Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English
npr.orgAs a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words.
Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough, there is a very sudden phase change where people around you go from "you speak pretty good English" to "you speak amazing English" with nothing in between — all of a sudden you're perceived as a peer, and you choice of vocabulary then sets you apart. Ever since I've noticed this I've been trying to make my vocabulary "worse" by incorporating more mundane words into it.
1. https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
I (native English speaker) have noticed this a lot. The example that I remember most vividly is receiving advice while trying to cook food on a barbecue: A Portuguese speaking friend suggested that I "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue". It make perfect sense but sounded incredibly fancy to me. A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.
"A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education."
There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious).
One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize".
Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing.
I intentionally try to simplify my word choice, even though my vocabulary is much larger than what I use in writing or daily speech, and even when the first word that comes to mind is long/fancy word.
I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar word would do. It sounds more natural, and you don't come off sounding like you're trying to impress anyone (which is usually counterproductive if you're using vocabulary to do it).
> It sounds more natural
Weeeell, there's more to it than that. English has a rich vocabulary, why not use it? Just like there is more to a palette than primary colors, why restrict yourself?
Me, I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and color. Wakarimasu ka?
My father was felled by Alzheimers. What was interesting is his sentences became an incomprehensible jumble of words, but the words were from a well educated man's vocabulary. He never sounded pretentious, it was just how he talked.
(My family does not hail from English aristocracy as far as I can discern. He was the first to attend college.)
I'm from a lower class background; I learned from early on to adapt my language to that of the upper/upper-middle class, and it has 1000% earned me more credibility than my intellect or experience deserve. This isn't to say that this kind of implicit classist gatekeeping is merited--it's not--but this is the reality of the world we live in.
So the scenario in question is "someone trying to fit in with the upper classes" to which your response is something like "use the language however you like"--which is a fine thing to say, and no doubt especially easy to say for those of us who have the ability to speak in the upper class dialect/register, but that's not the stated goal. I.e., if you're trying to fit in with the upper classes, using "utilize" is a tell that you don't fit in (IMO the upper class register prefers to use very few words to convey a lot of meaning; precise, terse, and fashionable vocabulary is the name of the game)--if your goal is to use English however you like, and if you like "utilize" instead of "use", then go right ahead.
> I'm from a lower class background; I learned from early on to adapt my language to that of the upper/upper-middle class
I have a similar background, but I can't say I adapt my language to that of upper classes. My accent and skin color pretty much gives away my background when I utter my first word, and unfortunately, just like having a southern US accent, people are subconsciously biased to thinking I'm probably not too smart. I love using "ten-dollar words"[1] - not that I shoe-horn them in, but they are the ones that usually pop into my head first and I can't be bothered to water them down. Additionally, I figure, "dumb" accent + "smart" words cancel each other out - more or less - which puts me on equal footing with my "normal" sounding colleagues. It's easier to change/adapt my vocabulary than it is to change my accent.
I love language, I do a lot of reading, and it's a delight when you find the right word that precisely expresses what you're thinking. Reading a lot expands your vocabulary and improves your adeptness at deploying it. When done in moderation, using puns and subtle literary references is fun (even when no one picks up on it) - as long as it doesn't detract from the actual message I'm communicating.
1. I do not mean speaking like the Architect from The Matrix here. The other week, I was called out by a monolingual collegue for using "nomenclature" rather than "naming convention" or "naming system" - which feel kludgey to me. Also, when I do make the effort to use shorter words after thinking of a long one first, that adds brief pauses to my speech, which gives the appearance of an ineffective communicator.
There are a lot more tells than vocabulary. There's accent, even tone.
And, of course, there's the style of clothing, haircut, makeup, accessories, etc. Pretty much everything :-)
One interesting tell that I might have heard in Jamie Johnson's documentary "Born Rich" was talk of holidays.
If you talk about holidaying with one's family in some exotic locale or of having a summer home in the Hamptons, the person you're speaking with can surmise that you're not poor.
The rich kids in that documentary also regularly go out to bars and think nothing of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on champagne.
It's definitely not just about how one talks that signals to others that one is part of the upper class.. but once one is established as in the upper class, then things such as one's manner of speech might distinguish you.
I think the idea is not to perfectly blend in, but to get closer to that circle by being more relatable.
I still need to grow out of the opposite. I had a typical lowish middle class upbringing, not poor, but parents were teachers so I was ahead of most classmates just by being around that environment and reading a lot. Being a country town this of course attracted teasing. I learned to talk plain and dumb it down. It's still hard for me to talk otherwise, but writing is OK. Only the teacher saw that so I never changed how I wrote too much.
Much worse than using high-falutin' vocabulary (I might sometimes take advantage of 'utilise' myself) is using high-falutin' grammatical constructions AND USING THEM WRONGLY. Which takes us back nicely to the OP:
> "Having lived in the U.K., I know many whose first (and only) language is English and who make routine errors when speaking and many more when writing," says Madani.
The latest horror is people trying to use the 'so [adjective] a [noun]' construction but instead saying 'so [adjective] of a [noun]'. Folks, when you say 'so [adjective] of a [noun]' you don't sound no ways educated. There's a reason that Abraham Lincoln wrote of "the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom" and not "so costly of a sacrifice"; and the reason is that Abraham Lincoln was not bloody illiterate. (It may actually have been written by John Hay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixby_letter, but Lincoln's secretaries weren't illiterate, either.) Now you might not think it makes much of a difference; but 'much' is a determiner, not an adjective, which should be clear if you think about it for a much time.
*highfalutin (without apostrophe)
Dontcha think its awfully “high-falutin’” to correct a man on his grammar in a such as that way?
That is not obviously so. Spellings and proposed origins are fairly all over the place.
"I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and color. Wakarimasu ka?"
This reminds me of William Gibson's Sprawl slang, of Anthony Burgess' Nadsat slang from A Clockwork Orange, and of Cockney rhyming slang, thieves' cant, etc.
That sort of use can have a certain appealing charm to it in small doses (or might be annoying, depending on who you talk to and what you say), but unfortunately I don't think most users of "utilize" and the like rise to that level.
Personally I don't care to utilize "utilize", either. It smacks of annoying bureaucratic slang, like "synergy", "incentivize", "leverage".
I'm bemused by cop jargon like "vehicle". Even journalists, when covering crimes, slip into saying "vehicle".
> rhyming slang
I like dazzuble dazzutch, but am not very good at it, fo shizzle.
Yep. I'm not sure there isn't ever a place for utilize; it's not 100% interchangeable with use. But, yes, it's part of a list of business and related jargon that is usually best avoided. Sometimes there are legitimate synergies. And sometimes leverage does actually apply--as in getting outsized benefits from using something. But, yes, should probably be used a lot less than they are.
I actually purposefully try not to use sesquipedalian language much anymore ( ;) ) because I'm always afraid it's going to come off as pompous, and moreover nothing is worse than someone who learned a new fancy word but is using it incorrectly. Well, one thing is worse: when you're that person.
Of course I'll simplify the language I use when talking to people who have limited English skills, like kids or others learning the language.
Sesquipedalian means use of very long words, not quite the same as using a rich vocabulary.
> incorrectly
I sometimes pronounce words incorrectly that I'm very familiar with. What happened was I read the word a lot, yet had never heard it spoken. My mind would make up a pronunciation as I read, and eventually thought that was the real pronunciation.
I wasn't referring to pronunciation, but rather the word having a slightly different meaning than how it's being used.
The concept of "U English" vs. "non-U English" was written about in the '50s. Don't say "pardon?", say "what?" or you'll be marked as a commoner ;)
The US has had a long history of anti-intellctualism[1], and in the 1950's "egghead" was popularized as a term of abuse against intellectuals.[2]
It's possible that the popular disdain towards the use of long words in the US is related to this anti-intellectual attitude.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
When I first studied at an English university (having been halfway through a linguistics program in Germany) my fellow students said I "sound like a book".
As being told that is embarrassing, one quickly adjusts...
(Nice examples here on HN, like "utilize the periphery of the barbecue" [to place one more sausage on it].)
But a latter move to the US led to a repeat ("Hey dude, you talk like an alien?! Goofball!!") although the British accent was well liked.
> I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar word would do
"Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill
Minuscle locutions are preferable, and superannuated locutions are pre-eminent
> pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize"
This battle is lost, but mine is "proceeded to". People seem to feel like it makes them sound more official - "He proceeded to enter the room, and he then proceeded to sit down." Once you start noticing it it's everywhere.
It's one of the things people do when they're making fun of cop-speak. Cops are the best example of people who are trying to make what they say sound official, but instead just make it long-winded and bizarre.
> Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing.
I shall avail myself of that advice.
In Romanian "a utiliza" is "to use". I imagine it's the same in other Latin languages. So, see the original comment :-)
I'm talking about native English speakers. It's not as grating if it comes from a non-native speaker, who you know hasn't mastered the language yet. When a native speaker says it, it feels like they should know better and are intentionally trying to make themselves sound smart.
I think a lot of the usage you reference is blindly picked up in corporate environments, and has little to do with trying to 'sound smart'. My wife laughs at my vocabulary on my Zoom calls. After listening to myself, I have to agree.
So what I'm hearing is that your ask for everyone is to not leverage obvious linguistic synergies in order to enhance the listening experience?
Romanian is an example of the exact same thing. It did not inherit a utiliza from Latin, rather it borrowed it in the 19th century from French utiliser, because French was viewed as the posh and intellectual language then. Before that, for ‘to use’ Romanians just used the (Greek loan)word a folosi, which is generally more common than a utiliza even today.
I think a better correspondence is "a utiliza" -> "to utilize" and "a folosi" -> "to use".
Edit: Mediterraneo10 explains it better.
> try to use fancy words
As a non-native speaker of English, one that I have never grasped is the overuse of the word "vehicle" to mean "car". It's extremely common, but not sure why. It's just a car, why call it a "vehicle"?
I understand it in the very generalized context of, say, the DMV. It's the dept. of motor vehicles because they handle cars but also trucks, vans, commercial haulers, even boats.
But not sure why someone says "I bought a vehicle" when really they just bought a car.
People here wouldn't do that so maybe it's more of a US thing. It seems to be a common affectation from police to sound authoritative by using words like this, and that's all over the news and TV. Maybe it leaked from there into the general population.
I'd use "vehicle" to be more general than "car". If I just bought one, I'd know whether I bought car, truck, SUV(ehicle), etc. Although, in some cases, you might say "car" generically if the distinction doesn't matter. Also, "vehicle" sounds a bit more formal, so if I were giving, say, a deposition, I might say that. I can't say that I think people around here overuse the term.
(Midwest USA)
> Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing.
It's a pet peeve as well, but they don't mean the exact same thing; you "use" a doorstop to hold a door open, you "utilize" a shoe as a doorstop. "util - ize", to turn something into a utility, in a way that it wasn't before. Use an umbrella, utilize a leaf as an umbrella. Use email, utilize email as file transfer system.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-a-w...
"you "use" a doorstop to hold a door open, you "utilize" a shoe as a doorstop."
Really?
Because I'd use a shoe as a doorstop.
I'd never "utilize" anything.
Update: Well, on doing a bit of research in to this instead of just using my intuition, I found that you're absolutely right about the special meaning of the word "utilize", according to a number of sources like [1].
I guess I must have been too hard on those people who were properly using the word.
Still, a survey of articles on these terms shows I'm far from the only one for whom the word "utilize" sounds pretentious, so in ordinary, non-specialist language I'd still err on the side of caution and use the word "use", which can in fact be used correctly everywhere "utilize" is used.
There's a good discussion of various points of view on this issue in [2].
[1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-a-w...
[2] - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19811/using-util...
Would you say you are trying to foster communication by using the lowest common denominator with regards to your choice in words?
That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and I can relate, but not because we talk like this in portuguese:
> "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
That would be really formal over here too, the kind of wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how to use it, but not at a barbecue.
I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like that when talking to english counterparts, but mostly because when I'm "translating" my thoughts into sentences I have to choose between a group of words of similar meaning, and due to my inexperience, I often choose a less "popular" one.
EDIT:
After reflecting on this a bit more I also believe I often sound formal when speaking english because it's easier to use more/fancier words for the sake of not being misunderstood than it's to come up with a short, direct sentence that transmits my message in a clear way.
It's like adding redundancy to the message for reducing the risk of transmitting unintentional errors ;)
I can also relate and my native language, Czech, is in the Slavic family. GP's friend probably used the word periphery because they knew it's common to the two languages, unlike the hypothetical Portuguese synonym. This applies to many words of Greek and Latinate origin. Their frequency is low in most languages, but they are understood in many languages. I find it sad that Brits are peer-pressured into giving up this aspect of their language due to perceived elitism. These 'elitist' words facilitate understanding across the various European languages.
So I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to that, becuase of shared Latin etymology.
so it's not that that word isn't fancy in portugese too. It's that that word might come easier to a portugese (or other romance language) speaker, since it's a cognate, so they use it, and end up sounding fancy in English.
An English speaker could do the same thing in portugese with the same words in reverse!
Exactly, periferia.
Only it comes (through Latin) from Greek :)
I notice I use some obscure words when speaking Spanish because there is a similar obscure word in English.
I even guess at words by taking what I think is an English word with a latin root, and converting it to Spanish, which sometimes works really well and at other times it doesn’t work quite so well at all!
> I'm assuming there is some cognate to "periphery" in portugese -- a portugese word that sounds very similar to that, becuase of shared Latin etymology.
"Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. "Peri" is overtly Greek, and so is "ph".
The Latinate version would be "circumference".
> "Periphery" does not have Latin etymology.
Yes, the English word (and the Portuguese cognate, periferia) does have a Latin etymology, via Late and Medieval Latin peripheria.
Now, the Latin word peripheria itself has a Greek etymology, from Greek periphereia. But both Portuguese and English get their word via Latin (and, in the English case, possibly also French, which also gets it from Latin, though sources differ on whether English got it from French or directly from Medieval Latin, and its plausibly not uniquely one or the other.)
> That's interesting. I'm a portuguese language native, and I can relate, but not because we talk like this in portuguese:
The chap in question was from Portugal. If I understand correctly from your website, you're from Brazil, right? Is there any difference between how that word would be used in Brazilian vs European Portuguese?
That's right, I'm from Brazil!
The meaning is the same, both in Brazil and in Portugal.
As a curiosity the two countries (along with others) are part of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 [1] whose purpose was to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language.
Nonetheless there is a lot of differences in usage, mostly regarding the "popular" vocabulary. Some heavily used words in one country are less frequently used in the other. There's also a noticeable difference in the accent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthograph...
Honestly we need the same for English.
No. Just let the language naturally evolve. This "agreement" was an awful thing forced down by political forces.
Context: I'm Brazilian and during high school I studied Portuguese "one official version behind". It had more rules, but the language itself was way nicer, and people used to write more close to it, than nowadays.
It's better to have a few mistakes due to some archaic rules than to force everything to be sterile and complicate how you pronounce things IMHO
Just let people evolve the language naturally instead...
No, our orthography is terrible. We should let it slip towards rationality in any of the tiny ways it tries.
I'm from Portugal. I'm not aware of any difference regarding that word in particular, but tbh I wouldn't know. I'm always surprised with some of the differences I find from time to time.
I can tell you though, that using the word "periferia" is actually common in some place (although a bit rare in most). It's mostly used as a synonym for 'around the borders'.
The example you've mentioned: "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue", actually seems perfectly fine. It seems a little bit over-detailed, I guess that a bit context-dependent but I wouldn't bat an eye to the equivalent of "move them to the periphery".
From what I recall 'periferia' is also commonly used in TV news.
In case it wasn't clear (I don't think anyone has mentioned this, but maybe I missed it), it's not that "periphery" is overly-detailed, it's just an overly-formal, uncommon word. I think the more common phrase would be "move the burgers to the side of the barbecue". "Edge" might also be used too, which is probably a little clearer.
My sister married a Brazilian guy, and one of the biggest things she noticed about his English was that he would agree with negative sentences ("I don't like sushi") by saying "Me too", which is impossible. (You have to agree with a negative sentence by saying "Me neither".)
Its more like:
- "Eu não gosto de bolo" ("I don't like cake")
- "Eu também [não gosto de bolo]" ("Me too [I don't like cake]")
I’d have chosen “I also” to explain, even then it’s not what he uses but it makes a bit more sense in English:
- I also [don’t like cake]
After 15+ years speaking and writing English daily, I still trip over the use of “in, on, at”.
And every now and then I have my first time pronouncing a word that I’ve known for years, from reading book in my teens. When I first tried to pronounce “phlegm” I tried to sound every letter on it.
> When I first tried to pronounce “phlegm” I tried to sound every letter on it.
The G is pronounced in the derived word "phlegmatic". It can't be pronounced in "phlegm"; English phonology doesn't allow for "gm" as a sound cluster.
