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

Just exactly how many languages have you tried this on Skugga? I was trying to figure out the melody for English. I think it's sort of a combination of Reggae, Rock, or maybe even Country and Western.

I sittin' here a frettin' 'bout my grammar.
I don't know why I just cain't take a hammer,
And knock the living daylights out me,
I pretty dense it pretty plain to see.

So don't even get me started on my spellin'
I know I'm gonna never be no good.
But if I can remember how this song goes,
I think I spell it just the way I should.

A hearty agreement on the foriegn language teaching methods in the US!

I took 4 years of Spanish in High School and made excellant marks. At the end of it, I couldn't speak the language and could only read the simplest of writing.
True, I was in High School 30 years ago, but from what my stepdaughter tells me nothing has changed.

Shame is, with the recent increase in the latino population here in the Southeastern US, it sure would be nice to know!

As I've grown older I have begun to look at language differently. When I was in school Spainish was a "foriegn language". Now, its' just more English that I need to learn. Oddly enough that mindset seems to help.

Basically its' "Ferget the Anglish 'quivilant, 'cause they' ain't one"! Let the words speak for themselves. Its' a bit like the metric/imperial conversions. Why convert if its' measured in those units? Just use the units it was measured with.

Did that make sense? I'm not sure I got my point across...but I hope I did!

NM

so say it anyway, Two Bit.

Spellcheckers are *rubbish*. Someone I used to work with had done us some business cards, and knowing her literary limitations, had spellchecked them. They came out saying 'Custom-made Corset's ' which according to the machine was correct.

Is 'its' and 'it's' really that hard to learn? On written documents it seems to be very commonly misused. I don't care about personal spelling but on official documents it is a great lapse. There was a sign up in the library once, a fancy laminated one advertising some council service, obviously printed by professionals... reading 'Did you here about the...' etc.

Hear!

kind of back to patriotism... is it not odd there aren't any crusty English types complaining about foreigners 'stealing our language'?

spell checkers are rubbish. Yes.

I work with Old English a lot. Every word gets marked in red. On my old computer, the processor wasn't fast enough for me to use Wordperfect if the spell-as-you go feature was on: I couldn't scroll down.

Spell checkers are useful when you're in a hutrry and don't have time to look something over for dumb typos. Of course, tht's no excuse for not knowing how to spell (my excuse is that spelling is illogical), and you need to be able to turn off the spell checker when you don't want it.

It needs strangling sometimes. It accepts 'Gwendolyn' as a name, but not 'Alice'.
The grammar check is worse though; it has a thing against sentence fragments- which can be used- and other creative formations. And passive voice, for some reason. I have never heard anything else describe that as an error.

All languages are bastardized from something else.

I think that no matter what language('s) one use's, one should make a legitimate attempt to use it properly. Spell checker's can be useful if they're part of an applied effort to make sure that written work's are error-free. They do not solve all problem's.

I find the commonnes's with which apostrophe's are misused to be a terrible tragedy.



'''''

Also, thwe word one won't accept possessives and sees sentence fragments that are complete sentewnces. But, if you learn to ignore it a lot, you can get good corrections from it. It is mostly useful when you are in too big a hurry to check your work closely, like in writing an urgent memo.

evolved from rather than bastardised, I would say. Sometimes stolen. Cobbled together, certainly. But the later ones are not inferior.

I can honestly say I *really do not need* the spellchecker. (If 'twere for maths, perhaps.) And there are risks (oohh, breakdown of society...) when someone who does not know the spelling trusts it and it's wrong.

Somewhere like this, I don't care how you spell if you're saying something worth reading.

Sorry for the density of this post....I'm just a dense person....

Why shouldn't Americans be proud?

Ok, so their president can be a little....moronic....at times.

My Prime Minister is John Howard. He is the King of the Morons.

Bush wants to go to war....Howard toadies behind hims gushing "yes sir.....right away sir....your wish is my command sir....."

Am I proud to be an Australian? Hell yeah! Am I embarrassed as all hell that we've chosen this spinless little twerp to be "the guy who runs the country". You better believe it.....

I can't keep up with this thread and the Opinions on Iraq thread, so I'm unsubscribing here. It's been nice reading this thread and seeing that people can oppose the war without being thought of as "traitors."

Well, if I don't know a spelling it suggests, I look it up in a dictionary. (I had a friend once who trusted spellcheckers and didn't know how rto spell, you should have seen some of the things he wrote. He had aliens say "We come in peas." in a story, once).

Spellcheckers can catch stupid errors, like hitting the wrong key. If you don't need a spell checker, congradulations, but some of us mortals still do. After all, some people, such as teachers, will not accept something if the spelling is wrong or it contains typos, even if it's readable.

I am a spelling champion.
I am a proofreader of everything I write.
I am a robot about grammar and syntax and all that crap.

I have always been able to. By imitation of the authors I read.
I never learned a single thing in English Composition class.

Because I am a good speller, I have to have a dictionary by my side all the time. I also have a large vocabulary and I have proven that, the more words you know, the more you know how to misspell!
So, I am constantly having to check my spelling and I truly resent normal people who are not dyslexic, but just careless, creating and posting signs in public that are misspelled or badly designed.

I hate spell checkers because I use words from a broad spectrum of cultural references and languages. The stupid spell heckler is limited in it's cultural abilities.

I also like to occasionally coin a new word for my own uses.


When portable spell checkers first came out about, oh, ten years ago, I used to test them with Yiddish words that were common in American literature and parlance.
Took a long time to find one that could handle "chutzpah".
I'm not sure that Word can even now.

