The French would complain even more about Spangfranglais. Let's go for it. As for badly written Japanese manuals, you must remember them Fraggle, not that they are entirely extinct. Oddly enough, the Chinese don't seem to have had the same difficulties. Any idea why?
Everyone learned from the Japanese experience. For a while, back in the days when a lot of stuff was coming over from Taiwan, the name "Chinglish" came into vogue. But today English is more widely studied and it's easy for people in China--or just about anywhere else for that matter--to become quite fluent in it. You can even get pronunciation practice on the internet. That wasn't available in those days.
Maybe the Japanese were smarter. They sold us Nikon cameras, but their instruction books allowed us to feel superior to them. Re cameras. I bought a very expensive SLR camera many years ago, and a digital one for £70 just recently. I find that the modern camera is in many ways superior to the old. The results from the old camera were always disappointing, but the digital process seems to pick up what I see myself. The new camera has its limitations, but given a good sunny day I can take a picture which is as full of life, colour and detail as anyone.
Digital cameras are widely used by professional photographers. I'm no photographer, but I suspect the main advantage of analog photography is finer resolution. The huge screen is the reason most movies are analog. Digital is fine for snapshots unless you're going to enlarge them to wall size. Video photography will continue to advance as computers continue to become faster and cheaper. Resolution will improve. I'm sure some day, probably within the lifetime of you younger people, analog photography will become an anachronism.
Different thread, so last post. To anyone who tried photography years ago, and gave it up because the photographs compared poorly with professional photographs, try again. Sub $100 cameras can now give results that would have been only achievable with cameras costing thousands of dollars.
To digress, have you heard of the discovery of a new language called Koro, in India. http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/stories/new-language-discovered-in-remote-region-of-india 800 speakers remain. The team of linguists were able to record and even translate much of Koro. They used the English alphabet to put the language in written form for the first time. Some of the words include ala, which means "moon"; dougrey, which means "star"; mugba, which means "cloud"; and laasu, which means "monkey." Ala means moon, interesting, given some of the hotter threads which have appeared on sciforums.
Haha. Spoken by many more than 800. Anyway, a language listed in govt. records need not be re-discovered.
i can name a new language, that is bron in 2009 it's myne, i created my own alphabet, and i use arabic french and english in it, and other words i created. i even used to have my own language when i was a kid, let's say 2 years old? i called things on my own, not how people call it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! people barely understand me when i say something sometimes, for some words.
India census is every 10 years. One of the question is about LANGUAE, and KORO has figured. Recording and documentation is a different thing.
A language is a means of communication. If no one understands it but you, it's not a language. People have invented languages which no one understood, such as Esperanto and Volapük, but their intention was to teach them so they could be used for communication. Esperanto succeeded, Volapük did not. The same can be said of Elvish; Tolkien was the only person who could understand it when he wrote his books, but others learned it from reading. The same is true of Klingon, except the medium was television instead of print. So I guess the definition of a language can be stretched to accommodate the honest intention to make it serve as a means of communication. Is that what you hope for yours? Are you going to publish it and teach it? At least to your friends? If the number of speakers is too small, then it's more like a code or a cant instead of a language.
Do you think it helps languages to survive to have the Bible or Shakespeare translated into them? I like the sounds of the few words I have read in Koro. I wonder how old it is. A language expresses a unique way of looking at the world. Disappearing voices. A sad thought.
