(Sorry. Seriously though, I'm surprised "prepone" never caught on before, it makes intuitive sense!)
Sounds fine to me. I think I'm going to use prepone from now on.
And I still construct sentences oddly, even though I've been speaking some English every day for 50+ years.
Hindi should be that common thread instead.
* Listening to market business analysis one will often hear "And this way the customer tries to gauge the value of THAT bag/watch/car..." where the word 'that' is emphasized with an almost implicit nod in the direction of the object. It's not so much grammar usage (which v. that). Rather it's a cloyingly emotional hustle (as I see) it to both magnify, mystify, and focus on the object in question.
* "... That said ... " / "...that being said..." appears often in writing, and even HN.
* Listen to any pitch in the software world. See if you can get through one without hearing any of these words or phrases: "... experience ...", 'actually' as in " ... Now press OK and it actually [does XYZ which was the whole point anyway]"; or "All we wanted to do was simply [some in, in fact, quite complex task] ... so we set out to [save the world]". More abstractly modern marketing emotionally plays on the feelings of connectedness or family in an insincere way. If you know Absolutely Fabulous you might know the Patsy line: "Get your dry cleaning back and it's a revolution" ... you know because the dry cleaners are practically your close loving family looking out for your chores so you have time to save the world / be a teacher ... so now everything is practically either an act of magic or Old Testament level miracles.
* In verbal conversation the word "like" is used far too much
* Finally, I have a number of friends for whom Portuguese is their native language. I don't understand it. Still I have tried to listen carefully for the parallel in English when we say "ummm" or "ahhh" to buy time while we think of the next line or the "like" example to start a sentence ... or the rising intonation to make a statement, and not asking a question. For a great example of rising intonation: look for the Noon dieting TV commercial and listen for the African American Lady who's got a line: "It's amazing how the little things ...". By the time she's done she's talking quickly at high pitch. I don't hear this in Portuguese.
In the first registration part, I discovered I didn't have an NHI number because I haven't been to a doctor. Therefore I was given a Post-It note on my consent form saying "Manual Entry".
After the jab, the observation nurses would call out names every few minutes: David, Priscilla, Marion, Yi Xin, Manuel, Daniel, Kyungbook, Richard... no surnames.
I didn't really think much of it. Besides, it was raining outside, I had my laptop, and I wasn't in a hurry to leave. When it was almost closing, there were only two of us left.
"Are you Manuel?" they asked. I said my name is Peter, not Manuel! But apparently they were calling "Manual". The Kiwi accent is hard to understand, even for a native speaker!
However, the dark underbelly of this phenomenon is that there are some serious racist undertones that come with this. Some words are "proper English" because it came from specific parts of the world, meanwhile similar words from other places are "Wrong English".
Certain speakers have accents that are "beautiful" and rewarded even if they completely butcher the language, it is completely understandable and held in high regard. Meanwhile others are considered "funny" or "stupid" and the speaker's intelligence gets questioned because of the accent.
As a non native speaker, I've had so many experiences where my intelligence is insulted and get shut down, because of my accent. Meanwhile the French guy next door gets applauded for saying the same thing again and gets a promotion. Language politics is real and it has severe consequences.
So maybe we should all use English as it is used by the actual English? But that would see a small minority of the number of English-language speakers setting the rules for the huge majority.
So maybe (as others have suggested) we follow the majority of native English speakers and use the Indian version?
Which ones? It's not like English, as actually spoken in England, is particularly uniform. It has uniform _spelling_, but that's about all; a lot of vocabulary and even grammar is quite regional.
I'm in. Just imagine stuck up californians suddenly speaking Geordie. Howay man.
That made me laugh! If forced to learn an IAL[1] I'd probably choose Solresol[2] because what sane person could resist the chance to yodel their complaints to Customer Services?
Or, if "terse and efficient" are an immovable part of the specification then I'd suggest Ithkuil[3] ... or maybe Rust?
[1] International Auxiliary Language
Languages keep on evolving, you just have to deal with it.
Or the hilarious situation I had at a legal conference. I thought one of my right-wing US friends had gone totally racist. He was complaining about all the new "turbins" he was seeing while driving to the conference. I thought he meant turban, but that's just how Americans pronounce "turbine", as in the wind turbines he could see from the highway.
I'm trying to learn German at the moment, and it's fascinating seeing the similarities between the languages, and the things we used to have in common but got dropped or modified in English.
What do you mean by this? French is spoken differently with different dialects over the world - eg. Quebecois French is not the same as France French. And while French may be one of the roots of English, there are also French words with their roots in English. It's all a mishmash.
I once worked as a KP in the Isle of Man alongside cooks from Belfast, Glasgow and Sunderland. My Wurzel upbringing did not prepare me for this. Took me 3 weeks of repeated "what?" to begin to understand them. But I find that 30 years later, I can still understand them. Weird how that works.
No such institution exists for the English language.
There are a few things that got pulled from Gaelic to English in Ireland that I love.
Like "him/herself" to mean the object of the sentence without naming them "ah would you look at himself, all dressed up like that", "I'll have to check with herself if I'm allowed out on a school night", etc
And no (or dimished) use of yes or no. Monosyllabic answers verboten.
I have the same feeling about "lose", which is increasingly spelled "loose". It annoys the living crap out of me, but in fairness English is whatever people say it is, and if people want to say it's "loose" then so be it.
I've already seen "moorish" succumb - from meaning (more or less) "spicy" to meaning "something I'd like to have more of". Which to be fair we don't have a word for, while we have plenty for "spicy" so it seems like a fair trade.
That's about my position on it. "I'm a descriptivist, but this is just stupid, let's not go there."
I remember reading 'Mutiny on the Bounty' as a child and talking about it with my father and I said something about the 'boatswain', and he (a former naval officer) looked at me like I had two heads. "You mean the [BOSUN]?" "Well, no it says 'boatswain'" "Yes, it's spelled like that, but it's pronounced BOSUN. It's like 'colonel'. Don't think about the letters."
Speaking of military terms, lieutenant as "leftenant" always threw me. I had just assumed they were different words.
(or at least, was - it is possible navy use has shifted)
> " 'Why not?,' I asked."
> " 'Because 'native' refers to the language you spoke as a child,' she answered with a tender, patient look."
Most people think of it like that because it's accurate in like 99.999% of cases, but that's not what "native speaker" means. It's more like, "is fluent and only learned through immersion, not from a class or relating words to another language" - which is how all children learn their first language, but is far less common as adults.
So native speakers mostly learn through memorization and internalizing grammar over a long period, instead of explicitly learning the rules of a language. That's why "prepone" is confusing - native speakers don't learn "postpone" as "post + pone", but as a single unit, so in an area where it's not a normal word, "prepone" is far less likely to be interpreted as "pre + pone", and more likely to be a new word entirely.
(Aside, reading the comic before the article, I paused on it and tried to figure out what it meant. I was thinking some odd local version of "prepare")
“a person who has spoken the language in question from earliest childhood”
And this makes sense, because “native” as an adjective means:
“associated with the place or circumstances of a person's birth”
So native speaker literally means a speaker by birth. Where are you getting the “fluent only by immersion” definition?
Are you instead talking about “native fluency,” which is typically used to mean fluency at the level of a native speaker, which is technically achievable by anyone (though realistically impossible after a certain age)?
Based on this, I could be considered native English speaker even though I've been speaking English only for the past 1/3 of my life. But that's exactly what I did. There were times when I sat down and read about the grammar in books, but to this day, I have no idea what a second or third conditional is, I just use them "naturally". It was two years ago that I realized what the difference was between an adjective and an adverb.
So, I don't really think this is a good explanation of what a native speaker is.
To me, your "mother language" is simply the language that your mother, or other primary caregiver, spoke to you as a child. It is certainly plausible to have more than one in multilingual households.
A native speaker may not have spoken that to language with their parents, but they learned it natively from other speakers at a young enough age that their phonemes adjust.
In my opinion, native speakers tend to have a much deeper understanding of the meanings and connotations of the words/phrases they use but may indeed have smaller volcabularies than fluent, but non-native, speakers. The difference between "costly" and "expensive" is obvious to a native english speaker, but might not have been learned by a fluent speaker with a larger volcabulary.
If you listen to linguists, grammar is descriptive not prescriptive. Grammar is not a fundemental trait of language, but a model of language use that helps us think about how language is used.
I do think it is important to be aware of how we use language to enforce economic and cultural segregation. Language use is often used as a proxy for class and education and those who don't fit the "standard" are faced with discrimination.
Something so subtle that a "native" - or maybe it would just be American? - speaker would never say.
Something that is sublime would somehow be inferior to its lime counterpart. Like everything has an innate limeness.
Disclaimer: I just googled "sublime etymology"
To a EU French ear, Canadian French is a horrible butchery of the beautiful language that is French. The Canadians don't roll their R's properly and all sorts of other unspeakable things. ;-)
Meanwhile, an EU French person visiting the French speaking parts of Canada will often have a significant amount of difficulty being understood. This is not because of their lack of mastery of the French language, but because their true pronunciation of French is not what the Canadian ear expects.
(Shout out to anyone who learned a lot of vocabulary from Calvin and Hobbes.)
2. "Language changes" pretty much equates to people making mistakes, and those mistakes becoming part of the language. Since English has spread over so much of the world, in addition to it not having a central authority that is looked to for its structure (as does French), many mistakes have come in, and made the language weird. This overlaps a bit with (1).
The question becomes: Will we call English English, or will some other language per above be called English? I for one don't use "nother" nor place periods before consequents, so I might be speaking my own language right now, based on what people online seem to have done with English :)
I argued for the contraction "amn't" through sixth grade, but my teachers kept correcting it.
