Proficiency alongside "poverty".

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milky

#394146 Thu, 19 Jul 07 11:53 PM

Linguaphile wrote:

CalifJim wrote:
<I was astounded by the simple mistakes the academicians made during their lecture>

Yes, I find that it's always hundreds of times easier to recognize errors when someone else makes them than to keep myself from making them.

CJ

Right. I used "taught" in my post above where I should have written "teach".

Maybe you should edit this too:

milky

Joined on Thu, Jan 15 2004

Senior Member (3,149)

Hume said that if we had perfect or complete descriptive knowledge of reality, we could not, by reasoning, derive a single valid "ought".

milky

#394148 Thu, 19 Jul 07 11:55 PM

Cool Breeze wrote:
Milky wrote:

I'm sometimes surprised, and somewhat puzzled, when I read linguistics papers written by nonnative speakers. The use of language in such articles can often range for highly proficient to quite poor.

He call these as lexical phrases or word combinations;"

Yes, indeed.

CB

Do you think the errors in the article are typos?

milky

Articles

Cool Breeze

#394477 Fri, 20 Jul 07 11:21 PM

Milky wrote:

Do you think the errors in the article are typos?

I have no idea. In a world where thousands of languages are spoken linguistic errors are bound to occur. In countries that have only a few million people it is very common for people in general and scientists in particular to speak more than one language. No scientist that wants to be taken seriously speaks only one minor language. It is taken for granted that an eminent scientist speaks three to five languages.

As a scientist is chielfly preoccupied with his science, not with a foreign language, mistakes inevitably occur in his publications in a foreign language. Jim's suggestion is a good one and makes sense but unfortunately many scientists in poor countries are not wealthy enough to hire someone to correct the language of their foreign language theses.

Fortunately English is structurally so simple that breakdowns in communication usually only occur when the wrong words are used; mistakes in grammar are usually self-explanatory. This is one of the reasons why English is such an excellent lingua franca.

I'll give you an example. The Finnish word for night is yö. However, öistään, yöstämme, öillensä, öittämmekään and dozens of other inflected forms of the word that are not listed in dictionaries exist. This may explain the fact that many Brits who have lived in Finland for more than 20 years prefer to speak English with Finns. Smile [:)]

There's not much anybody can do to improve the English used in the world of science. However, I wouldn't blame the nonnatives for the low quality of their language as it isn't their fault that the British colonised the world and exported their language. English was forced upon them. They had no choice. The fortunate fact is that these scientists would probably fare even worse trying to communicate in a more difficult language.

Cheers
CB

Cool Breeze

Joined on Fri, Apr 7 2006

Helsinki, Finland

Senior Member (3,004)

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.- Mark Twain

Grammar, Articles, Speak English

Forbes

#394649 Sat, 21 Jul 07 10:01 AM

Cool Breeze wrote:
Fortunately English is structurally so simple...

Forbes

Joined on Thu, Jun 16 2005

Regular Member (839)

Cool Breeze

#394917 Sat, 21 Jul 07 10:36 PM

Forbes wrote:
Cool Breeze wrote:
Fortunately English is structurally so simple...

?

Hi Forbes

In the days of Old English the grammar of the language was more complicated than it is today: nouns had three genders, and there were even strong masculines as there are in modern German, 's' wasn't the normal plural ending for nouns etc. These days an English noun can have a maximum of four forms: boy, boys, boy's and boys'. A verb normally has only four forms: ask, asking, asks, asked. Countless adjectives have only one form: beautiful, difficult etc.

Adjectives have no plurals: old cars (not: olds cars).
Relative pronouns have no plurals: The cars that are parked in the street are mine. (Not: The cars thats are parked...)
Relatives that and which have only one form each, which serves many purposes:
The cat which looks old is mine. (subject)
The cat which you saw is mine. (object)

And so on. There are languages that use a different form of a verb for every grammatical person in all tenses and even the negative word (not) is inflected for all grammatical persons. If that happened in English, sentences like these might be correct:

I am not tired.
You are nott tired.
He is note tired.

We are net tired.
You are nette tired.
They are nottem tired.

In my native language all nouns have a basic minimum of about 30 inflected forms but for greater expressiveness far more forms are used.

The difficult thing about English is the fact that spelling and pronunciation are worlds apart. There are at least eight ways to pronounce ough, for instance: rough, though, plough, through etc.

