Posted on 10/28/2008 6:30:12 PM PDT by big black dog
If you want to flame me, you can do so rightfully, as I am posting this from the viewpoint of a casual observer rather than an a knowledgeable linguist.
But here I go:
The easiest items to adjust for are nouns. You just plug in a noun in one language for another. Perhaps there are are languages with "easier" nouns than English but I don't know why or how. However, this is not the problem.
The Romance languages have two difficulties. How to use the personal or impersonal "you" term. (In English it's left generic) It varies widely between cultures and it can be very easy to inadvertently insult somebody. And then there is the comparatively extremely complex conjugation of verbs compared to the English Language.
The complex symbolic languages of the Asian nations don't relate well at all (at present) to the Phoenician alphabet type technology in the world. Especially troublesome are preparing cost worthy machines that use this language.
I can't speak for or against the language and alphabet of the Cyrillic nations, but it is not something most of the world seems inclined towards.
Literacy in English should be stressed among all other languages.
Being an almost equal mixture of two older languages, English has two words for almost anything, the Germanic word being generally more powerful, the Latin word generally seeming softer and perhaps more cultured. Going back to the two examples above, I might say a thing is clear, or lucid, or I might say a thing is obscure, or dark. Both sets of adjectives technically have the same meaning, but Orwell's point was that their different effects make English an unusually flexible language.
No gender. "La" just means "the".
Well, unless some leftist spin has removed gender from the Wikipedia Esperanto article to help Obama get elected.< /tongue firmly in cheek>
Genders of nouns, which most other languages have, leave me mystified. That alone is reason enough to prefer English.
No, it does not, neither for nouns nor for anything else.
I see the latin feminine article “la” there
"Esperanto has a single definite article, la, which is invariable. It is similar to English the."
In German, neuter cars (das Auto) drive on feminine streets (die Strasse) and freeways (die autobahn), while neuter space ships (das Raumschiff) travel to masculine planets (der Planet) or masculine stars (der Stern).
I used to work with a tech/document writer (female) that insisted that he/his etc, were grammatically correct uses for the third person, even in the touchy feely political correct world we find ourselves in. She even publicly chastised supervisors for trying to be PC about their grammar.
Now, persuade the Russians. Khoroshoe schast'ye! Or, as one might say in pidgin English, ''rotsa ruck''.
So, stars and planets; large celestial bodies are masculine. Streets, something that is driven (walked) on are feminine.
Because such a word does not exist. Russian uses many words borrowed from German, French and English, but the borrowing occurs when there is no native word. For example, the word "horizon" is written (and spoken) as "gorizont". There was an unsuccessful attempt to create a native word, but it was beyond laughable.
However, "telefonirovat'" (to phone) was gaining acceptance.
Only in exceptionally formal speech. I think it was used in translation of Hercule Poirot stories. Also, the word "telefonogramma" meant a phone message received and recorded on paper. It's largely obsolete and will cause strange looks if used, just as if in English you refer to someone's car as "jalopy" :-)
Well known examples come from food animals: cow and swine for the animals, beef and pork for the meat.
Persuading the Russians is very difficult. It took them to persuade them to adopt the Western calender.
You do know the reason the various tsars never adopted the Gregorian calendar, and kept the Julian calendar until overthrown by Lenin and the Bolshies, don’t you?
I think English is easier than German, Latin, and Greek because over the years we have mostly dropped the use of cases for nouns (basically conjugating nouns as well as verbs). We do have some remnants of noun cases, but we aren't taught how they are identified in English, and it's probably easier that way. But, since we don't teach some of the specific points of English grammar, people view these speech parts as outsiders and think that English is hard to learn because it has so many “exceptions” to the rule. In reality, these exceptions are just remnants of a more complete linguistic past.
I don't think the topic poster has a very convincing argument, but I do think English is a relatively easy language to learn. On that same note, Spanish was very easy for me to learn as well, but it has its “irregularities” too.
I ramble.
1. English grammar has dropped many grammar aspects from its Indo-European ancestry, becoming less rigid in many respects.
2. Less rigidity allows greater adaptability from many language families.
3. These points enable speakers from different language families to understand each other, even if the syntax is altered between two speakers. From experience, syntax mismanagement is less understood in other languages than it is in English.
Ok. Ok. I'm done.
A calendar invented by a Catholic Pope. Can't have that, now can we?
;^)
Even worse, various European languages can't even agree on the gender for an object. Example: the moon -- the French and Germans assign different genders to that noun. Maybe that is why they are so historically antagonistic -- if you can't agree on the moon's sex, WHAT CAN you agree on?
Yes, correct. Thanks.
Yes, my mistake. Thanks
English is quite easy to learn at a basic level. Noun verb noun, no declensions. Getting up to speed in Russian or German or Arabic is much harder.
Of course, accent is another thing.
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