At work a few years back, a Chinese colleague was speaking with an Indian colleague. I had some trouble understanding them with their heavy accents, but they were apparently having no trouble understanding each other.
At the same workplace, my Italian boss would sometimes converse with a Canadian colleague in French.
My dad is one of those people who when speaking to non-native English speakers, he speaks (a lot) louder, as if that helps them to understand (I don’t think it does).
In Italy one time, my daughter was trying to order espresso with hot milk but got served a glass of cold milk because she asked for a latte. She's currently studying German and is amused by the German for "birth control pills": "Anti-Baby-Pillen".
I am reminded of a habit from seven habits of highly effective people: seek first to understand, then to be understood.
Shrug.
I asked my high school English teacher the proper way to contract "should not have" in writing; I was trying my hand at short stories, and I wanted it in the dialogue. She said it wasn't a thing. Not that there's no standard convention, but that it's not a thing.
Despite me saying and hearing "shouldn't've" all the time.
Of course these are a social construct, but it’s not unfair to characterize that:
“General American English or General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm) is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans and widely perceived, among Americans, as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics.”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation
Use of words/phrases such as "thought process" (mostly incorrectly), "sync up", "paradigm shift", "disrupt", "blue/green ocean", "ballpark" and so on and on...
'blighty' is a misheard vilaiti(foreigner). It's a tango, that's how the sausage is made and there are no wrong answers.
You make a mess of yoga and Indian cuisine. We add liberal modifications to english. It's all good.
Interesting thing is, if there is a time when are a lot more Indians speaking English and all making the same 'mistakes' than other people, how long till the mistakes are part of the language.
I'm starting to be very tired of reading this kind of statement everywhere. No, not every existing concept is a conspiracy to discriminate against some people. Not everything is a social construct (few things are). You [article author] are not a victim of a grand linguistic scheme established by men/White/English speakers/whatever to make you feel bad about your English level. The concept is valid and useful in language education.
In (modern) linguistics, you try to be descriptive rather than prescriptive, watching language artifacts through the looking glass. English exists in many so-called varieties, geographical varieties, different varieties used in different social strata of one and the same society.
As it happens, though, Arabic is also a notably polycentric language, although it has a single prestige dialect too (MSA). And English is the closest thing India has to a prestige dialect, since all other languages are regional.
There is a trend by native English speakers to bash english, and treat it like no other language can have any of these issues.
The only major difference is noted in the other response; English has a lot of different dialects. Korean has Standard Korean that everyone learns now, and unofficial regional dialects. With English you have people randomly learning American English, UK English, Indian English, etc, which all have various differences in vocabulary, idioms, grammar, etc.
Imagine a world where India is the center of the English speaking world (not too far fetched considering the population of English speakers), we would all start using prepone because that's just the cultural norm of the most common branch of English.
— James Nicoll
I think this aspect of English is what makes it so complicated. For instance, words are spelt with an "f" or a "ph" depending on what language we originally stole it from.
I use it all the time.
And why do we computer people have prefixes and postfixes, when the world was just getting by fine with prefixes and and suffixes. (I realize we did have to invent 'infix'.)
And why is it antebellum and pre-war, but postbellum and post post-war. Why does no one ever use postdeluvian and only antediluvian?
sigh
I am constantly amazed by my co-workers abilities to think quickly over highly technical topics and make passionate arguments over complex topics-- in a second or third language!
Human beings are fantastic.
Closest equivalent I can think of is "move up."
"We're moving up the launch" is common, but never heard anyone say "we're moving down the launch", even though delays are common.
The issue with "prepone" is that "pone" isn't really used as a world. A quick googling shows that it is a word, but in regular speech it's not used as a standalone.
English is fun
you can move up a date, but nobody talks about
moving down a date.
A lot of, if not most, Greek/Latin neologisms and combined words use a root that is never used as is.
Both “neologism” and “combine” above are examples of this…
And then I remembered the word preposterous, enough said.
I'd consider "(later) down the road" an example of that.
(From "intro" in case it's not obvious.)
But "tomorrow morning" becomes "Morgen früh" which is "tomorrow early" (or "early tomorrow" in English). "Morgen vormittags" ("tomorrow before noon") is also a variation.
when using "back" to talk about the past, it's "backwards" as in "behind you". "further back" = "further behind you" = "more in the past"
A future meeting "moved back" is definitely postponed. (US English)
Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough, there is a very sudden phase change where people around you go from "you speak pretty good English" to "you speak amazing English" with nothing in between — all of a sudden you're perceived as a peer, and you choice of vocabulary then sets you apart. Ever since I've noticed this I've been trying to make my vocabulary "worse" by incorporating more mundane words into it.
1. https://msburkeenglish.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/uncleftis...
There's the opposite problem, too, where people with poor educations will try to use fancy words to impress people (but often wind up just sounding pretentious).
One of my pet peeves is hearing people using the word "utilize".
Just say "use"! It sounds far less pretentious and means the exact same thing.
I intentionally try to simplify my word choice, even though my vocabulary is much larger than what I use in writing or daily speech, and even when the first word that comes to mind is long/fancy word.
I try to use a five cent word when even a five dollar word would do. It sounds more natural, and you don't come off sounding like you're trying to impress anyone (which is usually counterproductive if you're using vocabulary to do it).
> "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue"
That would be really formal over here too, the kind of wording that I'd expect in a grilling manual explaining how to use it, but not at a barbecue.
I can relate because sometimes I find myself speaking like that when talking to english counterparts, but mostly because when I'm "translating" my thoughts into sentences I have to choose between a group of words of similar meaning, and due to my inexperience, I often choose a less "popular" one.
EDIT:
After reflecting on this a bit more I also believe I often sound formal when speaking english because it's easier to use more/fancier words for the sake of not being misunderstood than it's to come up with a short, direct sentence that transmits my message in a clear way.
It's like adding redundancy to the message for reducing the risk of transmitting unintentional errors ;)
English has its barbarian roots overlaid with French words from the Norman conquest of England. The French aristocracy moved in and took over. The modern result of that is the "English" words of French origin are tells of upper class origins. Americans use that, consciously or unconsciously. Sometimes it's referred to as "coded speech".
For example, someone from upper class America will "purchase" something while a lower class person will "buy" it.
It's not just slight accent changes that distinguish class in America.
Education doesn't affect word choice much. The people who will say things like this were largely already saying them before they received an education.
It's quite an unusual language - a mix of Romance, Arabic, and a hint of English, which sounds like Russian when spoken. There are also plenty of false friends which confuse native speakers of both languages.
That still doesn't explain why someone would say periferia when they meant lado or maybe bordo.
I studied physics so moving the burgers to the periphery of the bbq is great. Precise, unambiguous and what not. Moving them to the side may mean so many things: one side (which one), how bug the side is. Heck, is that side still on the bbq?
As for the example you mentioned, I mainly noticed similar when speaking with my French colleague: when he runs out of words he throws in a French word,which in most cases I can immediately understand because it's either used internationally or at least in my own language,but it's often not the most appropriate word for that sentence,so there's lots of 'periphery of the barbecue' :)
A native english speaker would not have said that, unless they wanted to sound like the instruction manual, or a BBC BBQ Sports commentator. It is overly formal, a common problem that non-native speakers face.
— Jacques Vallee, The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (1982) https://books.google.com/books?id=6f8VqnZaPQwC
There's an old MMORPG that I used to play with friends as a kid. It has an item called copper shield. My friends and I didn't speak english at the time so we'd misspell and mispronounce the item as cooper shield. We had no idea what copper even meant, to us it was just the name of the shield. We all know what copper means now, but that didn't change our understanding of the shield.
A few years ago I decided to create a new account and play again for old time's sake. I joined a party and started talking to people. The second I said "cooper shield" I got a private message in my native language from a guy who learned it by playing the game with us. Because of that highly specific misspelling, he could tell not only that I was a foreigner but also which country I was from.
My Spanish girl friend at the time was among the first batches to take the computer-adaptive version of the GRE (which increases difficulty as you get questions right, and vice versa). While preparing for the verbal part, she noted that the "difficult" words being explained were often words she knew (to lament, intransigent), while the "simple" explanation involved words she had to learn (to mourn, unyielding).
This could then lead to a positive feedback cycle for native Spanish speakers taking the test - get the first few questions right, get "harder" questions with long Latin words (easy!), or get the first few questions wrong, and get "easier" questions with short Germanic words (oh no).
Her test score was indeed many standard deviations away from the paper based practice tests she had taken - but only on the verbal part.
A long time ago I was in the US and I used the word "labyrinth" because I didn't know "maze" and, well, in french for a maze we say "labyrinthe"... I still remember the reaction of my american friend, very surprised by my "advanced" english vocabulary.
We native romance language speakers have it easy ; )
Ironically, though, "maze" may come from the Norwegian word "mas".
But is "labyrinth" from a romance language? It appears in Liddell & Scott's Greek-English Lexicon with the remark that it is a foreign word.
Or is "British" still an euphemism for "English"?
Ahh, here's the book: Classical English Style, by Ward Farnsworth [1].
Haven’t had a chance to try it with folk whose first tongue is a Germanic tongue because they all speak really good English, but if I came across someone who didn’t have great English I’d probably use more Germanic words.
I find this subconscious perception of speech with more Latin-origin words interesting though. Something about Germanic words just feels more earthy and real, Latin-origin words feel quite flowery and sort of hard to pin down.
There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to a list of just what you described, synonymous words with Romance vs Germanic origins.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_d...
I was taking an Arabic class and the professor was Egyptian. At one point she mentioned 'Pigeons of peace', which sounded ridiculous to my ears since 'doves' are a peace symbol and not pigeons, even though they are the same animal.
I've definitely gone with `consecuentemente` in Spanish because it's an English cognate and I couldn't remember whether I should have used `porque` (=because), or one of the annoyingly similar `por que`(=so that), `por qué` (=why), or `porqué` (=a reason).
