I'm no english expert but even this one doesn't make any sense to me.
mouse
n. pl. mice
moose
n. pl. moose
Any others you know of?
Discrepancies in the english language
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MOSQUITO FIGHTER
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You're right, it's a hemorrhage.Minzoku wrote:
Why do they call it internal bleeding? If it's internal, it's not really BLEEDING, is it?
Sheep
pl. Sheep
Deer
pl. Deer
"Here's a man who thinks the plural of goose is sheep"
Feedback will set you free.
captpain wrote:Basically, the reason people don't like Bakraid is because they are fat and dumb
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captain ahar
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UnscathedFlyingObject
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English isn't too hard. I've about 4 years learning it, and I think I'm not half bad. Though, there's still stuff that puzzle me like when to use "in" or "on" and the pronunciation of many words. English pronunciation tends to be unpredictable.
Japanese is harder. Speech levels, kanji, weird ass sentence structure, etc conspire to make it impossible for a lot of people. More than half the people in my japanese class dropped out half way through the course.
Japanese is harder. Speech levels, kanji, weird ass sentence structure, etc conspire to make it impossible for a lot of people. More than half the people in my japanese class dropped out half way through the course.
"Sooo, what was it that you consider a 'good salary' for a man to make?"
"They should at least make 100K to have a good life"
...
"They should at least make 100K to have a good life"
...
'In' and 'on' can really be used interchangeably in quite a few circumstances. And hey, at least you got 'pronunciation' down. Many Americans still think it's just 'pronounce' added to 'iation.' An interesting "word" I still remember from middle school is 'ghoti.'UnscathedFlyingObject wrote:Though, there's still stuff that puzzle me like when to use "in" or "on" and the pronunciation of many words.
Why are they called apartments when they're all stuck together?
Why is the Secretary of the Interior in charge of everything outside?
Why aren't they called bull boys? Cows is for girls, and bulls is for boys. It should be "cowgirls" and "bullboys."
Basically, for every grammar rule you can think of, there is at least one exception. Most languages are the same.
Why is the Secretary of the Interior in charge of everything outside?
Why aren't they called bull boys? Cows is for girls, and bulls is for boys. It should be "cowgirls" and "bullboys."
Basically, for every grammar rule you can think of, there is at least one exception. Most languages are the same.
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dave4shmups
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English is the hardest language for a non-native speaker to learn, and, yes, a lot of it doesn't make much sense, especially when compared to a latin-based language, like Spanish.
Why is the ough in dough pronounced differently from the ough, in tough? This is just one example.
Why is the ough in dough pronounced differently from the ough, in tough? This is just one example.
"Farewell to false pretension
Farewell to hollow words
Farewell to fake affection
Farewell, tomorrow burns"
Farewell to hollow words
Farewell to fake affection
Farewell, tomorrow burns"
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GaijinPunch
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Articles, as they are called, pretty hard for any langauge I think. Maybe not in Espanol, as the almight "en" covers both in/on (and even "at", no?). Think of the poor Japanese people learning English. Can you really explain the meaning of "the"?UnscathedFlyingObject wrote:English isn't too hard. I've about 4 years learning it, and I think I'm not half bad. Though, there's still stuff that puzzle me like when to use "in" or "on"
I wouldn't go that far, but I would say that it's a pretty hard language to speak well, since most native speakers suck at it. The thing is, the threshold for poor speaking is very high due to the low homogeneity of most English speaking countries. Go to Japan and mispronounce a word by one little syllable and you just get a blank look.English is the hardest language for a non-native speaker to learn
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BulletMagnet
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Uhm...
English has lost any trasparency in phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, for a number of reasons (too many to list them, really), so you basically don't write (graphemes) what you say (phonemes). This means that building a lexicon is actually differentiated in two different processes: building a written lexicon (i.e. learning how to write a word) and building an oral lexicon (how to pronounce a word). Then, of course, there's the need to match a written and an oral form.
This is not a problem for Finnish speakers, for instance, or for Italian (or Spanish, or whatever) speakers, or anyone who speaks a language whose written form is representative of its oral form. For instance, Finnish has 25 graphemes (letters) and 26 phonemes (sounds), so a speaker can easily figure out how a new word is written, once he listens to it for the first time.
Now, this covers the mere phonological (and "graphemical") aspect of language.
Syntax is a different issue, to some extent.To keep things simple, syntax rules are somewhat universal (i.e. they are common to all languages) but they are parametrical: for instance, it's impossible to omit a pronoun in English without being ambiguous, in most of the cases, but that's because the verb doesn't express the information conveyed by the pronoun. In romance languages, for instead, this information is on the verb, so pronouns are fully optional:
ENGLISH SPANISH
I eat (yo) com-o
The "o" in the Spanish example conveys the "first person singular" information, so the pronoun is omittable.
