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Languages

Zuu said:
... You act like this is a bad thing.
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This. Considering English's sporadic grammar rules and words like set which have over 100 different meanings and its obsession with stealing words from other languages and half of its words being easily modifiable into meaning just about anything you want them to as long as you use them in the right way, I'd say English is a powerful, if very difficult, language.

French is for succinct people. English is for artists! *sparkle*
 
Mon francias c'est tres nul, mais it's tres amusant to parle it in front of my amis pas que they all study francais et then they throw livres dans my tete.

Bon temps.
 
Dannichu said:
Mon francias c'est tres nul, mais it's tres amusant to parle it in front of my amis pas que they all study francais et then they throw livres dans my tete.

Bon temps.
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Translation:
"My french is very meager, but it's very amusing to speak it in front of my friends because they all study french and then they throw books in [I think you meant a, which means at] my head.
 
English for the most part has no different noun genders,
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Yeah, this is a good thing. Noun genders are arbitrary and useless. Why would you want them? I speak Spanish and they don't enhance the language. Spanish has some advantages over English but noun gender is definitely not one of them.

I'll never understand the fascination English speakers have with noun genders. o.o I've actually heard this sentiment a lot before.

and only two forms of verbs in the present tense; that much is crazily condensed compared to other languages.
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English may not have conjugations, but it has a lot of tenses. English has way more tenses than Russian, for example, and I think about as many as Spanish. The simple conjugations just make life easier. Besides, English makes up for it with articles (ask a Russian speaker learning English about all the FUN they have with articles), prepositions, and all the wonderful irregular conjugations we have. English may not be morphologically complex, but that doesn't make it "watered down".

This is probably also partly due to my insane pickiness, and my habit of correcting everyone's grammar mistakes as soon as they hit the air, but I also live in a Midwest US suburb where people "ain't got no" something more often than they "don't have any" of it.
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"Ain't got no" is perfectly acceptable in some dialects. I don't see the problem with using it at home or around friends; most people have to code-switch between two dialects anyway. :P

There is something overwhelmingly satisfying about looking at text in a foreign language and not seeing it as total gibberish. :3
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Isn't it wonderful? And the feeling you get when you can just pick up a newspaper and read almost anything in it is extraordinary.
 
Grammatical genders serve absolutely no purpose whatsoever and should be obliterated.

SI J'AVAIS L'PORTEFEUILLE DE MANU CHAO, J'PARTIRAIS EN VACANCES AVEC TOUS MES POTOS!
 
Superbird said:
[I think you meant a, which means at] my head.
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I think you mean à! A means 'has'.

Alors oui, je crois que je parle semi-couramment le francais ; je veut dire, je l'étudie pendant, euh, six ans, et j'y continuerai pendant au moins une autre année. Et, euh, je veut l'étudie à l'université peut-etre (Si les frais universitaires sont réduits à l'avenir... Maudit conservateurs...!).
 
je veux dire, depuis six ans

Aussi, si vous pensez qu'il est la faute de les conservateurs que les universités vont avoir des frais augmentés, vous avez tort — le Lord Browne n'a pas une préférence dans la Chambre des Lords, et le ministre pour les Universités, M. Cable, est une libéral-democrate. Et personne ne veut augmenter les frais universitaires, mais après la situation catastrophique que le parti travailliste a laissé, il est necessaire. Bien que je ne sois pas d'accord en termes de les frais universités, je pense qu'ils sont necessaire, malheureusement.
 
...Je l'ai su. J'aurais DU le savoir. Zut. Ne t'inquiete pas, sois assuré que normalement j'aurais l'écrire correctement. Heuh.

Mmmouais peut-etre. Mais vraiment, je plaisantais... Mais c'est, bien, injuste...! En fait, si les frais ne sont pas réduits, quel sera le résultat? Les riches deviennent plus riche, et les pauvres deviennent plus pauvre (Parce que les riches qui peuvent aller a l'université, ils obteniront des metiers bien-payé prestigieux, et les pauvres... ils doivent travailler comme, je ne sais pas, comme éboueurs etcetera).
 
Ne parlons plus de la politique! J'trouve que la langue française est trop belle pour ça.