Cheers
CB

Cool Breeze

Nouns, Verbs, Tenses, Grammar, Plurals, Negatives, Spelling, Pronouns, Pronunciation, Genders, Relative Pronouns

milky

#395067 Sun, 22 Jul 07 09:45 AM

Cool Breeze, is there any concrete evidence which shows that English was any more difficult to learn in the past than it is now?

milky

Cool Breeze

#395107 Sun, 22 Jul 07 11:26 AM

Milky wrote:
Cool Breeze, is there any concrete evidence which shows that English was any more difficult to learn in the past than it is now?

I don't think I can answer that question. There is only evidence that English grammar was more complicated in the past. What is easy for some may be difficult for others. For example, people who have a good ear for music usually have fewer problems with the pronunciation of English but may struggle with its grammar. For some learning English grammar is a breeze Smile [:)]

but they can never get the pronunciation right.

In my opinion it goes without saying that the fewer inflections there are, the less time it takes to learn them. For myself, I am living proof of that - it took me less time to learn English grammar than Latin grammar.

Some say that learning the German adjectives is a tough job. People who say that have never studied a grammatically complicated language.

CB

Cool Breeze

Grammar, Inflections, Pronunciation, Learning English, Learn English, English Grammar

Forbes

#395153 Sun, 22 Jul 07 01:39 PM

Hi Cool Breeze

I thought that might be what you were getting at.

I think it is a mistake to equate complexity solely with the degree of inflectional morphology of a language.

I have never studied Finnish, but I would be willing to bet that at least one of the following is true:

1. that a language with at least 30 cases has a corresponding lack of prepositions

2. that word order is fairly free and is used to express different emphases

3. that the inflectional morphology, though complex, is regular

4. that it is perhaps not quite so difficult to learn once you begin to get the hang of it

I have to say that I have met one or two Finns and they do seem to relish the idea that Finnish is a "difficult" language. I have also met some "Swedish Finnish" (I am not sure what the correct term is) and they all tell me that they are bilingual in Swedish and Finnish. They will of course have been helped in acquiring Finnish because either they live in a bilingual community or started to learn the language at an early age (I am not sure how it works) so they would not have been prejudiced by any concept of "difficulty". I expect that your idea that Finnish is difficult is confirmed by the fact that you do not know many foreigners living in Finland who have mastered it. This will be because:

1. It is more difficult to learn any language when you are an adult

2. Someone who is working full time will not be able to devote more than an hour or two a week to learning the language

3. Everyone will find it more convenient to speak to foreigners in English and there is therefore little incentive for them to learn Finnish

4. You keep harping on about how difficult the language is and put them off!

(I live in Spain and all the above applies to expats.)

You think that English is "simple". I venture to suggest that this is because you started to learn it at an early age and were introduced to it gradually so that you did not perceive its difficulties; you acquired your mastery over a long period. Also, I suspect that Finns are "subjected" to English in a way that the English are not subjected to foreign languages. A lot can be learned without realising it.

Consider the following:

There is no single way of negating verbs in English. I do not eat, but I must not. I do not have any eggs, but I have not got any eggs.

There is no single way of forming questions. Do you come here a lot? but Can I go out?

It is not always easy to know when to use the continuous form of the verb. Try and explain why you can say Are you having cakes for tea? but cannot go into a shop and say Are you having cakes?

The meaning of prepositional verbs is not always transparent. John has got it in for me.

English is a highly analytic language and meaning is often derived from context:

A. You keep complaining. Have you got it in for me?

B. I asked you to bring in the shopping. Have you got it in for me?

These are just a tiny example of the complexities of English and they have nothing to do with inflectional morphology.

Forbes

Verbs, Prepositions, Word Order, Morphology, Inflectional Morphology, Prepositional Verbs

MrPedantic

#395202 Sun, 22 Jul 07 03:47 PM

It interests me that some modern languages have at least the appearance of greater simplicity (e.g. the loss of inflection) than their counterparts of 900 years ago. This seems counter-intuitive: you would expect a language to evolve towards (not from) complexity.

It also makes me wonder why those languages evolved into their highly inflected forms in the first place.

My guess is that the quantum of complexity has not decreased; but that it is simply housed elsewhere (syntax?), in the present forms.

MrP

MrPedantic