E.g. "ameliorate" comes more naturally to the tip of my tongue than "improve", but it's almost never a better word to use.
I got beat up a lot too.
I remember "ameliorate" that an american friend (an adult) didn't even know (but again this guy mixed Portugal and Porto Rico so maybe not the best sample lol), while for me it was clearly an easy cheat because I had more trouble reaching for "enhance".
Ofc since I'm also an ass, I like to claim English "stole" all those French word then proceeded to misspell and massacre them.
Fair enough, but then French is nothing more than horribly misspelled, massacred and ungrammatical Latin.
Of course the same could be said about any other current language, after replacing Latin with whatever our ancestors spoke a couple of thousand years ago.
In regards to "amazing English", how about picking one obscure dialect like Scotish and perfecting that so that the other 95% of English speaker take you as a Scots/Welsh/Californian and don't ask any more questions?
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1XQx9pGGd0&list=PLbBvyau8q9... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in...
For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not pronounced at all, or pronounced differently, in different countries.
And there are dialects that are pretty much incomprehensible to people who grew up in the mainstream dialect (true of many other languages as well) but then we add weird things like Americans hearing race in accent and dialect, while the British can hear class but for the most part the opposite is not true.
I think simple English is one of the easiest languages to learn, because of its ubiquity and in most places the material advantage of speaking some; while good English is one of the hardest.
Thanks to the magic of the innernets I have recently discovered a Finnish comedian named Ismo who talks about this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGcDi0DRtU
(Arguably NSFW if you work in a kindergarten.)
In my experience as an EFL teacher living abroad in multiple countries... this is not even remotely accurate.
English students across the world are often "taught" a ton of nonsense grammatical rules that simply don't exist, or that are simplifications which don't always apply.
I remember one interview at a school where the (non-native English speaker) director criticized me for ending a sentence with a preposition -- a classic "fake" rule.
I once reviewed an English test used for Citibank interviews, which I would have failed because a majority of the multiple-choice questions had more than one perfectly valid answer, but I guess not according to the overly simple grammar "rules" that were taught.
It actually can become a serious source of tension between foreign learners who are proud of the 10 years they spent in English classes and insist they therefore speak "correctly", while you the native speaker are making "mistakes".
I remember one memorable conversation where a work colleague tried to insist that something at the store was "costly", and wouldn't accept that the correct term was "expensive" (or just "costs too much"). The dictionary we had wasn't of much help either, since definitions often don't capture the actual subtleties of usage and connotation.
I also can't count the number of times actual (again, non-native) English teachers insisted it was correct to say "I have a doubt" rather than "I have a question" when you don't understand something... and often there's literally no convincing them, because how could their 10 years in the classroom and 20 years of teaching be wrong...?
As a matter of fact, if you look up prepone in Wiktionary "prepone" is mentioned as being used in India, so it's not that weird that the teacher in the article used it.
For a few years now, I've thought that the ideal work environment for encouraging diversity and inclusion would be an all-remote team that used only written communication, preferring asynchronous communication as much as possible. One advantage of such an environment would be that people like me couldn't judge others based on their accents. But then, I'm not ready to actually go to this extreme in my own work. I'm the cofounder of a tiny company, and my cofounder and I have several spoken conversations per day. I don't think either of us want to change that. Perhaps I could limit myself to written communication with any employees that we hire, but that feels like a double standard.
A more algorithmic rule is found in APA style: https://blog.apastyle.org/apastyle/2016/10/hyphenation-stati...
Edit: NPR also uses the Associated Press Stylebook and related resources.
Multiple adjectives always have to be in the order: opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose.
You can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife, or a beautiful big new oval blue nylon sleeping bag. Those sound completely natural and intuitive, but any tweak to the order just sounds "wrong" to a native speaker. Try it!
If you have a "cardboard brown box", it sounds like the box is the color "cardboard-brown"! If you have an old little knife, it sounds like "little knife" is the kind of knife it is! Other tweaks change the implied meaning in a way that is completely opaque to a non-native speaker.
Why can't you have a "green rectangular French old silver little whittling lovely knife"?
However, I don't believe it is opague to a non-native speaker who has sufficient experience with the language.
Ugh. When will this victim mentality end? I'm a naturalised citizen in a foreign country and get asked this all the time because of my accent. It has never come across as anything less than interest.
If they're cutting them off in order to change topic & bring it up, not so much!
Language is a crazy thing.
When I taught English abroad, I would get asked questions all the time on things I hadn't researched yet so often the answer was "just because".
The more someone's accent differs from what I'm used to, the more difficult it is for me to understand. I notice that on the phone, I can understand an accent like mine over a bad connection. The further one's accent is from mine, the better quality connection I need.
It's also significantly more work to understand a presentation the more distant the speaker's accent is. That means the less interesting the presentation is, the more likely I am to not make the effort.
It's not fair, but it's a fact of life.
Language is a living protocol that you can only learn by listening people use it and using it yourself constantly. Whether a made up word makes sense syntactically and grammatically doesn't matter. In fact whether it's in a dictionary also doesn't matter. What matters is being understood. So you need to use words people know. Sometimes you're in a position to make up a new word, when you need to. Talking to students about when their exam is... is not one of those situations.
And a heavy accent literally corrupts your communication. On top of making it hard to understand what words you say, your intonation becomes completely unintelligible, because you're speaking English, but intonating in another language. You're literally not speaking entirely in English. Strong Indian accent is especially infuriating for this, I find it very hard to listen to and understand.
And by the way, made-up words and strong accents are ESPECIALLY annoying to OTHER non-native English speakers, because we have an extra hard time parsing this on top of understanding a non-native language already.
I should know, I'm a Bulgarian, so... (I have slight accent).
This applies to any accent you were not exposed previously. I noticed that after some time you get used and understand it perfectly fine.
Also, you can get used to a teenager saying "like" every second word and ending every single sentence by raising their pitch, or with excessive vocal fryyyyy. Ar tarnang avary vawaaal to aaah. But it doesn't necessarily mean that's effective communication style.
There are dialects and accents that are actually less articulate than others. So even if you get used to them, it helps, but you still get less information content, and more dialect-specific ambient ornamentation (like some of the teen-speak examples I mentioned above).
I disagree. In this case, it was based on the fact that no one you were talking to knew the meaning of the word you'd made up. This is descriptivism at work.
If something is to become a word, people need to actually use it in the first place. Indian English is different than American English is different than Black American English is different than UK English.
[1] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderles...
However, a native speaker won't struggle in speech, and they'll know the various idioms used all the time in colloquial speech. Of course native speakers don't have to take the TEFL/TOEFL! They don't consciously think about grammar rules, they just employ them nearly always perfectly in speech. Of course not every native speaker is good at writing at an academic level and we should be aware of that.
This phenomenon is also not unique to English! This article and the one linked are basically following the trend of bashing one's own English; how dare native speakers speak their language like they have been their entire life? Part of learning any language is learning the cultural idiosyncrasies and idioms. Of course, native speakers should strive to make sure they're not overusing idioms with a EFL/ESL audience, but knowing "grammar" and "complex technical terms" doesn't actually mean you can speak [American/UK/Indian/Black American/etc] English.
Humans are just curious when someone has a different accent than the local area. There are various American accents. I've had that question asked a lot when I was living in Korea. Getting upset about it is entirely a personal choice.
I'm not American but I don't like this. If an American author had written that everything is fine until "a foreigner joins the group" there would be a twitterstorm.
What's more, this is not about Americans, or even native English speakers. I'll give you a completely different example of how a group with a common language can exclude someone who doesn't quite share it.
I knew a couple were the woman was Greek and the man was from Chile. They lived in Greece and hung out with Greeks. I witnessed first hand, dozens of times, how the Chilean guy was left out of conversations. It happened in three phases. In the first phase, everyone would speak to him in English. This lasted for a few minutes, time enough to exchange greetings and pleasantries and so on. In the second phase, the Greeks would revert to speaking to each other in Greek. In the third stage, the Chilean man would try to join the conversation in Greek. At that point, the Greeks would reply in English. Then the process looped back to the second phase.
The Chilean guy was trying to learn Greek, but he never could - because nobody spoke to him in Greek long enough for him to learn it. He also failed to make any friends, because everyone spoke to him only for a short time, as long as they felt comfortable speaking in English.
Obviously I noticed this so I tried to rectify it by speaking to him only in Greek. We ended up code-switching a lot but at least we could keep going for a longer time than he did with others. I realised his frustration when we explicitly discussed how I spoke to him in Greek and he said, exasperated "you're the only one!".
Language can be a huge barrier that we raise subconsiously around us- but it doesn't help to single out one nationality for it. Everyone does it.
Usually this difference is small enough that it doesn’t matter but there are cases like an Indian saying, “there are too many Mexicans in this neighborhood” and meaning “This neighborhood has a lot of Mexicans” in a neutral sense, but an American hearing that might interpret it as “The number of Mexicans in this neighborhood is a bad thing”
I think most Americans would interpret it this way given it plays directly into the stereotype of "All Indians/Asians Are Incredibly Racist/Sexist."
Now, we Indians find it hard to understand when others non-native speakers speak English just as others for Indians.
I had had my experiences being the "English Translator" for Indians and Japanese speaking, well, English. I enunciate, use simpler words, and shorter sentences.
I happen to grow up in a corner of India where languages and dialects differ every quarter-mile. So, English happened to be the common thread. Our schools fined us ₹0.50 in my times if we do not speak in English since very early grade.
During early 2000s I started visiting countries outside India, such as US, and UK. Then I realized, that my English sucks. I have been learning a lot more since. Working mostly with Native English Speaking clients did do a whole lot of fast-forward into "speaking English" the proper way.
