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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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 Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:46 pm Post subject: |
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Well, if we're going to start being snobby about it:
All Romance languages = badly spoken dialects of Latin
English = once a robust and precise Germanic language, now a simplified mishmash of Germanic plus Latin that resembles no other language but itself and relies on word order and context to be clear. Eye drops off shelf, church helps rape victims, stud tires out, enraged cow injures farmer with axe. Book early! Only context and familiarity in this ambiguous language tells you that book is the imperative form of the verb to book (and whether it's singular or plural imperative nobody knows) while early here is an adverb, not an adjective.
And Latin itself was a pretty rough language too. The name Septimus = seven. Res publica = public thing. Lots of other examples I can't think of now.
Now, if we want to truly use a common language that is not only precise and impressive but also common to a large majority of the world, go with this. Something tells me Fox would like it.
http://dnghu.org/en/Grammar-Indo-European-Language/
If we had to pick a creole to be a world language though I would go with Papiamentu. |
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NYC_Gal 2.0
Joined: 10 Dec 2010
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| Posted: Wed Mar 30, 2011 10:56 pm Post subject: |
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| Esperanto? |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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NohopeSeriously
Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Location: The Christian Right-Wing Educational Republic of Korea
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 4:23 am Post subject: |
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Interesting conlang. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 8:41 am Post subject: |
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| NohopeSeriously wrote: |
Interesting conlang. |
It's one of my favourites. Turning all the images on the �sterreiche Nationalbibliothek into pdfs and uploading them here took me a bit over a month. Occidental was the first really prominent naturalistic (= hopes to be as understandable as possible without prior study to a certain audience) auxlang, and IMO much better than the later Interlingua. The problem with Interlingua is that it's not even as easy to properly read as Spanish, and everything ends up being much too long too. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 8:51 am Post subject: |
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What about a link to your blog? I lost it awhile back. |
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Koveras
Joined: 09 Oct 2008
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 11:47 am Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
English = once a robust and precise Germanic language, now a simplified mishmash of Germanic plus Latin that resembles no other language but itself and relies on word order and context to be clear. Eye drops off shelf, church helps rape victims, stud tires out, enraged cow injures farmer with axe. Book early! Only context and familiarity in this ambiguous language tells you that book is the imperative form of the verb to book (and whether it's singular or plural imperative nobody knows) while early here is an adverb, not an adjective.
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Scraps of poor English don�t prove that English is a poor language. Are you confident enough in your Latin, old English, and PIE to say that they�re somehow foolproof against mots mal choisi? What makes relying on order and context worse than relying on correct declension? |
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Draz
Joined: 27 Jun 2007
Location: Land of Morning Clam
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 5:00 pm Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
English = once a robust and precise Germanic language, now a simplified mishmash of Germanic plus Latin that resembles no other language but itself and relies on word order and context to be clear. |
English has evolved into the perfect language. I wouldn't change a thing. Flexible and expressive, absorbing other languages while being absorbed into them at the same time. Glorious.
A fixed and elegant grammatical structure isn't what makes a language awesome. Well, maybe it is for the rigid and humorless. I'd rather have some fun with my language. "church helps rape victims" is an example of why English is great, not a downside.
| NohopeSeriously wrote: |
Or learning English-based creoles that often have a down-to-earth approach to grammar. English should be more simplified for the sake of the world population. |
Shock, horror! All the dialects of English developed through need and use. The idea of replacing all of them with a random one suitable for one specific group of people purely based on its grammatical simplicity is silly.
If I need to talk to someone with limited English, I can dumb it down for them. That doesn't mean all the English in the world should be dumb. Er, "simplified". |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 5:30 pm Post subject: |
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| Koveras wrote: |
| mithridates wrote: |
English = once a robust and precise Germanic language, now a simplified mishmash of Germanic plus Latin that resembles no other language but itself and relies on word order and context to be clear. Eye drops off shelf, church helps rape victims, stud tires out, enraged cow injures farmer with axe. Book early! Only context and familiarity in this ambiguous language tells you that book is the imperative form of the verb to book (and whether it's singular or plural imperative nobody knows) while early here is an adverb, not an adjective.
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Scraps of poor English don�t prove that English is a poor language. Are you confident enough in your Latin, old English, and PIE to say that they�re somehow foolproof against mots mal choisi? What makes relying on order and context worse than relying on correct declension? |
My point was that every language has flaws, not that English is a poor language. |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Thu Mar 31, 2011 5:32 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
What about a link to your blog? I lost it awhile back. |
That one linked there is one of mine, the other one is a lot bigger but the section on Occidental is here:
http://www.pagef30.com/search/label/occidental |
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NohopeSeriously
Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Location: The Christian Right-Wing Educational Republic of Korea
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| Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2011 10:24 pm Post subject: |
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| Draz wrote: |
Shock, horror! All the dialects of English developed through need and use. The idea of replacing all of them with a random one suitable for one specific group of people purely based on its grammatical simplicity is silly.
If I need to talk to someone with limited English, I can dumb it down for them. That doesn't mean all the English in the world should be dumb. Er, "simplified". |
Funny. English used in Voice of America is often described as simplified. Oh, the horror. As my French linguistics professor back in university said "bad English grammar may be a blessing in disguise."
So I would encourage people to speak English with a poor grammar for the sake of spreading English in a good way.  |
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NohopeSeriously
Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Location: The Christian Right-Wing Educational Republic of Korea
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| Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 8:00 am Post subject: |
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| mithridates wrote: |
| My point was that every language has flaws, not that English is a poor language. |
English has become so widespread that it seems that it's losing its values. That's another aspect how English could be a "poor" language. |
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Slowmotion
Joined: 15 Aug 2009
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| Posted: Mon Apr 11, 2011 3:07 pm Post subject: |
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| After being in Korea for a few years, I really came to appreciate the awesomeness of English. |
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DejaVu
Joined: 27 Jan 2011
Location: Your dreams
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| Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 3:56 am Post subject: |
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| Make English French. |
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NohopeSeriously
Joined: 17 Jan 2011
Location: The Christian Right-Wing Educational Republic of Korea
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| Posted: Tue Apr 12, 2011 6:39 am Post subject: |
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| DejaVu wrote: |
| Make English French. |
Approximately 1/3 of the English vocabs is French, specifically Medieval Norman French words. We're proudly 33% "cheese-eating monkeys" by linguistics heritage.  |
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