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Reforms that you want to see in languages

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72 messages over 9 pages: 1 2 3 4 57 ... 6 ... 8 9 Next >>
lichtrausch
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5960 days ago

525 posts - 1072 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin

 
 Message 41 of 72
08 April 2010 at 3:25am | IP Logged 
chucknorrisman wrote:

And peace is important, but I guess the Japanese and we Koreans have our ethnic identities and cultures that we want to preserve as well, and one way to do that is through keeping the scripts of our language instead of replacing them with those of Chinese.

I don't think anyone is arguing for replacing Kana or Hangeul with Chinese characters. My wish is that Chinese loan words (which make up about half the vocabulary of both languages) would be written using traditional Chinese characters in both Korean and Japanese. And that Chinese would use traditional characters as well. Basically similar to the old days except without Classical Chinese or 文語体 or any of that.
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Vinlander
Groupie
Canada
Joined 5821 days ago

62 posts - 69 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French

 
 Message 42 of 72
08 April 2010 at 4:42am | IP Logged 
The English spelling reform is just plain silly. As fair as there's too many dialects to choose from don't make me laugh. I'm one of those wacky speakers that has trouble with grammar. In our dialect strict grammar rules don't exist, so for speakers of my dialect there already is such a thing as "standard English". American broadcast, or RP, would be the obvious two choices. You guys make it too political. It's not about getting rid of 100 percent of all irregularities, it's about getting rid the majority of them.
Of course it won't please everybody,not everybody will use it. But if you just look at the way people talk on chat lines it is clear we need reform. If not were gonna have a divide between those who can read English and l33t sp53k.


I would also like to see, a variant of English that is more Germanic, like Anglish. People get the wrong idea when you mention something like this, like your some kind of purtian facsist. It's not about making English purer, just more independent from the imperial force that is latin. It won't replace English, for those of us who feel like are language is merely a tool for globalization and commercialization of everything, we can have just little bit of freedom in how we think and speak.






Edited by Vinlander on 08 April 2010 at 4:44am

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Johntm
Senior Member
United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5422 days ago

616 posts - 725 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 43 of 72
08 April 2010 at 5:56am | IP Logged 
Vinlander wrote:
l33t sp53k.





The correct form is 1337 5p34k :)
Maybe I could add that to the list of languages I know? administrator, could I add 1337?
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QiuJP
Triglot
Senior Member
Singapore
Joined 5855 days ago

428 posts - 597 votes 
Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French
Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese

 
 Message 44 of 72
08 April 2010 at 6:11am | IP Logged 
MarcoDiAngelo wrote:
dantalian wrote:
QiuJP wrote:
For Russian:

Please put back the alphabets that represented unstressed vowels! Even natives have problem on whether to spell я, е, or и in an unstressed position.


Not for anything!
Any changes in spelling inevitably result in difficulty in understanding of the former cultural heritage for the next generations.
I'd rather return the prerevolutionary Russian orthography with all its complications than think of any further simplification .:))


I disagree. For example, you have every important Russian literary work re-printed with new orthography rules. Every literate person can read them and you have children who don't have to memorize "yat-words" and you also don't have to write many unnecessary letters. Isn't that better than it was before?


I think you have all missunderstood me. All I would like to see is:

і to replace "я", "е", and "и" in unstressed position. It is also used if there is an ambiguity in meaning, for example: мир (world , but also peace)

Є to replace e in unstressed "ye" sound like in знаешь.

ә to replace unstressed "a" or "o"

All these small changes is sufficient to make Russian more phonetic.

Edited by QiuJP on 08 April 2010 at 6:14am

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Minlawc
Newbie
United States
Joined 6532 days ago

24 posts - 56 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese

 
 Message 45 of 72
08 April 2010 at 5:42pm | IP Logged 
I would like a regularized spelling of English. Some spellings are just plain stupid, like the word "debt", the "b" was never pronounced. In my fantasy land I would write English using Chinese characters.

