think it's kind of cute that English has more than one spelling standard. And the great diversity in the spoken language makes English a lot richer and more interesting.
As for Spanish spelling, many native speakers have their bugbears about it. I personally think it's fine. If anything, it's gotten slightly simpler in recent years. I actually like our use of tildes (diacritic/acute accents). I'm sure a lot of native speakers would like to get rid of those.
Edited by getreallanguage on 11 December 2010 at 1:56pm
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map
| Message 20 of 85 11 December 2010 at 4:47pm | IP Logged |
Ay wud also want a better englisj ortOgrafy. But ay dowt ðat ðe Anglofoonz kan agrii upon witsj dayalekt it shud represent. Wii majt get a töutal kaos. Or wii majt get pjur holiwudyan.
An pliiz döunt kill off Nju Norwedyan an Spanish - ay like ðöuse tuu motsj
Edited by Iversen on 12 December 2010 at 12:29pm
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QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5856 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese
| Message 21 of 85 11 December 2010 at 8:17pm | IP Logged |
I would like Chinese to have a case system. Chinese characters should decline according
to their grammatical purposes: verbs should conjugate, nouns and adjectives should
reflect their grammatical position and after prepositions. In the spoken language,
infection is shown through the different ways a character is pronounced in different
dialects. For example:
Mandarin: Nominative case
Cantonese: Accusative case
Shanghainese: Dative case
Hakka: genitive case
etc.
I believe this will unify the Chinese languages without losing any dialects. It will
also end the nonsensical debate between dialects of the Chinese language.
Edited by QiuJP on 11 December 2010 at 8:18pm
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Liface Triglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Lif Joined 5859 days ago 150 posts - 237 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Dutch, French
| Message 22 of 85 11 December 2010 at 9:02pm | IP Logged |
No noun gender in ANY language. Especially German.
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furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian
| Message 23 of 85 11 December 2010 at 9:30pm | IP Logged |
Make Latin more regular.
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LauraM Pro Member United States Joined 5353 days ago 77 posts - 97 votes Studies: German Personal Language Map
| Message 24 of 85 11 December 2010 at 9:56pm | IP Logged |
Liface wrote:
No noun gender in ANY language. Especially German. |
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DITTO.
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