These differences are mostly the core issue behind syntatic variation: Referring to GajinPunch's example, Spanish (or any other Romance languages) have less prepositions, because the information conveyed by the combination of a verb with a preposition is usually expressed by a verb entry. This a good example :
ENGLISH ITALIAN
"Come IN" " EN-tra"
In The Italian example, the preposition is incorporated in the verb, but the meaning is the same of the English counterpart. While this is a pretty wild semplification, it can be said that syntactic variation among languages is more or less based on how meaning is expressed by (syntactic) forms: both forms above express a given meaning (i.e. the order of going inside a context-based place), but the two languages express this meaning in two different forms.
Now, if we assume that meaning is basically a concept/idea/whatever (it can sound bizarre, but such a simple concept is by no means uncontroversial) about a given portion of "reality", we can say that we can take basic meanings and combine them to express a complex meaning. For istance, the meaning of a proposition like:
" The cat eats the fish"
Can be evaluated on the basis of its simple meanings: we're saying that there's a cat, and it is a specific cat (i.e. we combine "cat" with "the"), and this cat is doing the action of eating ("eats"), and the victim of this action is a fish, which is also specific ("the fish").The fact that the cat is in subject position and "the fish" in object position also tells us who's doing the action and who's receiving it, so to speak.
So, basically, the meaning expressed in a proposition is based on the meaning of the single words involved, and the way we composed them together. However, the way we go from the basic meanings to the final meaning is probably the key issue in syntax variation: This also implies that in some languages we must express clearly some meanings, while in others we can leave them unexpressed: for instance, languages with cases systems (like latin) haven't articles (no "the" for them) because the information conveyed by the article is omitted (i.e. it can be figured out by "world knowledge",namely the knowledge we have of facts expressed by a proposition) or expressed by the case system. For istance, a phrase like
The boy eats the apple
is in latin
puer edet mela
"A/the boy eats a/the apple"
And disambiguation is realized by checking if we actually have at least one boy or a specific boy.
About language learning: people who have trouble learning other languages, even if they're closely related to their own (for instance, someone having problems learning Spanish while being a French speaker) often don't know very well their own official language.
A common case is the following: a speaker doesn't know properly the official language(s) of its country, but rather a regional variant or a dialect.When learning the new language, then, it has problems learning rules in a contrastive way (i.e. "in your first language you can often omit the article, in the new language you can't except in a few cases") because of the interference between official language and dialect, which makes differences fuzzier and less easy to grasp.
About the specific case of English: English syntax in itself is more or less simple (you may want to try learning a slavonic, or a Bantu, or Australasian language, for instance), the core issue is building a written lexicon and matching it to the oral one. Also, there are a lot of varieties and dialects, so it's difficult to find a certain coherence between, say, the "Oxfordian" pronounce of some English schools and the way actual speakers pronounce the language. But this is the same for roughly all languages.
Of course, this is a big oversimplification of much complex issues, but i hope it can shed some light on the issue.
English has lost any trasparency in phoneme-to-grapheme conversion, for a number of reasons (too many to list them, really), so you basically don't write (graphemes) what you say (phonemes). This means that building a lexicon is actually differentiated in two different processes: building a written lexicon (i.e. learning how to write a word) and building an oral lexicon (how to pronounce a word). Then, of course, there's the need to match a written and an oral form.
This is not a problem for Finnish speakers, for instance, or for Italian (or Spanish, or whatever) speakers, or anyone who speaks a language whose written form is representative of its oral form. For instance, Finnish has 25 graphemes (letters) and 26 phonemes (sounds), so a speaker can easily figure out how a new word is written, once he listens to it for the first time.
Now, this covers the mere phonological (and "graphemical") aspect of language.
Syntax is a different issue, to some extent.To keep things simple, syntax rules are somewhat universal (i.e. they are common to all languages) but they are parametrical: for instance, it's impossible to omit a pronoun in English without being ambiguous, in most of the cases, but that's because the verb doesn't express the information conveyed by the pronoun. In romance languages, for instead, this information is on the verb, so pronouns are fully optional:
ENGLISH SPANISH
I eat (yo) com-o
The "o" in the Spanish example conveys the "first person singular" information, so the pronoun is omittable.
These differences are mostly the core issue behind syntatic variation: Referring to GajinPunch's example, Spanish (or any other Romance languages) have less prepositions, because the information conveyed by the combination of a verb with a preposition is usually expressed by a verb entry. This a good example :
ENGLISH ITALIAN
"Come IN" " EN-tra"
In The Italian example, the preposition is incorporated in the verb, but the meaning is the same of the English counterpart. While this is a pretty wild semplification, it can be said that syntactic variation among languages is more or less based on how meaning is expressed by (syntactic) forms: both forms above express a given meaning (i.e. the order of going inside a context-based place), but the two languages express this meaning in two different forms.
Now, if we assume that meaning is basically a concept/idea/whatever (it can sound bizarre, but such a simple concept is by no means uncontroversial) about a given portion of "reality", we can say that we can take basic meanings and combine them to express a complex meaning. For istance, the meaning of a proposition like:
" The cat eats the fish"
Can be evaluated on the basis of its simple meanings: we're saying that there's a cat, and it is a specific cat (i.e. we combine "cat" with "the"), and this cat is doing the action of eating ("eats"), and the victim of this action is a fish, which is also specific ("the fish").The fact that the cat is in subject position and "the fish" in object position also tells us who's doing the action and who's receiving it, so to speak.
