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Most logical languages

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Sir Nigel
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 Message 57 of 143
24 January 2007 at 12:37pm | IP Logged 
From experience I'd say a lot in Texas use "Y'all" including the younger generation.
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Captain Haddock
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 Message 58 of 143
25 January 2007 at 3:27am | IP Logged 
dreaminjosh wrote:
Captain Haddock wrote:
"Y'all" sounds hopelessly outlandish.


That's a very strong opinion. I guess in Canada this would sound "outlandish"... though, I don't see what hope has to do with it.


Yes, I mean it sounds outlandish in Canada, very Texan and foreign. :) My overall point was that "you" is still the only standard 2nd-person plural pronoun acceptable throughout the English-speaking world, even if most places have a preferred replacement.
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quendidil
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 Message 59 of 143
07 September 2007 at 1:39am | IP Logged 
All agglutinative languages are very logical, there are very few irregularities. Anyway, counter words in Japanese and Chinese make up for the erroneous plurals in other languages that are absent in the aforementioned two. What's the point of having plurals when you can just state the number in front, or even just say "a few" or "many" if you don't know the exact number? You can also usually understand if the speaker is referring to more than one noun by the context.

The variety of kanji pronunciation in Japanese is frankly, a result of poor learning, if you learn each reading separately. Learning kanji compounds in whole words rather than in isolation largely resolves this problem, save for a few odd words, like 人事 which can be pronounced hitogoto or jinji, but in any case, the context can still provide understanding of the exact reading to be used.


Also, Latin noun genders are actually quite detectable, depending on the word endings, even in the 3rd Declension. You can't say the same for French, which has god-awful pronunciation and terribly mixed-up word endings.

edit

"You" in English was originally used for the 2nd person plural, "thou" was the 2nd person singular. By Shakespeare's time, the two words had acquired the t-v distinction in western European languages. Thus, "thou" in reference to god is in no way a heightened form of respect, merely a way to address the deity with more familiarity.

Around two hundred years later, "you" became the common 2nd person pronoun for both singular and plural and "thou" was stigmatized and restricted to provincial dialects. In some dialects of England, "tha" can still be head as a derivative of "thou".

Edited by quendidil on 07 September 2007 at 1:43am

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angeltreats
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 Message 60 of 143
15 September 2007 at 2:27pm | IP Logged 
I know this is an old thread but thought I'd add my two cents (or pence where I come from).

In much of Ireland, Scotland and I think parts of England including Liverpool, people tend to use the word "yous" (sometimes pronounced "yiz") as a second person plural. It's totally grammatically incorrect but very, very common.
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masoris
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 Message 61 of 143
01 November 2007 at 7:21pm | IP Logged 
Classical Chinese is most logical written language because it can express many thing in few characters. If you translate English book to Classical Chinese, you can found that it needs less than half pages.
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Karakorum
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 Message 62 of 143
01 November 2007 at 7:28pm | IP Logged 
masoris wrote:
Classical Chinese is most logical written language because it can express many thing in few characters. If you translate English book to Classical Chinese, you can found that it needs less than half pages.


That doesn't indicate logic. It may indicate (orthographic) brevity, though even that is debatable; but I don't see a direct correlation between brevity and logic.
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Hencke
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 Message 63 of 143
02 November 2007 at 5:59am | IP Logged 
Karakorum wrote:
masoris wrote:
Classical Chinese is most logical written language because it can express many thing in few characters. If you translate English book to Classical Chinese, you can found that it needs less than half pages.


That doesn't indicate logic. It may indicate (orthographic) brevity, though even that is debatable; but I don't see a direct correlation between brevity and logic.

True. All it really indicates is a higher concentration of morphological and semantic content per square centimeter of paper surface. And a large part of that is due to the Chinese characters, which is a totally different approach to representing speech in writing than our latin alphabet.
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leosmith
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 Message 64 of 143
02 November 2007 at 7:24am | IP Logged 
What's yous guys's definition of logical then?


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