(Whereas in "phlegmatic", you can put a syllable break between the G and the M, so it's at least possible to produce the sounds.)
See my post elsewhere ... I was pointing out there are three things I dislike in native English Speakers (I am one) that I have not yet detected with my Portuguese friends. Now, I can't understand it but I've asked about this and nothing was confirmed or denied:
- Stalling mid-talking with "ummm" or "ahh" while one thinks of more words to say
- Rising intonation to make a statement; usually rising intonation is for questions"
- Over reliance on works such as "like" ... which even now can be used to start a sentence as with: "like, I was going to the store the other day, and ..."
Portuguese is a beautiful language, and like French definitely unlike English, pronunciation of all the syllables is required. In that way it's a more athletic language. In English it's quite important enunciate the first and last syllables, while we compress or cram the middle ones.
Stalling noises are common. In French, the most common one is a sort of euuuuuuuu noise. This is one of the first things taught in intensive language courses to sound "native."
The rising intonation is just an evolution of the language. I doubt it will stick, but it seems to be mostly used in story-telling scenarios to express some exasperating or confusing scenario in which the question is the point of the story. Almost all meaning in English is in the grammar and diction, so intonation is much more of an aesthetic preference.
Like is just a stalling word. French for example will often use words like donc to take a pause and decide how to best continue.
There is all sorts of slurring going on in French, as well. You can certainly say gendarmerie, but you'll more often probably hear gendarmrie in day to day speech. Certain subgroups do tons of weird stuff like swapping syllables of words. Mon moto becomes mon Tomo. The language is pretty famous for not pronouncing the last syllable of tons of words.
I don't speak Portuguese, but I bet you will find the same or similar patterns in that language.
I'm Greek, and "periphery" sounds fancy here too :P We'd just say "to the edge".
We also say "Perifereia Attikis" for the municipality (?) of Attica. I don't find it fancy, just not often used.
It depends on the context, you wouldn't say "στην περιφέρεια της ψησταριάς", that sounds pretty fancy.
It does. To be honest, I don't know how I'd phrase "on the edge of the barbecue". "Στην απέξω μεριά"?
We also use "περιφέρεια" for the circumference of a circle so I could say "στην περιφέρεια της ψησταριάς" to make a nerdy joke... but that supports your point.
> We also use "περιφέρεια" for the circumference of a circle
Blasphemy! (In English, at least, circles have a "circumference" while every other shape has a "perimeter". Ovals seem to use either word.)
I never actually thought about combining "perimeter" with "circumference" to get "periphery".
We don't really use "periphery" for the circumference in Greek, we use "perimeter". Periphery refers to something outside the object you're describing, whereas perimeter is right at the edge of the object, but usually belonging to it.
... and I've forgotten how to speak Greek :(
I've lived in the UK for the last 15 years. I even think in English, these days.
I've lived in Greece for the last 40 years and even I think in English (when I think in language).
For me it's to do with work. I think of work all the time and I find it difficult to think of it in Greek. So I end up thinking about work, in English, all the time.
The problem is that I keep forgetting Greek words and I find myself using English expressions even when I speak in Greek, even when I'm not speaking about work. And then I start saying things I'd never say in either language. I'm particularly shocked when I make blunders like "περιφέρεια του κύκλου". I just hope it's too early for early Alzheimer's.
Oh don't worry, this happens to me all the time too. It seems to be normal.
"Στην άκρη" I'd say.
Ah, right. Dammit. I'm starting to forget my Greek...
I'm Lithuanian and the main use case for "periphery" is to describe everything else outside the major cities:) E.g. : they live in periphery, aka in a small village.
> "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
To my ear, that sounds like something a non-native English speaker would say, rather than what an educated native would say. In my head the phrase comes complete with a vague foreign accent :-)
I think the typical word probably has no cognate in English.
Eg. I don't speak fluent Portuguese but the closest cognate to o lado that I can think of would be to suggest to move it laterally.
To the side.
Side is not a cognate with lado. It's a translation.
Lateral is a cognate. They both come from latin latus.
> A native English speaker would never have said that
English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech".
For example, someone from upper class America will "purchase" something while a lower class person will "buy" it.
It's not just slight accent changes that distinguish class in America.
Very interesting. The connection to French is not immediately obvious as both "purchase" and "buy" would translate to "achat". However, "por chase" in French is "for the chase/hunt" which begins to resemble some definition of "purchase".
Norman/Saxon meat/animal word pairs are interesting; the saxons were the hunters and farmers, and the normans ate the meat. This led to a bunch of word pairs:
There are other areas of English vocabulary with dual Saxon/Norman words as well.Beef/cow Poultry/chicken Pork/pig Veal/calf Mutton/sheepBill Bryson has a great book that explores how English became what it is now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue It’s an easy read with lots of interesting info.
Please don’t recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. Bryson has no actual background in linguistics and there is a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page of that book. There are loads of pop-sci “history of English” books written by people who were actually competent in the subject.
Thanks for the heads up, I looked into criticism of this book and I won’t recommend it in the future.
If you happen to see this reply, would ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English’ by McWhorter be a better choice for a pop-sci history of English? r/Linguistics seems to be fine with him.
In which French did you find "por chase”? (this is not aggressive, I am french and this does not mean anything but it may be a dialect or some as ancient French?)
The etymology given by Wiktionary[0] is:
> From Middle English purchasen, from Anglo-Norman purchacer (“seek to obtain”) from pur- (from Latin pro-) + chac(i)er (“to chase, pursue”). Compare Old French porchacier (“to follow, to chase”), which has given French pourchasser (“to chase without relent”).
OK thanks, so this is XIV-XV century French (http://micmap.org/dicfro/search/dictionnaire-godefroy/porcha...)
An Italian friend of mine, when struggling to find the word for a Satellite Dish, called it a parabola. I was very impressed.
As an Italian-American who rarely gets to speak Italian, my visits to my family in Italy are full of these kinds of things, but in the other direction, naturally.
I end up using less common, typically larger words mostly because they have direct equivalents in English, including a whole bunch that end in -ation, which in Italian typically end in -azione.
My relatives joke with me that I'm a weird, overeducated dummy who "knows" these big words but doesn't know basic idioms.
No worries, Feynman used such a word in Portuguese when he did not know the short, common one and it was a great success.
I do not remember the word anymore, it was in You Must Be Jocking, Mr Feynman. - in the party where he was teaching in Brazil
I read that book when I was an English-monolingual kid, living in Portugal, and /consequentemente/ that story really stuck in my head when I was struggling for Portuguese words: https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html
As an Italian in the US, I initially had trouble in stores asking for "sodium bicarbonate" (baking soda) or "talc" (baby powder). I would have never thought of those names since I didn't need them for either baking or babies.
But maybe it was just my accent.
In Spanish we call them "antenas parábolicas".
I knew what a parabólica was as a child, but learnt the root of the word until high school math class.
I had a moment in math class when I thought... "So that's why it's called parabolica".
Other Latins might not have been so impressed. This is exactly what we call it in Portuguese: a parabolic antenna (antena parabólica).
I find that particularly amusing because Parabola is exactly how we call satellite dishes here in Italy. It’s technically called Antenna Parabolica but plenty of people simply call it Parabola (at least here up north)
Technically in English you'd only use "satellite dish" to describe a parabolic antenna that's being used for satellite communications.
In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that happen outside of a technical context.
What else does anyone use the term satellite dish to refer to?
Any antenna that's parabolic in shape that isn't designed/used to communicate with a satellite is just called a satellite dish is common usage, but technically really shouldn't be.
It's funny, I can't recall every hearing anybody say "satellite dish" for a terrestrial antenna in my years in metro and suburban California. I've heard "reflector dish", "dish antenna", "microwave dish", or "directional antenna" (which could also apply to YAGI and other non-dish structures).
I wonder if it is regional or has other socioeconomic factors? Actual satellite dishes weren't common structures when I was growing up, outside either a sports bar with satellite TV feeds or more commonly large dishes on industrial, military, or scientific facilities. Other, smaller directional antenna were more commonly seen on radio towers etc.
Probably? One of the subtexts of this article and the ensuing conversation is that English has an absolutely mind-smashing amount of variability in usage.
In my general area, just a few hundred kilometers separates two groups of people who are frequently confused by each others' usage of the word "party store." Expanding a hyponym's meaning to encompass that of its hypernym is so common that I'm not even sure it requires special explanation. I've got some family members whose favorite kind of coke is Pepsi.
Parabolic antennas that are used for terrestrial communication.
Meanwhile in America, you will often hear a satellite dish be shortened (incorrectly) to just being called a "satellite."
You'll even hear the word "satellite" mis-applied to parabolic antennas that are not directed at an actual satellite!
We say "parabólica" in Spain.
That too (like "periferia") comes to Latinate languages through Latin from Greek.
Seems all you nice folk think of Greeks as... posh? Must be all the philosophers :P
Exactly the same in French, for what it's worth.
I asked my teen children what "parabole" means to them and they had no idea that such antennas exist (or rather existed... at least for the generak population) :) They know about disquettes, though.
> A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.
Education doesn't affect word choice much. The people who will say things like this were largely already saying them before they received an education.
I don't know if this is quite the same phenomenon, but when I attended the 2008 Lua workshop (in Washington, DC), my roommate was Brazilian, and when he needed to refer to the blanket on my bed, the word he found was "mantle".
Portuguese sometimes has a strangely literary cadence and the sentence structure tends to formality.
It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic, and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken. There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native speakers of both languages.
That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia when they meant lado or maybe bordo.
Usually the words that are close to Latin or Greek in Portuguese will have English equivalents (<- here's one!) that are also close to the Latin/Greek. So in a pinch for a word and trying to translate in your head, it's easier to remember the words with a smaller transformation from Portuguese to English than something very different. Some sort of compression coding of a translation dictionary inside of the brain :D
in Brazil the outskirts or suburbs of a city are called "periferia", and it might be that the person didn't know the english words for "lado" or "borda" so he used a close relative which is "periferia", sounds very plausible to me. nothing to do with fancy words, because "periferia" definetly ain't fancy (in pt)
> which sounds like Russian when spoken
Or rather Polish. Both Polish and Portuguese have nasals and sibilants in abundance.
It also depends on the kind of education.
I studied physics so moving the burgers to the periphery of the bbq is great. Precise, unambiguous and what not. Moving them to the side may mean so many things: one side (which one), how bug the side is. Heck, is that side still on the bbq?
English isn't my mother tongue and my vocabulary is rather simplistic but I had some situations where I had to simplify it even further,as some native English speakers didn't know the meaning of certain words: e.g. acquire, kitsch,etc.
As for the example you mentioned, I mainly noticed similar when speaking with my French colleague: when he runs out of words he throws in a French word,which in most cases I can immediately understand because it's either used internationally or at least in my own language,but it's often not the most appropriate word for that sentence,so there's lots of 'periphery of the barbecue' :)
> A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.
A native english speaker would not have said that, unless they wanted to sound like the instruction manual, or a BBC BBQ Sports commentator. It is overly formal, a common problem that non-native speakers face.
That sounds like the kind of phrase I would use as a mild joke while hanging out with someone. It's my sense of humor sometimes to be intentionally fancy because it sounds pretentious.
Someone please tell me what's the correct way of saying this
As is general true in English, there are a lot of idiomatic ways to say the same thing.
I would probably say to move them "off to the edge" or just "to the edge". Confusingly, "off the edge" would not be correct, that would mean pushing them onto the ground!
Wouldn't you say "on the side"?
Almost never. I wouldn't even assume that a grill had a "side", I'd think it was just as likely to be round. I'd say "edge." Native speaker.
"edge of the barbecue"
Uh, I would never say "edge", as for me the edge is the absolute end where it would fall off (also not a native speaker). Periphery is very natural and "the side" is probably how I would say this (as I realise that periphery probably does sound awkward). TIL
Bear in mind that people tend to use periphrasis for concepts don't know or can't remember in the moment, which can end sounding fancy.
I'm a native English speaker, and that sounds like something I've said before, and all I've had is public schooling, with no college. :)
Richard Feynman noted something similar in his story about traveling to Brazil and learning Portuguese[1]. People would compliment him for using larger elegant sounding words, when really he just couldn't remember simpler words.
At one standards meeting, Pete went out to dinner with the Italians, to discover that only one of them spoke a little English. In an attempt to be polite, he told them, “Machina ipsam culturam non habet” (Latin for “the computer has no culture of its own”). The English-speaker replied, “Pete, there’s nothing wrong with your Italian, except that you use all those archaic words.”
— Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC
Oh thank you, I just commented about that elsewhere and you provided the link :)
Word choice is vital. I was once outed as a non-native english speaker because of a single word.
There's an old MMORPG that I used to play with friends as a kid. It has an item called copper shield. My friends and I didn't speak english at the time so we'd misspell and mispronounce the item as cooper shield. We had no idea what copper even meant, to us it was just the name of the shield. We all know what copper means now, but that didn't change our understanding of the shield.
A few years ago I decided to create a new account and play again for old time's sake. I joined a party and started talking to people. The second I said "cooper shield" I got a private message in my native language from a guy who learned it by playing the game with us. Because of that highly specific misspelling, he could tell not only that I was a foreigner but also which country I was from.
> Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar.
My Spanish girl friend at the time was among the first batches to take the computer-adaptive version of the GRE (which increases difficulty as you get questions right, and vice versa). While preparing for the verbal part, she noted that the "difficult" words being explained were often words she knew (to lament, intransigent), while the "simple" explanation involved words she had to learn (to mourn, unyielding).
This could then lead to a positive feedback cycle for native Spanish speakers taking the test - get the first few questions right, get "harder" questions with long Latin words (easy!), or get the first few questions wrong, and get "easier" questions with short Germanic words (oh no).
Her test score was indeed many standard deviations away from the paper based practice tests she had taken - but only on the verbal part.
I can relate to this as a Spanish speaker that used English text books in high school. Many of the advanced words in vocabulary and spelling were easy to understand and spell for us.
Funny enough, a similar thing (using obscure, ten-dollar words instead of simple ones) happens with many Russians learning English. It happens for a totally different reason - obviously Russian is a Slavic, not Romance language. Turns out that most high quality translated material for Russian is old literature and scientific papers. So that’s what the translators are trained on, and that’s what many Russians speaking English sound like. As an example, a friend of mine was just learning English and didn’t yet know words as simple as “stairs”, but would use ten-dollar words like “prurient”, “strumpet” and “veritable”.
I have witnessed this phenomenon living in London as a native of the city. A new-to-London Russian colleague of mine used ornate phraseology and what I would consider as 'posh' words quite regularly. A major phrase for her was "It seems to me" as a precursor to saying virtually any opinion. I never knew the reason for it though, so TIL.
In case you are curious what the exact reason might be:
"It seems to me" is most likely coming from the much less fancy sounding, and more casual "мне кажется" (mnye kazhetsya).
"Mnye" would be "to me", and "kazhetsya" could be represented as "it seems". I say "could be" because there is no direct translation for "kazhetsya" as far as I'm aware.
The closest (and most direct) translation of "kazhetsya" that I can think of, and retains the meaning would be "it seems likely that <...>".
What she was trying to communicate was "I think", I think. (pun intended)
Like "Me parece" in Spanish.
Coming from English, I struggle with when to use я vs Мне.
Not sure if you'd like an advice or merely sharing your experience, but after reading your comment I spent an hour or so trying to provide a simple rule of thumb. To my surprise, I failed miserably. But I scraped some info together in the process, so I'll post it in a hope that it might give you a better perspective. Mind you, I'm not a linguist or a teacher.
First of all, I made a list of Russian я/мне lines with English translations next to them just to see if there is consistent presence of a hint in English lines that can point to the right Russian translation. There is none. So if you are trying to figure out the proper pronoun this way, you are doing it wrong.
To make an educated choice between я/мне you'll have to familiarise yourself with nominative and dative cases.
Here is some basic info on the cases in "question" and even more basic examples:
Nominative case of "I" is "я". Nominative case answers questions such as "who?" or "what?".
Кто пришёл? (Who came?) Я пришёл. (I came.)
Dative case of "I" is "мне". Dative case answers questions such as "to whom?" or "to what?".
Дать кому? (Give to whom?) Мне. (To me.)
As you might've noticed, native English speakers won't normally construct questions in a way they are constructed in most Russian cases, so I'd suggest to get familiar with cases and their respective questions first, and try to construct sentences later.
Or, depending on your goal, you can simply memorize common sentences/lines altogether and figure out why they work later.
Thank you for taking the time to write this. And good point regarding dative case. I should just think in terms of sender/receiver.
Where I especially get mixed up with Russian is when dative and acusitive are in the same sentence. Next up for me is instrumental case - oh boy
I had an Austrian friend that learned all his English from star trek TNG and DS9... it was amazing :D
He'd watched the series in German and then in English and knew it well enough to pick things up.
