M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French
| Message 1 of 85 11 December 2010 at 2:04am | IP Logged |
Ok, let's say that you've just found the wonderful oil lamp - and out comes the genie who gives you the following offering:
You get the chance to change one single aspect of any language. Just say a word and the language will change. Tomorrow, every user of the language will accept your change and start to use it straightaway.
So what would you change? Maybe you just choose to remove the Russian instrumental case altogether, decide that the word "cheese" should be spelled as "ˈchēz" or decide that Japanese only should use romaji (but if you change that, you will certainly upset me!! ;).
Lol. This topic is almost a little bit offensive to me when I think about it.. So what would you change? :)
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leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog
| Message 2 of 85 11 December 2010 at 2:12am | IP Logged |
English orthography.
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delta910 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5876 days ago 267 posts - 313 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, German
| Message 3 of 85 11 December 2010 at 2:14am | IP Logged |
I second that.
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hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe
| Message 4 of 85 11 December 2010 at 2:22am | IP Logged |
aɪ θərd ðæt.
R.
==
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justberta Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5586 days ago 140 posts - 170 votes Speaks: English, Norwegian* Studies: Indonesian, German, Spanish, Russian
| Message 5 of 85 11 December 2010 at 2:51am | IP Logged |
I'd change the written part of Norwegian called Bokmaal to Nynorsk.
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Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish
| Message 6 of 85 11 December 2010 at 3:40am | IP Logged |
I'd like to remove all recent English loanwords (i.e. those borrowed in the last 30
years) from all the languages I'm studying.
Or perhaps I'd wish for speakers of other Germanic languages to stop speaking good
English so the world (especially me) would have more incentive to learn their languages
;)
Honestly, there's no single feature of a language I'd want to change, because every
linguistic development - and especially those that are exotic and difficult for me as
an
English speaker - can give me insight into the capabilities and the workings of the
human
mind. I appreciate this diversity and wouldn't wish to make the world's languages more homogeneous.
Edited by Lucky Charms on 11 December 2010 at 3:40am
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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 8 of 85 11 December 2010 at 4:53am | IP Logged |
I wood aulso probbably chainge Inglish orthografy. Nuthing too drastic, but certanly the rules cood be made mor consistent without completely destroying readabillity, etymollogy, or the abillity to reccognize cognates in forren langwages.
Edited by Levi on 11 December 2010 at 4:55am
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