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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 49 of 85
12 December 2010 at 8:19pm | IP Logged 
I'm a bit surprised at the amount of people who would change a language to make it harder and more confusing. Why?
4 persons have voted this message useful



chucknorrisman
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5449 days ago

321 posts - 435 votes 
Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish
Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French

 
 Message 50 of 85
12 December 2010 at 8:24pm | IP Logged 
Siberiano wrote:
kyssäkaali wrote:
This is an example of how I would not want the orthography to be changed. Looks terrible. While I feel a lot of people would disagree with me, I believe English needs a massive amount of diacritics and every vowel should be represented by its own letter, not by combining two random characters.

Гайз, старт юзынг Сайрылык, ѳэ проблэм ўылл дысаппиар.

I've always thought the first syllable of "Cyrillic" was pronounced with an "i" instead of an "ai".
3 persons have voted this message useful



ellasevia
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2011
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 6143 days ago

2150 posts - 3229 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian
Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian

 
 Message 51 of 85
12 December 2010 at 9:32pm | IP Logged 
Liface wrote:
I'm a bit surprised at the amount of people who would change a language to make it harder and more confusing. Why?


Because it makes them far more fun and interesting to study! I lose my interest for easier languages a lot quicker--part of the reason I seem to never be able to stick with Esperanto.

Edited by ellasevia on 12 December 2010 at 9:33pm

4 persons have voted this message useful



Segata
Triglot
Groupie
Germany
Joined 5172 days ago

64 posts - 125 votes 
Speaks: German*, Japanese, English
Studies: Korean, Esperanto

 
 Message 52 of 85
12 December 2010 at 9:36pm | IP Logged 
LauraM wrote:
MORE genders in other languages???
Wirklich??? Aber warum?! LOL

I like a good challenge. ;)
Also, at least as far as I'm concerned, I value beauty more than efficiency when it comes to languages. And don't you think that in a way complexity equals beauty? ;)
3 persons have voted this message useful



getreallanguage
Diglot
Senior Member
Argentina
youtube.com/getreall
Joined 5472 days ago

240 posts - 371 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, English
Studies: Italian, Dutch

 
 Message 53 of 85
12 December 2010 at 10:57pm | IP Logged 
ellasevia wrote:
getreallanguage wrote:
Standard English already has such a thing as a gender neutral pronoun for the third person singular. It's called the 'singular they'. Ever since I found out about it I've been happily using it. It's a lot shorter and nicer than having to say 'he or she', when you want to be all gender neutral about it.

As for a 'plural you' distinct from 'singular you', nonstandard American English has many distinct forms for 'plural you'. Examples include y'all, you all, y'alls, all y'all, yous, yinz and you guys, the latter of which seems to be steadily becoming standard, at least in less formal speech. I've even heard 'you guys' on Fox News, from an editorialist with his own daily evening show. Those are examples of Subject/Object forms of these pronouns. Some of these also have their own distinct possessive forms. Isn't American English fun?

Is that really standard English? I was always told that using the 'singular they' was informal and not correct English... That doesn't keep me from using it everyday though.

For those words for a 'plural you,' the only ones that I've ever heard with any commonness are "you guys" and "y'all." The former sounds okay to me, and I probably use it myself sometimes, but the latter sounds horribly dialectal (even within American English) and annoying, as do the others on that list.


As far as I'm concerned 'singular they' is absolutely standard, at least in American English. I've seen it used in all sorts of 'prestigious' news publications, etcetera.
2 persons have voted this message useful



batswinger
Newbie
United Kingdom
Joined 5097 days ago

2 posts - 6 votes
Speaks: FrenchA2

 
 Message 54 of 85
12 December 2010 at 10:57pm | IP Logged 
Liface wrote:
I'm a bit surprised at the amount of people who would change a language to make it harder and more confusing. Why?


Quite, my thoughts exactly. Possibly it is a case of a casual elitism amongst language adepts.

With one in five of our children failing their literacy milestones at the age of 11 and a similar percentage of our working population in the UK having a reading age of 13 year-olds (a chronic problem in the entire English speaking world), something has to be done with the difficult-to-teach & archaic spellings. Illiteracy is right at the centre of a whole complex of social ills and is in part due to the absence of rationality in the spelling.
2 persons have voted this message useful





meramarina
Diglot
Moderator
United States
Joined 5968 days ago

1341 posts - 2303 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: German, Italian, French
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 55 of 85
13 December 2010 at 12:29am | IP Logged 
Well, my comment was only a joke, a pretty bad joke, I admit, but I enjoy languages as they are and as they will be if they are changed or reformed.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Kounotori
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 5345 days ago

136 posts - 264 votes 
Speaks: Finnish*, English, Russian
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 56 of 85
13 December 2010 at 1:40pm | IP Logged 
I'd bring the dialectal exessive case into widespread use in standard Finnish:

"The exessive case is a grammatical case that denotes a transition away from a state. It is a rare case found in certain dialects of Baltic-Finnic languages. It completes the series of "to/in/from a state" series consisting of the translative case, the essive case and the exessive case."

In Finnish the exessive case is formed with the suffix -nta/-ntä:

opettaja = teacher
opettajaksi = to the state of being a teacher (translative)
opettajana = as a teacher (essive)
opettajanta = from the state of being a teacher (exessive)

Actually, learning to use the case would be very easy for native Finnish speakers even without resorting to magic. There have been propositions to adopt the case into mainstream Finnish as early as the 19th century, but in the end nothing has ever become of it.


2 persons have voted this message useful



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