Frankly, you are arguing against me on some points by the curious technique of writing more or less exactly what I have already writtenI
Your reference to new, technologically useful words was exactly my point too!
Aah but my point was cultural/social changes are equally relevent to science changes. And if it's OK to introduce tech slang, what the difference between that and say music slang. They both reflect changes in society and how we communicate, So what the big deal? New cultural forms needs new names, Drum + Bass, Bassline, Garage, Reggaetron, House, Emo are all corruptions as you would call it, but perfectly valid words to describe new musical forms, which soon become normal everyday words. It's no different from how music itself has been seen over the decades. Jazz, Rock n Roll, Elvis, The Rolling Stones, Hippies, Punks, New Romantics, Ravers were all seen as morally degenerate by the previous generation, whilst the current youngsters viewed the previous moral degenerates as something quite anodyne and dull. Plus ça change..
As for the French failing to have a rich language and literary tradition of their own - it´s a suggestion so ludicrous that it hardly warrants response. So, I leave that to any indignant Frenchman who might care to reply to it.
We seem have a French speaker posting here, doesn't seem too idignant to me. Are you offended NikoJorj? Beside I wasn't criticising their literature. A little bit of relevent info -
"The statistics of English are astonishing. Of all the world's languages (which now number some 2,700), it is arguably the richest in vocabulary. The compendious Oxford English Dictionary lists about 500,000 words; and a further half-million technical and scientific terms remain uncatalogued. According to traditional estimates, neighboring German has a vocabulary of about 185,000 and French fewer than 100,000, including such Franglais as le snacque-barre and le hit-parade."Fives times the vocabulary is a phenomenal difference in richness. A hugely varied and rich resource for all thing literary.
As for making references to the use of the traditional Scottish tongue - hold on a minute, please. I lived in Scotland for almost thirty years before I managed to exit that sorry land - many others would have followed but lacked the ability - and you might care to learn that the use of Gaelic, as with the wearing of the kilt, is little more than a tourist conceit and, outwith some hick communities, a national embarrassment, other than at weddings, where it becomes something even more ridiculous. Perfectly good street names in standard English are doubled, at rate-payer expense, with Gaelic alternatives for no greater purpose than to sell some faux bullshit to the poor saps being milked of their tourist pound for the pleasure of bad food, indifferent lodgings and grim service, to stretch a word.
Gaelic public services - yes, radio and such, more crap designed to garner minority votes for outlandish political parties again at poor old rate-payer cost. Of course, you might change the name of the fiscal contribution, but it is always the same old gang that gets the pleasure of actually having to pay the money.
I never mentioned Gaelic, which seems to be a very sore point with you. I was talking about English with a strong Scottish accent being spelled as it it pronounced and is not something you see very often in literature.
On this theme, I come from Wales and every sign is biligual there and has nothing, nothing to do with tourism. Anything but. Nada.
Bungalow? Verandah? As I said, where no traditional name exists, a new one is a legitimate addition to the lexicon. New words, as you also say yourself, are not corruptions; the intentional misuse of existing ones is nothing but. Which is what I implied.
What's this intentional misuse? Is there some secret cabal of people from Eastern Europe, subverting how English is used, simply to annoy Daily Mail readers?
For the non-Brits, the Daily Mail is a right wing very, very xenphobic tabloid newpaper.
There's a 'corruption' for you Rob, Tabloid, which is a technical printing term, like broadsheet, fold or six sheet. Except now it's generally accepted meaning is trashy or sensationalist when used to describe journalism. Times change, words need to. And will always need to.
Present day English, without the use of long-established or assimilated foreign ones: I did state that, in my opinion, English was already on a very high plateau; that need to introduce new foreign additons or influences beyond any specifically intended for technological reasons had long passed. I still believe that. Why do you invoke Victorians to misinterpret what I have been writing? I made no reference to science fiction; had I done so, I would have accepted new words in the context of something which did not exist previously - of course such things require a name.
