Exactly! Vulgar English is the seed of future English, not the one taught at school or dicussed exquisitely by linguists and scholars. Certainly English has a second person plural, but evidently many of you all feel it’s missing, otherwise this thread hadn’t been started in the first place. We don’t have this sort of problems in Spanish: we do have two words for that: “ustedes” and “vosotros”. Vosotros evolved from “vos” and “otros” (thou and the others) and “ustedes” from “vuestra merced” (thy grace) pluralized. But let’s take a look at Latin... hmmm! The second person plural is vos!!! So our old fashioned Spanish speaking ancestors did exactly the same in the evolution to modern Spanish than your folks are doing informally in your island (and elsewhere)... Think about it.

I can kind of see Alex's point, but we've gone too far in the other direction to go back now. It'd be easier to revoke "party" as a verb...

I guess English is what it is...
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...)

mnlg:

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 pronoun

As a joke, I like to use v'ĉiuj from time to time, but actually this is more to ape the English "y'all"

"Viuj" anyone?

It should be 'one,' but colloquially we use 'you.'

Another way of putting it, speakers use 'you,' but in writing one should say 'one.'

alexbeard:I love how one of the hardest languages in the world is turning into the international language

I 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.

Spanglanese:It should be 'one,' but colloquially we use 'you.'

Another way of putting it, speakers use 'you,' but in writing one should say 'one.'

There. Problem solved.
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'.

I believe that any language will over time get as difficult as native speakers can get it, to be more efficient and to exclude foreigners. Where it will get difficult differs per language.

Haha, i'm happy to see that a singular/plural 2nd person form lacks to you! (for me, "you" in english it's singular/plural and i'm surprised that you seem consider it as singular)

I have writed on some posts of lernu forum where i said that i didn't understand why there was not singular 2nd form in esperanto and that i usually use "ci" to distinguish only one person (important especially when you write to somebody in forums or irc). With the answers of other people, i feeled me a little bit attacked, grrr...

Yes, yes, use y'alls, youse, thou, ye...what you want, it will be better for you, and for us who use singular and plural 2nd person

russ:

alexbeard:I love how one of the hardest languages in the world is turning into the international language

I 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.

Well I guess what I should have said was "one of the harder languages"
because, compared to spanish/esperanto type languages, english is crazy