Search results for 'tag:Dialects tag:Numbers' matching tags 'Dialects' and 'Numbers'

Re: TEFLese

MrPedantic — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 23:15:04 GMT

TEFLese is a dialect. It is a product.

Suppose we accept that statement. Why does it matter? Non-native speakers outnumber native speakers, after all; if they and their teachers create TEFL-ese, and begin to use it between themselves, that's their affair.

(And imagine what our common friend M. would say, if he heard you, Anon. "The sentences don't get any more authentic"? Mere prescriptive sniping. In fact, I suspect that M. would advise disgruntled natives to pursue an entirely different course of action: to attend classes in TEFL-ese themselves, so that they could learn to communicate with the global majority.)

MrP

Re: where

Marius Hancu — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 14:45:22 GMT

I read it as:

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, a large number of words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or in case they that/in the situation that they had already been generally used in the language, acquired new and important meanings.

where seems old and dialect here, IMO.

Re: Plural of s = s'es?

Pter — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 12:24:01 GMT

The Chinese language has many dialects. We all share the same set of characters but these characters are pronounced differently in different dialects. Same characters different pronunciations. We don't say the characters belong to any one particular dialect. They are just Chinese characters. You can't say Mandarin characters or Cantonese characters because these terms do not make sense. For example, the numbers one, two, three are written as one, two, and three horizontal strokes respectively in Chinese "ä¸ äº ä¸" (can you see these characters?) They are pronounced as yi1 er4 san1 in Mandarin and jat7 ji6 sam1 in Cantonese. These are not exact transliteration though. Chinese is a tonal language and the numbers are used to indicate the tone. Mandarin has four tones while Cantonese has nine (some say six depending on which method you use to indicate the tones). So, everyone can read the same Chinese book but they read them differently.

Re: have sb. to do

Yankee — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 14:21:53 GMT

Apparently, the book A hand-book of present-day English (by E. Kruisinga) was written in 1914, so today -- nearly a hundred years later!-- there are bound to be a few things in that book that are no longer widely used. I've never heard anyone use "to" in the phrase "I'll have you know" when the meaning is basically "I'd like to point this out in order to be sure you know it". However, if I were to hear "I'll have you to know" with the same meaning as "I'll have you know", I'd expect it to be either a poetic/archaic usage or part of a regional dialect (as Marius has suggested). You need to analyze what Google is giving you -- just looking at the number of Google hits alone is frequently not a reliable indicator of usage.

In addition, I'd also like to point out that "I'll have him visit" and "I'll have him to visit" (for example) have different meanings:

I'll have him visit = I will cause him to visit me or someone else (i.e. he will visit me)
I'll have him to visit = It is possible for me to visit him (i.e. I will visit him!)

Re: Curious about Comtemporary RP Accent**

Tam Sadek — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 02:50:13 GMT

According to John Wells at University College London:

"I do not understand the proposed distinction between Mainstream RP and Contemporary RP (unless the writer thinks, wrongly, that âcontemporaryâ means âyoungâ)."

You can read more of what he says about it at: http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/wells/blog0707a.htm

Whereas according to the British Library's Accents and Dialects of the UK website in their section on London RP, the commentary says:

"Michelle speaks with an accent most of us would immediately associate with a middle-class background. Many of the vowel sounds she uses have a traditional RP ring, but she also uses a number of pronunciations characteristic of contemporary RP. In other words she uses certain features we only encounter among younger speakers."

You can read more about this as well as hear a sample of this accent at: http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/sounds/text-only/received-pronunciation/london/

Make of this juxtaposition what you will...

Hope that helps

Re: correct sentence??

Ruslana — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:29:06 GMT

From answers.com:

Speakers of some vernacular American dialects, particularly in the South, may use the possessive reflexive form hisself instead of himself (as in He cut hisself shaving) and theirselves or theirself for themselves (as in They found theirselves alone). These forms reflect the tendency of speakers of vernacular dialects to regularize irregular patterns found in the corresponding standard variety. In Standard English, the pattern of reflexive pronoun forms shows slightly irregular patterning; all forms but two are composed of the possessive form of the pronoun and âself or âselves, as in myself or ourselves. The exceptions are himself and themselves, which are formed by attaching the suffix âself/âselves to the object forms of he and they rather than their possessive forms. Speakers who use hisself and theirselves are smoothing out the pattern's inconsistencies by applying the same rule to all forms in the set. â¢ A further regularization is the use of âself regardless of number, yielding the forms ourself and theirself. Using a singular form in a plural context may seem imprecise, but the plural meaning of ourself and theirself is made clear by the presence of the plural forms ourâ and theirâ. Hisself and theirselves have origins in British English and are still prevalent today in vernacular speech in England.