Unfortunately, I feel my own language is limited and very complex. My family switch to English if we need to understand things faster and better. My daughters are learning our original language but they sounded very funny and kinda "language-retarted" to their counterparts (cousins, relative back home).
The interesting thing is I can speak and understand a minimum of three languages (English, Hindi, and our Language) like most Indians. I can also get away with exchanging info with people speaking in Marathi, Gujarathi, and a bit of Bengali, Punjabi, Haryanbi, etc.
Attempting and preparing to learn Japanese soon.
I guess it bothers me even more as someone who wasn't born in an English speaking country but spoke it nearly exclusively after childhood. It's a common sentiment - one of my old history teachers lived in England for 20 or so years, and was asked if he can provide some proof he can speak English for his citizenship. How would someone live in the damn country for 20 years as a teacher and not be able to speak the language?
I moved to Switzerland to do a master's degree in Germany which was still, essentially, in German. Didn't matter that I'd already read research literature and written term papers in English, I still had to do a TOEFL for no discernible reason. But even worse, should I end up deciding to do another degree somewhere else, I'd just have to do it all over, even though I use English everyday at work.
I understand making sure that people speak and understand English properly in an academic setting, but TOEFL etc. are just money machines.
By lying on their resume. That's why people ask questions like that, to uncover frauds.
I've noticed that it's quite common for monolinguals to be judgemental about people's English if it doesn't sound exactly like their own dialect of English. But the lack of linguistic ability often lies with the monolingual listener in these cases. I grew up monolingual, so I understand how easy it is to judge someone who speaks in a way that is less comfortably understood. But communication is a two way process, both the speaker and the listener have to develop the skill and put in the effort for successful communication to take place. There are countless dialects of English, and a lot of variety even among people who speak English as their first language. It seems that many people are unaware of this.
I bought a book a couple of years ago: iOS and macOS Performance Tuning. I took note that the author had not used the word "performant" even once in the book's 400 pages. Maybe I'm a snob, but it made the author seem the more credible to me.
The careful omission of a statement whether English was one of those three languages leads me to believe it was not. The manager knew he didn't speak it from infancy because Madani spoke it fluently but without the style of a native speaker. Perhaps the difference in that position would be irrelevant, such as a STEM job. There are positions, however, it would matter, such as sales or public relations where that last one percent can mean everything.
There's also the fact the title of the article is "Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English" which leads me to believe the people sharing their gripes are, in fact, not native speakers of English.
Non-native here, but I have an opinion on your choice of examples. They aren't posh or counter-productive, on the contrary, they are just specific to fields under-represented in popular culture (political history, fantasy/longevity research, music/acoustics). I don't see any obvious ways to convey the same meaning using more common words.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prepone%2C+ant...
Pre production post production. Pre release post release. Prepone, postpone.
And I also didn’t like the quoted person in the article that said they had to (my words) “dumb down” their technical conversation whenever an American entered the conversation or they wouldn’t understand the terms they were using. That is just arrogance and borderline xenophobism in my opinion. Neither the implication that speaking perfect grammar and knowing more words is almost equivalent to moral superiority.
Anyway, that represents the diversity in non-native speakers perceptions somehow I guess. I enjoyed a lot the insights of the professor from New Delhi — I loved the word prepone - and I think the concern about prejudice over not being “native” or “mother tongue” very valid.
I noticed that the usage of slang, correct grammar is an indication of the position on the social ladder and education.
Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication.
Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word.
"Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem.
Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two).
Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement.
You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form.
Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which.
It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.
Basically in Polish (and other Slavic languages) you take several concepts that are separate fixed words / grammar orders in English, and you meld them together with prefixes and postfixes to form a super-word that contains all information:
(I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they) x (future/now/past) x (surely/maybe) x (finished/unfished) x (statement/question) x ...
"she would have played" -> "zagrałaby"
"would you play?" (fem.) -> "zagrałabyś?"
"he would have played" -> "zagrałby"
"she has been playing" -> "grała"
"she played" -> "zagrała"
Indeed if you come from a simple language like English, it must be a mindfuck.
OTOH, regarding the past and whether something was happening regularly or not, there's some similar concept in Spanish that I never mastered. And all the "subjunctive" in French/Spanish... Languages are hard. Part of why English got so popular is that on grammar level it's really simpler than most other languages.
Thai has refreshingly simple grammar but pronunciation is really hard for Westerners as is comprehension, and the writing system is, um, rich in complexity. Most Western expats simply give up, I hope I will not.
I have heard Polish is pretty difficult. Native Polish speakers, much like Hungarians, take great pride in the difficulty of their language.
AFAICT from spending a lot of time hanging around with natives and learning a few simple sentences, Spanish and Serbian are both pretty "easy" at least up front. I have plans to spend more time in the Canary Islands so I will have to learn some basic Spanish and I do hope it's as easy as it seems.
I can only sympathise with you, but that is the thing. As native speaker you just know when the words sounds good or off.
One good thing is that you can always read Polish words phonetically. The notation to sounds is always the same. So its something :)
You say the spelling is irrational, I challenge you to find reason in the Chinese spelling, and the French one is full of traps due to our insane obsession with keeping our Latin root intact in spelling but not in verbal French.
The genders make little sense in French, serve little purpose but constitute an immense barrier to a new learner. My wife will never, in her entire life, remember a table is a girl but a bridge is a boy. Because of that, she'll always sound like an idiot. My daughter might, but she hates French already and is incredible in English.
Cantonese, or any Chinese variant, has large issues with temporality while English finds the right balance between having several tenses but not the idiotic amount French would have.
I don't know, coming from a romance and an asian experience, English really is a good language you should be proud of. The pronunciation, sure, I'll always sound French, but that's a small problem compared to the vast advantage learning to read it provided me around 16 yo. Learn French at 16 yo and see if you move from the countryside of Normandy to an IB in Hong Kong thanks to it :D
I think there are differences in accent, but I don't recognise anywhere as being "pretty much incomprehensible".
I speak "standard" German as a foreigner, and have definitely found dialects that are "pretty much incomprehensible". I haven't found differences to such a degree in English.
Find yourself a native Glaswegian to chat with, and see if you still feel the same way.
(Also, is Scots not a dialect of English? I'm not sure -- a mix at the very least. Great tutorials on TikTok for that as it's apparently endangered.)
If you mean German, haha that's easy, just go to Switzerland with a short stop in Swabia on the way, though in both places you'll have to practically beg people to speak their native tongue in front of a foreigner. The Swiss Germans especially will reflexively speak one of the major foreign tongues, namely Hochdeutsch or English, though in my experience the Swabians will still say stuff like schaffe gell and assume you can grok it since Germans know that much from TV.
Part of the imcomprehensibility stems from their wide use of sayings that aren’t really deductible. “Who knit ya?” is “who are your parents?” It makes sense in retrospect, but I don’t think many people would think that in retrospect.
That's because we use the Latin alphabet for it, but it clearly wasn't mean to encode English. Contrast it with Italian, for which after learning the basic pronunciation of letters you can pretty much read out loud any words and be understood.
My native language is Lithuanian and I always saw English words as sounding weird. However when I learned about the vowel shift and listened to some examples - the words from before sounded exactly like someone would pronounce them while reading in Lithuanian. In fact majority of pupils learning English for the first time would mis-pronounce the written words in exact same manner as they were supposed to sound before the vowel shift. Try listening to some of the soundfiles on that page ("bite", "mate", "boot", etc) and see how much more consistent they were.
I know plenty of people who haven't "lived in English" before they're able to speak it. But I don't think English is much different than other languages in that the most effective way to learn it is to use it.
Compared to the other languages I know, the difference between "school English" and "English on the street" is larger. But of course the other two (German and Hungarian) could be exceptions!
I have heard the same thing said of Spanish, at least as spoken by the working class in Madrid.
Regional dialects and quaint idioms are absolutely English though. How else to add tone and shading to our communication? It's the sand the forces the oyster to make pearls.
Everyone was learning American or British English. No one was trying to learn Indian English ;)
"On the contrary, communication ends because [the foreign researchers] cannot explain to the American, in simple language, the advanced topics they were discussing. Yet, the American *takes over the conversation*."
Speaking simply, to the point and without jargon, is actually an advanced skill. When you don't know the word circle you say square and then hack at the corners with other words until the other person nods. Part of the reason why Zoom classes suck.
I remember getting answers wrong on some tests like:
a) How is 12:45 pm read? I said "twelve forty five pm" but the only valid answer was "a quarter to one"
b) What is the ethnicity of Laos? Which may be Lao or Laotian depending on who you ask. The teacher only accepted Laotian.
c) On one test he also insisted that NK and SK were "one country" and also had that answer marked as wrong. Which may or may not be depending on who you ask.
I tried to appeal some of those answers in the tests but it only annoyed the teacher.
I think it is quite plausible that, for any language, speakers that learned it as a second language will know the grammar and grammatical terms better than most native speakers (particularly monoglot ones).
Since you provided many examples, I will also give a few:
An astounding number of people overcorrect to "It was a present for my wife and I" or so, having trouble with the few remnants of cases (nominative, accusative, genitive) English still has. Similarly, many native speaker seem incapable to identify the much maligned "passive voice". Or, ask a native speaker under what circumstances you'd use the past perfect continuous.
Hard disagree - I don't think your experience as an EFL teacher is relevant to places where english is an official language and is taught from their equivalent of K-12, like India (and many former colonies). EFL courses are far shorter, and not taught to similar depth - some former colonies use the same examination boards as UK students, so it's a far-cry from EFL.
English speakers in those places do not make mistakes that "native" speakers make, like writing "I should of done that" or say "on accident" because it's the opposite of "on purpose" - they simply accept that the rules don't make any sense. I'm not sayin they are better or perfect: they have their own class of mistakes they are prone to.