Sinon... je vais me mettre en grève.
 
M-m-mais JE DEFENDAIS MES DROITS!

Mais ouais, j'en suis d'accord, le francais est belle. En fait, le samedi, mon correspondant de l'échange francais arrivera...! J'ai vraiment hâte d'avoir une semaine en laquel je peux parler le francais avec quelqu'un, plutot qu'a moi-meme.

...Je deteste le fait que mon clavier anglais ne me laisse qu'insérer les accents aigue seulement.
 
Ah, je suis d'accord - le français est très beau. Mais il est moins beau que l'italien, la langue d'amour, ou que le latin, la mère de tout ces langues belles.
 
Look, guys, I can do this too!

Vceraj sem naletel na prav ogromnega cmrlja, ki je letal okoli ministrstva za okolje.
 
... said:
Yeah, this is a good thing. Noun genders are arbitrary and useless. Why would you want them? I speak Spanish and they don't enhance the language. Spanish has some advantages over English but noun gender is definitely not one of them.

I'll never understand the fascination English speakers have with noun genders. o.o I've actually heard this sentiment a lot before.
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This might sound like a stupid question, but it's slightly related. I've often wondered why there are gender pronouns. I don't really see the point, since it only helps with ambiguity if you're talking about two people who identify differently. Most languages seem to have them and I've always wondered why, has it ever been entirely necessary to use them? Why are there only two (I know there are languages that have more than two but in my experience most have two when referring to people) when we could have more, and we could even use other arbitrary differences between people to base pronouns off of.

It might be a bit more confusing but calling everyone 'it' would have been much easier. It works for when we're talking about animals!
 
Like many Americans, I natively speak English, and apparently pretty well too. I'm in English 10, and it's pretty easy, considering I'm the only freshman in that period.

I'm also trying to learn Spanish. I would've said that in the little Spanish that I know, but I haven't the faintest idea what the word for 'learn' is. I just learned that one of my student teachers studied abroad in Spain, and I'd love to do the same.

Otherwise, my school also offers German courses, which I would enjoy if I get room in my schedule, and I might try to get my grandparents to teach me Arabic and Korean if they have time after moving back to the U.S.
 
Rasrap Smurf said:
This might sound like a stupid question, but it's slightly related. I've often wondered why there are gender pronouns. I don't really see the point, since it only helps with ambiguity if you're talking about two people who identify differently. Most languages seem to have them and I've always wondered why, has it ever been entirely necessary to use them?
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Languages have many features that aren't entirely necessary. English has a whole bunch of tenses that simply don't exist in other languages. Russian distinguishes between ways of moving in a way that can't be expressed succinctly in English which is made worse by the addition of prefixes. The Romance languages have an entire tense which means absolutely nothing and is used in certain grammatical situations just because (subjunctive tense, whoo!).

Why do they develop? I don't know. I've often asked myself that. Perhaps I'll ask the folks at some language boards I go to and see if they know.

Why are there only two (I know there are languages that have more than two but in my experience most have two when referring to people) when we could have more, and we could even use other arbitrary differences between people to base pronouns off of.
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Only two because... well in ancient cultures there were considered to be two sexes? The languages with more than two usually have noun class as opposed to noun gender and it IS based off arbitrary differences (one classification in one Australian language iirc groups together "women, fire, dangerous things". and yes this is fodder for lots of jokes).

It might be a bit more confusing but calling everyone 'it' would have been much easier. It works for when we're talking about animals!
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There are many languages that have this - off the top of my head Finnish, Navajo, and Yoruba (and i think they all use some variation of "ei" for it - weird coincidence).

I think "he" and "she" reduce ambiguity, though. There's already ambiguity when you're talking about same-sex groups ("and then he, John, told him, Ahmed, that he, Max, liked him, Jacob.") - he and she clear up SOME of it when you're talking about mixed groups. I suppose it would be worse if there were just some catch-all third person pronoun. I think there's some conlang which lets you assign "markers" to people so you have like "Jacob-ka" and "Ahmed-mi" and then you can be like "He-ka likes him-mi." It may have been interlingua but I really don't care about conlangs so I wouldn't know. :P
 
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