To my ear, his English was pretty good.
That said, the 2 groups of non-native speakers that have impressed me the most are people from Sweden and Norway. I've mistaken more than one of them for native speakers (to their delight) :D
I desperately want to do this in the other direction, but I can't figure out how to stream foreign dubbed trek in the states and I don't have a DVD player anymore... It may take a bit more effort.
My teacher of English once helped a group of Russian Baptists who were emigrating to the US with their English. They learned it themselves using the KJV Bible and verily I say unto thee, that who listeneth to them and keepeth a straight face truly hath no sense of humor.
I certainly wonder what kinds of conversations your friend was involved in given their choice of words…
I think some of this was because of the Norman conquest. For a few hundred years the nobility spoke Norman French and the peasants spoke old English. So our words for animals are Germanic and our words for meat come from French. Beef is boeuf, but that word is only for the meat. The refined words were from French and Latin. If there was another word it was lower class.
I hear you!
A long time ago I was in the US and I used the word "labyrinth" because I didn't know "maze" and, well, in french for a maze we say "labyrinthe"... I still remember the reaction of my american friend, very surprised by my "advanced" english vocabulary.
We native romance language speakers have it easy ; )
The Norwegian word ("labyrint") is also based on the Greek word (possibly through Latin, somehow).
Ironically, though, "maze" may come from the Norwegian word "mas".
Today, I've learned a new Norwegian word - labyrint. I've not stumbled across it.
Thank you.
Richard Feynman had a similar story about speaking Portuguese, coming up with a longish word because he couldn't remember the common one, and impressing his hostess.
But is "labyrinth" from a romance language? It appears in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon with the remark that it is a foreign word.
It's the Greek word that was adopted in Latin and then romance languages.
It's not originating from romance languages, but it's the “default” (and virtually only) word in romance languages (well, at least French).
If you can do that in a British accent, no matter how bad it is, you will immediately be pundit material in the USA. And also more attractive!
Moving from a British university to an American one, I noticed this. People listened to me more. Scary.
I wonder if that also applies to someone from the Hebrides. I used to have a supervisor from there, and even his English coleagues often had problem to understand his dialect....
Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
I think in this exact usage it's a euphemism for some kind of specific London accent that I don't actually know the name for.
RP, Received Pronounciation.
There's a really fascinating guide for English writing which is all about this: how the best writers in English have used the cultural connotations of Germanic and Latinate words for effect. When to using one or the other, but also playing them off each other, or using the tension between them, and so on.
Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth [1].
As a non-native English speaker, Farnsworth as a last name sounds very fancy.
Funnily, I think of it as more of a hillbilly name :D. Maybe because I think of Philo Farnsworth who was raised in rural western America.
I just think of Futurama
Yep, I’m a native English and French speaker and when I speak in English to someone whose first language is a Romance language I make an effort to use more Latin-origin words, which does make the English sound very formal to native speakers.
Haven’t had a chance to try it with folk whose first tongue is a Germanic tongue because they all speak really good English, but if I came across someone who didn’t have great English I’d probably use more Germanic words.
I find this subconscious perception of speech with more Latin-origin words interesting though. Something about Germanic words just feels more earthy and real, Latin-origin words feel quite flowery and sort of hard to pin down.
The dual origin story of the English language is quite fascinating!
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to a list of just what you described, synonymous words with Romance vs Germanic origins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_d...
I noticed dove/pigeon on there:
I was taking an Arabic class and the professor was Egyptian. At one point she mentioned 'Pigeons of peace', which sounded ridiculous to my ears since 'doves' are a peace symbol and not pigeons, even though they are the same animal.
I had no idea doves and pigeons are the same animal. Fascinating!
The first section with the foods helps illustrate the class difference: the Germanic words we still use in English to describe the animal, while the Norman words we still use to describe the processed food products from the animal.
Yep! The reverse is somewhat true as well. When I had to get a photo ID in France I couldn't remember whether «noir et blanc» was idiomatic and in that order, so I said «monochrome» instead. The photographer was impressed that I knew such a "technical" photography term.
I (native German) realised a similar thing happening because I tend to use some syntactical features that lend itself naturally to Germans, like use of "whom" (corresponds to German 'wem', but 'wem' is pretty standard German and 'whom' is hardly used in colloquial English).
This goes the other way too.
I've definitely gone with `consecuentemente` in Spanish because it's an English cognate and I couldn't remember whether I should have used `porque` (=because), or one of the annoyingly similar `por que`(=so that), `por qué` (=why), or `porqué` (=a reason).
When I was learning/using French, kinda the inverse of what you said, I'd try to think of a sophisticated English word to use. It could even bleed back into English speaking, for example I would "recount" (raconter) something rather than "tell" it.
Yeah, I've had the same experience, but I've really had to resist that instinct, to avoid sounding too pompous.
E.g. "ameliorate" comes more naturally to the tip of my tongue than "improve", but it's almost never a better word to use.
I emigrated to the US at age five from Germany and learned a lot of my English from Peanuts comics. One of the words I learned from that strip was "incidentally" which I used for years before someone told me about "by the way".
I got beat up a lot too.
> I got beat up a lot too
As someone born in the 90s I'm always shocked to hear about how culturally accepted it was for children to be physically abused at school in my parents' generation. People talk about getting beaten up at school like it was nothing, like they deserved it for talking funny or liking comic books.
It's so normal that the children's shows I grew up with on Nickelodeon / Cartoon Network / etc all had the main characters getting beaten up at school as a regular plot point.
I just can't believe it. I'm so glad it is largely seen as unacceptable these days.
My family emigrated in 1969. To Kentucky. Physical and mental abuse was, sadly, quite common and accepted, especially towards anyone perceived as an outsider (which I very obviously was). And unfortunately my parents were completely clueless about how to handle it because it was new to them too. It took me literally 20 years before I finally figured out how to navigate American culture, and even today I sometimes feel like a stranger in a strange land, especially watching the political trends (which, as a native German and ethnic Jew, are absolutely freakin' terrifying).
I find it similarly disturbing to hear of kids torturing animals, which apparently is/was kind of common?
I've never done it myself and only knew one person who (as an adult) admitted to doing it as a kid, but apparently it is/was a thing.
When I read that many serial killers tortured animals when they were young before moving on to attacking humans[1], it somehow didn't surprise me.
The phenomenon reminds me of Hogarth's famous series of engravings on "The Four Stages of Cruelty"[2], which starts by showing children torturing animals in the streets of Eighteenth-century London.
It's appalling to me that this sort of behavior was ever tolerated.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13dogfighting-t....
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Stages_of_Cruelty
I agree, it's weird how quickly it has changed. I went to school almost exactly from 2000 to early 2010s and I saw it change before my eyes. Quite literally we were the exact school year (grade) where physical abuse became much less tolerated. I'm not sure what exactly changed, but it a stark contrast between looking at the upper years when young vs when I reached that point. The teachers verified it too, and our grades were also much higher than previous years. I remember when I was in year 3 we used to literally fight on the playground and no one cared, it was _totally_ normalised.
As you said, most 90s cartoon media portrays it pretty clearly, because it really was normal. The idea of children having physical boundaries was just not really as prominent back then, at least in my experience.
When I went to high school in the mid 2000s I remember it being the dawn of zero-tolerance policies for everything major and minor. Parents were also suing schools, and I think those policies were a bit of a to reaction that.
That wasn't a thing here at all. We didn't have any zero tolerance policies and suing a school in the UK was unheard of.
Uh, it's arguably worse than ever today. It just doesn't happen on the playground anymore. I contend the situation was better when it was out in the open and not on handheld devices.
Verbal and emotional abuse are certainly major problems faced by children today, but physical abuse is so so so much worse. Physical abuse has strong emotional / social repercussions as well.
I much rather would have the regret of mocking and ridiculing scrawny Billy in 2nd grade online than the regret of physically kicking him while he was on the ground crying.
I think he would as well. There are different levels of abuse in the physical world and the virtual world. Comparing the worst form of online abuse to the least physical abuse would likely prove you correct. The opposite is true of the worst physical abuse vs. the least virtual abuse.
Virtual abuse is a somewhat new phenomenon only in that it is much more prolific. Prior to the internet, we had telephones, telegraph, pen & paper, and others. Abuse was common in these mediums and still is today. Because of the cheap, instantaneous, and inherently anonymous nature of the internet being quite new, I expect it will take a couple generations for society to create customs and norms that are more consistent with our physical world customs and norms.
I heard on a podcast the other day about people joining the US Military or Police that have never been in a fist fight in their lives. Being nearly 50, that is incredible to me.
I'm one of those people. I joined the Marines in 2005 and have still never been in a non-sparring fight at 33 years old. Given sufficient training, I think it could be preferable. When training with rifles/pistols, the people who'd never used a gun before usually did the best because they didn't have bad habits.
When I was about 6 years old, I got into an argument with a neighbouring child who hit me. I walked back over the road crying to my Dad who was working on his car on the drive. He showed me no sympathy and immediately sent me back over the road to hit the kid back. I did (I was more scared of my Dad than the other kid) and the other kid then went off crying.
Not sure I'd do the same with my son (if I had one, I only have a daughter).
I’m 46 and have never been in a fist fight. Neither have most of my friends of similar age, as far as I know. I’ve lived in Norway for most of my life. Based on what I read in Norwegian news (I no longer live there myself), it seems that fist fights and other forms of violence are far more common among teenagers now than when I grew up.
Now we have swung so far in the opposite direction that college students will suffer an emotional breakdown if they hear an opinion that differs from one they hold.
I don't think we're better off.
It's very obvious, you're right. I'm French and I sometimes I have to prove people the words are in an English dictionary while they're absolute basic 6-yo level in French.
I remember "ameliorate" that an american friend (an adult) didn't even know (but again this guy mixed Portugal and Porto Rico so maybe not the best sample lol), while for me it was clearly an easy cheat because I had more trouble reaching for "enhance".
Ofc since I'm also an ass, I like to claim English "stole" all those French word then proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
> I like to claim English "stole" all those French word then proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
Fair enough, but then French is nothing more than horribly misspelled, massacred and ungrammatical Latin.
Of course the same could be said about any other current language, after replacing Latin with whatever our ancestors spoke a couple of thousand years ago.
Japanese is similar. Chinese-origin words usually sound more sophisticated than pure Japanese words.
The dynamic between Chinese and Japanese/Korean/Vietnamese in East Asia is very similar to the one between French and English, or more broadly Latin/Greek and all European languages. It's a good example to use for both sides (whether it is Easterners learning European languages or Westerners leaning East-Asian ones).
Japanese does take the cake though! If you thought silent letters or weird pronunciations were bad, try replacing every second word with an emoji and guess the pronunciation. Or if everything was spelled according to the rules of the English “ghoti” :p
I wouldn’t say Japanese is hard to pronounce once you get used to it. Obviously without kanji it’s perfectly deterministic, but even with kanji there are enough patterns you tend to just have a sense how to pronounce it.
Except for names. Maybe I’m just not at that level, but I’ve spoken it for years and still have no idea when I see most names unless I’m familiar with it.
One take I remember from The Adventure of English[0]: When it's in the kitchen it's germanic/anglo-saxon, when it's in the lord's dining room it's a French (vulgar Latin). Romanized languages are an important part of English, though not that much in those most common words[1]. English is the product of quite a few invaders introducing new elements to a language that was itself invasive.
In regards to "amazing English", how about picking one obscure dialect like Scotish and perfecting that so that the other 95% of English speaker take you as a Scots/Welsh/Californian and don't ask any more questions?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0&list=PLbBvyau8q9... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
An interesting corollary is that I can sort of "channel" French more easily by thinking about it as "fancy" English with respect to grammar and vocabulary (and of course, a French accent). I similarly experienced French people praising my mastery of the language even though I can only understand like 40-60% of what a French speaker is saying to me (although I'm not sure if this is because of my "fancy English" approach or if I'm just inordinately good at the French accent or if the French are just pitying me by telling me my French is very good).
I think the reciprocal is also true. I’m a native speaker, who speaks Spanish as A second language. It’s sort of amazing how using “fancy”English words often results in correctly guessing correct Spanish cognates. I guess one downside though is that people don’t perceive me as having said anything remarkable because it’s all quite normal to them.
On various occasions I've been asked by native speakers to use shorter sentences and simpler words. Sigh.
Yeah, it's much better compared to other languages pairs, where the diminishing returns set in hard after a certain point...can be rough for morale!
That looks fantastic, wish Anglish was more widespread.
Recently I've been learning German and one of the examples was "Hier darf man nicht rauchen" (Here one may not smoke) and it has a note after "NB: Not pretentious in German". I found that quite interesting
Isn't this selection bias? It's like walking in on a flight to US, and seeing how poorly sloppy everyone is dressed. So you might assume that the US is some sort of third world country. But you would be wrong, because the US is rich enough that even the lower class can travel. So if you are talking with some native speaker, you just might be speaking with an idiot, because even idiots speak English as their first language. Where as English speakers from other countries, might be well educated, since it's their second language.
I don’t think the opposite of ”idiot” is ”well-educated”.
And I also didn’t like the quoted person in the article that said they had to (my words) “dumb down” their technical conversation whenever an American entered the conversation or they wouldn’t understand the terms they were using. That is just arrogance and borderline xenophobism in my opinion. Neither the implication that speaking perfect grammar and knowing more words is almost equivalent to moral superiority.
Anyway, that represents the diversity in non-native speakers perceptions somehow I guess. I enjoyed a lot the insights of the professor from New Delhi — I loved the word prepone - and I think the concern about prejudice over not being “native” or “mother tongue” very valid.
I just saw the word prepone for the first time last week. My boss, who is from India, used it. I had to look it up.
That's probably because it was invented by Indians speaking English in India. Its not illogical etymologically but there is no reason you should be expected to understand it.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prepone
>Indian English
I think you're confused about how Americans dress. Even people with money dress casually, and we don't dress up to get on airplanes. In fact, most of us dress extra-casual on planes. I normally won't wear sweatpants in public, but I will on a plane, because it's far too uncomfortable to wear pants and a belt while crammed into a tiny seat. People who normally dress well will wear pajamas on planes.
That's true through an upper middle class level, then you get into always traveling business class (aka humanely-sized seats, better food). The bump from business/first -> private is not that much better.
People who dress smartly on business class flights are probably just wearing whatever clothes they Normally wear for business, especially if they came straight from the office. You might find different dress on e.g. business class on a flight from San Francisco to Shenzhen (which is likely to contain engineers out to inspect factories).
Honestly, even in business class, sweatpants are just the better choice.
You should see how Australians fly. SYD-LAX is 13h, SYD-DBX is 14h and another 10h to Europe. There's no pretention about dressing to impress, it is calibrated for maximum comfort and practicality.
I have the impression that I get asked less questions by immigration / customs when I dress better.
I was in a hostel where I and a Southie were the only native English speakers, and the Southie was unfortunately trying to explain how to "speak American" to someone from Eastern Europe. Cringe-worthy doesn't describe it.
Agree. In my native language, we use tons of slang and ignore grammer all the time. In fact lot of talk is based on context, you literally don't have to finish sentence, still other person understands meaning behind it.
It's the same in the majority of the languages.
I noticed that the usage of slang, correct grammar is an indication of the position on the social ladder and education.
It used to be like that but not any more. These days upper people mostly speak 'accented' english.
I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often.
For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries.
And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans hearing race in accent and dialect, while the British can hear class but for the most part the opposite is not true.
I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest.
Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
(Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)
What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :)
Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication.
Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word.
"Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem.
Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two).
Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement.
You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form.
Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which.
It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.
There is a famous picture for that: https://9gag.com/gag/arOAPm6
Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information:
(I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x ...
"she would have played" -> "zagrałaby"
"would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagrałabyś?"
"he would have played" -> "zagrałby"
"she has been playing" -> "grała"
"she played" -> "zagrała"
Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it must be a mindfuck.
OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.
>> Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.
I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker, so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't have much to do with whether it becomes a common tongue. I think English seems easy because its grammar works a bit like a word-stack, you can put words in order and make a phrase, whereas for other languages you have to modify words with pre- and suf-fixes. So in English you can sort of ignore grammar and only keep syntax in mind, whereas in other languages you have to manage both at once.
But, and this is just a theory, I suspect that there is no human language that is really "hard" to learn. Given that most languages must be spoken by at least a few thousand people over a few generations, I guess that every language is eventually optimised to be learned and used without trouble given the average linguistic ability of human beings.
There is actual research in the domain of language complexity! (Which, to be fair, is still a somewhat more niche topic in linguistics)
What little I know of it does suggest a couple of things (but my knowledge might be slightly outdated):
- It's true that no language is fundamentally unlearnable, not even as an adult (although you can of course always debate what "fluency" means exactly - to this date, I'm fairly certain that there are certain kinds of mistakes I make in English which native speakers don't make).