As for teachers, in my experience, some of them are the worst spellers on the planet.
I have had a running battle with the non-English Course teachers who are sending home handouts in ungrammatical Newspeak.
Of course, I've also taken issue with "science" teachers who wouldn't recognize real science if it bit them...


Back on a topic...
I was born in Illinois.
I am not proud to be an Illinoisan.
I just am one. It's fact.
The bozos here in Texas keep calling me a Yankee.
I remind them that their Grandpa came from Indiana.
They're not proud to be a bozo.
They just be one. It's a fact.
I was born in the U.S.
I am not proud to be a U.S.ian.
I just am one. It's a fact.
And since people are willing to get a little upset sometimes just because you came from a certain place, it becomes an issue.

I blame the Illinois part on my mom...
I left as soon as I could and she's still there...

I like making up words too.
I used to be a spelling champion.
I like puns and word games.
Maybe it is the midwest.

Michael Jackson & Red Skeleton are from there.
It seems to breed pure Republican Yankees and cynics. Teehee.
After that comes a more than fair amount of criminally insane.
I am from Indiana and left as soon as I could.
After being in Colorado for 20 years my Mother said...I guess you are'nt coming *home*Most people NEVER leave. I cannot imagine spending my life on a few blocks of the earth,never traveling. Never being curious, they seem content. Many that left~~~ happily came running back. I do not get it myself

I have heard that S.W. Native Tribes had some Yiddish words in there vocabularies way back. Has anyone heard that before?

"hutrry"

Ah, the irony of making a spelling mistake on a thread all about spell checkers.

As a southwest native tribian and proud of it, I don't remember learning Yiddish as a child. It was probably just an oversight brought on by a surplus of English speakers, who didn't happen to come from Eastern Europe, in the area. Now if I'd been born Mohawk, it might have been a different story as well as a different area.

Seriously, though, I've never heard of Yiddish words in any of the tribal languages although it might be a artifact of the 10 Lost Tribes theory leftover. Obviously if you're not too picky about pronounciation you could probably find Yiddish or any other words practically anywheres I think. But would those words have Yiddish meanings? Isn't Yiddish part Hebrew and part German?

I can't imagine spending my life on a few blocks either, mainly because I can't imagine a few blocks at all in most of the Great Basin or Colorado Plateau country and hope I never do imagine such things.

It's bad enough to have to imagine Main Street anywhere in the region, but some people do. I had to imagine the main street of Winnemucca, Nevada one time and that was really a nightmare, what with caravans of Winnebagos and we're not talking indian tribes either okay? It ain't pretty, believe me!!

YAY!!! YAY!!!! For COLORADO!!! I love my state, even though we rank last in the arts...

There is an interesting problem with Yiddish.

I had heard a rumor, of the Fortean Times sort, years ago, that the Welsh and possibly the Phoenicians had been among the tourists and immigrants to the continent. I mean, forgetting Columbus, how could anybody miss it? Apparently, there is some similarity between Phoenician and some of the Semitic languages. Don't quote me, though.

Yiddish is Hebrew or Aramaic consonants pronounced with German vowels.
There is a version called Ladino which uses Spanish or Portugese vowels.
Since the First Nations of the American continent speak a variety of tongues, many of them regional, and many of them almost incomprehensible to each other, and the human, um, mouth and throat apparently capable of a limited number of sounds (enya and Bjork notwithstanding), the possibility of a bored or motivated Linguist finding parallels is unavoidable.

The odd thing about leaving the anal little red neck community I survived my childhood in in Southern Illinois, is that after a bit of wandering, I ended up in it's virtual carbon copy in East Texas!
I guess Lilith believes I might be a threat to the big cities... or vice versa...

My roommate, Rita, is deaf. She's told me that one of difficulties associated with lip reading is that there are maybe 16 distinguishable lip patterns for something like twice that number of phonemes in English. Consequently, reading lips can be fraught with ambiguities.

Now, there's probably hundreds of phonemes from which the thousands of human tongues have been constructed.

I read that children often are born with the ability to articulate hundreds of sounds. Learning their native tongue tends to reduce the number of these sounds they can subsequently articulate, which accounts in no small part for the difficulties encountered in learning foreign languages later in life. Apparently they just stop hearing the distinctions at some point and so they no longer can easily reproduce the sounds or phonemes.

Phoenician is classified as semitic. That covers a geographical range from north Africa to the Iranian Plateau. Hamitic languages represented by ancient Egyptian and Berber among others, range from Somalia to Morocco. Indo-European Languages range initially from the Baltic to the Indian Subcontinent, but also include areas subsequently colonized by English, French or German speakers among others.

In my homeland, the people speak a language linguists tell us is Shoshonean or Numic. This is part of the Uto-Aztecan group of languages that has ranged for thousands of years from the Valley of Mexico to the Snake River Plain. Rita's language group ranges from the western Great Lakes region into the northern Great Plains of Canada and the United States.

There have been persistant rumors over the years about white indians speaking Welsh or something similar. There are even assertions of ogham inscriptions in southeastern Colorado and other places in America. I don't know if these rumors have ever been substantiated to everyone's satisfaction.

It's quite likely Europeans or Neareasterners might have made landfall on the American continents at times prior to the documented expeditions of the Icelanders or Spaniards. It's possible Africans may have made voyages as well as Polynesians and other fareasterners. So maybe there is some evidence of their languages preserved somewheres in the polyglot of traditional native tongues. I just haven't run on to any instances yet. But then I probably wouldn't recognize them if I did.

tonsil revenge:

" Apparently, there is some similarity between
Phoenician and some of the Semitic languages. Don't quote me, though."

Phoenician is a Semitic language. Quote me on it if you like.

Analiese:

"I don't know if these rumors have ever been substantiated to
everyone's satisfaction."

Not to mine.

anhaga