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English as a language of the net
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Subey
Hey this is more a question for people whose first language isn't english...

Obviously we all need a common language to communicate effectively.. and it looks like english has sort of won as the international language everyone is forced to use to talk to one another, especially in a community like this one where people are from all over the world...

what i'm curious about is what people think about using english? do they like it etc?

regards
vmc
English is a good language and is necessary when communicating with foreigners. You can be understood everywhere if you know English
Delay Llama
We're used to it.

Like it or not, English has become a lingua franca: whenever you need to speak with someone who speaks a different language, the first attempt is to talk in English. That's because of economical and cultural reasons. In most places, songs in English can be easily found in the top-40 chart.

The grammar is not very complex, and although the language has a rich vocabulary, you can overuse some expression if you're a learner (like "get" which means almost everything you can think of :p). It's also comfortable for those who speak a Neo-Latin language, because the most complex words in English come from latin, so these words are not difficult at all for these people.

The tricky part would be the pronounciation. "Th" as in "they" and "think" is usually changed by the pairs "t,d","s,z" and "f,v" for foreigners, depending on their native tongue. "a" and "e" as in "bad,bed" are often pronounced the same way. Vowel reduction is also something that foreigners usually don't learn (the way you pronounce unstressed vowels), so "photographer" can often sound like "faw-taw-grah-fair", depending on the speaker (in fact, there are many vowels that can be confusing for foreigners). I remember I had bookmarked a page which talked about different accents in English, but I can't find it :(

Finally, there's far more than "one" English. Generally speaking, we can divide English into "North American English", "European English" and "Australian English". Foreigners are bound to mix them up, depending on their contact with the language. Most people learn N.A. English for cultural reasons (movies, music,...) but in Europe and Asia you can find people who speak European English.

I would like to know from native speakers if they think the difference (in grammar) between American, Canadian, British, Australian and any other English is subtle or not.

*edit*
I don't know if this is interesting to you but here's some useful info on non-native English accents:
http://www.gazzaro.it/accents/files/EnglishAccents.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/PhonProcess/accents.html
astroboy
quote:
Originally posted by Delay Llama
I would like to know from native speakers if they think the difference (in grammar) between American, Canadian, British, Australian and any other English is subtle or not.


I'm not aware of any grammatical differences b/w different english dialects. Apart from Americans spelling things differently to everyone else and putting a comma before the "and" when they list things. The "pseudo-grammar" of various regional slang dialects might be different, but slang is grammatically incorrect by its nature.

...As for the topic... I think we should all speak Latin ... or Esperanto :P
djSlain
english vs latin? I've heard that there are alot of loopholes in the rules of english compared to latin
torontotrance
English is the language of business and the internet (really). It is not the most common language (actually number 3 I believe) but widely used. Learn it and it will open doors (for the non english speaking countries).
whiskers
english has relatively simple structure and all.. it may be tough to pronounce some stuff, but it's doing better than esperanto...
TwoPlow
We should all speak African Click.

English is so simple and so forth because it was originally a Pidgin language. I think within the next few hundred years, either we'll all be speaking english, or there will be some sort of Blade-Runner type pidgin language encompassing everything else.
Perfect_Cheezit
i've never heard of english being a pidgin language, but if you mean a hodgepodge of German, French, and Latin that turned into what it is after several hundred years of linguistic evolution then sure

my native language being english i obviously speak it; its become the language of business and politics in the Western bloc for sure, and highly influential in the rest of the world

it only looks like its growing
robin
anything but french :o

Switch
if the dutch weren't so stupid to trade Suriname for New York, we might have used dutch as the world language now :rolleyes:
ali92
quote:
Originally posted by Delay Llama
We're used to it.

Like it or not, English has become a lingua franca: whenever you need to speak with someone who speaks a different language, the first attempt is to talk in English. That's because of economical and cultural reasons. In most places, songs in English can be easily found in the top-40 chart.

The grammar is not very complex, and although the language has a rich vocabulary, you can overuse some expression if you're a learner (like "get" which means almost everything you can think of :p). It's also comfortable for those who speak a Neo-Latin language, because the most complex words in English come from latin, so these words are not difficult at all for these people.