I'm for the Standard English.

dialect continuum

Zerox — Sat, 12 May 2007 16:21:13 GMT

This is an interesting topic in my opinion but I haven't found a clear, if there is even one, answer to the problem that arises in dialect continuum, for example. Mutual intelligibility is the criterion of defining a language. So, let's say that we have numbers from 1 to 10, each number represents a dialect, and mutual intteligibility is greater with numbers close to each other, that is 1 and 2 are mutually intelligible; 1 and 3 are also mutually intelligible, though not so much as 1 and 2. When we get to number 10, mutual intelligibility is lost with 1 and 10. That's fine: we have two different languages. But how about number 5 which is mutually intelligible with both 1 and 10? With how many languages are we dealing here actually?

Re: Help!!Help!!

MissUAE — Tue, 01 May 2007 11:53:08 GMT

Ok this is my task, but i wana from u to organise and paraphrase it, please??

Really i will not forget ur help

thanks alo0o0o0ot

Historical linguistic:

History and Development

Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century and grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity.

At first historical linguistics was comparative linguistics and mainly concerned with establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages comparative study is now a highly specialised field and most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties.

Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation - even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. But Saussure drew a distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics, which is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone: written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments, and in any case are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways which point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.

The biological origin of language is in principle part of the remit of historical linguistics, but most linguistics regard it as too remote to be reliably established by the comparative method, given the remoteness from historical records. Other techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are regarded by some as means of overcoming the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable.

The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. However, it is now recognized that relating language to ethnic identity is problematic, as is relating language history to archaeological or genetic evidence.

Generative linguistic

Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. The term "generative grammar" is used in different ways by different people, and the term "generative linguistics" therefore has a range of different, though overlapping, meanings.

Formally, a generative grammar is defined as one that is fully explicit. It is a finite set of rules that can be applied to generate exactly those sentences (often, but not necessarily, infinite in number) that are grammatical in a given language (or, of course, particular dialect or otherwise sociolinguistically defined way of using a language), and no others. This is the definition that is offered by Noam Chomsky, who popularised the term, and by most dictionaries of linguistics. It is important to note that generate is being used as a technical term with a slightly obscure sense. To say that a grammar generates a sentence means that the grammar "assigns a structural description" to the sentence.^[1]

More popularly, but somewhat to the apparent distaste of certain professional linguists including Chomsky, the term is used to define the approach to linguistics taken by Chomsky and his followers. Chomsky's approach is characterised by the use of transformational grammar - a theory that has changed greatly since it was first promulgated by Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures - and by the assertion of a strong linguistic nativism (and therefore an assertion that some set of fundamental characteristics of all human languages must be the same). The term "generative linguistics" is often applied to the earliest version of Chomsky's transformational grammar, which was associated with a distinction between "Deep Structure" and "Surface Structure" of sentences.

Chomsky also launched his approach to linguistics with a virulent attack on alternative approaches, in particular the behaviorist view then popular, in the form in which it had been put forward by B. F. Skinner in a book also published in 1957, Verbal Behavior. A final, and still looser, meaning of "generative linguistics", therefore, might be summarised as "anti-Skinnerian linguistics" - or just generalised anti-behaviorism.

Psycholinguistics, which in the early 1960s was developing rapidly as part of the general movement towards cognitive psychology, found this anti-behaviorist emphasis congenial, and rapidly absorbed many Chomskian ideas including the notion of generative grammar. However, as both cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics have matured, they have found less and less use for generative linguistics, not least because Chomsky has repeatedly emphasised that he never intended to specify the mental processes by which people actually generate sentences, or parse sentences that they hear or read.

Cognitive linguistics emerged in the latter years of the twentieth century as an alternative linguistic paradigm to generative linguistics. Cognitive linguistics seeks to unify the understanding of language with the understanding of how specific neural structures function biologically. This is more a difference in practical research strategy than in philosophy: in principle, neurological evidence has always been considered relevant by generative linguists, but in practice it has usually been regarded as too inconclusive and open to interpretation to be of much use. However, some researchers within generative linguistics (e.g. Alec Marantz) publish in neurolinguistics.

