Ah well. Arnie is all-knowing so I always believe him. If arnie were to tell me that this pope is Jewish, I'd believe him hook, line and sinker.

On the other hand, I have found through experience that oftentimes quotes are either mis-attributed or have never been said at all. The famous "Up with which I will not put!", supposedly said by Churchill, never was really said. [I am sure my exclamation mark followed by a quotation mark and then a comma is wrong! I wasn't sure how to punctuate it.]

The famous "Up with which I will not put!", supposedly said by Churchill, never was really said

I think it should be: "up with which I shall not put". Simple futurity and not volition in the first person.

I probably quoted the non-quote wrong.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
I know we've talked about the complexity of English here before and have come to consensus that it is not any more complicated than other languages. However, yesterday my cab driver was telling me that of the languages he knows, English is the most complicated. From what I remember, the languages he speaks include Russian (native), Spanish (classic), Portuguese, Polish, Bulgarian, French, German and English. I know...he is only an n of one.

Keep in mind that all tungs (languages) hav oddities and quirks.

Your Russian cab driver would be the first Russian that I know who thought English was hard. Maybe I should say that thought speaking English was hard. I learn'd Russian at the Defense Language Institute and our Russian teachers laff'd at the overall grammatical simplicity of English when liken'd to Russian ... And they luv'd it that so many of our words are shorter.

Pretty much the same thing when I liv'd in Germany for two years and learn'd German. German speakers of English told me that English grammar was simpler than German.

I spend a lot of time in Latin America (and hav a grasp on Spanish as well) and even the Spanish speakers tell me how hard Spanish grammar is next to English.

Now writing English is a whole nother story!

There are 561 spellings in an abridgd dictionary for the 40 common sounds of English, or about 14 per sound. If we take only the 10,000 most common words, as found in a sample of 100,000, there are still 361 different spellings, or 9 per sound. … In an abridgd dictionary there are 43 spellings for "schwa". (Dewey, 971; 8, 110-1)

The biggest complaint that I hear from foreigners about English is the spelling. It drives them nuts. I hav friends who learn'd English for four or five years but will not speak to me in English. They don't hav a good grasp on how the words should sound. Others gave up on English long before that. I can't say that I blame them. I pretty much gave up on French for the same reason … that and I never found a good reason that I needed or wanted to know French after my trip to Paris.

As an English teacher in China I'd have to say that in two years I haven't heard anyone complain about English spelling.

The biggest issues my students (and fellow teaches) complain about have to do with segmentation and idiom.

In speaking they are terrific sound mimics and in writing they usually do very well at spelling.

Where they fall down is in comprehension. Segmentation is an issue because when you write and then speak a sentence it is rare for the word breaks and the sound breaks to match.

You may well write "Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow." but what you say is much more likely to sound like "Meh ree ya da li tul la mits flee swas why ta zno". This is because in spoken English linking ensures that we vary rarely begin a sound unit with a vowel sound.

The segmentation is entirely different and that's a matter of sound not spelling.

No amount of spelling reform could ever fix it because the word breaks would still come in the wrong places.

The other problem is that in everyday speech we use tens of thousands of idiomatic constructions that don't break down to anything sensible when you look at the words.

"When I was off to the shops, heading down the road to the high street, I saw a real head-turner. She was a right little beauty."

"off to the shops"
"down the road"
"the high street"
"a real head-turner"
"a right little beauty"

Why are we "off" to the shops - what is the verb?
How can we be both going "down" the road and yet arriving at the "high street""?
What is a "real head-turner"?
Why is the "beauty" either "right" or little"?

These expressions would all give most of my students trouble though an equivalent, less idiomatic formulation wouldn't.


"When I was going to the shops, walking along the road to the town's main street, I saw a beautiful girl. She was very beautiful."

The main issues aren't spelling or grammar which are perfectly adequately taught here by the Chinese teachers. They are issues of understanding the spoken language as it is actually used.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: BobHale,

quote:

The biggest complaint that I hear from foreigners about English is the spelling.

I can tell.

Bob, those are great examples. I can see where spelling would be a minor concern.

I always have difficulty trying to come up with a metric for grammatical complexity (or simplicity) when comparing languages. I've studied a few heavily inflected languages (Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Greek, and to a lesser extent German) and what they have in the way of a large inflectional morphology, they make up for in a simpler syntax. Languages like English and Chinese have a more complicated syntax, because the relationship between words in phrases and sentences are marked by word order and not cases and other affixes. And, I have yet to have met a Russian speaker who has complete mastery of such a tiny part of English grammar as definite and indefinite articles. What most people mean by grammatical complexity is that the language under discussion does things differently from their native language.

As for a language like English and its (admittedly) bad orthography: a phonetic alphabet would be going to far because the regional pronunciations are so varied. Phonemic spelling might be a better fit for a global language like English, but we would have to agree that the phonology of one standard would be used. The phonemic inventory of my regional variety of English differs from other regional varieties. I don't have the pin/pen or cot/caught mergers, but I do have the wine/whine one. I, personally, don't see spelling reform happening any time soon, but I could be wrong.

I agree about spelling reform, z.

I wasn't familiar with phonemic spelling before and read this Wikipedia article on it. Interestingly, phonemic awareness increases students' ability to read.