- A lot of the complexity does come from things like vocab and usage patterns, so even for a language where the grammar is "easy" (whatever that means - suppose we have a definition for that) it's not like it would be "easy" to speak properly. English in particular seems to have this "easy to learn, hard to master" problem.
- when we talk about grammar, there are definite differences in complexity, at least when we focus on certain areas (such as complexity of words). English is really just very simple in that regard, so is e.g. Chinese.
- contrary to GP's assumption, there is some evidence to believe that the causality goes in the opposite direction: English is not widely spoken because it's easy, it has become easier as part of being widely spoken as a second language.[1]
- relatedly, it appears that languages with very few non-native speakers (such as indigenous languages spoken only by a couple hundred of people) tend to have rather complicated grammatical features
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
> There is actual research in the domain of language complexity! (Which, to be fair, is still a somewhat more niche topic in linguistics)
I know little about this as well, but there’s been some research done by…… John McWhorter, I think? A quick search through my Big List of Things to Read (3000 articles and counting!) gives https://elementy.ru/downloads/elt/mcwhorter_creole_grammars.... and https://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.71, which you may want to have a look at if you’re interested. David Gil is also well-known for his insistence that Riau Indonesian is simpler than most other non-creole languages.
> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Ah yes, this one. I remember carefully reading it a while ago, and I ended up very sceptical about its conclusions. For one thing, I don’t agree with rankings such as ‘Isolating > Concatenating’ and ‘Agent > Agent & Patient’ (though these do admittedly seem to be common assumptions). The ranking as a whole is a bit weird also — I’d love to know how they concluded that Tiwi is less complex than Dyirbal, for example. But I’m more suspicious of the linear fits, which appear extremely bad — I’m not convinced you can conclude anything from a fit of R²=8.9% (for Afro-Asiatic) or R²=14.1% (for Sino–Tibetan). In fact, only one of the graphs has R²>90% at all. And I note that they very carefully avoid giving p-values — except for the overall ‘complexity against population’ graph, a very significant correlation which however disappears when languages are split into groups by family (Simpson’s Paradox again?).
(Though keep in mind that I’m not great at statistics and any of the above could be incorrect.)
Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data. It’s good for other things, but I very regularly find that a good proportion of its data is incorrect. It’s fine if you want to, say, see roughly what proportion of languages use active–stative alignment, but not for much else. (Though I suppose you could argue that the CLT applies and the errors will cancel out. But as I said, I’m bad at statistics and wouldn’t know how correct this is.)
(Personally, I’m sceptical that there’s a link between complexity and population. Witness Swahili, the lingua franca of a good chunk of East Africa. Or Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. The main reason most widely-spoken languages are ‘simpler’ is that they disproportionally come from IE, ST and Austronesian, which aren’t the most morphologically complex families anyway.)
All of what you say may be correct, but
> Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data.
the state of linguistic data is appalling in general. We have over 7000 languages in the world and yet, most of them are barely described, with grammars often being terribly inconsistent. I don't really know how to solve that problem except, in fact, hoping that the errors somehow do cancel out as you suggested.
I dunno, as a native-English speaker of (bad) Czech which has similar-ish thing to what you listed I am not sure these are such a mindfuck after all. If you threw all that at person at once they’d definitely lose their mind, but realistically they’ll learn it in something like this order (edit: updated to use similar example “hrát” - to play):
- conjugating verbs, “hraju” = I play, “hraje” = he/she plays
- past tense of verbs, “hrál jsem” = I was playing, “hrál” = he was playing, “hrála” = she was playing
- that verbs have a “perfective” form, so “zahraju” = I will play, “zahraje” = he/she will play
- naturally the past tense of these follow, “zahrál jsem” = I played, “zahrál” = he played, “zahrála” = she played
- that this can be conditional, “zahrál bych” = I would play, “zahrál by” = he would play, “zahrála by” = she would play
It’s not a stroll in the park, but the path that leads you to constructing those little sentence fragments isn’t too bad IMO. There are other complications tho (I just showed first and 2nd person singular, no plurals, I didn’t decline any nouns or adjectives, didn’t cover positions of words in a more complex sentence)
It always amazes me somewhat when people talk of languages like Polish as having complex words, because Indo–European languages generally have pretty simple words compared to most languages outside Europe. Consider, for example, the average word from Yimas:
planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak
‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’
Or Wichita:
kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks
‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’
These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)
That just sounds like an agglutinative language, which is scary just because the words are long. But if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word.
The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.
> if you know the language, it's easy to figure out since you can see the individual words inside the big word
This happens to be correct for those Yimas and Wichita examples I gave, but in many languages the relationship between the constituent parts and the word itself is extremely nontrivial, e.g. in Mohawk:
tcioteriʻsioñʻhắtie né hotăskoñnioñniʻhătiḗne
s-yo-ate-rihsy-u-hatye-∅ ne hro-at-askw-uny-∅-hatye-hne
And in any case, most of the ‘individual words inside the big word’ aren’t ‘words’ at all but bound morphemes, in many cases with quite general semantics which are more along the lines of ‘someone caused this’ or ‘action done multiple times’ rather than anything more concrete.
My favourite word is in Nuxalk: clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' . It has no vowels and it's pronounced [xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ]. You can here it here[1]. It means "he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant".
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C...
I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme? Also, the languages are head-marking (meaning that grammatical relations are encoded on the verb) which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.
That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).
(I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)
> I think that cross-linguistically, these might be a bit extreme?
You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara:
ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka
But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well.
> Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.
Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well.
> I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).
I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t.
> (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)
Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/
(And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)
Languages are not inherently easy or hard. It all depends on where you're coming from: if you happen to already speak languages that are similar, then it can be said English will be easy to learn, otherwise, it's a language like any other. Just ask any Japanese or Chinese speaker how easy/hard it was to learn English.
The reason English got so popular is purely because of the power and wealth English speaking nations have amassed in the recent history.
Spanish is easier because there's just the two - an action is either discrete or not. There's some ambiguity as to which to apply in some cases, but the fact that there's just the two forms means there's basically an order of magnitude less to memorize.
But yeah, the challenge is that the prefixes/postfixes aren't uniform... if it was always po/przed/za/whatever prefix for the same use, that would be one thing, but instead it differs across verbs. Conceptually I get it, but it's just so difficult to go through the process of constructing words while speaking.
Though honestly I don't think that's the worst part - it's a ton of information, but there's a useful communicative purpose to it. What gets me is changing the endings to nouns based on the case - most of the time, doing that adds absolutely nothing from a meaning/comprehension standpoint. If I say "Cooper jest moj pies," 100% of Polish speakers are going to understand me 100% of the time, even though grammatically I'm clearly wrong. I swear it's just so my in-laws can have a good chuckle while I stumble through sentences :)
I speak German and Hungarian, and I'm trying to learn Thai but between lockdown and my age it's going very slowly. I'm properly fluent in German but I learned it when I was a teenager and studied German literature at university. Hungarian took me a while (as in years) and there are still bits of it I don't get, but I'm fluent-ish for most practical purposes. It's not an Indo-European language and it has agglutinative grammar and it never had orthographic reform, but it's pretty consistent once you get over the hump, it has a lot of loan words and concepts from German and Slavic languages, and it's a very fun kind of weird.
Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not.
I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language.
AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.
> pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension
Yeah no kidding.
I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”.
For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone.
The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember.
I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster.
As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite.
I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.
> Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which.
I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off.
One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)
"One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically."
Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of "skrzyżowanie" :)
I said that phonetically the pronunciation doesn't change not that its easy xD
Good luck, you will need it :D
I'm also learning Polish. If you think declensions are fun, just wait until you get to the number system!
I think English has large advantages over other languages. I'm French and live in Hong Kong, and the superiority of English vs both French and Cantonese is hard to deny.
You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root intact in spelling but not in verbal French.
The genders make little sense in French, serve little purpose but constitute an immense barrier to a new learner. My wife will never, in her entire life, remember a table is a girl but a bridge is a boy. Because of that, she'll always sound like an idiot. My daughter might, but she hates French already and is incredible in English.
Cantonese, or any Chinese variant, has large issues with temporality while English finds the right balance between having several tenses but not the idiotic amount French would have.
I don't know, coming from a romance and an asian experience, English really is a good language you should be proud of. The pronunciation, sure, I'll always sound French, but that's a small problem compared to the vast advantage learning to read it provided me around 16 yo. Learn French at 16 yo and see if you move from the countryside of Normandy to an IB in Hong Kong thanks to it :D
Japanese takes the Chinese writing system and makes it even worse.[1]
> And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well)
I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible".
I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
> I haven't found such differences in English.
Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
My brother's wife is from the Shetland islands. He'd always know when she was on the phone to her family, because she would drop straight into the dialect without realising it. The thing is, the Shetlanders know that their dialect is sufficiently different, so they learn TV English as well so they can make themselves understood to outsiders.
I was in Glasgow years ago for a conference. Wonderfully friendly locals, I didn't understand a word they said.
I wouldn't find them "pretty much incomprehensible", although there might be one or two variations in accent or words that we might trip over once or twice.
It would be much different experience from speaking with someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the same.
I had it happen to me with a taxi driver in Newcastle.
Obligatory Limmy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YfRbNipdOg
NSFW language, if you can understand it.
also hilarious if you can understand it
I've watched the entire show 4 times and can understand everything by now, but I still can't say I get the humour.
Limmy's humour is wilfully niche even among Scots and the Scots-adjacent. He has no intention of appealing to a wide audience. He's a great example of Twitch being good at finding an audience for the long tail of creators.
What English speakers refer to as dialects is milder than what other languages do, as English wiped all of its actual dialects out pretty early on. On the other hand, what's called in German a dialect might often be considered a language by linguists.
If you mean in English, I would say look to the poorer corners of blighty, or deep enough into Australia, and you may find what you need. Or, if you're in Los Angeles and white, ride the bus from Santa Monica to DTLA on any given weekend and just listen to people talk: that's English just as sure as mine is, but I get maybe half.
(Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least. Great tutorials on TikTok for that as it's apparently endangered.)
If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues, namely Hochdeutsch or English, though in my experience the Swabians will still say stuff like schaffe gell and assume you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.
For the benefit of confused Americans like myself: English as it is spoken in Scotland, Scots, and Scots Gaelic are three different things.
Interesting, I think Wikipedia is saying it's a distinct language that shares a lot of words etc with English:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.
> And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.
It's usually based around a combination of factor - mutual intelligibility, orthographic conventions, etc. Also, of course, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
>. Or, if you're in Los Angeles and white, ride the bus from Santa Monica to DTLA on any given weekend and just listen to people talk: that's English just as sure as mine is, but I get maybe half.
Eh.
It's nothing more than repetition for the most part, along with certain parts of speech being implied. If your trying to overhear someone else's conversation you'll miss key points of context.
Having been to London , and South Central LA , I can't imagine any scenario where people from these places couldn't communicate with each other. A few words are definitely going to be different.
>Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least.
Scots and English are two dialects of the same language.
The US mostly doesn't really have true dialects but there can be a fair bit of localized slang in some groups. And some accents, especially heavy rural Southern accents, can be tough especially for a non-native speaker.
> The US mostly doesn't really have true dialects
I think speakers of Cajun, Gullah, or High Tider dialects would seriously beg to differ.
And those are just a few of the "true" dialects of the American South.
Outside of that there are many dialects that mix Spanish and English throughout the southwest.
Also dialects spoken by yiddish speakers, most frequently found in east coast cities like New York.
I grew up in an orthodox jewish community pretty near an even more, what might be termed "ultra orthodox" jewish community, and the dialect of english spoken there would probably be incomprehensible to native english speakers, both because of all the yiddishisms and also because of the accent.
I'm curious as to whether the practice of ultra orthodox men moving to a different community to marry does anything to standardise the Hebrew/English/Yiddish dialects between different communities/countries.
Does Newfinese fit the bill? Particularly the older generation. Listen to the first 10 seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvnDy7PXiTc
Part of the imcomprehensibility stems from their wide use of sayings that aren’t really deductible. “Who knit ya?” is “who are your parents?” It makes sense in retrospect, but I don’t think many people would think that in retrospect.
I moved to Ireland 4 years ago. And for at least 2 years, I could not understand ( or hear ) a word my - not direct - Irish manager said. It was alien to me.
And you probably got off lightly:
Ha ha :) That video is priceless. And I experienced this first hand. If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start sounding gibberish.
> If you get 5 or more kms outside Dublin, people start sounding gibberish.
What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.
It comes across as more egocentric than "I had difficulty understanding them," but it is often the case that away from the more international areas it can become really difficult to understand the locals, whether that is rural Eire, Picardy or West Virginia.
Sorry If I sounded that way. As it's clear I am not native and meant "I can unfortunately hear gibberish with my untrained ears", not "they don't know how to speak proper". It's my dumbness.
You can definitely find dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible" in the US just by traveling around Appalachia.
I'd never had a problem understanding a native English speaker from the US until I met a truck driver from eastern KY. Couldn't understand a single word he said. He was driving with his wife, who translated for him.
When my father (who had a Midlands-ish English accent) met my father-in-law (strong NC Appalachian accent), they could not at first understand each other. It was pretty funny.
> And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries.
That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.
You could still properly encode English using Latin by using more digraphs and trigraphs.
It's not true that one cannot hear race in British accents, it is actually quite overt. I've lived in London and Manchester and the vast majority of established Black British and South Asian British communities do speak with a noticeably different accent to other ethnicities of the same economic class living nearby. The type of London accent mostly influenced by Caribbeans since the 60s even has a proper name - Multiethnic London English
This is heavily tied up with class, though. My middle-class professional second-generation Indian and Pakistani acquantiances speak in a way that i don't think i could distinguish from the way middle-class professional white people speak. Meanwhile, if you visit ends where Multiethnic London English is widely spoken, you'll meet white people who speak it too.
The part about spelling being inconsistent with how it sounds is likely due to "great vowel shift" [1].
My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift. Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite", "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they were.
I'd take our spelling system over Chinese characters or hieroglyphics any day. English has weird exceptions but with spell check and autocorrect, I think it's manageable. Their they're there, where we're were, there are many bad combos that unfortunately do need memorization.
Chinese does have autocorrect and spell check based on statistical analysis of how often words are next to each other. Another benefit of such a system is that it's similar to romance languages where when characters are used in different languages, even though they are pronounced differently there is some mutual intelligibility. I don't speak french or portuguese but when reading the ingredients list (which they always put a sticker over the English section to show the local language) I'll use my Spanish knowledge to know what's inside.
> For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it.
I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.
Sorry, I should have emphasized really.
Compared to the other languages I know, the difference between "school English" and "English on the street" is larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian) could be exceptions!
I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as spoken by the working class in Madrid.
I just noticed your username is Hungarian for sure. Pun intended. :) If you've spoken to a lot of Hungarians, as I have, I think some of the distance between "school English" and "street English" for Hungarians has to do with the distance between English and Hungarian. I haven't noticed any school/street difference with Germans speaking English. Most of the Germans I've met I could swear speak English as a first language. For what it's worth, I speak intermediate "school Hungarian", but "street Hungarian" still feels a lifetime away for me. When I learned Spanish I feel like I went from "school Spanish" to "street Spanish" in 3-5 months.
I could see some one who learnt formal English in a school setting in another country might struggle with Geordie, a strong scots English or full "Yam Yam"
> But this scenario doesn't fit with Serrano's experiences of English, where nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers.
In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate.
English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are simplifications which don't always apply.
I remember one interview at a school where the (non-native English speaker) director criticized me for ending a sentence with a preposition -- a classic "fake" rule.
I once reviewed an English test used for Citibank interviews, which I would have failed because a majority of the multiple-choice questions had more than one perfectly valid answer, but I guess not according to the overly simple grammar "rules" that were taught.
It actually can become a serious source of tension between foreign learners who are proud of the 10 years they spent in English classes and insist they therefore speak "correctly", while you the native speaker are making "mistakes".
I remember one memorable conversation where a work colleague tried to insist that something at the store was "costly", and wouldn't accept that the correct term was "expensive" (or just "costs too much"). The dictionary we had wasn't of much help either, since definitions often don't capture the actual subtleties of usage and connotation.
I also can't count the number of times actual (again, non-native) English teachers insisted it was correct to say "I have a doubt" rather than "I have a question" when you don't understand something... and often there's literally no convincing them, because how could their 10 years in the classroom and 20 years of teaching be wrong...?
I have noticed Indians using that phrase quite a lot: "I have a doubt." I think it may just be a quirk of Indian English and should probably not be considered incorrect, the same way British English quirks are not incorrect.
Likely in the same vein as "please do the needful", just a common translation / usage quirk.