So, basically, the meaning expressed in a proposition is based on the meaning of the single words involved, and the way we composed them together. However, the way we go from the basic meanings to the final meaning is probably the key issue in syntax variation: This also implies that in some languages we must express clearly some meanings, while in others we can leave them unexpressed: for instance, languages with cases systems (like latin) haven't articles (no "the" for them) because the information conveyed by the article is omitted (i.e. it can be figured out by "world knowledge",namely the knowledge we have of facts expressed by a proposition) or expressed by the case system. For istance, a phrase like
The boy eats the apple
is in latin
puer edet mela
"A/the boy eats a/the apple"
And disambiguation is realized by checking if we actually have at least one boy or a specific boy.
About language learning: people who have trouble learning other languages, even if they're closely related to their own (for instance, someone having problems learning Spanish while being a French speaker) often don't know very well their own official language.
A common case is the following: a speaker doesn't know properly the official language(s) of its country, but rather a regional variant or a dialect.When learning the new language, then, it has problems learning rules in a contrastive way (i.e. "in your first language you can often omit the article, in the new language you can't except in a few cases") because of the interference between official language and dialect, which makes differences fuzzier and less easy to grasp.
About the specific case of English: English syntax in itself is more or less simple (you may want to try learning a slavonic, or a Bantu, or Australasian language, for instance), the core issue is building a written lexicon and matching it to the oral one. Also, there are a lot of varieties and dialects, so it's difficult to find a certain coherence between, say, the "Oxfordian" pronounce of some English schools and the way actual speakers pronounce the language. But this is the same for roughly all languages.
Of course, this is a big oversimplification of much complex issues, but i hope it can shed some light on the issue.
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
I wonder about the psycho-historical root of grapheme/phoneme decorrelation in English (as opposed to the descriptive root). Can it be explained without recourse to special pleading for the language's flexibility in acquiring vocabulary from other languages?
Might the developmental pattern of English itself, as reflected in native speakers' specific habits of word-groping, prioritize the "verbal" (
) over the written?
I'd especially like to read some thinkers fluent in both English and another language on the subject.
Might the developmental pattern of English itself, as reflected in native speakers' specific habits of word-groping, prioritize the "verbal" (
) over the written?I'd especially like to read some thinkers fluent in both English and another language on the subject.
For the record, the full rhyme is "I before E except after C, or when pronounced "ay" as in neighbour or weigh."landshark wrote:I before E except after C. But what about weird?
That's science!
None of these rhyme!dave4shmups wrote:Why is the ough in dough pronounced differently from the ough, in tough? This is just one example.
bough--[rhymes with now]
cough--"coff"
dough--"doe"
rough--"ruff"
through--"throo"
I believe it's from "nombre" or similar instead of "number"... like how all the abbreviations in the Periodic Table are from the Latin names instead of the English. You can prolly Google most of these, regardless.sffan wrote:Why is "Number" abbreviated "No." ? Where did the "o" come from?
"This is not an alien life form! He is an experimental government aircraft!"
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neorichieb1971
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English has the most adjectives of any language I believe.
One of the reasons might be that its influenced by all 4 corners of the globe.
I mean, since the 80's with MJ "Bad" is actually good. The over use of the word "cool" in the USA makes me wonder how the hell someone came up with that word to describe something that stands out or is trendy.
Like someone could say their car is "hot" or "cool", but it really means the same thing.
One of the reasons might be that its influenced by all 4 corners of the globe.
I mean, since the 80's with MJ "Bad" is actually good. The over use of the word "cool" in the USA makes me wonder how the hell someone came up with that word to describe something that stands out or is trendy.
Like someone could say their car is "hot" or "cool", but it really means the same thing.
This industry has become 2 dimensional as it transcended into a 3D world.
Some people happen to pronounce neither (nai-ther).sffan wrote:...or when pronounced "ee" as in seize or neither.Minzoku wrote:
For the record, the full rhyme is "I before E except after C, or when pronounced "ay" as in neighbour or weigh."
That rule is useless because there are too many exceptions.
And also, how/why the hell is Wednesday pronounced (wens-day).
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neorichieb1971
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Well, being a grad student in Linguistics (to be exact, Semantics), it's all stuff i'm supposed to know by heart 
"The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was one common to both the descendants of its original human stock and the machines [...]: the urge not to feel useless."
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
I.M. Banks, "Consider Phlebas" (1988: 43).
Go to Japan and mispronounce a word by one little syllable and you just get a blank look.
yeah i experienced this when i visited Japan, i would try to read words out of my phrase book, but they only understood what i meant half the time when i showed them the book and pointed out the word i was trying to say, even tho i was pronouncing it 'exactly' (or so i thought
) as the book was telling me to pronounce it 
i would love to speak Japanese better though i did pick a little up on my week long visit in October