People whose first language is not english

Discussion in 'Linguistics' started by Varda, Oct 7, 2007.

  1. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Interesting perspective. I'm not a sports fan at all, but the announcers of American football and basketball games drive me crazy because they sound so emotional. I agree that I don't get that from baseball, but then baseball is an excruciatingy slow game and listening to someone describe it is like listening to a government project status report.
    Sure they do. They're the Washington Nationals and my friends go to see them.

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    I've had this experience before. A few years after I moved to Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Dodgers became the Los Angeles Dodgers. The New York Giants moved to San Francisco at the same time, and Californians went crazy to finally have major league baseball on the West Coast.
     
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  3. madanthonywayne Morning in America Registered Senior Member

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    I'd agree that every language has words that impart a certain shade of meaning that can't be easily conveyed in another language.

    However, I'd say English has a larger vocabulary than most languages. As a doctor, I often see patients who speak various languages and we must communicate via a translator. I'll say three words, and the translation will be a paragraph! I notice that many speakers of foriegn languages speak very quickly so that they can squeeze in all the words required to say something that can be said in a few words in English.

    Consider
    Spanish: Mira a la izquierda. (8 syllables )
    English: Look left. (2 syllables)
    Spanish: Mira para arriba. (7 syllables )
    English: Look up. (2 syllables )
    Spanish: Mira a la derecha. (7 syllables )
    English: Look right. (2 syllables )
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Oct 11, 2007
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  5. Ripley Valued Senior Member

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    Varda, out of curiosity, do you speak English with a Portuguese accent?
     
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  7. Enmos Valued Senior Member

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    Sometimes, but mostly it's the other way around. English is much more 'expressive' than my own language (Dutch).
     
  8. draqon Banned Banned

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    English is sooooooooo limiting than Russian language...there are so many emotions and concepts that can be described in Russian and not in english...
     
  9. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    Yes, but look more closely. These are not vocabulary limitations. The Spanish words are perfectly equivalent in meaning to the English words, they just have more syllables. In addition, Spanish syntax requires more "noise words" than English. They can't say, "Look left," they have to say, "Look to the left."

    English began streamlining its phonetics a thousand years ago, when Anglo-Saxon evolved into Middle English after the Norman Invasion. Hundreds of common words like "come" and "are" dropped their E and became monosyllables. We also streamlined our grammar and lopped off most of our inflections. Germans still say, Wir haben einen guten Haus, seven syllables, with a first-person plural ending on the verb and an accusative ending on both the article and the adjective. We found a way to get along without all those inflections and shortened the same words to four syllables: "We have a good house." We also streamlined our syntax. Even the French, who have done a fabulous job of silencing their final E's and losing their inflections (in speech if not in writing), have to say, La plume de ma tante in five syllables, when we can say, "My aunt's pen" in three.

    We use the process of synthesis to express relationships more compactly than languages which have to use prepositions: English "doghouse" vs. Spanish casa de perro.

    And you're right, languages like Spanish and (even worse) Italian are spoken much more quickly than French and (even better) English in order to attain the same information transfer rate.

    Of course as I've often mentioned, Chinese has it all over English. In my own admittedly unscientific tallies, I clock an average of seven Chinese syllables to ten in English, in the equivalent sentence. Their phonetics, grammar, syntax, and word-building facility are far more streamlined and advanced than ours. Chinese has no inflections at all because it has no gender, tense, number, mode, etc. It's made up of one-syllable morphemes that can be combined into compounds that are analogous to our words. It has virtually no noise words: no articles or prepositions. And as a result Chinese is spoken more slowly than English. It's easy for a student or a foreigner to pick out the words he knows and extract some meaning out of a conversation.

    You can't possibly do that with Spanish or Russian.

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