Not incorrect when the speaker or millieu is Indian, but it would grate a little to claim it is more correct than "I have a question." Saying "I have a doubt" is almost le Carré, a spymaster weighing fragments of deception.
Regional dialects and quaint idioms are absolutely English though. How else to add tone and shading to our communication? It's the sand the forces the oyster to make pearls.
In my case it was Brazilians simply naively translating their native "Tenho uma dúvida".
Everyone was learning American or British English. No one was trying to learn Indian English ;)
Serrano also seems completely off-kilter with his analysis of mixed competency group communication:
Having been in engineering discussions where the language was not English, it is very noticeable to me that it takes longer for me to formulate a comment or reply. Native speakers are simply far faster to express themselves. When there are multiple native speakers the pace quickens."On the contrary, communication ends because [the foreign researchers] cannot explain to the American, in simple language, the advanced topics they were discussing. Yet, the American *takes over the conversation*."Speaking simply, to the point and without jargon, is actually an advanced skill. When you don't know the word circle you say square and then hack at the corners with other words until the other person nods. Part of the reason why Zoom classes suck.
I had to take an English 101 class again a couple of years ago because otherwise I would have had to pay for some extra bureaucracy to skip the class.
I remember getting answers wrong on some tests like:
a) How is 12:45 pm read? I said "twelve forty five pm" but the only valid answer was "a quarter to one"
b) What is the ethnicity of Laos? Which may be Lao or Laotian depending on who you ask. The teacher only accepted Laotian.
c) On one test he also insisted that NK and SK were "one country" and also had that answer marked as wrong. Which may or may not be depending on who you ask.
I tried to appeal some of those answers in the tests but it only annoyed the teacher.
It is not so much about English and Americans, but about learning a first language as a child versus learning a second language later in life. Learning a second language usually involves learning the grammar, and explicitly learning the rules that native speakers "just know".
I think it is quite plausible that, for any language, speakers that learned it as a second language will know the grammar and grammatical terms better than most native speakers (particularly monoglot ones).
Since you provided many examples, I will also give a few:
An astounding number of people overcorrect to "It was a present for my wife and I" or so, having trouble with the few remnants of cases (nominative, accusative, genitive) English still has. Similarly, many native speaker seem incapable to identify the much maligned "passive voice". Or, ask a native speaker under what circumstances you'd use the past perfect continuous.
Why do you think being able to classify the parts of speech would make someone more authoritative on correct usage than native speakers? Imagine documenting a language you don't know, identifying the tenses and the verb order, and finding something surprising so you decide it's the speakers who are wrong and not your model!
Here the quote from the article that GP was objecting to:
> nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers.
That is the proposition I wanted to support: more explicit knowledge about the language. Who is "correct" is a whole other ballpark.
> English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are simplifications which don't always apply.
Hard disagree - I don't think your experience as an EFL teacher is relevant to places where english is an official language and is taught from their equivalent of K-12, like India (and many former colonies). EFL courses are far shorter, and not taught to similar depth - some former colonies use the same examination boards as UK students, so it's a far-cry from EFL.
English speakers in those places do not make mistakes that "native" speakers make, like writing "I should of done that" or say "on accident" because it's the opposite of "on purpose" - they simply accept that the rules don't make any sense. I'm not sayin they are better or perfect: they have their own class of mistakes they are prone to.
Memorizing grammar rules and technical vocabulary is not particularly difficult. I do believe nonnative speakers are better at textbook grammar than natives. That, however, doesn't mean they can pass for a native speaker in writing or speech. Get someone who knows all the ins and outs of English grammar, but never been to an English speaking country and have them write an essay. Just about every native speaker will be able to tell the text is not written by a native speaker. Grammar is trivial, but language is hard.
Isn't "I have a doubt" a way to say that you are not sure? Not that you do not understand it know, but that, well, you doubt.
Like in "homeopathy is backed by science" to what someone would understandably say "I have a doubt" (in a mocking way in that case)
American English: "I doubt that" or "I have doubts" is much more natural. "Doubt" is almost never singular.
Yes, I was just quoting OP (as a non-native speaker of English I also prefer "I doubt that" or "I have doubts" (except when in singular).
This said, some may copy from their language 1:1 - in French you say "j'ai un doute" (I have a doubt) so this may also be the reason. There are also other versions ("j'en doute" - I doubt that, or "j'ai des doutes" - I have doubts)
Singular "doubt" is pretty common, but almost exclusively used when indicating a lack of doubt.
yeah "i have a doubt about this particular issue" doesn't seem wrong.
No. The problem here is that you're assuming that "doubt" is associated with not understanding, when it's actually associated with not believing, so you're essentially saying, "I understood what you said, but I don't believe you"
I had the impression the phrase was being used to interrupt a speaker to ask a question. In that case, it would sound odd to the average American, and insinuate that you thought they were wrong.
There is such a thing as Indian English, maybe not officially but it certainly exists and it does differ from British and American English.
As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it.
There is such a thing as Indian English
If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.
I am a non-native English speaker. “Even I” would come to my mind first and then that.
For some reason it means “I also” in Indian English and it sounds weird to non Indian dialect.
Like “Even I don’t understand this” sounds obnoxious to me because in my mind it means “Even I, an almighty being, don’t understand this, who are you to think you can understand it” but it means “I also don’t understand” in Indian English.
According to google “Even” as adverb: used to emphasize something surprising or extreme. So I assume what I think at first is what native English speakers also think.
I hear this daily and I know what it meant to mean now, I had a friend who did not know this and thought her Indian colleague was talking down to her.
"Even I" is pretty common for native speakers, although it's normally used to break an assumption rather than being a full replacement for "I also".
For example: you are in a class and someone asked a question about a topic. The person next to you turns and says "I can't believe they don't understand this topic." Your neighbor is making the assumption that you also understand it. So if you didn't understand the topic, a response could be "Nah, even I had some questions about it."
Although someone could definitely use it to be condescending, or just trying to be cheeky.
Funnily enough, "do the needful" is proper English. It is too proper.
It comes from mid-19th century British English, which was used to design templates for formal letter writing in India.
These artifacts have remained as part of Indian English, but died as part of British and American English.
[1] https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/09/doing-needful.h...
Heard this phrase growing up in Ireland also so I think you may be over generalising. A quick search shows Irish origins actually.
> A quick search shows Irish origins actually.
I thought the British gave that phrase during colonial times.
Very interesting, thanks. I have some Irish friends and we've both commented to each other that it seemed to be somewhat unique to Indian English speakers, makes me wonder more about it.
And in a sense, yes, I was intending to over-generalize a bit, I think that for various languages that used broadly in different geographies, certain words and phrases tend to pop up locally that are often not widely used outside of that region. This is just from observations I have made traveling globally and working with global teams for 20+ years. I mentioned "do the needful" as it popped into my head from the parent comment about Indian English.
That phrase is so well known, i think some Indian speakers now avoid it when speaking to British or American speakers!
The one that sticks in my mind is "club" as a verb meaning "group". "We will club these events together into one message for efficiency".
I've heard "do the needful" used by non-Indians in tech, thanks to Indian expats in tech using it.
I hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.
The first time I heard/read "prepone" and "do the needful," it was maybe jarring because I had never heard either of those before, but in both cases it was pretty obvious what they meant.
That's funny, because as a half a century long US native speaker, I started using that phrase a couple of years ago because I thought it sounded neat and everyone understands what it means.
And sirs. So many sirs.
Another common usage Indian English speakers make is using singular with one of for example saying "one of my friend" instead of saying "one of my friends". Also using only in a way completely different from how a native speaker would use. For example, to a question: Is the answer wrong? They will reply: No, the answer is correct only to mean that the answer was correct. I am a first generation Indian myself.
Then you need to learn more about it, Indian English is more than just that one phrase. That's like saying, "if there is one phrase that, to me, defines American English, I think it would be "Howdy".
that would be a fine thing to say. Seems like everything is fine.
No it's not. My point is that "do the needful" is not a proper representation of Indian English, as the parent comment implied. There are a lot more pecularities that makes the dialect what it is, but people are just not aware of them (yet). A quick google search will tell you that.
"Howdy" seems like a successful synechdoche for American dialect to me. Seems like what makes something a proper representation is somewhat personal.
Not to derail the conversation more, but "howdy" is more of a southern American thing than just American. I never used that in the midwest/north until I moved to the south.
Yeah, I'm from the midwest and only would use it somewhat tongue in cheek or to mix things up. But most short-hands for American culture internationally seem to be focused on Southern/Western.
Yes it is. To the point where there is actually a meme about it: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-the-needful
I'm South Asian by the way, so this meme is also associated with my own culture.
If Wikipedia is to be believed [0], India ranks third in the list of countries ranked by number of English speakers and it's only fair to regard Indian English as a form of the language that is at least as valid as those from other countries.
Having said that, one of the things that you have to learn when you start speaking with English speakers from around the world is to recognise which of the words in your vocabulary will be understood vs which are particular to your native country. I'd put words like "prepone" and "needful" into this category: you need to find an alternative when talking to people from places where those words aren't understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
The difference is that Indian English exists almost entirely as a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language, so it'll never sound as natural. It's not the language of the street or the discourse.
> The difference is that Indian English exists almost entirely as a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language
A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first and only language. Especially kids born in cities, whose parents' linguistic backgrounds differ.
> it'll never sound as natural
It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here.
> It's not the language of the street or the discourse.
Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the waiter in English. The consumption numbers of English news channels, English newspapers, etc. should give you an idea of the prevalence of English here.
>A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first and only language
"The 2011 Census showed English is the primary language—mother tongue—of 256,000 people, the second language of 83 million people, and the third language of another 46 million people, making it the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi"
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-e...
256K is not a huge amount. Even if that's up to 1.256 million in the last 10 years, that's nothing compared to the size of India.
>It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here
It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent. This could also possibly be explained by the complete lack of English language Indian media outside of India, in the US particularly. We get UK, Canadian, and sometimes even Australian and NZ programming in the US. Why no Indian?
>Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the waiter in English.
I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not. English is a lingua franca, not the preferred option if there's a shared mother tongue.
> I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not. English is a lingua franca, not the preferred option if there's a shared mother tongue.
That's no different than the US.
Having studied in convent boarding schools, it was the norm for my classmates to not be able to speak any language except English. I was too young to care about census data back then, so I did not ask my classmates. But extrapolating much later on, I have the impression that there are millions of monolingual English speakers here. I don't trust the linguistic census of India. The instructions for census agents are complex [1], and I don't trust that the people who are forced to go door-to-door would have the energy to explain this at each house.
> It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My point was: who decides, and on what basis? There was a time when Australians did not consider their accent acceptable on their own news channels. They adopted RP [2]. Would you consider John Bishop's scouse accent [3] unnatural? How about all the other accents of UK, like Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.?
> Why no Indian?
No idea. The vagaries of business decisions and culture. Most Indian programs are terrible, IMO. Many of my female cousins watch Korean soap operas. Among my younger cousins, anime is the norm. All with subtitles.
> when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not.
To the contrary, it would depend on the locality of the cafe, the topic of the conversation, their interpersonal dynamics, and so on. My school required us to speak just English on the premises, and would scold us if we used Kannada. Fining kids [4] is pretty common too. It eventually leads to school kids using English with each other after school too. In a city like Raichur or Kolar, the odds of Kannada being the default language are good. In Bangalore, while I think I can predict the language, my prediction would depend on a lot of local factors.
[1] https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnP_C6RSdJU
That's untrue for the current generation.
I and a lot of my Indian peers consider English to be our 1st language.
A habit I've noticed among English-speaking Indians is ending chat sentences with "...!!!"
For example: "Good morning, Bob...!!!"
I would really like to know where it comes from. In my experience, they don't realize that "..." comes across as dramatic or passive-aggressive. The "!!!" part I assume is just meant to convey enthusiasm, but it comes across as very aggressive.
As a midwestern white American, I've certainly had prejudices based on people's accents, and I've probably misjudged whether someone was a "native" speaker. Having read this article, I will renew my efforts to fight those ugly prejudices.
For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferring asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double standard.
On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of the UK population is dyslexic (I'd expect that to be similar in any English-speaking country), so exclusively-written communication will be somewhere between "unpleasant" and "awful" for them.
That, and people will start judging on grammar, ability to spell, word choice, etc, etc. I think you'd just be trading one set of prejudices for another.
> On the other hand, somewhere in the region of 10-15%[1] of the UK population is dyslexic.
As an Brit, at least we live in a country where insulin is covered.
People’s writing ability is really variable as well though. Here in Iceland you get some comically translated written stuff in English purely because everyone thinks they know it well because they on the whole have a very high level of spoken English. That naturally holds true for native English speakers as well but probably with smaller variance.
Fair point. But, and I might be wrong here, I figure people can much more easily control their writing than their speech, especially if they're not expected to send an immediate written response (e.g. in chat). Perhaps my mental model of foreign accents is wrong, and forgive me if I'm being an ugly American here, but I've often thought of a foreign accent as a disability, as if the person had a stutter or other speech impediment.
There’s plenty of accents amongst native speakers. The way you feel about other people’s speaking voices is very much on you and belies a lack of worldliness. It’s a big place and I’d recommend checking it out. You do seem conscious of that though but it’s not something I’d accept personally.
do you feel the same about a regional accent - I mean southerners in the US often feel discriminated against as their accent is used as a shorthand for many negative stereotypes. What regional accent do you have?
My regional accent is midwestern (I'm from Kansas). I don't think I feel quite the same about regional accents, but of course, unconscious bias is a thing.
I have some sort of accent (I moved to the U.S at 10 after living in Germany for 4 years, Denmark in 6), but when I am in America, most Americans (maybe 99.9999% of them) think I'm from the U.S - although generally from some other part of the U.S than the one they're from.
I did have the experience of one guy thinking I was from Germany after 20 years in the U.S (hence the 99.+ percentile) but he was quite the outlier.
However when Americans meet me in Europe they immediately identify me as having a non-American accent, which really messes with all my European friends since they think of me as being essentially American.
So this disability thing seems quite context dependent.
I think that is common, when someone needs to translate something into English you know they just hand it to an intern with Word. I see the evidence of it on every public sign and document here in Denmark, but also traveling around in the rest of Europe.
"Native" is such a weird construct with language. I'm Scottish, and while I've lived in the US since early childhood, I still retain a few pronunciation "quirks" inherited from my parents. At least in my case, it's mostly to the amusement of friends (haha, you say "wheel" funny or "ooh, that rolled 'R' is sexy"). But still so strange, since I think my pronunciation is closer to "correct" than American's.
Yeah, I really struggle with the concept of "native" as well. I grew up in the US but the first language I spoke was Tamil. When I went to a nursery, I couldn't communicate with any of the other kids. My parents then spoke to me almost exclusively in English. As a result I can only speak/read/write English but can still understand Tamil at an elementary level.
I used to think I spoke perfect American English until someone pointed out that I say the th sound weirdly (I think it's called dental th-stopping [0]). I also spent some time in England as a child and now say some words like "rather" with the English pronunciation. I'm living in England again now as an adult and am picking up some English colloquialisms, though usually pronounced in an American accent.
I also unintentionally end up speaking in an Indian accent when I talk to speakers of Indian English, but can't put on (even intentionally) an English accent to save my life even though I had one when I lived in England as a child.
> "Native" is such a weird construct with language.
The article raised my awareness of that. That's why I put the one usage of "native" in the GP comment in quotes, and mostly avoided the word.
I find this preference hard to fathom. Sure, written communication is great for much of the workday but sometimes you need nuance and, short of spending hours wordsmithing the right tone, it's better to meet face to face (or by video is that isn't possible). I say this as an English speaker that is completely comfortable with written words.
Maybe part of the problem is AV equipment? Once place I worked we had MAJOR communication difficulties with understanding Indian and SE Asian folks over the speakerphone. It was a perfect storm of unfamiliar inflections, vowels not being differentiated from each other strongly enough, consonants getting screwed up and rapid speech.
Really good headsets on both ears and repeated exposure seemed to resolve the discomfort and dread for many folks. I always wondered if there were similar complaints on the Asian side, I never heard anything about it. Do they find British/American accents hard to understand? I don't know.
Written communication is getting weirder (in a good way) by the day thanks to translation software.
With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't know the language at all.
Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's slow and pretty cumbersome to use.
Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.
I don't know about "non-native" but words tend to lose the hyphen over time when their usage becomes more common. A recent example is e-mail, old texts contain the hyphen but more recent books and articles will likely omit it. It doesn't stop just there though, even the word tomorrow used to be hyphenated, you can find it as to-morrow in the book "The adventures of three Englishmen and three Russians in Southern Africa." To-day and to-night too https://episystechpubs.com/2020/05/19/editors-corner-to-day-...