The tricky part would be the pronounciation. "Th" as in "they" and "think" is usually changed by the pairs "t,d","s,z" and "f,v" for foreigners, depending on their native tongue. "a" and "e" as in "bad,bed" are often pronounced the same way. Vowel reduction is also something that foreigners usually don't learn (the way you pronounce unstressed vowels), so "photographer" can often sound like "faw-taw-grah-fair", depending on the speaker (in fact, there are many vowels that can be confusing for foreigners). I remember I had bookmarked a page which talked about different accents in English, but I can't find it :(

Finally, there's far more than "one" English. Generally speaking, we can divide English into "North American English", "European English" and "Australian English". Foreigners are bound to mix them up, depending on their contact with the language. Most people learn N.A. English for cultural reasons (movies, music,...) but in Europe and Asia you can find people who speak European English.

I would like to know from native speakers if they think the difference (in grammar) between American, Canadian, British, Australian and any other English is subtle or not.

*edit*
I don't know if this is interesting to you but here's some useful info on non-native English accents:
http://www.gazzaro.it/accents/files/EnglishAccents.html
http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/PhonProcess/accents.html


British & American English are the two that are most different from each other. The US unnecessarily changed a high numer of things in English and practically created a sub-language of their own. Read what I and a Taiwan resident have to say about date formats regarding this. British English is more widespead than American so, that's why I prefer it over American. Canadian English is a mixture of American & British English. Australian is pretty much like British English.

(from me)
Yes, the ONLY time 24 h, 24:00, or 24:00:00 is used is to mean an event ending time (eg. The party goes from 18:00 - 24:00).

At 2003-12-05 19:38 (UTC +0000), you wrote:


As I have seen a fair amount of confusion in others on how to handle
24:00:00, thus like avoiding it in most cases. The only exception is
using it as a completion time that all events have completed by. Used
only for events finished on or BEFORE 23:59:59,99... (23:59:60,99....
on leap second days). As all events are done by 24:00:00 (or
00:00:00) no part of the event spans a day boundry.


--- In ISO8601@yahoogroups.com[/email], "Budai, Andrew" wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: NGUYEN Adam
> To: ISO8601@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: 2003 12 06, Saturday 00:35
> Subject: Re: [ISO8601] Fwd: Must do away with time "24:00:00"
>
>
> Hello. Why should North America avoid the use
of "24:00:00"? The end of one day is the beginning of the next. It
makes sense. If you are talking about file modification times, 24:00
should not exist there, as a file is modified either at one time or
another. I heard that those times can be accurate to 0.01 second.
Taking that into account, the limits should be 23:59:59.99 and
00:00:00.00, no "24:00:00" in there.
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------
----------
>
> I not only agree with the above opinion, but I also want to add
that most people, who are affected by the date and time mode
described in ISO 8601, are not Unix or other program operators, but
ordinary calendar and clock users.
>
> A globally acceptable uniformity in telling the time and dates is
imperative. For that purpose, we should embrace the basic concept.
Refinements for special applications can be added as the requirements
of each user varies. However, we should keep in mind: the basic idea
is to let a new generation of ordinary people develop an English
language that is unambiguous, common to all, and easy to use.
>
> BUDAI Andrew - Taiwan

Budai, Andrew says:

I believe it was Paul van Dyk who said that the big obstacle to using modernized form of dates and times is tradition, mainly in the US.
I could add one more: the information available to both teachers and students in the United States is erratic, sporadic, and sometimes not available at all. No single government organ takes up the issue of uniform standards taught in every state, applied to government offices, like the U,S, Postal Service, or even the General Accounting Office.
As one who was educated in the united States but traveled around the world, I find it easy to accept the logical system over the traditional one.

Other English language territories, to my knowledge, aren't quite so baffled by YYYY-MM-DD and the 24-hour time system, although in spoken word, it is still in its infancy. The UK and continental Europe seem
to be comfortable with airport announcements in English, like
Flight XYZ 345 is boarding at 18:30 from gate 78. When it is on the hour, it is simply at eighteen hour, or eitheen hours. Singular would
bring it more in line with other European languages, like French, Hungarian or German.