In Japanese, use Katakana only for emphasis and use more Kanji. Though it would be more convenient to only use the kana. The homophone argument is bogus, otherwise how would they understand each other in spoken Japanese.
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unityandoutside
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 6014 days ago

94 posts - 149 votes 
Speaks: English*, Russian
Studies: Latin, Mandarin

 
 Message 46 of 72
08 April 2010 at 6:32pm | IP Logged 
QiuJP wrote:
MarcoDiAngelo wrote:
dantalian wrote:
QiuJP wrote:
For Russian:

Please put back the alphabets that represented unstressed vowels! Even natives have problem on whether to spell я, е, or и in an unstressed position.


Not for anything!
Any changes in spelling inevitably result in difficulty in understanding of the former cultural heritage for the next generations.
I'd rather return the prerevolutionary Russian orthography with all its complications than think of any further simplification .:))


I disagree. For example, you have every important Russian literary work re-printed with new orthography rules. Every literate person can read them and you have children who don't have to memorize "yat-words" and you also don't have to write many unnecessary letters. Isn't that better than it was before?


I think you have all missunderstood me. All I would like to see is:

і to replace "я", "е", and "и" in unstressed position. It is also used if there is an ambiguity in meaning, for example: мир (world , but also peace)

Є to replace e in unstressed "ye" sound like in знаешь.

ә to replace unstressed "a" or "o"

All these small changes is sufficient to make Russian more phonetic.


Stress is too unstable in Russian to reflect it in orthography. Some words would just become unrecognizable messes when you put them into inflected forms. I don't know about you, but having to change the entire spelling of words like голова is way worse than just changing the ending and remembering some stress changes.

What I would like to see is consistent marking of ё. Part of me would also like stress to be marked in the written language, but I think stress marked Russian is a lot less pretty and a lot more cumbersome to write, so I'm content just dealing with stress memorization.
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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 6011 days ago

4399 posts - 7687 votes 
Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

 
 Message 47 of 72
08 April 2010 at 7:13pm | IP Logged 
unityandoutside wrote:
QiuJP wrote:
I think you have all missunderstood me. All I would like to see is:

і to replace "я", "е", and "и" in unstressed position. It is also used if there is an ambiguity in meaning, for example: мир (world , but also peace)

Є to replace e in unstressed "ye" sound like in знаешь.

ә to replace unstressed "a" or "o"

All these small changes is sufficient to make Russian more phonetic.


Stress is too unstable in Russian to reflect it in orthography. Some words would just become unrecognizable messes when you put them into inflected forms. I don't know about you, but having to change the entire spelling of words like голова is way worse than just changing the ending and remembering some stress changes.

What I would like to see is consistent marking of ё. Part of me would also like stress to be marked in the written language, but I think stress marked Russian is a lot less pretty and a lot more cumbersome to write, so I'm content just dealing with stress memorization.

This is a perfect example of the difference between phonetic and phonemic orthography, and it happens in English as well.

Take "record". A REcord (noun), but to reCORD (verb). In the verb, E is phonetically schwa, but it still represents an E phoneme because when it gains stress through a change of grammatical class, it gains a strong vowel quality.

However, there are unstressed vowels that are phonemically schwa in that they are always realised as schwa in every derived form.

Eg -ant/-ance, -ent/-ence. (important, importance; different, difference)

The vowel in these is always schwa, so spoken English doesn't support making a written distinction, and there's a strong argument for doing away with it altogether.

The counterargument is that it makes Spanish, French, Latin etc easier to read, but to me that's beside the point -- English orthography should be about English itself, not other languages.
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lichtrausch
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5960 days ago

525 posts - 1072 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Japanese
Studies: Korean, Mandarin

 
 Message 48 of 72
08 April 2010 at 7:35pm | IP Logged 
Minlawc wrote:

In Japanese, use Katakana only for emphasis and use more Kanji. Though it would be more convenient to only use the kana. The homophone argument is bogus, otherwise how would they understand each other in spoken Japanese.

Because written Japanese uses a far broader vocabulary than spoken Japanese, and because you can hear different intonations in the spoken language which you would not hear in the written language if it was all written in kana. The problem could be solved by putting the kanji in parenthesis when the meaning is ambiguous, like how they do it in Korean. Although I'm completely against any radical reduction of kanji such at this.


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