h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

All you "pretentious" types didn't think the moderators were going to let you get away with shovelling Chinese wholesale into British English did you? Somewhere lost in the old thread, I think, are the only five words acceptable in modern English. Shall/Will we take bets on whether the old thread comes back before they find a translator for the last few posts?

I think the problem was that somebody posted a message with a Subject in Chinese. Everybody else replied without changing the subject, so they were all hidden.

All I said was, Gaelic, the Celtic language of Ireland and Scotland, uses a word order of Verb-Subject-Object, which is very rare as a word order.

And I agree with Jack Naples that Italian and Japanese have a similar syllabic structure.

VSO is the third commonest pattern, but still quite rare. The rarest, IIRC, is the bizarre object-verb-subject, considerably rarer that Yoda-speak. All of the six permutations are represented in the world's languages, whether Chomsky et al want to believe it or not.



It's not just the syllabic structure, either:

Hoccaido-Honsciu-Scicocu-Chiusciu

(that's the Japanese islands Italianised - *please don't mod*

"And I agree with Jack Naples that Italian and Japanese have a similar syllabic structure."

What does that mean? (Especially given that, presumably, the post you're replying to was hidden).

My point was that both Japanese and Italian seem to divide the words up into syllables which start with a consonant and end in a vowel, except that the first may be just a vowel. I'm sure this is a simplistic view of both languages but it does make Japanese easy to say for Italians. Jack seemed to mean more than just that, and illustrated his point by listing the names of the four biggest islands in Japan, for which his posting was moderated.

How do I get hold of the mods?

I'm not going to have a leg to stand on with that one, mind: 'It's a sort of pretend Italian version of Japanese' 'Yes, dear, of course it is. The couch is in its usual place.'

OK, so there was a bit more to what I was saying: Japanese and Italian both favour open syllable structures (like in the word 'aha') - also both have very few words that end in a consonant, both have doubled consonants. Anyway...

Ahh, Jack, look at the state you've got the BE thread into with your oriental orientation!

Do all orienteering routes lead east?

Orient comes from 'oriri' meaning to rise, and occident literally means 'falling'. And Japan in Japanese (which I'm not going to write out) means 'sun root.'

The Romance languages weren't having any of that 'oriental' stuff, and borrowed the English words for compass directions, at a time when borrowings from English into other languages were very rare.

One of the recently moderated postings that had a non-English subject line was mine:

<< According to a Chinese woman sitting next to me, it [Jack Naples' tag line] means *I am going to China for the first time* although she did hesitate a little... >>

Nothing overly mind boggling I admit, but now you know

~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~

On the subject of consonants & vowels // Italian & Japanese...

Maori (a Polynesian language) is similar with either zero or one consonant(s) per syllable and all words end with a vowel.

Perhaps as a consequence, Maori names are relatively well pronounced by Japanese tourists who generally struggle in vain to get their tongues around Eulopean / Engrish names

six7's

My Italian sister-in-law has always had problems pronouncing the name of her son, because he is called Denis. On the other hand, most English people can't pronounce Roma properly.

A rough scale of syllable complexity:

Russian > German > English > French > Italian > Japanese > Maori > Hawai'ian

Russian contains laughably complex consonant clusters ( as I noticed while reading A Clockwork Orange as Burgess intended - armed with a Russian dictionary), and whereas English has a few similar ones in theory, well, no-one really says 'strengths' with every consonant sounded, do they?

Babies start off at the Hawai'ian level - some have a lot of work to do from there. Casual speech reduces syllable complexity, and this is perhaps particularly noticeable in English.

I saw an American asking "Why is there an f in twelfths when it is pronounced twelths?". Do you pronounce l-f-th-s? I certainly do.

I'd like to see you try in rapid speech! The coordination of the three fricatives f-th-s is nigh on impossible at a normal rate of speaking. Of course, ultimately I'll have to believe you if you say you can do it.

Myself, I'd probably only pronounce the l and s fully, with a sort of h sound in the middle. Slovenliness!

A classic error of anglophones speaking French is to fail to fully pronounce vowels that have been 'all but lost' in cognates

- like the middle syllable of 'interesting'; usually pronounced 'in-truss-ting'

In French you can't just say 'in-tress-ant'; you have to say 'in-tair-ess-ant'.

That seemed quite a relevant and useful point until i started trying to make it!

Interesting comparison between Japanese and Italian.

Certainly the syllable structure of Japanese is very simple. There are about 70, but they're very regular.

There are 46 basic characters in both Katakana and Hiragana. With these and some hardening/softening, you get a mostly regular structure (I've shown the changed sounds in parentheses):

a, i, u, e, o
ka, ki, ku, ke, ko (g)
sa, shi, su, se, so (z, ji for shi)
ta, chi, tsu, te, to (d, ji for chi & zu for tsu are rarely used)
na, ni, nu, ne, no
ha, hi, fu, he, ho (b, p)
ma, mi, mu, me, mo
ya, yu, yo
ra, ri, ru, re, ro
n, wa
(o) - the particle o, aka wo

I think I got that. It's the exceptions I usually get wrong, but there aren't very many.

When young, I practised saying "twel f th s" and it comes naturally at any speed. It's the same with "Feb ru ary" and getting the "d" in the right place in "We d nesday" although I allow myself the pronunciation "Weddensday" so as not to appear too odd.

To the English eye, the Welsh "eglwys" and the town Amlwch look rather tricky.

Can you guess how many ways English people say Catwg?


Alji (Member of The Guild of Wizards @ U197895)

Is that like the old Ghoti, fish trick?

These suspenders are killing me