When listening to BBC, the announcement of time is Twenty-two hour GMT. To say twenty-two hundred is a relic from the past, and has no value, as simply there are no hundreds of hours, only twenty three hours and fifty-nine minutes in common parlance, before it turns to a new day and starts with zero hour zero minute, or simply midnight.

An area not covered by the standard, but one in need of some attention is the order of the days of the week. Some of my American desk calendars picked up the European style: Monday ~ Sunday order, but the majority is still using the weekend to start the week: Sunday ~ Saturday. It's in the language: Weekend = Sunday, so why should it be the beginning? To me, it's like starting the year with December, or make twelve o'clock the first hour of a day.

As an engineer as well as a language teacher, I wish to receive some input on this.

BUDAI, Andrew

BUDAI, Andrew: An American reply from Asia.
----- Original Message -----
From: Adam NGUYEN
To: [email]ISO8601@yahoogroups.com
Sent: 2003 09 03 Wednesday 02:17
Subject: Re: [ISO8601] Re: Pure ISO 8601 or varied for popular formats


I was referring to just the date format, not the actual calendar in use. The Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans have been using the year-month-day date order for a VERY LONG time. Just ask Justin JIH ( his site is at http://www.geocities.com/jusjih ). He'll tell you the same thing.


What I really wonder is how did the US all of a sudden just start using month-day-year order in their dates ("Sunday, January 9, 2000" & "01/09/2000" are examples of written dates. "Sunday, January the ninth, two thousand" & "Sunday, January ninth, two thousand" are examples of the speech used in the US). The US' official language is English, which has always used day-month-year in a written date order in English-speaking countries before the US somehow, "came up with", the month-day-year order. Where did they get this idea from? Maybe they always have written their dates in month-day order and when they needed to put the year in, they just slapped it on as something extra?
What's accepted in HK? A year-month-day longhand date in English like "2000 January 1 (Saturday)"?
==========================================================
I have an educated guess as to why we Americans got stuck with such an ass backward system. The first clue is the English language, which used to express dates based on Christian religious traditions of yore, and - by the nature of western European languages - using possessive mode. First of April, in the Year of the Lord Seventeen Hundred and Sixty-nine.

In numbers, 1st of April, 1769 AD. The revolutionary American governments wanted to break away from anything that was British, and switched the order around*. July fourth, 1955. The growing economic prowess and world leader ambitions would not allow the United States to give up its traditions, even when it meant falling behind Canada, Mexico and the rest of the world. Hence the US is the only major industrialized nation that has made no effort to subscribe to the SI (Systeme Internationale), the modernized metric system, although it has been a legal measurement system there for over a century. The US also starts the week with the weekend, and the first hour of the day is 12, after midnight, instead of zero hour. You go figure!

Hong Kong is still plugging the British system, but slowly the ISO 8601 system and SI are seeping in. The cars are still driven on the left side of the highways, the flats are still sold by area of square feet. Hong Kong has about 45 years to join the standards set by the Mainland Chinese. However, economic considerations will force Hong Kong and Macao to modernize much sooner than that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*A similar madness is what the Taiwan government is cooking up by developing a system for Romanization of Chinese characters, one that is different from the decades-old Pin-yin Chinese system. Their reason for being different: to spite Beijing. It is a blatant politicizing of a scientific issue. Never mind the difficulties of those who are trying to tackle the Mandarin language and now have to learn two different methods of reading Chinese characters printed in western letters.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

BUDAI A. E. — Xinzhu City Taiwan

Adam NGUYEN (me) says: In closing, I'd like to say "Get rid of DD/MM/YY, MM/DD/YY, DD/MM/YYYY, MM/DD/YYYY and YY/MM/DD date formats, as they all can be confused with each other, depending on who reads them. Instead, only the YYYY-MM-DD date format should be allowed on forms, etc. If the format is used by more people in public places, the public will catch on."
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