Science fiction! Eh?? You seem to have completely misread what I said. I simply drew an analogy to what you said about English not needing any outside influences or changes as it was such a high level [whatever that means?] to the Victorians saying a similar thing about science, not science fiction. They naively thought everything in science had been discovered.
Don´t lecture me on the Italian language:; my mother was Italian, well-educated and well-travelled too. If you believe English is more difficult than Italian, then I have news for you: you are mistaken yet again.
No lecturing, I simply said English spelling is more dificult than Italian spelling. Not that English is more difficult than Italian, a subtle but very important distiction. Just like learning Japanese Kanjii is much harder than learning the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet. A Japanese child is expected to learn a basic 1800 before leaving school. Learning the two syllabic Japanese alphabets is a doddle in comparison, even though there are nearly twice as many characters in each of them compared to English. I managed to be able to read and write Hiragana in a week, but learning Kanji, jeesh what a task! Makes colour mangement look easy!
And if you want to get very specific on this issue go here
A cultural effect on brain functionA less technical snippett
"Young Italian readers can achieve 92% accuracy on word reading tests after only 6 months of schooling, whereas learning to read in English takes much longer. Compared to German, another consistent orthography, accuracy levels in English are lower and reading speed is slower even after three years of schooling. Adult English readers are slower at reading non-words than readers of the consistent Serbocroat orthography." Welsh should be even easier as it is completely phonetic [i.e. has perfectly consistent orthography]. So as soon as you learn the few rules it is sooooo easy to pronounce, assuming you carry summon up enough phelgm! So much easier for Spanish speakers than most native English speakers to try.
Having said that, English being such a mishmash of other languages and having so few rules, is not that easy to master if learning later in life. The so called 'rules of English' were simply 'Rules of Latin' dumped on English so as to try and codify the language a couple of centuries ago. A French friend of mine once said about English -
"You knew you mastered it when you understood and know phrasal verbs and where to put F^%k in the sentence." Somewhat irreverent, but she succintly described the very open, simultaneously vague and varied nature of English.
If you want to find out more about language and how we create/use it this is an interesting read.
The Language Instinct To a person born in whichever country, the native language is not, should not, be difficult. It is too easy to lay blame on teachers. I have two of them in my family and I can only tell you that they don´t earn a great deal of money in that profession but, based on professional experience, they have made the decision to scrimp and save every penny they can with one goal: to put their own children through private education, which they have been doing for several years now.
Why? Because the state system, so beholden to that dreaded lowest common denominator, the democratic vote system, sucks. It cannot deliver. It never will deliver becasue it is based on flawed left-wing political cant already demonstrated as failed in the very countries from whence it spread.
The present geniuses running the UK wish to lower the voting age to sixteen: well, can you get more cynical than that? Even the well-educated young tend towards leftish thinking in the innocence, the naivety of mind common to most young people. It takes the experience of earning your living to open your eyes to the rights and wrongs of one set of people footing the bills for all of the people. Allow enough inexperienced people to vote and you have Socialism for ever and a day. But there you go, what´s the point of writing any of this - just lke Lucy Jordan, you will believe what you learned sitting in your daddy´s easy chair whilst I am now too old to feel like throwing away the lessons of the years.
Aargh, more politics!!
Left wing, socialist goverment!!!!!
?? We've had a right wing party in power since 1979. New Labour are more right wing than dear old Maggie and thinking that all youngsters are left wing is a bit off the mark in my experience. Though the minority, extreme radical lefties you find at Uni, often become more right wing with age it is true. I grew up in a very right wing environment, yet as I get older I see how that is deeply flawed, much like you think socialism is deeply flawed. The major flaw to my mind in all political ideologies is not the stance, but the corrupt people who end up with the power. Left or right wing, they all get caught doing what they most protest about.
But anyway, at least we all have another common denominator: photography!
Take care - Rob C
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We sure do. But it is nice to chat about something different at times.