Descriptive linguistic:

Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is spoken (or how it was spoken in the past) by a group of people in a speech community. All scholarly research in linguistics is descriptive; like all other sciences, its aim is to observe the linguistic world as it is, without the bias of preconceived ideas about how it ought to be.

Linguistic description is often contrasted with linguistic prescription, which is found especially in education and in publishing. Prescription seeks to define standard language forms and give advice on effective language use, and can be thought of as the attempt to present the fruits of descriptive research in a learnable form, though it also draws on more subjective aspects of language aesthetics. Prescription and description are essentially complementary, but have different priorities and sometimes are seen to be in conflict.

Accurate description of real speech is a difficult problem, and linguists have often been reduced to grossly inaccurate approximations. Almost all linguistic theory has its origin in practical problems of descriptive linguistics. Phonology (and its theoretical developments, such as the phoneme) deals with how native speakers pronounce their languages. Syntax has developed to describe what happens when phonetics has reduced spoken language to a normalized control level. Lexicography collects "words" and their derivations and transformations: it has not given rise to much generalized theory.

An extreme "mentalist" viewpoint denies that the linguistic description of a language can be done by anyone but a competent speaker. Such a speaker has internalized something called "linguistic competence", which gives them the ability to extrapolate correctly from their experience new but correct expressions, and to reject unacceptable expressions.

There are tens of thousands of linguistic descriptions of thousands of languages that were prepared by people without adequate linguistic training. With a few honorable exceptions, all linguistic descriptions done before ca. 1900 are amateur productions.

Re: Canadians and their English

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 05:54:21 GMT

General Canadian English is extremely similar to General American English. However, there are a number of differences between the two dialects. Firstly, GCE (General Canadian English) exhibits a linguistic phenomenon called Canadian Raising. Basically, the diphthong âaiâ--as in "by" or "lie"--is raised before voiceless consonants (t, k, p, s, f); by contrast, this diphthong is not raised before other consonants (v, z, d, b, l, m, n, r, etc). Thus, by using Canadian Raising, the words in the following word pairs can be pronounced differently: ride and write, five and fife, and rise and rice.
The diphthong "au," as in "loud," is commonly raised before the consonants "t," "th," "ch," and "s." This diphthong is not raised before the consonants "d," "z," "n," and "j." As was pointed out, the word "about" sounds like "a boat"... well, to American ears, that is. In General American English, the diphthong "ai" is not raised before any consonant, nor is the diphthong "au." Yet, this raising has been occurring in various areas of the U.S., and it has spread quite far.

Another difference between these dialects is that, in GCE, the vowel "o" is always pronounced as "o" before the consonant "r." Therefore, âsorryâ is pronounced sor-ee, âborrowâ is pronounced bor-row, and âsorrow,â sor-row. In General American English, the vowel "o" is sometimes pronounced as the vowel "a"--as in "father"--before the consonant "r." In GAE (General American English), "sorry" is pronounced sar-ee, "borrow" is pronounced bar-row, and âsor-rowâ is pronounced sar-row. This, nevertheless, isn't very common in GAE; in fact, I canât think of any other word that is pronounced with the vowel âa,â other than sorrow, borrow, and sorry.

Many Canadians pronounce the word "marry" as "merry." In GAE, âmarryâ is pronounced with the vowel âae.â

In GCE, "pasta," "mazda," "lava," "drama," âYahooÂ®,â "taco," and other similar words are pronounced with the vowel "ae." In GAE, these words are pronounced with the vowel "a.â In GCE, on the other hand, these and few other foreign words are pronounced with the vowel "a": macho, Guatemala, Bach, and karate. Why is this so? I sure as heck don't know; it's an anomaly.

Of course, let's not forget Canadian lexicon. In Canada, "pop" is universally used as a term for a carbonated beverage. Even in the U.S., "pop" is used quite widely. It's largely used in the Midwest, Upper Midwest, and Northwest. As well, many Canadians refer to candy bars as "chocolate bars."
In GCE, the idioms "in hospital" and "to university" are used, in lieu of the American idioms "in the hospital" and "to the university," which includes a definite article. So, one may say, "I'm going to have my surgery in hospital," or "I'm going to attend university during the fall."

The last letter of the Canadian alphabet, "zed," is different from the last letter of the American alphabet, "zee."

Well, this is pretty much all I know about GCE.

Re: Exercise number fife, number twelfe

Marvin A. — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:28:33 GMT

Is it possible that it was not recorded by a native speaker? If it was, then they could be speaking a dialect that is significantly influenced by German, such as that found in certain areas of Wisconsin.