Like in "homeopathy is backed by science" to what someone would understandably say "I have a doubt" (in a mocking way in that case)
If there is one phrase that, to me, defines Indian English, I think it would be "do the needful". For American English speakers, I think the first time you hear/see that, it is totally confusing and jarring in an odd way.
For some reason it means “I also” in Indian English and it sounds weird to non Indian dialect.
Like “Even I don’t understand this” sounds obnoxious to me because in my mind it means “Even I, an almighty being, don’t understand this, who are you to think you can understand it” but it means “I also don’t understand” in Indian English.
According to google “Even” as adverb: used to emphasize something surprising or extreme. So I assume what I think at first is what native English speakers also think.
I hear this daily and I know what it meant to mean now, I had a friend who did not know this and thought her Indian colleague was talking down to her.
It comes from mid-19th century British English, which was used to design templates for formal letter writing in India.
These artifacts have remained as part of Indian English, but died as part of British and American English.
[1] https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/09/doing-needful.h...
The one that sticks in my mind is "club" as a verb meaning "group". "We will club these events together into one message for efficiency".
I hope it goes mainstream some day, at least in tech.
Having said that, one of the things that you have to learn when you start speaking with English speakers from around the world is to recognise which of the words in your vocabulary will be understood vs which are particular to your native country. I'd put words like "prepone" and "needful" into this category: you need to find an alternative when talking to people from places where those words aren't understood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
For example: "Good morning, Bob...!!!"
I would really like to know where it comes from. In my experience, they don't realize that "..." comes across as dramatic or passive-aggressive. The "!!!" part I assume is just meant to convey enthusiasm, but it comes across as very aggressive.
That, and people will start judging on grammar, ability to spell, word choice, etc, etc. I think you'd just be trading one set of prejudices for another.
As an Brit, at least we live in a country where insulin is covered.
I used to think I spoke perfect American English until someone pointed out that I say the th sound weirdly (I think it's called dental th-stopping [0]). I also spent some time in England as a child and now say some words like "rather" with the English pronunciation. I'm living in England again now as an adult and am picking up some English colloquialisms, though usually pronounced in an American accent.
I also unintentionally end up speaking in an Indian accent when I talk to speakers of Indian English, but can't put on (even intentionally) an English accent to save my life even though I had one when I lived in England as a child.
The article raised my awareness of that. That's why I put the one usage of "native" in the GP comment in quotes, and mostly avoided the word.
Maybe part of the problem is AV equipment? Once place I worked we had MAJOR communication difficulties with understanding Indian and SE Asian folks over the speakerphone. It was a perfect storm of unfamiliar inflections, vowels not being differentiated from each other strongly enough, consonants getting screwed up and rapid speech.
Really good headsets on both ears and repeated exposure seemed to resolve the discomfort and dread for many folks. I always wondered if there were similar complaints on the Asian side, I never heard anything about it. Do they find British/American accents hard to understand? I don't know.
With Deepl (and even Google Translate) I can communicate very well with anyone in German, Polish or any of the supported languages, while in person it would be impossible, as I don't know the language at all.
Google Assistant works, but it gets annoying real fast as it's slow and pretty cumbersome to use.
What makes you think so?
In my opinion, “native speaker” should mean “a person who is completely fluent in a language and formulates their thoughts in it.” But I’m wondering if we should include “social norms” in the definition of “native”...
I did not speak English until we moved to America when I was 12. Now I hardly have a chance to speak my “native” language anymore, and instead am fluent, accent-less and conduct my daily activities (and even dream) almost exclusively in English. My kids and my wife all speak English only. I have become a native speaker, and by my own definition, I have become a foreign speaker in the language I learned as a kid. I’m still fluent in it, but I struggle sometimes to find the right words (translate from English).
Another anecdote, my wife, who is an Australian native - speaking what is closer to the “Queen’s English” than American English - was forced to take an ESL test when she first moved here to start college to assess her English knowledge. Is she a native speaker? Linguistically, yes. But she struggled to understand others in America and, more importantly, have others understand her. “Can I have some cutlery?” directed at a waiter for met with a blank stare (clearly unfamiliar with that term, I interjected with “eating utensils”). This is where societal norms and cultural lingo comes into play.
> "I grew up with three languages, as my parents did not share the same 'mother tongue' " Madani says. "And, in any case, how would this manager know what language I grew up with? I was especially miffed as she spoke but one language."
It's my (possibly mistaken) assumption that anyone from India, self-described as a linguistic "have", and majoring in English and teaching English now, probably has been speaking it since before they started school. It seems strange that article doesn't actually clarify anything about her language education and the second interviewee specifically shows that the authors didn't only select for non-native speakers. I assume the editor wrote the title without sufficient thought and the author would have chosen something else.
If you're ever worried about how you'll be perceived in these kinds of scenarios, just make sure you're speaking with enough of an accent to communicates English is not your first language. The people who would otherwise be offended will not recognize you a target of the current cultural tensions that pronouns represent.
Translating from English to Persian must be tough, no? For example I did this test in Google Translate and it appeared to strip the second sentence of it's meaning, making the person that put the chicken in the oven ambiguous:
> Sam and Sally went home. Once there, she put the chicken in the oven.
> سام و سالی به خانه خود رفتند. پس از آنجا ، او مرغ را در اجاق قرار داد.
You may be surprised on how this ambiguity can be beneficial, specially in teenage years when talking about your "friend" will not reveal their gender :)
I love language-learning, and I can usually bootstrap myself to a level where the locals don’t reply in English when I want to practice. However, with Dutch I found it difficult to bootstrap and I experienced what your Chilean did. When I complained about how locals weren’t letting me practice, I was told (the famous Dutch directness!) that I needed to simply hire a teacher to get to a higher level, instead of being annoying to local people. People’s time is precious, and a foreigner speaking the local language haltingly is arguably disrespectful of their time.
My experience mirrors what is described in the article, but only with people from Europe. Non-native English speakers from Europe look down on Americans, in a sort of "gate-keeping" manner where Europeans "own" the language. They have a better grasp of the "precise and elaborate formal English" and do not hesitate to correct Americans and tell them they don't understand grammar and are uneducated. (I'm inclined to agree with them.)
My experience speaking with non-native speakers from Asia, India, and Central & South America has been different. Maybe we are more willing to accept that there is a language barrier, but no one "owns" it.
And, like the article says, trying to use a culturally relevant idiom is a futile task.
This is a common pattern of false equivalency, like "reverse racism" and the likes.
The analogy is invalid because the harms of discrimination come from the power imbalance.
In this case, immigrants in the US are in a position of disadvantage, due to linguistic/cultural struggles and the perception issues they cause. Perpetuating stereotypes that reinforce that perception causes harm.
Or rather Polish. Both Polish and Portuguese have nasals and sibilants in abundance.
Thank you.
Except for names. Maybe I’m just not at that level, but I’ve spoken it for years and still have no idea when I see most names unless I’m familiar with it.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/prepone
>Indian English
Yeah no kidding.
I first ran into this with white/rice/? (I forget the third definition of kao). So now whenever my wife/MIL is trying to show me the difference in tone between “different” words like that my response to them is usually “kao, kao, kao”.
For anyone who hasn’t tried to learn Thai: a number of words are pronounced almost exactly the same (the way there and their are in English) but with slightly different tone.
The example I give above (“kao”) is pronounced basically like cow, but the tone means you’re saying either white, rice (yes white rice technically is kao kao but no one says that) or... something else I still can’t remember.
I’ll freely admit I’m quite bad at languages other than English. I didn’t do fantastically when they introduced Japanese at school, and I struggle with Thai a lot, particularly to comprehend native speakers because they typically abbreviate everything and speak very quickly (even to a foreigner with a confused look on his face). Speaking one tiny (and no doubt grammatically imperfect) phrase makes that worse because they assume you’re fluent and speak more/faster.
As an example: “thank you” gets shortened from three syllables to one in pretty much every encounter I’ve experienced - even with government officials like police and immigration; the syllable that remains is the last one, which is just a “word” added to make the sentence polite.
I wish I spoke more and I am learning bit by bit but even learning through immersion isn’t fast, for me at least.
I thought the British gave that phrase during colonial times.
And in a sense, yes, I was intending to over-generalize a bit, I think that for various languages that used broadly in different geographies, certain words and phrases tend to pop up locally that are often not widely used outside of that region. This is just from observations I have made traveling globally and working with global teams for 20+ years. I mentioned "do the needful" as it popped into my head from the parent comment about Indian English.
For example: you are in a class and someone asked a question about a topic. The person next to you turns and says "I can't believe they don't understand this topic." Your neighbor is making the assumption that you also understand it. So if you didn't understand the topic, a response could be "Nah, even I had some questions about it."
Although someone could definitely use it to be condescending, or just trying to be cheeky.
> nonnative English speakers who learned the language in a classroom are often more educated on grammar rules and complex technical terms than American native speakers.
That is the proposition I wanted to support: more explicit knowledge about the language. Who is "correct" is a whole other ballpark.
That's a neat solution, thanks!
(Please address complaints about putting a trema over an 'n' to Spın̈al Tap.)
Spanish has very different words for amigo/novio, or amiga/novia.
> But that day in the classroom, my incomprehensible English taught me that being an linguistic "have" is unstable and delusional at best.
What does it mean to be a linguistic have? Is this a reference to the haves/have-nots. Is she trying to say someone with linguistic fluency? Seems like the "an" is misapplied there too which mucks up the sentence.
In my native Romance language it is written the same and it's an usual word. I never thought that it's a neologism in English and perceived as pretentious.
