"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.
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.
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"
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
As 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.
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....
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.
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 ;)
> 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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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".
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.)
> "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 :-)
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".)
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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
"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).
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.
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.
> 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.
"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].
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 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.
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'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.
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'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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!
> 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:
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?)
> 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”).
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?
> 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.
> 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.
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' :)
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.
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.”
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.
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 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".
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).
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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 ; )
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.
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.
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].
It is very important to know your audience in English. Speaking at the right level of the socio-economic audience will allow you to mingle freely with people in all walks of life as a peer instead of an outsider. Also if you think Latinate words are received more favorably the reaction you get from people when speaking restored classical Latin pronunciation is incredible.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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).
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).
> 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.
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?
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.
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:
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
>. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 :)
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.
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".
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.)
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)
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 :)
>> 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
> 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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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"
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you think diversity is important in any way? It is more of a meme than a proven scientific truth. It is much easier to function in an homogenous group of people and there are countless of examples for homogenous groups doing things and being a huge success.
Silicon valley was mainly straight white males, countless of music and dance styles was invented by African Americans, Japanese came with Nintedo and Anime and many other good things. These were all homogenous groups working together without too much friction to bring some good to this world.
So don't try too hard to "diversify" things, there is not much benefit in it, it is just a political meme.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 303 ms ] threadhttps://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+ant...
Pre production post production. Pre release post release. Prepone, postpone.
Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
"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.
I'd consider "(later) down the road" an example of that.
English is fun
A future meeting "moved back" is definitely postponed. (US English)
when using "back" to talk about the past, it's "backwards" as in "behind you". "further back" = "further behind you" = "more in the past"
And then I remembered the word preposterous, enough said.
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…
But "tomorrow morning" becomes "Morgen früh" which is "tomorrow early" (or "early tomorrow" in English). "Morgen vormittags" ("tomorrow before noon") is also a variation.
[1]: http://esl.fis.edu/vocab/phrasal/phrasal-important.htm
(From "intro" in case it's not obvious.)
What makes you think so?
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I use it all the time.
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
[2] https://www.ifost.org.au/~gregb/solresol/sorsoeng.htm
[3] http://www.ithkuil.net/
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.
No such institution exists for the English 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.
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 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."
Speaking of military terms, lieutenant as "leftenant" always threw me. I had just assumed they were different words.
(or at least, was - it is possible navy use has shifted)
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?
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.
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.
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.
That's about my position on it. "I'm a descriptivist, but this is just stupid, let's not go there."
I'm in. Just imagine stuck up californians suddenly speaking Geordie. Howay man.
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.
Languages keep on evolving, you just have to deal with it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_coop
That's a neat solution, thanks!
(Please address complaints about putting a trema over an 'n' to Spın̈al Tap.)
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.
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
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...
Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
> "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 ;)
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?
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.
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...
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...
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.
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".
I've lived in the UK for the last 15 years. I even think in English, these days.
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.
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!
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!
"Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. "Peri" is overtly Greek, and so is "ph".
The Latinate version would be "circumference".
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.)
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.
Lateral is a cognate. They both come from latin latus.
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 :-)
- "Eu não gosto de bolo" ("I don't like cake")
- "Eu também [não gosto de bolo]" ("Me too [I don't like cake]")
- 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.
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.)
- 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.
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.
In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that happen outside of a technical context.
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.
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.
Seems all you nice folk think of Greeks as... posh? Must be all the philosophers :P
You'll even hear the word "satellite" mis-applied to parabolic antennas that are not directed at an actual satellite!
But maybe it was just my accent.
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.
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 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".
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).
Edit: Mediterraneo10 explains it better.
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...
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
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...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egghead
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.)
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.
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.
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.
And, of course, there's the style of clothing, haircut, makeup, accessories, etc. Pretty much everything :-)
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 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.
> "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.
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.
"Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill
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.
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 shall avail myself of that advice.
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.
(Midwest USA)
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.
Or rather Polish. Both Polish and Portuguese have nasals and sibilants in abundance.
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!
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.
Bill 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.
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.
> 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”).
[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purchase
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?
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.
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.
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' :)
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.
1. https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html
— Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Not sure I'd do the same with my son (if I had one, I only have a daughter).
I don't think we're better off.
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
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 ; )
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.
Ironically, though, "maze" may come from the Norwegian word "mas".
https://www.etymonline.com/word/maze
Thank you.
Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth [1].
1: https://www.librarything.com/work/24739629
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).
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.
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.
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
"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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.)
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.
Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
NSFW language, if you can understand it.
It would be much different experience from speaking with someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the same.
(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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
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...
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.
Scots and English are two dialects of the same language.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pit0OkNp7s8
What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 :)
Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of "skrzyżowanie" :)
Good luck, you will need it :D
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.
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.)
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.
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.
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C...
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.)
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.)
- 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)
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'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.
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...
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.)
> 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.
The reason English got so popular is purely because of the power and wealth English speaking nations have amassed in the recent history.
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.
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.
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
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcdYKxHT8kY
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
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 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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-stopping
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.
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.
[1]: https://www.cache.org.uk/news-media/dyslexia-the-facts
As an Brit, at least we live in a country where insulin is covered.
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.
Silicon valley was mainly straight white males, countless of music and dance styles was invented by African Americans, Japanese came with Nintedo and Anime and many other good things. These were all homogenous groups working together without too much friction to bring some good to this world.
So don't try too hard to "diversify" things, there is not much benefit in it, it is just a political meme.
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.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/prepone
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'm South Asian by the way, so this meme is also associated with my own culture.
I thought the British gave that phrase during colonial times.
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.
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.
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.
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 hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.
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...
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...
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.
"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.
That's no different than the US.
> 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
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIshUJUvdbo
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223807
I and a lot of my Indian peers consider English to be our 1st language.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27223555
Sounds fine to me. I think I'm going to use prepone from now on.
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.
Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be American? - speaker would never say.
Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.
Disclaimer: I just googled "sublime etymology"
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.
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.
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.
And I still construct sentences oddly, even though I've been speaking some English every day for 50+ years.