Usually publishing organizations have house rules and the copy hews to these rules. NPR uses the spellings in Webster’s New World College Dictionary Fifth Edition, and then has a few rules of their own.
A more algorithmic rule is found in APA style: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2016/10/hyphenation-stati...
Edit: NPR also uses the Associated Press Stylebook and related resources.
Lack of hyphen use drives me nuts. "Cooperation" is a prime example. Without the hyphen, my internal monologue pronounces the word like "chicken coop"[1]. Whereas, "Co-Operation" makes pronunciation much clearer.
Doesn't the New Yorker still hold the line, and print it with a dieresis? On the other hand, I knew a women who belonged to a food cooperative, and referred to it as the "coop", pronouncing it as if it were a chicken coop.
I think I would be satisfied with the New Yorker-style: "nonn̈ative".
That's a neat solution, thanks!
(Please address complaints about putting a trema over an 'n' to Spın̈al Tap.)
When I saw the title I pronounced it as "NON-nah-tiv" (like "normative"), and didn't realize it was non-native until your comment.
My favorite example of one of the difficulties of learning English comes from my friend who's an adult ESL teacher.
Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.
You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it!
If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker.
Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?
That word order this is not a hard and fast rule doesn't stick out at all if it's shifted.
There are relationships that arise when you change the order, e.g. nylon blue sounds as if it's a shade of blue, but not a nylon that is some shade of blue.
However, I don't believe it is opague to a non-native speaker who has sufficient experience with the language.
Thank you for this. I did try a few combinations and it does sound funny in my head. Wondering how this ordering evolved for a non-native speaker like me. I did not hear or know about this rule.
> "I still encounter the situation when a stranger interrupts me after a few words I spoke to interrogate me: 'You have a strong accent. Where are you from?' It is a continuous reminder that you are forever an alien in your own country."
Ugh. When will this victim mentality end? I'm a naturalised citizen in a foreign country and get asked this all the time because of my accent. It has never come across as anything less than interest.
In my experience, it's usually interest and friendliness -- but after the first time you hear it used aggressively, you'll never forget that can happen.
I frequently ask speakers of my native Flemish where they're from because they have interesting regional accents or speak baffling dialects. And that's a language spoken by barely 6 million people. Feeling an "alien in your own country" because you don't speak a language in the exact same way as the people around you ... seems very counterproductive.
These people are natives with dialects. As an immigrant you face prejudices sometimes and being in a negative interaction makes you more wary of the other parties intent.
Yeah, I get that. But at some point you have to let go of that fear & wariness. Arseholes are pretty universal, and whether they're having a go at you because of your accent, your immigration status, or the colour of your hair doesn't matter all that much. Arseholes gonna arsehole, and they'll find a stick to beat you with if they so desire. The vast majority of people, thankfully, aren't arseholes, and their intentions tend to be on the "good" part of the spectrum.
Asking where someone is from _could_ be polite interest if there's a lull in the conversation.
If they're cutting them off in order to change topic & bring it up, not so much!
I will chime in with a slight anecdote. I have a direct report that speaks fine English but his written communications are just south of ideal. He asked me to help him by explicitly pointing out issues with his writing. I have been happy to do so but the process has really highlighted for him how refined my understanding of WHAT is right is contrasted to how poor my understanding of WHY it’s right is. More than half the time I’m forced to say “ that isn’t right, this is how it should be worded instead but I don’t really understand why”.
Language is a crazy thing.
I think the royal order of adjectives is the coolest example of this. Native speakers of English know it intuitively without (usually) even knowing it exists!
That's the difference of EFL/ESL and a native speaker. If you live in the US/UK you're probably aware of how pitiful the average person is at grammar. However, they can always tell if a sentence is right or wrong for their variant of English.
When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer was "just because".
The author complains about being discriminated against because of his accent. Of course it's unfair, but there is a practical reason behind it.
The more someone's accent differs from what I'm used to, the more difficult it is for me to understand. I notice that on the phone, I can understand an accent like mine over a bad connection. The further one's accent is from mine, the better quality connection I need.
It's also significantly more work to understand a presentation the more distant the speaker's accent is. That means the less interesting the presentation is, the more likely I am to not make the effort.
It's not fair, but it's a fact of life.
I'm not sure why is this here. It's basically a teacher complaining that people don't like when she makes up words, and has a strong accent.
Language is a living protocol that you can only learn by listening people use it and using it yourself constantly. Whether a made up word makes sense syntactically and grammatically doesn't matter. In fact whether it's in a dictionary also doesn't matter. What matters is being understood. So you need to use words people know. Sometimes you're in a position to make up a new word, when you need to. Talking to students about when their exam is... is not one of those situations.
And a heavy accent literally corrupts your communication. On top of making it hard to understand what words you say, your intonation becomes completely unintelligible, because you're speaking English, but intonating in another language. You're literally not speaking entirely in English. Strong Indian accent is especially infuriating for this, I find it very hard to listen to and understand.
And by the way, made-up words and strong accents are ESPECIALLY annoying to OTHER non-native English speakers, because we have an extra hard time parsing this on top of understanding a non-native language already.
I should know, I'm a Bulgarian, so... (I have slight accent).
> Strong Indian accent is especially infuriating for this, I find it very hard to listen to and understand.
This applies to any accent you were not exposed previously. I noticed that after some time you get used and understand it perfectly fine.
That's true not just about accents, but about any language. But whether the parties communicating have enough time to actually learn each other's dialects is another question entirely (and usually no, there isn't).
Also, you can get used to a teenager saying "like" every second word and ending every single sentence by raising their pitch, or with excessive vocal fryyyyy. Ar tarnang avary vawaaal to aaah. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's effective communication style.
There are dialects and accents that are actually less articulate than others. So even if you get used to them, it helps, but you still get less information content, and more dialect-specific ambient ornamentation (like some of the teen-speak examples I mentioned above).
> I found out that "prepone" was not an actual word in English, based on the dogma that all legitimate words in a language must be found in a dictionary.
I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up. This is descriptivism at work.
Prepone is not a word in American Standard English. Or casual American English. Nobody uses it, although we should. It's totally logical from "postpone", but languages are not rational or logical.
If something is to become a word, people need to actually use it in the first place. Indian English is different than American English is different than Black American English is different than UK English.
doesn't really hold up. If there was one person left alive on Earth they would still speak a language, and there would be observable rules about it all the same.
Strange choice of interview subjects given the article title: the first seems to be a native speaker and the second asserts he is a native speaker. They're just not from the US.
> the first seems to be a native speaker
What makes you think so?
It might help to have a strong definition of “native”. The problem is that the definition changes slightly from person to person.
In my opinion, “native speaker” should mean “a person who is completely fluent in a language and formulates their thoughts in it.” But I’m wondering if we should include “social norms” in the definition of “native”...
I did not speak English until we moved to America when I was 12. Now I hardly have a chance to speak my “native” language anymore, and instead am fluent, accent-less and conduct my daily activities (and even dream) almost exclusively in English. My kids and my wife all speak English only. I have become a native speaker, and by my own definition, I have become a foreign speaker in the language I learned as a kid. I’m still fluent in it, but I struggle sometimes to find the right words (translate from English).
Another anecdote, my wife, who is an Australian native - speaking what is closer to the “Queen’s English” than American English - was forced to take an ESL test when she first moved here to start college to assess her English knowledge. Is she a native speaker? Linguistically, yes. But she struggled to understand others in America and, more importantly, have others understand her. “Can I have some cutlery?” directed at a waiter for met with a blank stare (clearly unfamiliar with that term, I interjected with “eating utensils”). This is where societal norms and cultural lingo comes into play.
So would someone have two or more native languages if they can change which one they formulate their thoughts in? I guess that just emphasizes your point or the article's point more that it's a vague term to begin with.
It might depend upon what you count as native (as the article talks about later), but she certainly seems to have had constant English exposure since early childhood. Anyone more familiar with New Dehli might have a better guess, but to me it felt like the article was doing what the second speaker complained of:
> "I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how would this manager know what language I grew up with? I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language."
It's my (possibly mistaken) assumption that anyone from India, self-described as a linguistic "have", and majoring in English and teaching English now, probably has been speaking it since before they started school. It seems strange that article doesn't actually clarify anything about her language education and the second interviewee specifically shows that the authors didn't only select for non-native speakers. I assume the editor wrote the title without sufficient thought and the author would have chosen something else.
I didn't even understand what that sentence meant
> But that day in the classroom, my incomprehensible English taught me that being an linguistic "have" is unstable and delusional at best.
What does it mean to be a linguistic have? Is this a reference to the haves/have-nots. Is she trying to say someone with linguistic fluency? Seems like the "an" is misapplied there too which mucks up the sentence.
Perhaps because they have accents not associated as 'native' of that area. I moved away from my home country a long time ago: when I get back, people I don't know ask where I'm from because my accent has changed. After a few days it comes back and I blend back in. I believe this is very common to migrants, so not only do they have an accent not from 'here' but maybe they have a twinge of the local sound.
As a non-native speaker, and coming from "genderless languages"[1], Persian, it took me quite some time to get used to gender based pronouns. With the new pronoun restructure in the English language in north America, I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns) .
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...
>I'm having hard time to understand how to talk amongst strangers (people whom I'm not familiar with their preferred pronouns)
If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough of an accent to communicates English is not your first language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that pronouns represent.
And then they'll be offended that you are a bigger minority than them
As a Finn I can second this. It took me a while to remember to use the correct pronoun and still get it wrong sometimes (by defaulting to he/him if I don't pay attention to it)
I don't know Mandarin, but my Chinese PhD supervisor does this all the time, always accidentally using he/him to refer to women. Unfortunately that can be a pretty dangerous mistake to make
It totally blows my mind that there are languages without gendered pronouns. It's like someone saying "mother" and "father" were the same word (just "parent", no specialized words by gender) in a language.
Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous:
> Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in the oven.
> سام و سالی به خانه خود رفتند. پس از آنجا ، او مرغ را در اجاق قرار داد.
Yes the second part of the sentence is mainly saying "that person", and doesn't indicate the gender.
You may be surprised on how this ambiguity can be beneficial, specially in teenage years when talking about your "friend" will not reveal their gender :)
As a teenager I missed in English having a clear difference between girl friend and girlfriend or betweens boy friend and boyfriend.
Spanish has very different words for amigo/novio, or amiga/novia.
You can always say "Once there, the girl put the chicken in the oven.".
There's a different, perhaps even worse, pitfall for people coming from gendered languages where the gender of a possessive pronoun agrees with the thing possessed rather than the person possessing. I have heard Spanish people say things like "I saw Joe Biden and her wife on television".
This happens because his/her/their are all "su" in Spanish.
You can ignore preferred pronouns until someone tells but even then it doesn't matter. It didn't affect the language at all.
There -is- a difference of natively learning a language and learning it later on as EFL/ESL. It has nothing to do with politics, or being perfect. In fact, many ESL/EFL speakers have better grammar and vocabulary than the average native speaker because they have to focus on those things in order to learn the language.
However, a native speaker won't struggle in speech, and they'll know the various idioms used all the time in colloquial speech. Of course native speakers don't have to take the TEFL/TOEFL! They don't consciously think about grammar rules, they just employ them nearly always perfectly in speech. Of course not every native speaker is good at writing at an academic level and we should be aware of that.
This phenomenon is also not unique to English! This article and the one linked are basically following the trend of bashing one's own English; how dare native speakers speak their language like they have been their entire life? Part of learning any language is learning the cultural idiosyncrasies and idioms. Of course, native speakers should strive to make sure they're not overusing idioms with a EFL/ESL audience, but knowing "grammar" and "complex technical terms" doesn't actually mean you can speak [American/UK/Indian/Black American/etc] English.
Humans are just curious when someone has a different accent than the local area. There are various American accents. I've had that question asked a lot when I was living in Korea. Getting upset about it is entirely a personal choice.
>> Sergio Serrano has participated in many international scientific conferences across the globe. "In a typical situation, a group of foreign researchers are discussing a complex technical issue with very precise and elaborate formal English," Serrano says, "until an American joins the group."
I'm not American but I don't like this. If an American author had written that everything is fine until "a foreigner joins the group" there would be a twitterstorm.
What's more, this is not about Americans, or even native English speakers. I'll give you a completely different example of how a group with a common language can exclude someone who doesn't quite share it.
I knew a couple were the woman was Greek and the man was from Chile. They lived in Greece and hung out with Greeks. I witnessed first hand, dozens of times, how the Chilean guy was left out of conversations. It happened in three phases. In the first phase, everyone would speak to him in English. This lasted for a few minutes, time enough to exchange greetings and pleasantries and so on. In the second phase, the Greeks would revert to speaking to each other in Greek. In the third stage, the Chilean man would try to join the conversation in Greek. At that point, the Greeks would reply in English. Then the process looped back to the second phase.
The Chilean guy was trying to learn Greek, but he never could - because nobody spoke to him in Greek long enough for him to learn it. He also failed to make any friends, because everyone spoke to him only for a short time, as long as they felt comfortable speaking in English.
Obviously I noticed this so I tried to rectify it by speaking to him only in Greek. We ended up code-switching a lot but at least we could keep going for a longer time than he did with others. I realised his frustration when we explicitly discussed how I spoke to him in Greek and he said, exasperated "you're the only one!".
Language can be a huge barrier that we raise subconsiously around us- but it doesn't help to single out one nationality for it. Everyone does it.
If your Chilean is having difficulties learning the local language to such a degree that people don’t tolerate his practicing attempts, then he might need to just sign up for a course where a teacher, paid to be patient, will work with him.
I love language-learning, and I can usually bootstrap myself to a level where the locals don’t reply in English when I want to practice. However, with Dutch I found it difficult to bootstrap and I experienced what your Chilean did. When I complained about how locals weren’t letting me practice, I was told (the famous Dutch directness!) that I needed to simply hire a teacher to get to a higher level, instead of being annoying to local people. People’s time is precious, and a foreigner speaking the local language haltingly is arguably disrespectful of their time.
This happened in conversation between friends and family and they were not Dutch but Greek. We are famous for our time-wasting culture, even more so than the Dutch are famous for being direct.
I'm an American; I don't like this, too.
My experience mirrors what is described in the article, but only with people from Europe. Non-native English speakers from Europe look down on Americans, in a sort of "gate-keeping" manner where Europeans "own" the language. They have a better grasp of the "precise and elaborate formal English" and do not hesitate to correct Americans and tell them they don't understand grammar and are uneducated. (I'm inclined to agree with them.)
My experience speaking with non-native speakers from Asia, India, and Central & South America has been different. Maybe we are more willing to accept that there is a language barrier, but no one "owns" it.
And, like the article says, trying to use a culturally relevant idiom is a futile task.
> If an American author had written
This is a common pattern of false equivalency, like "reverse racism" and the likes.
The analogy is invalid because the harms of discrimination come from the power imbalance.
In this case, immigrants in the US are in a position of disadvantage, due to linguistic/cultural struggles and the perception issues they cause. Perpetuating stereotypes that reinforce that perception causes harm.
I appreciate this of course, but for me any stereotype is harmful beause it teaches people to be intellectually lazy. From this intellectual laziness many evils are born and racism is one of them. If the goal is to eliminate racism, we're not going to get there any faster than we will by not accepting any stereotype at all, whatsoever, regardless of who is at the receiving end.
It’s interesting when a phrase has slightly different meanings between cultures. For instance, I have seen several Indians use “too many” to mean “a lot”, Americans use “too many” to mean a lot sometimes but there is a negative connotation for Americans where “too many” means “a lot and there should be less.”
Usually this difference is small enough that it doesn’t matter but there are cases like an Indian saying, “there are too many Mexicans in this neighborhood” and meaning “This neighborhood has a lot of Mexicans” in a neutral sense, but an American hearing that might interpret it as “The number of Mexicans in this neighborhood is a bad thing”
> American hearing that might interpret it
I think most Americans would interpret it this way given it plays directly into the stereotype of "All Indians/Asians Are Incredibly Racist/Sexist."
I was taught that "there should be less" is the plain meaning of "too many".
English has been adapted by many communities as common medium in India, where none are native-speakers. The Indianized English that we speak are understood well by other Indians and it can vary/struggle a bit as you move across the country (north-south, east-west).
Now, we Indians find it hard to understand when others non-native speakers speak English just as others for Indians.
I had had my experiences being the "English Translator" for Indians and Japanese speaking, well, English. I enunciate, use simpler words, and shorter sentences.
I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be the common thread. Our schools fined us ₹0.50 in my times if we do not speak in English since very early grade.
During early 2000s I started visiting countries outside India, such as US, and UK. Then I realized, that my English sucks. I have been learning a lot more since. Working mostly with Native English Speaking clients did do a whole lot of fast-forward into "speaking English" the proper way.