Maybe you can... I can barely get through the first half of "skrzyżowanie" :)
Good luck, you will need it :D
This said, some may copy from their language 1:1 - in French you say "j'ai un doute" (I have a doubt) so this may also be the reason. There are also other versions ("j'en doute" - I doubt that, or "j'ai des doutes" - I have doubts)
I would probably say to move them "off to the edge" or just "to the edge". Confusingly, "off the edge" would not be correct, that would mean pushing them onto the ground!
Beef/cow
Poultry/chicken
Pork/pig
Veal/calf
Mutton/sheep
Bill Bryson has a great book that explores how English became what it is now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue It’s an easy read with lots of interesting info.
> From Middle English purchasen, from Anglo-Norman purchacer (“seek to obtain”) from pur- (from Latin pro-) + chac(i)er (“to chase, pursue”). Compare Old French porchacier (“to follow, to chase”), which has given French pourchasser (“to chase without relent”).
"It seems to me" is most likely coming from the much less fancy sounding, and more casual "мне кажется" (mnye kazhetsya).
"Mnye" would be "to me", and "kazhetsya" could be represented as "it seems". I say "could be" because there is no direct translation for "kazhetsya" as far as I'm aware.
The closest (and most direct) translation of "kazhetsya" that I can think of, and retains the meaning would be "it seems likely that <...>".
What she was trying to communicate was "I think", I think. (pun intended)
First of all, I made a list of Russian я/мне lines with English translations next to them just to see if there is consistent presence of a hint in English lines that can point to the right Russian translation. There is none. So if you are trying to figure out the proper pronoun this way, you are doing it wrong.
To make an educated choice between я/мне you'll have to familiarise yourself with nominative and dative cases.
Here is some basic info on the cases in "question" and even more basic examples:
Nominative case of "I" is "я". Nominative case answers questions such as "who?" or "what?".
Кто пришёл? (Who came?) Я пришёл. (I came.)
Dative case of "I" is "мне". Dative case answers questions such as "to whom?" or "to what?".
Дать кому? (Give to whom?) Мне. (To me.)
As you might've noticed, native English speakers won't normally construct questions in a way they are constructed in most Russian cases, so I'd suggest to get familiar with cases and their respective questions first, and try to construct sentences later.
Or, depending on your goal, you can simply memorize common sentences/lines altogether and figure out why they work later.
He'd watched the series in German and then in English and knew it well enough to pick things up.
To my ear, his English was pretty good.
That said, the 2 groups of non-native speakers that have impressed me the most are people from Sweden and Norway. I've mistaken more than one of them for native speakers (to their delight) :D
What a dumb and ignorant thing to say.
It would be much different experience from speaking with someone with a different German dialect, so I'd feel the same.
NSFW language, if you can understand it.
A huge number of kids in India learn English as their first and only language. Especially kids born in cities, whose parents' linguistic backgrounds differ.
> it'll never sound as natural
It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here.
> It's not the language of the street or the discourse.
Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the waiter in English. The consumption numbers of English news channels, English newspapers, etc. should give you an idea of the prevalence of English here.
"The 2011 Census showed English is the primary language—mother tongue—of 256,000 people, the second language of 83 million people, and the third language of another 46 million people, making it the second-most widely spoken language after Hindi"
https://www.livemint.com/news/india/in-india-who-speaks-in-e...
256K is not a huge amount. Even if that's up to 1.256 million in the last 10 years, that's nothing compared to the size of India.
>It already sounds perfectly natural to everyone here
It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent. This could also possibly be explained by the complete lack of English language Indian media outside of India, in the US particularly. We get UK, Canadian, and sometimes even Australian and NZ programming in the US. Why no Indian?
>Wrong. India is not homogeneous like that. In Bangalore, an Indian walking into a shoe shop on Brigade Road will get addressed by the shopkeeper in English. Or an Indian visiting a pub in Koramangala, also gets addressed by the waiter in English.
I'm well aware. However, when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not. English is a lingua franca, not the preferred option if there's a shared mother tongue.
That's no different than the US.
> It doesn't to anyone outside of the subcontinent.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My point was: who decides, and on what basis? There was a time when Australians did not consider their accent acceptable on their own news channels. They adopted RP [2]. Would you consider John Bishop's scouse accent [3] unnatural? How about all the other accents of UK, like Irish, Welsh, Scottish, etc.?
> Why no Indian?
No idea. The vagaries of business decisions and culture. Most Indian programs are terrible, IMO. Many of my female cousins watch Korean soap operas. Among my younger cousins, anime is the norm. All with subtitles.
> when a bunch of Kannada speakers are hanging out at a cafe, would they be speaking English? Of course not.
To the contrary, it would depend on the locality of the cafe, the topic of the conversation, their interpersonal dynamics, and so on. My school required us to speak just English on the premises, and would scold us if we used Kannada. Fining kids [4] is pretty common too. It eventually leads to school kids using English with each other after school too. In a city like Raichur or Kolar, the odds of Kannada being the default language are good. In Bangalore, while I think I can predict the language, my prediction would depend on a lot of local factors.
[1] https://www.censusindia.gov.in/Census_Data_2001/Census_Data_...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnP_C6RSdJU
I and a lot of my Indian peers consider English to be our 1st language.
I did have the experience of one guy thinking I was from Germany after 20 years in the U.S (hence the 99.+ percentile) but he was quite the outlier.
However when Americans meet me in Europe they immediately identify me as having a non-American accent, which really messes with all my European friends since they think of me as being essentially American.
So this disability thing seems quite context dependent.
I'm South Asian by the way, so this meme is also associated with my own culture.
If you happen to see this reply, would ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English’ by McWhorter be a better choice for a pop-sci history of English? r/Linguistics seems to be fine with him.
Where I especially get mixed up with Russian is when dative and acusitive are in the same sentence. Next up for me is instrumental case - oh boy
As someone born in the 90s I'm always shocked to hear about how culturally accepted it was for children to be physically abused at school in my parents' generation. People talk about getting beaten up at school like it was nothing, like they deserved it for talking funny or liking comic books.
It's so normal that the children's shows I grew up with on Nickelodeon / Cartoon Network / etc all had the main characters getting beaten up at school as a regular plot point.
I just can't believe it. I'm so glad it is largely seen as unacceptable these days.
I've never done it myself and only knew one person who (as an adult) admitted to doing it as a kid, but apparently it is/was a thing.
When I read that many serial killers tortured animals when they were young before moving on to attacking humans[1], it somehow didn't surprise me.
The phenomenon reminds me of Hogarth's famous series of engravings on "The Four Stages of Cruelty"[2], which starts by showing children torturing animals in the streets of Eighteenth-century London.
It's appalling to me that this sort of behavior was ever tolerated.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/magazine/13dogfighting-t....
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Four_Stages_of_Cruelty
As you said, most 90s cartoon media portrays it pretty clearly, because it really was normal. The idea of children having physical boundaries was just not really as prominent back then, at least in my experience.
I think he would as well. There are different levels of abuse in the physical world and the virtual world. Comparing the worst form of online abuse to the least physical abuse would likely prove you correct. The opposite is true of the worst physical abuse vs. the least virtual abuse.
Virtual abuse is a somewhat new phenomenon only in that it is much more prolific. Prior to the internet, we had telephones, telegraph, pen & paper, and others. Abuse was common in these mediums and still is today. Because of the cheap, instantaneous, and inherently anonymous nature of the internet being quite new, I expect it will take a couple generations for society to create customs and norms that are more consistent with our physical world customs and norms.
I don't think we're better off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language
And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.
It's usually based around a combination of factor - mutual intelligibility, orthographic conventions, etc. Also, of course, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
Eh.
It's nothing more than repetition for the most part, along with certain parts of speech being implied. If your trying to overhear someone else's conversation you'll miss key points of context.
Having been to London , and South Central LA , I can't imagine any scenario where people from these places couldn't communicate with each other. A few words are definitely going to be different.
Scots and English are two dialects of the same language.
I think speakers of Cajun, Gullah, or High Tider dialects would seriously beg to differ.
And those are just a few of the "true" dialects of the American South.
Outside of that there are many dialects that mix Spanish and English throughout the southwest.
Not sure I'd do the same with my son (if I had one, I only have a daughter).
I end up using less common, typically larger words mostly because they have direct equivalents in English, including a whole bunch that end in -ation, which in Italian typically end in -azione.
My relatives joke with me that I'm a weird, overeducated dummy who "knows" these big words but doesn't know basic idioms.
I do not remember the word anymore, it was in You Must Be Jocking, Mr Feynman. - in the party where he was teaching in Brazil
But maybe it was just my accent.
I knew what a parabólica was as a child, but learnt the root of the word until high school math class.
I had a moment in math class when I thought... "So that's why it's called parabolica".
In practice, though, I don't think I've ever seen that happen outside of a technical context.
You'll even hear the word "satellite" mis-applied to parabolic antennas that are not directed at an actual satellite!
Seems all you nice folk think of Greeks as... posh? Must be all the philosophers :P
I've heard this said often but I don't believe it. For one thing, ancient Greek was once the lingua franca around the Mediterranean (e.g. the New Testament was written in Greek koine) and it's hard enough to this native Greek speaker, so at the very least a language being easy or hard doesn't have much to do with whether it becomes a common tongue. I think English seems easy because its grammar works a bit like a word-stack, you can put words in order and make a phrase, whereas for other languages you have to modify words with pre- and suf-fixes. So in English you can sort of ignore grammar and only keep syntax in mind, whereas in other languages you have to manage both at once.
But, and this is just a theory, I suspect that there is no human language that is really "hard" to learn. Given that most languages must be spoken by at least a few thousand people over a few generations, I guess that every language is eventually optimised to be learned and used without trouble given the average linguistic ability of human beings.
What little I know of it does suggest a couple of things (but my knowledge might be slightly outdated):
- It's true that no language is fundamentally unlearnable, not even as an adult (although you can of course always debate what "fluency" means exactly - to this date, I'm fairly certain that there are certain kinds of mistakes I make in English which native speakers don't make).
