Job Discussion Forums

[Shroob]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21505114

What does everyone think?

[just another laowai]

[fluffyhamster]

That's a longer and more discursive article than the one I posted a while back. Thanks for the link, Shroob!

The theoretical advantage of SaypU is that it could be typed on a standard keyboard (though using a reverse e for the schwa doesn't seem a good idea). Then again, so can standard English LOL. And how likely is it that switching and re-educating to an entirely new respelling system would ever be a political winner anywhere.

@JAL: I guess Chinese tones could be represented by numbers after the syllable, like they sometimes are in e.g. Mandarin currently. (A decision would need to be made as to whether the tones would be canonical/each in seeming isolation, or taking account of tone sandhi - ni3 hao3 versus ni2 hao3). I'm not sure that vowel harmony would be a problem in context.

[LongShiKong]

What's funny is hearing native English speakers mispronounce words they've only encountered in print.
--------------------
Also in the news this week:

[johntpartee]

What goes around comes around. It seems that every twenty years or so somebody comes up with some new way of "normalizing" spelling and/or pronunciation. It never takes. Always kinda fun, though. Makes our beloved mother tongue look like some sort of bizarre cross between Urdu and Martian.

[Cool Teacher]

Bad idea and bad article! IMHO because people change the way they talk all the tiem.

I was reading some books about language and they showed that wehn someone says a word in a sentence the word changes its sound so the regualr spelling doesn't always capture the word.

Think about it...

hand
bag

Put them together: "hambag"

Sand
Witch

Put them together: "samwitch"



Also, why do they use an example of an idiom (Khruschev's "we will burry you")?

Even if all the spelling is the same people will still talk in local ways with local accents and local words and local langauges. There will always be the possibility for misunderstanding.

And recently there was the Ahmadinejad thing too. I don't think all mistakes of translation are innocent either.

It is a pipedream!

[spiral78]

Wow. I use reductions sometimes (rarely in the classroom and mostly only with native speakers) but I'm sure I've never said 'samwich' or 'hambag.' What the heck book did that come from?!

I've only 'taught' reductions ( as a listening skill - I don't think it's an element that non-native speakers need to master in production in most cases) only for immigrants or students who are going to work long-term with native speakers who use 'em (e.g. Texans:-)).

[Sashadroogie]

I suspect it comes from the Wiki entry for 'assimilation':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assimilation_(linguistics)

A far better example could be 'sunburn', where most speakers do indeed tend to turn the 'n' into an 'm'.

[Sashadroogie]

Where does Nikita's quote come into any of this, by the way? As it happens, the Russian idiom has been grossly misinterpreted by western piggie media outlets, deliberately perhaps. It does not connote violence at all. A more faithful rendering would be along the lines of 'We are the new generation, the future, and will outlast you and officiate at your funeral.' Not as snappy, perhaps, but far less scary.

[Sashadroogie]

Which Pinker book was that, Cool Teacher? 'Language Instinct' or 'Words and Rules'? Can't recall...

[Sashadroogie]

Anyway, this whole alphabet is based on many flawed premises. The uppermost being that anglophone children are at a disadvantage because of their spelling system. Utter linguistic-deterministic nonsense. It is along the lines that children, and adults, read phonetically letter by letter. Simply not so, if you are a competent reader in the first place.

[spiral78]

Ah, Wiki
Font of all wisdom. Wingdings, I mean, not Times New Roman;-)

[Sashadroogie]

Along the sames lines of unproven assumption, this gem:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574

English makes you poorer, apparently because of its strong 'Future tense'...

I dunno. Professors of Economics making statements about language make me as nervous and sceptical as EFL teachers devising business plans

[Cool Teacher]

[Cool Teacher]