Unfortunately, I feel my own language is limited and very complex. My family switch to English if we need to understand things faster and better. My daughters are learning our original language but they sounded very funny and kinda "language-retarted" to their counterparts (cousins, relative back home).
The interesting thing is I can speak and understand a minimum of three languages (English, Hindi, and our Language) like most Indians. I can also get away with exchanging info with people speaking in Marathi, Gujarathi, and a bit of Bengali, Punjabi, Haryanbi, etc.
Attempting and preparing to learn Japanese soon.
My girlfriend recently enrolled in a university and one of the requirements was a certificate from one of the official places (TOEFL etc., I forget the rest). They exist just to leech money off non-native speakers. Anyone can pass an exam as long as they go to the right place and pay the fee, and besides, why do you need a long written and spoken test to test people's English? Someone's level of English is immediately obvious from even a brief conversation. If they can't speak it, they'll fail out after the first exams or learn it anyway.
I guess it bothers me even more as someone who wasn't born in an English speaking country but spoke it nearly exclusively after childhood. It's a common sentiment - one of my old history teachers lived in England for 20 or so years, and was asked if he can provide some proof he can speak English for his citizenship. How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language?
What's even worse is that these tests (I think except Cambridge English? but very few institutions accept that) expire after two years or so, and they cost a lot of money.
I moved to Switzerland to do a master's degree in Germany which was still, essentially, in German. Didn't matter that I'd already read research literature and written term papers in English, I still had to do a TOEFL for no discernible reason. But even worse, should I end up deciding to do another degree somewhere else, I'd just have to do it all over, even though I use English everyday at work.
I understand making sure that people speak and understand English properly in an academic setting, but TOEFL etc. are just money machines.
> How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language?
By lying on their resume. That's why people ask questions like that, to uncover frauds.
I find it hard to believe one could go through the nationalization procedure and not speak English. It's a very in-person kind of thing, no way to con your way through it really.
> I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language.
I've noticed that it's quite common for monolinguals to be judgemental about people's English if it doesn't sound exactly like their own dialect of English. But the lack of linguistic ability often lies with the monolingual listener in these cases. I grew up monolingual, so I understand how easy it is to judge someone who speaks in a way that is less comfortably understood. But communication is a two way process, both the speaker and the listener have to develop the skill and put in the effort for successful communication to take place. There are countless dialects of English, and a lot of variety even among people who speak English as their first language. It seems that many people are unaware of this.
I can't fault Indians for "prepone" when so many of my fellow programmers say "performant."
I'm just a fan of all forms of linguistic innovation. Language is a tool - so long as you're being understood, you're doing it right.
What's wrong with performant? (Non-native speaker here)
It's a neologism. Some people love it. (Actually, it seems like a lot of people do.) To others however, it strikes the ear as awkward sounding. I wouldn't say there's anything "wrong" about it. It's a matter of taste. It's a bit of a pet peeve for some of us.
I bought a book a couple of years ago: iOS and macOS Performance Tuning. I took note that the author had not used the word "performant" even once in the book's 400 pages. Maybe I'm a snob, but it made the author seem the more credible to me.
The main argument against "performant" isn't linguistic, it's technical. "Performant" is vague. It can always be replaced by something more descriptive like "fast", "uses little memory", "asymptotically optimal", "parallelizable", and so on.
Thank you. In light of the fact that George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" essay was just recently posted here, I want to acknowledge that you make a better case than I do. One should aim to make one's meaning plain, as opposed to resorting to inflated (and often vague) language.
Additionally, it might be cross-pollination from Germanic languages, which I think all have the word.
Thank you for telling me. Having been using it for ages and never realized that it can be interpreted in this way.
In my native Romance language it is written the same and it's an usual word. I never thought that it's a neologism in English and perceived as pretentious.
You're welcome. But I have to say that I think one of the other replies to my post makes a better case than I.
Maybe we can productionalize it.
"I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how would this manager know what language I grew up with?
The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. The manager knew he didn't speak it from infancy because Madani spoke it fluently but without the style of a native speaker. Perhaps the difference in that position would be irrelevant, such as a STEM job. There are positions, however, it would matter, such as sales or public relations where that last one percent can mean everything.
STEM is taught in English so kids that aren't taught English growing up have a particularly hard time adjusting with both language and the content.
Uh if parents did not share the same mother tongue in India, it is a very good possibilty that English is one of those three languages.
The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. Had it been, he would have very likely said so, and talked about how the American was wrong for assuming that because someone speaks in an Indian accent their native language isn't English. Instead, he dodges the point entirely and takes offence that someone should care about the difference between being a fluent and a native speaker. Whether or not he's right about that, claiming you are a native speaker of a language when you did not speak it from earliest childhood is factually incorrect.
There's also the fact the title of the article is "Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English" which leads me to believe the people sharing their gripes are, in fact, not native speakers of English.
As a non-native speaker living in a non-English speaking country who has started learning English decades ago at school in my teenage years, the sheer richness of the English vocabulary never ceases to fascinate me. There are so many words with subtle and nuanced meanings (primarily of Latin and French origin) you can almost never hear in an American movie or a reality show. I have encountered them primarily in British news articles and documentaries. Using them among other non-native speakers even seems snobbish and counter-productive. I mean stuff like "subjugate", "rejuvenate", "reverberate", etc.
> Using them among other non-native speakers even seems snobbish and counter-productive.
Non-native here, but I have an opinion on your choice of examples. They aren't posh or counter-productive, on the contrary, they are just specific to fields under-represented in popular culture (political history, fantasy/longevity research, music/acoustics). I don't see any obvious ways to convey the same meaning using more common words.
This makes me lugubrious.
"prepone" has been coined independently quite a lot of times in the history of English. It just so happens that it stuck around when the Indians did it.
In Google's Book Ngram Viewer, prepone shows up in a higher percentage of texts in the early 1800s than in text from the past two decades. However, I don't know how accurate the corpus is for those old texts.
If you look through the documents from that period it looks like they are a mix of words split over lines, non-english words, and ORC errors. G'Ngrams is very unreliable when it comes to the oldest materials. One clue to that is how the occurrence goes from max to min and back again in less than a decade.
'antepone' seems to have the advantage for the latter half of the 19th century and then around 1965 'prepone' blows it away.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+ant...
And yet preposition has long been a word.
With it's usefulness it's a surprise it's not picked up as an actual word.
Pre production post production. Pre release post release. Prepone, postpone.
> "In one instance," he said, "while working at a large Swiss firm, an American manager quibbled at my CV asserting that English was my native language.
> " 'Why not?,' I asked."
> " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a child,' she answered with a tender, patient look."
Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means. It's more like, "is fluent and only learned through immersion, not from a class or relating words to another language" - which is how all children learn their first language, but is far less common as adults.
So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly learning the rules of a language. That's why "prepone" is confusing - native speakers don't learn "postpone" as "post + pone", but as a single unit, so in an area where it's not a normal word, "prepone" is far less likely to be interpreted as "pre + pone", and more likely to be a new word entirely.
(Aside, reading the comic before the article, I paused on it and tried to figure out what it meant. I was thinking some odd local version of "prepare")
So a cursory google search shows this definition of “native speaker” in several places:
“a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood”
And this makes sense, because “native” as an adjective means:
“associated with the place or circumstances of a person's birth”
So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are you getting the “fluent only by immersion” definition?
Are you instead talking about “native fluency,” which is typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though realistically impossible after a certain age)?
The speed you replied, I think you might have missed the second paragraph I edited in (a habit I have of posting the comment, rereading it outside the edit box, then adding clarification). The edit should make it clear I'm not talking about native fluency.
I don't think your second paragraph ("So native speakers ...") changes the meaning. And, FWIW, i also disagree - i think that a native speaker is someone who grew up speaking that language with everyone around them.
> So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly learning the rules of a language.
Based on this, I could be considered native English speaker even though I've been speaking English only for the past 1/3 of my life. But that's exactly what I did. There were times when I sat down and read about the grammar in books, but to this day, I have no idea what a second or third conditional is, I just use them "naturally". It was two years ago that I realized what the difference was between an adjective and an adverb.
So, I don't really think this is a good explanation of what a native speaker is.
I think that the authors ideas about what it means to know a language are implicit to the whole article but never directly discussed. There is knowing the meaning of a word and then there is knowing the contextual usage and conotative meanings. On their face, "expensive" and "costly" have the same meaning, but in many circumstances they aren't fully interchangeable.
To me, your "mother language" is simply the language that your mother, or other primary caregiver, spoke to you as a child. It is certainly plausible to have more than one in multilingual households.
A native speaker may not have spoken that to language with their parents, but they learned it natively from other speakers at a young enough age that their phonemes adjust.
In my opinion, native speakers tend to have a much deeper understanding of the meanings and connotations of the words/phrases they use but may indeed have smaller volcabularies than fluent, but non-native, speakers. The difference between "costly" and "expensive" is obvious to a native english speaker, but might not have been learned by a fluent speaker with a larger volcabulary.
If you listen to linguists, grammar is descriptive not prescriptive. Grammar is not a fundemental trait of language, but a model of language use that helps us think about how language is used.
I do think it is important to be aware of how we use language to enforce economic and cultural segregation. Language use is often used as a proxy for class and education and those who don't fit the "standard" are faced with discrimination.
Reminds me of that scene from Die Hard where the non-native German speaker says "feels like it's gonna rain like, dogs and cats" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0yQbpoQ0hY
Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be American? - speaker would never say.
As a native speaker, I don't remember anyone teaching me the rules of adjective order but I have internalized them and definitely notice when someone violates my expectations. I rarely witness a native speaker do so. https://www.grammar-monster.com/lessons/order_of_adjectives....
Or... You think I know f__k nothing, but I know f__k all!
I think some of the confusion is that "pone" is not a root word or term. So, the opposite of postpone is not prepone, in the same way that prepartum is the opposite of postpartum.
I like 'sublime' for that. It sounds like an object could have three states: lime, sublime, and superlime.
Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.
My favorite is "why is no one ever whelmed?". I've seen this many times in popular culture over the years. People get overwhelmed and underwhelmed but no one ever seems to just get whelmed, even though it's really the same thing as overwhelmed.
Apparently it could have been like that, as it comes from 'sub'+'limen' ("threshold")
Disclaimer: I just googled "sublime etymology"
Subb! I suggest you make a backmal undertological antiposal about this.
Why? The stem is from Latin ponere, to put, so could theoretically work both ways
I probably should have said "a commonly used or understood root word".
It shows up rarely in that form in "standard" English, but the related morpheme "-ponent" shows up more often: component (put+together), exponent (put+out), proponent (put+forth). And then the "-pose" variants come from the same Latin root but modified via French: compose, expose, propose.
Non-native English vs Native English is nothing compared to European French vs Canadian French.
To a EU French ear, Canadian French is a horrible butchery of the beautiful language that is French. The Canadians don't roll their R's properly and all sorts of other unspeakable things. ;-)
Meanwhile, an EU French person visiting the French speaking parts of Canada will often have a significant amount of difficulty being understood. This is not because of their lack of mastery of the French language, but because their true pronunciation of French is not what the Canadian ear expects.
A lot of native English speakers think English is a difficult language to learn. It's true that English has a lot of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies caused by mixing German, Latin, Greek, etc. But English is structurally very simple: few subject/verb agreement classes, few tenses, modifications like "ask vs. command" or "desire vs. predict" are achieved by adding words instead of conjugation. There are no genders to memorize. It's probably easier than the average language to construct grammatically correct sentences.
English also has the largest vocabulary. Granted, most of it isn't used in everyday speech but I encounter a lot of words in writing I don't see used in speech.
(Shout out to anyone who learned a lot of vocabulary from Calvin and Hobbes.)
I can understand why it would be annoying to constantly be asked about your accent, but on the other hand, it's someone taking a bit of information they have and using that as a starting point to learn more about you. That's a good thing! Obviously it shouldn't be asked in a way that derails an existing conversation, but we could use more people trying to learn about each other these days, not fewer.
1. English is made up of several languages;
2. "Language changes" pretty much equates to people making mistakes, and those mistakes becoming part of the language. Since English has spread over so much of the world, in addition to it not having a central authority that is looked to for its structure (as does French), many mistakes have come in, and made the language weird. This overlaps a bit with (1).
Regarding (2), now that there are on the order of a billion non-native speakers of English who often talk to each other, we will see more and more changes to the language from THEIR mistakes. English will belong less and less to native speakers as time goes on. Wild!
Or new languages will spawn from it combined with whatever of the numerous other-language-speakers use it. Steven Fry talked a bit about "Panglish" on QI, was interesting.
The question becomes: Will we call English English, or will some other language per above be called English? I for one don't use "nother" nor place periods before consequents, so I might be speaking my own language right now, based on what people online seem to have done with English :)
I’m a native English speaker.
I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it.
At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble understanding each other.
At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse with a Canadian colleague in French.
My dad is one of those people who when speaking to non-native English speakers, he speaks (a lot) louder, as if that helps them to understand (I don’t think it does).
In Italy one time, my daughter was trying to order espresso with hot milk but got served a glass of cold milk because she asked for a latte. She's currently studying German and is amused by the German for "birth control pills": "Anti-Baby-Pillen".
I am reminded of a habit from seven habits of highly effective people: seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Shrug.
>I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it.
I asked my high school English teacher the proper way to contract "should not have" in writing; I was trying my hand at short stories, and I wanted it in the dialogue. She said it wasn't a thing. Not that there's no standard convention, but that it's not a thing.
Despite me saying and hearing "shouldn't've" all the time.
'Anti-Baby-Pillen' is the most absurd name of a medicine I've come across.
On that first example, "prepone" might not officially be a word, yet, but I encourage them to keep at it. Its construction follows the same structure as its intended antonym, even back to the etymology of "postpone". Unlike some of my English teachers in elementary school, the lexicographers at Oxford are not a bunch of solely prescriptivist assholes. Get the word into common enough usage that there are multiple sources for the editors of the OED to cite, and you just might get "prepone" added to the next edition. The story about an argument with Tolkien over the correct spelling of the plural of "dwarf" notwithstanding, I think included-in-the-Oxford is a standard few can argue with for an English word being officially real.
There is a notion of General or Standard American English [1]. Similarly, in Britain there’s Received Pronunciation [2].
Of course these are a social construct, but it’s not unfair to characterize that:
“General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans and widely perceived, among Americans, as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
The word "prepone" is commonly used in Indian English, with the obvious meaning. On my last trip to Noida (near Delhi) the manager I was visiting saw how jet lagged I was and asked if they should "prepone my cab" (act the driver to come early to take me back to my hotel).
And what about business English? :)
Use of words/phrases such as "thought process" (mostly incorrectly), "sync up", "paradigm shift", "disrupt", "blue/green ocean", "ballpark" and so on and on...
'loot', 'dacoit', 'blighty', 'juggernaut', 'punch', 'chappals', 'verandah', 'bunglow' and too many to count all have Indian origins.
'blighty' is a misheard vilaiti(foreigner). It's a tango, that's how the sausage is made and there are no wrong answers.
You make a mess of yoga and Indian cuisine. We add liberal modifications to english. It's all good.
Interesting thing is, if there is a time when are a lot more Indians speaking English and all making the same 'mistakes' than other people, how long till the mistakes are part of the language.
> The whole concept of "mother tongue" is a political construct to keep certain people out, says Madani.
I'm starting to be very tired of reading this kind of statement everywhere. No, not every existing concept is a conspiracy to discriminate against some people. Not everything is a social construct (few things are). You [article author] are not a victim of a grand linguistic scheme established by men/White/English speakers/whatever to make you feel bad about your English level. The concept is valid and useful in language education.
Linguists don't distinguish between "proper" and "improper" English, or "right" or "wrong", although they are very interested what native speakers think of "grammatical" or "ungrammatical" sentences.
In (modern) linguistics, you try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, watching language artifacts through the looking glass. English exists in many so-called varieties, geographical varieties, different varieties used in different social strata of one and the same society.
This article seems to take an angle that any of this is unique to English. Are things any different for non-native speakers growing up in India, China, Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc?
English is unusual for being polycentric. For the vast majority of the world's languages, there's exactly one prestige dialect (Parisian French, Mandarin Chinese, Tokyo Japanese, etc) and a bunch of "inferior" dialects, and the first scenario (highly educated professor goes to a different country and is tripped up by using the "wrong" word) would not be possible.
As it happens, though, Arabic is also a notably polycentric language, although it has a single prestige dialect too (MSA). And English is the closest thing India has to a prestige dialect, since all other languages are regional.
French is monocentric? I don't think the Quebecois agree.
I don't think even the Quebecois think Quebec French is a prestige dialect.
No. I had similar experiences when learning Korean in Korea.
There is a trend by native English speakers to bash english, and treat it like no other language can have any of these issues.