- A lot of the complexity does come from things like vocab and usage patterns, so even for a language where the grammar is "easy" (whatever that means - suppose we have a definition for that) it's not like it would be "easy" to speak properly. English in particular seems to have this "easy to learn, hard to master" problem.
- when we talk about grammar, there are definite differences in complexity, at least when we focus on certain areas (such as complexity of words). English is really just very simple in that regard, so is e.g. Chinese.
- contrary to GP's assumption, there is some evidence to believe that the causality goes in the opposite direction: English is not widely spoken because it's easy, it has become easier as part of being widely spoken as a second language.[1]
- relatedly, it appears that languages with very few non-native speakers (such as indigenous languages spoken only by a couple hundred of people) tend to have rather complicated grammatical features
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
I know little about this as well, but there’s been some research done by…… John McWhorter, I think? A quick search through my Big List of Things to Read (3000 articles and counting!) gives https://elementy.ru/downloads/elt/mcwhorter_creole_grammars.... and https://benjamins.com/catalog/slcs.71, which you may want to have a look at if you’re interested. David Gil is also well-known for his insistence that Riau Indonesian is simpler than most other non-creole languages.
> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Ah yes, this one. I remember carefully reading it a while ago, and I ended up very sceptical about its conclusions. For one thing, I don’t agree with rankings such as ‘Isolating > Concatenating’ and ‘Agent > Agent & Patient’ (though these do admittedly seem to be common assumptions). The ranking as a whole is a bit weird also — I’d love to know how they concluded that Tiwi is less complex than Dyirbal, for example. But I’m more suspicious of the linear fits, which appear extremely bad — I’m not convinced you can conclude anything from a fit of R²=8.9% (for Afro-Asiatic) or R²=14.1% (for Sino–Tibetan). In fact, only one of the graphs has R²>90% at all. And I note that they very carefully avoid giving p-values — except for the overall ‘complexity against population’ graph, a very significant correlation which however disappears when languages are split into groups by family (Simpson’s Paradox again?).
(Though keep in mind that I’m not great at statistics and any of the above could be incorrect.)
Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data. It’s good for other things, but I very regularly find that a good proportion of its data is incorrect. It’s fine if you want to, say, see roughly what proportion of languages use active–stative alignment, but not for much else. (Though I suppose you could argue that the CLT applies and the errors will cancel out. But as I said, I’m bad at statistics and wouldn’t know how correct this is.)
(Personally, I’m sceptical that there’s a link between complexity and population. Witness Swahili, the lingua franca of a good chunk of East Africa. Or Quechua, the language of the Inca Empire. The main reason most widely-spoken languages are ‘simpler’ is that they disproportionally come from IE, ST and Austronesian, which aren’t the most morphologically complex families anyway.)
- conjugating verbs, “hraju” = I play, “hraje” = he/she plays
- past tense of verbs, “hrál jsem” = I was playing, “hrál” = he was playing, “hrála” = she was playing
- that verbs have a “perfective” form, so “zahraju” = I will play, “zahraje” = he/she will play
- naturally the past tense of these follow, “zahrál jsem” = I played, “zahrál” = he played, “zahrála” = she played
- that this can be conditional, “zahrál bych” = I would play, “zahrál by” = he would play, “zahrála by” = she would play
It’s not a stroll in the park, but the path that leads you to constructing those little sentence fragments isn’t too bad IMO. There are other complications tho (I just showed first and 2nd person singular, no plurals, I didn’t decline any nouns or adjectives, didn’t cover positions of words in a more complex sentence)
planmaawkurampikacakapimpitɨprak
‘he got those two and hid them and lay them down inside’
Or Wichita:
kiya꞉kíriwa꞉cʔárasarikitaʔahí꞉riks
‘by making many trips, he carried the large [quantity of] meat up into it’
These sorts of words, as far as I can tell, are the norm rather than the exception outside Europe. (Well, perhaps not that extreme, but certainly words like those Polish examples are pretty common.)
The cases in Slavic languages are much harder to deal with in real-time, IMO, since English speakers aren't used to thinking about all of those different aspects of the word.
This happens to be correct for those Yimas and Wichita examples I gave, but in many languages the relationship between the constituent parts and the word itself is extremely nontrivial, e.g. in Mohawk:
tcioteriʻsioñʻhắtie né hotăskoñnioñniʻhătiḗne
s-yo-ate-rihsy-u-hatye-∅ ne hro-at-askw-uny-∅-hatye-hne
And in any case, most of the ‘individual words inside the big word’ aren’t ‘words’ at all but bound morphemes, in many cases with quite general semantics which are more along the lines of ‘someone caused this’ or ‘action done multiple times’ rather than anything more concrete.
[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/x%C5%82p%CC%93x%CC%A3%CA%B7%C...
That said, you're absolutely right that it is English that is the outlier here. I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).
(I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)
You’re very probably right, though such ‘extreme’ examples are at least more representative of world languages than English is. Possibly more representative is something like, say, Jarawara:
ee to-ka-haba ee-ke ahi, fare owa teme-ne ite jaa, Boniwa; Boniwa teme-ne ite jaa, ee to-wa-ke-bana-ka
But that doesn’t emphasise my point nearly as well.
> Also, the languages are head-marking … which is just one of multiple possible ways if encoding grammatical relations.
Sure, but dependent-marking languages generally aren’t nearly as agglutinative as head-marking one, which again doesn’t illustrate my point too well.
> I guess that many English speakers don't realize how much of an oddball English is as a language (even within European languages, which by themselves have a number of fairly oddball features).
I personally like the list of Standard Average European features at https://risteq.net/languages/. And then English is highly isolating on top of that, which in and of itself is fairly uncommon (at least outside SE Asia and W Africa). Personally, I suspect that IE is no weirder than any other language families (TNG and Sino–Tibetan are at least as weird); people just tend to think of it as ‘average’ when it really isn’t.
> (I wish there was a "follow" feature here on HN, I really like reading your comments.)
Why, thank you! Honestly, I joined HN mostly to talk about programming, but there seem to have been lots of linguistics articles lately, so that’s what I’ve ended up talking about a lot. (There’s a fair bit of XKCD 386 about it, really.) But I post more regularly on linguistics here: https://www.verduria.org/
(And IIRC I believe the lack of notifications is intentional, though I don’t know the details.)
The reason English got so popular is purely because of the power and wealth English speaking nations have amassed in the recent history.
But yeah, the challenge is that the prefixes/postfixes aren't uniform... if it was always po/przed/za/whatever prefix for the same use, that would be one thing, but instead it differs across verbs. Conceptually I get it, but it's just so difficult to go through the process of constructing words while speaking.
Though honestly I don't think that's the worst part - it's a ton of information, but there's a useful communicative purpose to it. What gets me is changing the endings to nouns based on the case - most of the time, doing that adds absolutely nothing from a meaning/comprehension standpoint. If I say "Cooper jest moj pies," 100% of Polish speakers are going to understand me 100% of the time, even though grammatically I'm clearly wrong. I swear it's just so my in-laws can have a good chuckle while I stumble through sentences :)
> Also, they rely entirely on WALS, which isn’t a great source of linguistic data.
the state of linguistic data is appalling in general. We have over 7000 languages in the world and yet, most of them are barely described, with grammars often being terribly inconsistent. I don't really know how to solve that problem except, in fact, hoping that the errors somehow do cancel out as you suggested.
I wonder if it is regional or has other socioeconomic factors? Actual satellite dishes weren't common structures when I was growing up, outside either a sports bar with satellite TV feeds or more commonly large dishes on industrial, military, or scientific facilities. Other, smaller directional antenna were more commonly seen on radio towers etc.
In my general area, just a few hundred kilometers separates two groups of people who are frequently confused by each others' usage of the word "party store." Expanding a hyponym's meaning to encompass that of its hypernym is so common that I'm not even sure it requires special explanation. I've got some family members whose favorite kind of coke is Pepsi.
Weeeell, there's more to it than that. English has a rich vocabulary, why not use it? Just like there is more to a palette than primary colors, why restrict yourself?
Me, I enjoy using "five dollar words" where they fit, I also enjoy inserting slang, obscure puns, deliberate misspellings, foreign words, all to add some texture and color. Wakarimasu ka?
My father was felled by Alzheimers. What was interesting is his sentences became an incomprehensible jumble of words, but the words were from a well educated man's vocabulary. He never sounded pretentious, it was just how he talked.
(My family does not hail from English aristocracy as far as I can discern. He was the first to attend college.)
So the scenario in question is "someone trying to fit in with the upper classes" to which your response is something like "use the language however you like"--which is a fine thing to say, and no doubt especially easy to say for those of us who have the ability to speak in the upper class dialect/register, but that's not the stated goal. I.e., if you're trying to fit in with the upper classes, using "utilize" is a tell that you don't fit in (IMO the upper class register prefers to use very few words to convey a lot of meaning; precise, terse, and fashionable vocabulary is the name of the game)--if your goal is to use English however you like, and if you like "utilize" instead of "use", then go right ahead.
I have a similar background, but I can't say I adapt my language to that of upper classes. My accent and skin color pretty much gives away my background when I utter my first word, and unfortunately, just like having a southern US accent, people are subconsciously biased to thinking I'm probably not too smart. I love using "ten-dollar words"[1] - not that I shoe-horn them in, but they are the ones that usually pop into my head first and I can't be bothered to water them down. Additionally, I figure, "dumb" accent + "smart" words cancel each other out - more or less - which puts me on equal footing with my "normal" sounding colleagues. It's easier to change/adapt my vocabulary than it is to change my accent.
