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Do you use correct grammar/spelling on the Internet?
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Tuesday September 30 2014, @03:48PM
When in doubt, Webster's, the OED, and other such tools are your friends. You are right, though, English is a hard language compared to Spanish. I had little trouble learning Spanish, but if I had been born in a Spanish-speaking country I'm pretty sure learning English would be a lot harder.
English is both hard and versatile for the same reasons: it's a bastard language composed from words from other languages. That's why "knife" and "cough" are spelled like they are; they were borrowed from Germanic languages.
Occasionally someone will advocate changing spelling to be like words sound, and my answer is "do you spell it kah (Boston), car (midwest), Cwar, (New York City)? Tire, tyre, tar (southern) Tah (Boston)? Actually we should spell it "tyre" because that's how it's spelled where they were invented.
I can barely understand folks from Massachusetts.
Speaking of languages, something surprising happened at the bar last night. A native Spanish-speaking immigrant had forgotten the Spanish word for "basement". He said he struggles to speak in that language any more. The old adage is right: use it or lose it. Neither I nor any of the 3 or 4 guys who knew Spanish could remember how to say "basement" either until I got my phone out and looked it up on Google.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday October 03 2014, @05:14PM
At least English doesn't suffer from the common annoyance of conjugating every goddamn part of speech. Do we really need to genderize adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions...? Just leave it at subject-verb and be done with it.
Oh, and another thing...are there any languages where the genders actually make any sense? I've taken German and there at least it seems almost totally random what gender all kinds of inanimate things are going to end up with, instead of just making them all neuter.
On the other hand, English spelling is horrible. German is at least predictable in regards to spelling (except maybe double-vowel umlauts).
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday October 03 2014, @06:10PM
Well, the only languages I'm very familiar with are English, Spanish, and Thai (I never did speak Thai that well) and unfamiliar with German. Maybe it was because I was in middle school when I learned Spanish, but the gender-specific verbs weren't that much of a difficulty for me. Far harder was remembering "crap, what's the word for 'basement'?"
I took that class out of curiosity, because I'd pick up Spanish language radio on the AM radio from Mexico (AM skips like short wave) and wondered what they were saying. It turned out to be very useful when I lived in California and especially Florida; you actually had to know Spanish to shop at the convenience store by my apartment, and half the foreign tourists I dealt with at work spoke only Spanish.
It's been so long since I've used it, I have to admit that I don't remember if they made any sense, so I don't know.
Thai was a bitch to learn, I was 21 by then. Learned from a book and the help of the Thais themselves; I was in the USAF and that's where they sent me. Knowing the language saved my life once!
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org