Date: Sat, 23 Mar 1996 14:11:02 -0500 (EST) From: Marc Ramirez <mrami@mramirez.sy.yale.edu> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Satoshi Asami <asami@cs.berkeley.edu>, p.richards@elsevier.co.uk, fenner@parc.xerox.com, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: cvs commit: ports/editors/bpatch/pkg COMMENT Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.91.960323115242.1609E-100000@mramirez.sy.yale.edu> In-Reply-To: <22838.827546883@time.cdrom.com>
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On Fri, 22 Mar 1996, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> Nobody ever said that english was a language
> that made much sense, hell, it's a walking card-catalog of special
> cases. It's often a matter of great wonder to me that non-native
> speakers learn it at all!
What? English? It's easy!
Off the top of my head:
Nouns
English German
nom-sng the heart der Knopf
nom-plu the hearts die Knopfen
acc-sng the heart den Knopf
acc-plu the hearts die Knopfen
dat-sng the heart dem Knopf
dat-plu the hearts den Knopfen
gen-sng the heart's des Knopfes
gen-plu the hearts' der Knopfen
English has only 4 noun forms, compared to German's 7 (and German, by
far, is not a worst case; consider Kivunjo which has sixteen genders,
including human singluar, human plural, thin or extended objects, objects
that come in clusters, the clusters themselves, instruments, animals,
body parts, diminutives, abstract qualities, precise locations, and
general locations). If I wanted to, I could get into the ten declination
types in German, but I don't. :)
Once I was in a bar in Germany and I got into an argument with some
real-live Germans about the gender of Apfelmuss (it's neuter, btw. :).
One would think that applesauce would be a fairly common word... In my
opinion, the less of such arguments that can happen in a language, the
better. In English, well, geeks can work their lather up about VAX-VAXen,
but any other arguments tend to be short-lived.
Verbs
English has four forms for weak verbs (walk, walks, walked, walking) while
German has ten (kaufe, kaufst, kauft, kaufen, kaufte, kauftest, kauftet,
kauften, gekauft, kaufend). For strong verbs in English, the count goes
up to five (think) or six (drink). Of course, there's always Italian with
its 36 or so (oso, osi, osa, osiamo, osate, osano, osavo, osavi, osava,
osavamo, osavate, osavano, osai, osasti, oso`, osammo, osaste, osarono,
osero`, oserai, osera`, oseremo, oserete, oseranno, oserei, oseresti,
oserebbe, oseremmo, osereste, oserebbero, osiate, osino, osassi, osasse,
osassimo, osassero, osato, osando), but I'm being unfair there becuase the
tense system in Italian is still active (i.e., retains its meaning) and
regular, unlike the case system in German. In some areas the verb forms of
spoken German are being reduced as they were in English ({ich|wir|ihr|sie}
hab', du has', er hat), so German may come out of the quagmire yet... :)
Adjectives
English has no cases, and adjectives do not have to agree in number with
the noun. So, this leaves three forms (big, bigger, biggest).
Spelling
Spelling is, of course, the bane of English. Of course, English borrows
the most heavily of any language, which makes it difficult. And English
does have rules of spelling, they just differ based on the time the word
entered the language. :) If you want a really good (bad?) example of
vestigal spelling, though, you could always look at French, e.g., quel and
quelle, both pronounced [kwel]. French las lost a gender distinction in
the spoken language, but retained it in the written one!
So in short, in my opinion the English language is one of the cleanest in
design in many facets (and, of course, sucks in others). But it's
definitely not appreciably more difficult than most other languages for
non-native speakers to learn. Most people I've talked to who have learned
English as one of *two* foreign languages have said that English was the
easier of the two to learn (most people who know only Mother Tongue and
English bitch about English because, well, foreign languages are more
difficult to master than native ones :).
Well, anyways, I've proselytized English enough for one day. Back to
hacking!
Marc.
--
AMAZING BUT TRUE ...
There is so much sand in Northern Africa that if it were spread out it
would completely cover the Sahara Desert.
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