Mesaĝoj: 45
Lingvo: English
ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 11:20:13
It's 'yez' dammit
Actually, in Scots 'yez' is an acceptable pronoun, well, more acceptable than in formal English. And yez/youse sounds better than 'y'all' IMHO because there's no drawn out 'aaaaa' sound
however, some speakers are known to draw out the 'ou' in 'youse'.Personally, yez/youse makes more sense than 'y'all' when you consider 'you' is a singular personal pronoun, and 'you all' is almost an oxymoron (you = 2nd person singular, 'all implies more than one part)
And - anyone noticed that Esperanto also using 'vi' for both singular and plural? Maybe 'v'all' can be the new plural pronoun
But anyway, I've never had a problem with 'you' as in 'one'. For instance, no one I know has ever had a case of ambiguity saying 'if you were to do...'... Possibly pronounciation is a factor? In some English dialects, 'you', 'to', and 'do' would all be pronounced the same, but in Australia it's more like:
f yu wer* t' du
(* er = long schwa as we are not rhotic-speakers!)
But anyway I see no case of ambiguity and therefore I have no problem
And in regards to 'vulgar English', I would add '-es' to 'English' because the English spoken in Britain, the English spoken in the North American continent, the English spoken in Africa, the English spoken in Australia and the English spoken elsewhere (e.g. NZ, India, Malta) are all starting to diverge from each other, in particular in America, South Africa and Australia, where the vowel changes are probably chugging along quite nicely. And then there's things like 'th' in the U.S. being pronounced 'd' rarely vs. 'th' in Aus being pronounced 'v'/'f' quite commonly ('I'm going wiv me mates t'the Neverlands for free bucks' - actually a cockney convention).
mnlg (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 11:25:57
ceigered:And - anyone noticed that Esperanto also using 'vi' for both singular and plural?Most of the times this is not a problem, but I think that, overall, the language would have profited by the presence of a singular pronoun. Not to mention that every personal pronoun ends with -i, and this is also not a great choice when your medium of communication is prone to interferences.
Maybe 'v'all' can be the new plural pronounAs a joke, I like to use v'ĉiuj from time to time, but actually this is more to ape the English "y'all"
Rogir (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 12:13:37
Mendacapote (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 12:15:46
enwilson (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 12:28:39
alexbeard (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 15:42:37
Can't change it unless you get every single person in the world to...
..I still think there should be a spelling reform. My god, 1 out of 7 staters can't read above a 5th grade level....
English isn't readable, it's almost like chinese where each word is just a symbol you have to learn the sound for
Ah
English.
I love how one of the hardest languages in the world is turning into the international language
(come on guys. esperanto is never gonna catch on...)
orthohawk (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 16:03:44
mnlg:"Viuj" anyone?ceigered:And - anyone noticed that Esperanto also using 'vi' for both singular and plural?Most of the times this is not a problem, but I think that, overall, the language would have profited by the presence of a singular pronoun. Not to mention that every personal pronoun ends with -i, and this is also not a great choice when your medium of communication is prone to interferences.Maybe 'v'all' can be the new plural pronounAs a joke, I like to use v'ĉiuj from time to time, but actually this is more to ape the English "y'all"
Spanglanese (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 17:02:24
Another way of putting it, speakers use 'you,' but in writing one should say 'one.'
russ (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 17:46:16
alexbeard:I love how one of the hardest languages in the world is turning into the international languageI don't think English is one of the hardest languages in the world. Most assessments I've seen put it somewhere in the middle.
E.g. see http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/languages/m...
Of course it's impossible to objectively rate a language's difficulty, since partly it depends on what languages you already know. But one can look at various aspects of languages and rank them. English is much easier than many languages in terms of grammatical inflection, for instance. Polish and other Slavic languages are a nightmare in terms of inflection. We have no real declination nor verb conjugation to speak of. We have no noun gender.
In terms of number of distinct sounds, English is in the middle. (At one extreme there are language like Hawaiian with 13 phonemes, and at the other is !X66, a language in Botswana, with 156 phonemes, of which 78 are so-called clicks...)
There are tonal languages like various Asian languages e.g. Chinese, and even a few European languages; English doesn't have tones.
Of course English is perhaps most famously harder than many languages in terms of lousy mapping between written form and spoken form. (But then look at Chinese...)
See "What Makes a Language Hard?" by Lars-Gunnar Andersson in the collection "Simpozio pri interkultura komunikado" (Kava-Pech 2005) for some more ideas of objectively measurable attributes of languages that seem to correlate to difficulty.
Just as a personal anecdote, I'm a native English speaker learning Polish, which seems objectively harder than English to me in various ways, but I thought "Well, of course I'm biased." But I've talked to various Esperantists who were non-native speakers of both English and Polish, and they all said that of course Polish is harder than English.
vejktoro (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-13 18:37:41
Spanglanese:It should be 'one,' but colloquially we use 'you.'There. Problem solved.
Another way of putting it, speakers use 'you,' but in writing one should say 'one.'
Good work Spanglanese.
You`ll be kept on.
As a side note, It seems to me that 'one' has been accepted among most speakers. Maybe I feel this way because I live in Canada and we are exposed to French here all the time. We are accustomed to the French pronoun 'on'.