I love language, I do a lot of reading, and it's a delight when you find the right word that precisely expresses what you're thinking. Reading a lot expands your vocabulary and improves your adeptness at deploying it. When done in moderation, using puns and subtle literary references is fun (even when no one picks up on it) - as long as it doesn't detract from the actual message I'm communicating.
1. I do not mean speaking like the Architect from The Matrix here. The other week, I was called out by a monolingual collegue for using "nomenclature" rather than "naming convention" or "naming system" - which feel kludgey to me. Also, when I do make the effort to use shorter words after thinking of a long one first, that adds brief pauses to my speech, which gives the appearance of an ineffective communicator.
And, of course, there's the style of clothing, haircut, makeup, accessories, etc. Pretty much everything :-)
> "Having lived in the U.K., I know many whose first (and only) language is English and who make routine errors when speaking and many more when writing," says Madani.
The latest horror is people trying to use the 'so [adjective] a [noun]' construction but instead saying 'so [adjective] of a [noun]'. Folks, when you say 'so [adjective] of a [noun]' you don't sound no ways educated. There's a reason that Abraham Lincoln wrote of "the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice on the altar of freedom" and not "so costly of a sacrifice"; and the reason is that Abraham Lincoln was not bloody illiterate. (It may actually have been written by John Hay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bixby_letter, but Lincoln's secretaries weren't illiterate, either.) Now you might not think it makes much of a difference; but 'much' is a determiner, not an adjective, which should be clear if you think about it for a much time.
This reminds me of William Gibson's Sprawl slang, of Anthony Burgess' Nadsat slang from A Clockwork Orange, and of Cockney rhyming slang, thieves' cant, etc.
That sort of use can have a certain appealing charm to it in small doses (or might be annoying, depending on who you talk to and what you say), but unfortunately I don't think most users of "utilize" and the like rise to that level.
I'm bemused by cop jargon like "vehicle". Even journalists, when covering crimes, slip into saying "vehicle".
> rhyming slang
I like dazzuble dazzutch, but am not very good at it, fo shizzle.
Sesquipedalian means use of very long words, not quite the same as using a rich vocabulary.
> incorrectly
I sometimes pronounce words incorrectly that I'm very familiar with. What happened was I read the word a lot, yet had never heard it spoken. My mind would make up a pronunciation as I read, and eventually thought that was the real pronunciation.
It's possible that the popular disdain towards the use of long words in the US is related to this anti-intellectual attitude.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism_in_Americ...
As being told that is embarrassing, one quickly adjusts...
(Nice examples here on HN, like "utilize the periphery of the barbecue" [to place one more sausage on it].)
But a latter move to the US led to a repeat ("Hey dude, you talk like an alien?! Goofball!!") although the British accent was well liked.
"Short words are best, and old words when short are best of all." -- Winston Churchill
This battle is lost, but mine is "proceeded to". People seem to feel like it makes them sound more official - "He proceeded to enter the room, and he then proceeded to sit down." Once you start noticing it it's everywhere.
I shall avail myself of that advice.
Edit: Mediterraneo10 explains it better.
As a non-native speaker of English, one that I have never grasped is the overuse of the word "vehicle" to mean "car". It's extremely common, but not sure why. It's just a car, why call it a "vehicle"?
I understand it in the very generalized context of, say, the DMV. It's the dept. of motor vehicles because they handle cars but also trucks, vans, commercial haulers, even boats.
But not sure why someone says "I bought a vehicle" when really they just bought a car.
(Midwest USA)
It's a pet peeve as well, but they don't mean the exact same thing; you "use" a doorstop to hold a door open, you "utilize" a shoe as a doorstop. "util - ize", to turn something into a utility, in a way that it wasn't before. Use an umbrella, utilize a leaf as an umbrella. Use email, utilize email as file transfer system.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-a-w...
Really?
Because I'd use a shoe as a doorstop.
I'd never "utilize" anything.
Update: Well, on doing a bit of research in to this instead of just using my intuition, I found that you're absolutely right about the special meaning of the word "utilize", according to a number of sources like [1].
I guess I must have been too hard on those people who were properly using the word.
Still, a survey of articles on these terms shows I'm far from the only one for whom the word "utilize" sounds pretentious, so in ordinary, non-specialist language I'd still err on the side of caution and use the word "use", which can in fact be used correctly everywhere "utilize" is used.
There's a good discussion of various points of view on this issue in [2].
[1] - https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-utilize-a-w...
[2] - https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/19811/using-util...
so it's not that that word isn't fancy in portugese too. It's that that word might come easier to a portugese (or other romance language) speaker, since it's a cognate, so they use it, and end up sounding fancy in English.
An English speaker could do the same thing in portugese with the same words in reverse!
I even guess at words by taking what I think is an English word with a latin root, and converting it to Spanish, which sometimes works really well and at other times it doesn’t work quite so well at all!
"Periphery" does not have Latin etymology. "Peri" is overtly Greek, and so is "ph".
The Latinate version would be "circumference".
Yes, the English word (and the Portuguese cognate, periferia) does have a Latin etymology, via Late and Medieval Latin peripheria.
Now, the Latin word peripheria itself has a Greek etymology, from Greek periphereia. But both Portuguese and English get their word via Latin (and, in the English case, possibly also French, which also gets it from Latin, though sources differ on whether English got it from French or directly from Medieval Latin, and its plausibly not uniquely one or the other.)
The chap in question was from Portugal. If I understand correctly from your website, you're from Brazil, right? Is there any difference between how that word would be used in Brazilian vs European Portuguese?
The meaning is the same, both in Brazil and in Portugal.
As a curiosity the two countries (along with others) are part of the Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement of 1990 [1] whose purpose was to create a unified orthography for the Portuguese language, to be used by all the countries that have Portuguese as their official language.
Nonetheless there is a lot of differences in usage, mostly regarding the "popular" vocabulary. Some heavily used words in one country are less frequently used in the other. There's also a noticeable difference in the accent.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_Language_Orthograph...
I can tell you though, that using the word "periferia" is actually common in some place (although a bit rare in most). It's mostly used as a synonym for 'around the borders'.
The example you've mentioned: "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue", actually seems perfectly fine. It seems a little bit over-detailed, I guess that a bit context-dependent but I wouldn't bat an eye to the equivalent of "move them to the periphery".
From what I recall 'periferia' is also commonly used in TV news.
- "Eu não gosto de bolo" ("I don't like cake")
- "Eu também [não gosto de bolo]" ("Me too [I don't like cake]")
- I also [don’t like cake]
After 15+ years speaking and writing English daily, I still trip over the use of “in, on, at”.
And every now and then I have my first time pronouncing a word that I’ve known for years, from reading book in my teens. When I first tried to pronounce “phlegm” I tried to sound every letter on it.
- Stalling mid-talking with "ummm" or "ahh" while one thinks of more words to say
- Rising intonation to make a statement; usually rising intonation is for questions"
- Over reliance on works such as "like" ... which even now can be used to start a sentence as with: "like, I was going to the store the other day, and ..."
Portuguese is a beautiful language, and like French definitely unlike English, pronunciation of all the syllables is required. In that way it's a more athletic language. In English it's quite important enunciate the first and last syllables, while we compress or cram the middle ones.
The rising intonation is just an evolution of the language. I doubt it will stick, but it seems to be mostly used in story-telling scenarios to express some exasperating or confusing scenario in which the question is the point of the story. Almost all meaning in English is in the grammar and diction, so intonation is much more of an aesthetic preference.
Like is just a stalling word. French for example will often use words like donc to take a pause and decide how to best continue.
There is all sorts of slurring going on in French, as well. You can certainly say gendarmerie, but you'll more often probably hear gendarmrie in day to day speech. Certain subgroups do tons of weird stuff like swapping syllables of words. Mon moto becomes mon Tomo. The language is pretty famous for not pronouncing the last syllable of tons of words.
I don't speak Portuguese, but I bet you will find the same or similar patterns in that language.
To my ear, that sounds like something a non-native English speaker would say, rather than what an educated native would say. In my head the phrase comes complete with a vague foreign accent :-)
Eg. I don't speak fluent Portuguese but the closest cognate to o lado that I can think of would be to suggest to move it laterally.
If you talk about holidaying with one's family in some exotic locale or of having a summer home in the Hamptons, the person you're speaking with can surmise that you're not poor.
The rich kids in that documentary also regularly go out to bars and think nothing of spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars on champagne.
It's definitely not just about how one talks that signals to others that one is part of the upper class.. but once one is established as in the upper class, then things such as one's manner of speech might distinguish you.
The G is pronounced in the derived word "phlegmatic". It can't be pronounced in "phlegm"; English phonology doesn't allow for "gm" as a sound cluster.
(Whereas in "phlegmatic", you can put a syllable break between the G and the M, so it's at least possible to produce the sounds.)
Context: I'm Brazilian and during high school I studied Portuguese "one official version behind". It had more rules, but the language itself was way nicer, and people used to write more close to it, than nowadays.
It's better to have a few mistakes due to some archaic rules than to force everything to be sterile and complicate how you pronounce things IMHO
Just let people evolve the language naturally instead...
We also use "περιφέρεια" for the circumference of a circle so I could say "στην περιφέρεια της ψησταριάς" to make a nerdy joke... but that supports your point.
Blasphemy! (In English, at least, circles have a "circumference" while every other shape has a "perimeter". Ovals seem to use either word.)
I never actually thought about combining "perimeter" with "circumference" to get "periphery".
I've lived in the UK for the last 15 years. I even think in English, these days.
The problem is that I keep forgetting Greek words and I find myself using English expressions even when I speak in Greek, even when I'm not speaking about work. And then I start saying things I'd never say in either language. I'm particularly shocked when I make blunders like "περιφέρεια του κύκλου". I just hope it's too early for early Alzheimer's.