The only major difference is noted in the other response; English has a lot of different dialects. Korean has Standard Korean that everyone learns now, and unofficial regional dialects. With English you have people randomly learning American English, UK English, Indian English, etc, which all have various differences in vocabulary, idioms, grammar, etc.
Anyone who's actually been to India (and other British colonies with natives, like Singapore, Hongkong) knows that the English out there has branched into its own language, with own slang, own spelling and own colloquial phrases.
Imagine a world where India is the center of the English speaking world (not too far fetched considering the population of English speakers), we would all start using prepone because that's just the cultural norm of the most common branch of English.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
— James Nicoll
I think this aspect of English is what makes it so complicated. For instance, words are spelt with an "f" or a "ph" depending on what language we originally stole it from.
Wait prepone is not an English word, what!?
I use it all the time.
I have never heard it or even seen it in my life.
Me neither, but it's a perfectly cromulent construction.
My thoughts exactly, it would embiggen our vocabulary.
If you use it, then it is a word. If other people don't understand you, then that's your problem.
In English, which lacks the sort of central control that, say, French has, if people use it, it's a word. It's just a word that isn't commonly used in some dialects.
It's a perfectly cromulent word.
"So when I realized [preponed] wasn't "proper" English, I was dumbfounded, flummoxed, astounded, nonplussed," ~ "nonplussed" is a word, but "plussed" isn't. Thought that was interesting given the word being discussed is preponed (vs. postponed).
I prepend() things to arrays sometimes.
And yet you probably never 'postpend'.
And why do we computer people have prefixes and postfixes, when the world was just getting by fine with prefixes and and suffixes. (I realize we did have to invent 'infix'.)
And why is it antebellum and pre-war, but postbellum and post post-war. Why does no one ever use postdeluvian and only antediluvian?
sigh
I work for an English-speaking company and deal with colleagues overseas every day.
I am constantly amazed by my co-workers abilities to think quickly over highly technical topics and make passionate arguments over complex topics-- in a second or third language!
Human beings are fantastic.
"Prepone" makes sense even if it's not a word.
Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
That's a funny example to use, since you can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date. Same problem in the opposite direction.
"We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common.
The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not used as a standalone.
Rather than 'up and down', I think the visual is supposed to be 'up and back' (like forward and backward).
English is fun
More usually (in the UK) it's forward and back, which make more sense as direct opposites. It's a little confusing though because pushing something back means move it later and bring it forward means move it earlier, whereas when talking directly about time the meanings are usually reversed (e.g. "back in time" means earlier).
in this case i'd interpret "forward/backward" as "closer towards you / further away from you", with the metaphor being that you're standing on a timeline looking "in the future direction" and moving stuff closer/further.
when using "back" to talk about the past, it's "backwards" as in "behind you". "further back" = "further behind you" = "more in the past"
Does "back in time" mean earlier when speaking of future events? Or only past events?
A future meeting "moved back" is definitely postponed. (US English)
And yet when you "set something back" you move it later in time.
It reminds me of this scene from Stargate SG1: https://youtu.be/LxK0ZIk_sSEyou can move up a date, but nobody talks about moving down a date."Yesterday morning" and "tomorrow morning" is my favorite example. Several previous Indian coworkers of mine would say "today morning", which always made me smile a bit. It's not an unreasonable phrase to exist, given the others do as well.
In German the word for morning and tomorrow is the same, "Morgen".
But "tomorrow morning" becomes "Morgen früh" which is "tomorrow early" (or "early tomorrow" in English). "Morgen vormittags" ("tomorrow before noon") is also a variation.
That would be "Mañana en la mañana" in Spanish!
Pone not being an English word on its own is not really relevant.
A lot of, if not most, Greek/Latin neologisms and combined words use a root that is never used as is.
Both “neologism” and “combine” above are examples of this…
I have not heard about move up a date before but I understand it to move the date to another future date. I guess the point it doesn't matter if it is a word or not as long as it is easily understandable, typically within a region, a culture or an industry.
Pone may not be a word but pre and post should ideally be quite obvious and self sufficient qualifiers if standardized.
And then I remembered the word preposterous, enough said.
Moving up a date is like moving up toward the front in a line (or queue) vs moving back.
Right, but then why is isn't it "moving front" instead of moving up? Languages are weird.
> moving down a date
I'd consider "(later) down the road" an example of that.
If it makes sense and its meaning is widely understood by other English speakers, I think it is a word. We don't have some academy with the authority to say it isn't.
Not a synonym but a similar trick: "outro."
(From "intro" in case it's not obvious.)
I've read that people learning English have difficulty with phrasal verbs like "move up" [1], so I can understand why "prepone" might become popular.
As a “non-native” English speaker, the single most influential class I took for learning English is lexicology. Each student is required to recite 500 Latin roots and 200 affixes. It's hard, but after that, the vocabulary capability grows exponentially.
I may be postjudiced but it's no use posttending: I am postpared to postfer the word "prepone".
(Sorry. Seriously though, I'm surprised "prepone" never caught on before, it makes intuitive sense!)
Postpone, prepone, cornpone
Sounds fine to me. I think I'm going to use prepone from now on.
For people who don't understand this: in the US (mostly in the South), 'pone' is a type of unleavened quick bread usually made with cornmeal. It's almost never used as-is; I've only ever seen 'corn pone' (or 'cornpone'). It's not a root word in American English that you would naturally want to modify with pre- or -post-, unless maybe you were joking about being hungry (pre-pone) then eating a lot and needing a nap (post-pone).
It's the richness of possible sentence construction that gets me. Nearly any word order can be made to work.
And I still construct sentences oddly, even though I've been speaking some English every day for 50+ years.
I've heard from multiple people that learning what words should be singular and plural in sentences is confusing. For example, "garbage" vs "garbages"
>I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be the common thread.
Hindi should be that common thread instead.
If in North India that is the common thread, not the case for rest of India.
Native speaker: repetitious usage of stock phrases by other native speakers has begun to bug me recently. Some examples:
* Listening to market business analysis one will often hear "And this way the customer tries to gauge the value of THAT bag/watch/car..." where the word 'that' is emphasized with an almost implicit nod in the direction of the object. It's not so much grammar usage (which v. that). Rather it's a cloyingly emotional hustle (as I see) it to both magnify, mystify, and focus on the object in question.
* "... That said ... " / "...that being said..." appears often in writing, and even HN.
* Listen to any pitch in the software world. See if you can get through one without hearing any of these words or phrases: "... experience ...", 'actually' as in " ... Now press OK and it actually [does XYZ which was the whole point anyway]"; or "All we wanted to do was simply [some in, in fact, quite complex task] ... so we set out to [save the world]". More abstractly modern marketing emotionally plays on the feelings of connectedness or family in an insincere way. If you know Absolutely Fabulous you might know the Patsy line: "Get your dry cleaning back and it's a revolution" ... you know because the dry cleaners are practically your close loving family looking out for your chores so you have time to save the world / be a teacher ... so now everything is practically either an act of magic or Old Testament level miracles.
* In verbal conversation the word "like" is used far too much
* Finally, I have a number of friends for whom Portuguese is their native language. I don't understand it. Still I have tried to listen carefully for the parallel in English when we say "ummm" or "ahhh" to buy time while we think of the next line or the "like" example to start a sentence ... or the rising intonation to make a statement, and not asking a question. For a great example of rising intonation: look for the Noon dieting TV commercial and listen for the African American Lady who's got a line: "It's amazing how the little things ...". By the time she's done she's talking quickly at high pitch. I don't hear this in Portuguese.
Verbs that don't end with -ed in past tense. No rule, you just have to memorise all of them.
I think there is a rule (or more likely several rules), but knowing them involves learning the history of English, which is not what people usually want to do.
Shit, I'm a native speaker and I complain about this trash language all the time.
Funny story while waiting in the Observation Area after getting the COVID vaccination:
In the first registration part, I discovered I didn't have an NHI number because I haven't been to a doctor. Therefore I was given a Post-It note on my consent form saying "Manual Entry".
After the jab, the observation nurses would call out names every few minutes: David, Priscilla, Marion, Yi Xin, Manuel, Daniel, Kyungbook, Richard... no surnames.
I didn't really think much of it. Besides, it was raining outside, I had my laptop, and I wasn't in a hurry to leave. When it was almost closing, there were only two of us left.
"Are you Manuel?" they asked. I said my name is Peter, not Manuel! But apparently they were calling "Manual". The Kiwi accent is hard to understand, even for a native speaker!
It is great that this is being addressed. I think English is a language which has been evolving over time. Especially in the colonial era, the language spread and a different branch of English emerged. A lot of words from English became mainstream in local languages and a lot of words from local languages made it back to English.
However, the dark underbelly of this phenomenon is that there are some serious racist undertones that come with this. Some words are "proper English" because it came from specific parts of the world, meanwhile similar words from other places are "Wrong English".
Certain speakers have accents that are "beautiful" and rewarded even if they completely butcher the language, it is completely understandable and held in high regard. Meanwhile others are considered "funny" or "stupid" and the speaker's intelligence gets questioned because of the accent.
As a non native speaker, I've had so many experiences where my intelligence is insulted and get shut down, because of my accent. Meanwhile the French guy next door gets applauded for saying the same thing again and gets a promotion. Language politics is real and it has severe consequences.
As a Commonwealth inhabitant, having to deal with a multitude of formalized language variants, each with a small number of differences in orthography and vocabulary, strikes me as a useless waste of energy. Difference and local particularity for its own sake may please the odd local jingoist, but it is simpler to simply take the mother version to be definitive.
Ah but which "mother version"? American English is closer to the original spelling than British English, but getting the actual English to change their use of their own language because the Americans use it differently seems... odd. Plus there's no intrinsic reason to prefer the original spelling over later versions.
So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English? But that would see a small minority of the number of English-language speakers setting the rules for the huge majority.
So maybe (as others have suggested) we follow the majority of native English speakers and use the Indian version?
> So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English?
Which ones? It's not like English, as actually spoken in England, is particularly uniform. It has uniform _spelling_, but that's about all; a lot of vocabulary and even grammar is quite regional.
If we get a choice, then Irish English.
There are a few things that got pulled from Gaelic to English in Ireland that I love.
Like "him/herself" to mean the object of the sentence without naming them "ah would you look at himself, all dressed up like that", "I'll have to check with herself if I'm allowed out on a school night", etc
And no (or dimished) use of yes or no. Monosyllabic answers verboten.
Unless you're in Bristol and notice how much the "should'ov" spelling becomes a thing.
I really think that "should have" is going to be replaced by "should of". It already is in most actual usage, and it's only "language snobs" (like me) who care that it shouldn't be used like that.
I have the same feeling about "lose", which is increasingly spelled "loose". It annoys the living crap out of me, but in fairness English is whatever people say it is, and if people want to say it's "loose" then so be it.
I've already seen "moorish" succumb - from meaning (more or less) "spicy" to meaning "something I'd like to have more of". Which to be fair we don't have a word for, while we have plenty for "spicy" so it seems like a fair trade.
> It annoys the living crap out of me, but in fairness English is whatever people say it is
That's about my position on it. "I'm a descriptivist, but this is just stupid, let's not go there."
>So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English?
I'm in. Just imagine stuck up californians suddenly speaking Geordie. Howay man.
I'm not sure that Geordie counts as actual English, given that 80% of England (never mind the rest of the Anglosphere) can't understand it ;)
I once worked as a KP in the Isle of Man alongside cooks from Belfast, Glasgow and Sunderland. My Wurzel upbringing did not prepare me for this. Took me 3 weeks of repeated "what?" to begin to understand them. But I find that 30 years later, I can still understand them. Weird how that works.
Language has never worked like that. It's always going to be a changing thing, with branches that extend out until what was one language becomes two or more distinct languages.
Languages evolve. With something as big as the commonwealth, different groups will see their own local use of the language evolve in different directions. The "mother version" itself has evolved plenty over time, and I don't think it's reasonable to say that the way that particular version has evolved over time is the "definitive" version of the language.
Taking your point to its limit, all contemporary languages are a useless waste of energy. Let's adopt a terse and efficient esperanto so that the billions can easily conduct business.
> Let's adopt a terse and efficient esperanto
That made me laugh! If forced to learn an IAL[1] I'd probably choose Solresol[2] because what sane person could resist the chance to yodel their complaints to Customer Services?
Or, if "terse and efficient" are an immovable part of the specification then I'd suggest Ithkuil[3] ... or maybe Rust?
[1] International Auxiliary Language
Your ancestors came from Africa, why dont you speak your ancestor's African language?
Languages keep on evolving, you just have to deal with it.
In what way do you "have to deal with a multitude of formalized language variants"? How does that impact you day to day?
Like when I committed that greatest of Canadian sins: using the work 'labour' in a document read by an American client. The reaction was ridiculous.
Or the hilarious situation I had at a legal conference. I thought one of my right-wing US friends had gone totally racist. He was complaining about all the new "turbins" he was seeing while driving to the conference. I thought he meant turban, but that's just how Americans pronounce "turbine", as in the wind turbines he could see from the highway.
I have met Americans who believe the UK spelling of words with -our instead of -or actually represents a difference in pronunciation. That is, they have the mistaken impression that Brits say /kəlur/ instead of /kələr/.
'gaol' always throws me for a loop when I'm reading something British. I need to remind myself it's pronounced 'jail'. (A quick google tells me that all the major British newspapers switched over to 'jail' by the 1990's - score one for the good guys!)
I remember reading 'Mutiny on the Bounty' as a child and talking about it with my father and I said something about the 'boatswain', and he (a former naval officer) looked at me like I had two heads. "You mean the [BOSUN]?" "Well, no it says 'boatswain'" "Yes, it's spelled like that, but it's pronounced BOSUN. It's like 'colonel'. Don't think about the letters."
I've known the word boatswain for decades at this point and never knew it was pronounced like that!
Speaking of military terms, lieutenant as "leftenant" always threw me. I had just assumed they were different words.
Even worse: Try being at unit with brit/canadian/american exchange officers. Same spelling, different pronunciations depending on who you are talking about. And they really do care.
And it's only "leftenent" in the army; in the navy it's "latenant".
(or at least, was - it is possible navy use has shifted)
One of my father's college classmates was in Navy ROTC, and deliberately pronounce "boatswain" and "gunwale" as spelled, in order to bug the regular petty officer.
Also forcastle -> foc's'le
As a person whose spent my entire life in the US, I've never heard that pronunciation of turbine. Looking into it, it seems like some people do pronounce it that way but typically it's tied to a specific region AND industry. It's certainly not the widely accepted way to say it here south of the border.
That’s how some Americans say “turbine”. I’ve never heard it said that way but apparently this is mostly used by (older?) people from the Midwest, which certainly fits with your friend being right-wing.
I think you've missed the point of English, which is a collection of languages that evolved over time. Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above. The dictionary is post-hoc, and long may it stay that way.
Even for French, in practice, that’s not how it works... The académie is often criticized for being too rigid and not following the language that’s actually spoken.
L'académie is a ridiculous concept. How come some elite literates tell people how to speak? It's like if there was one way only to solve a programming problem, and that's rarely the case.
I love the description of English as "three different languages dressed in a trenchcoat pretending to be a proper language" :)
I'm trying to learn German at the moment, and it's fascinating seeing the similarities between the languages, and the things we used to have in common but got dropped or modified in English.
You're wrong about french, it's pretty different between France and Canada. I first learnt France french, then Canadian. happen to find "correct" french extremely boring, absolutely no reason to speak in a boring way if you can speak cool french ;)
France French is centrally controlled; there's essentially a standards body (though you could argue that in practice this is irrelevant; if what is actually spoken diverges from the standard, then what is actually spoken is the language, and the standardisers are just playing at constructed languages). No major variant of English works like this.
And don't forget Africa and the Caribbean.
> Unlike e.g. French, there is no definitive, latest version of the language decreed from above.
What do you mean by this? French is spoken differently with different dialects over the world - eg. Quebecois French is not the same as France French. And while French may be one of the roots of English, there are also French words with their roots in English. It's all a mishmash.
I think he’s referring to the Académie which pretends to control what’s correct French or not. Of course as you mention, Québec has its own thing and does not listen to them.
The Académie française is France's official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language.
No such institution exists for the English language.
Fair enough, though that's only France, not the language itself, but you're right, no equivalent exists in English.
I am referring to formalized standards here. There is exactly no literature that I care about which has been written in some English variant other than British or American. Why force students and professionals to buy special dictionaries and conform to oddball rules, which really only have a small number of differences, just because it tickles the fancy of a minority of would-be authorities. For example, Canada should just adopt American English. As for the countries mentioned in the article, the majority of "English speakers" there are not competent as speakers (easily seen by spending a few minutes reading Twitter), so the people proposing formalizing variants for those regions are not doing so in good faith, but to satisfy a political agenda that is only tangentially related to interest in language.