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

??? Sorry, even I had to do a double take on that one, and I have spoken english all of my life. good though .

It's still only the pronunciation we're wrangling over. The grammar's pretty easy. If it weren't far fewer beggars, touts and pedlars would make enough to stay alive

My mother's German. When she came over here in the late 1940s, she didn't speak a word of English. She learnt through conversation with the people she worked with and by reading English books and magazines with a German-English dictionary next to her. She says that she found English quite easy to learn, but I suppose it would be if you're in a situation where you can't use anything else. The only problems she had were with writing English and dealing with words that aren't spelt the way they sound or are pronounced differently from the way they look. For example, the 'sh' sound in 'machine' comes from 'ch' not 'sh'; Mum remembers the spelling by thinking of it as 'Mac-hine'. She also reckons that 'union' looks like it should be pronounced 'onion'.

Your mother owns a German?

I have found that, to some small extent, you can tell what someone's original language is by the mistakes that they make in English. It sems that some of what is hard wired when you learn your first language - such as gender cases in French or German, is hard to unlearn when it comes to your second.

That is splitting hairs. "My mother's German" is a perfectly legitimate abbreviation for "My mother is German" - in this context

I think, based on the smiley, that D.J. was joking. I've encountered his humour before - it's very much like mine (when I'm awake enough to spot it!)

English is at once the easiest and the most difficult language still practiced to learn.

Easy: No mucking around with genders for inanimate objects.
Few irregular verbs.
Regular verb conjugations incredibly simple.
Fewer conjugations to make, due to fewer pronouns (no plural for "you").
One word "the" replaces all that "le, la, les" garbage, to use the French example.

Difficult: Tons of words.
Exceptions to every rule, due to the borrowing of words from other languages.
Idioms and figures of speech. English speakers are the most nonliteral speakers around.
Contractions.

The great thing about learning English is that it is very easy for anyone to share Mom Dragon's experience. Here in the USA very few people speak another language, and it would be easy to have almost total immersion.

Not so. It is very easy for a native Spanish speaker to avoid learning English completely, everywhere along the US's Southwest. Spanish-language tv, radio, newspapers, etc. outnumber their English equivalents in some areas (and their English equivalents are almost always simulcast in Spanish), and legal documents like voting ballots are always issued in both languages. I've picked up a decent vocabulary in written Spanish as a result, but can't speak it worth beans, because I don't watch those tv stations. My friend's grandmother had been immersed in the California culture for many years, and her command of the English language was so broken as to be nearly useless... she could only barely communicate with her own grandson, whose Spanish was equally broken.

Holy Mother of Crap, that Dutchman must have been bored out of his mind.

Do they speak english in the U.S.A.?

yes, we speak inglish in the USA.

****English

Are you sure? I know you speak a simlar language but it is differn't, are the differances minor enough that it should just be considered a dialect or are the differances more major than that?

HappyDude.

Ow! As a linguistic student I always hate seeing the word dialect, unless you consider British English to be just another dialect of English as well. Generally, USEng, AusEng, etc are considered not as dialects with BrEng as the Standard variety, nor as seperate languages - they are simply varieties of English which have their own local standard (codified in dictionaries). They are either both a dialect and a language or they are neither

The Question is how far apart can the local standard's drift before they become a seperate language? Already US TV networks are reluctant to buy english products because they figure US audiances will not understand the actor's (e.g. Reed Dwarf), the recent movie Snatch also played on the point of mutual unintelligibility of BrEng & USEng.

I know, only one 'E' in red.

Red, reed, what's the difference? As for mutual intellegibillity, the main feature is usually accents, contractions, etc. ie:spoken English, or English used at an informal level. The same sort of a gap can be seen within England itself (especially) and to an extent within any English speaking country. Being an aussie, I know how much the question of mutual intelligibility comes into play - noone can understand us if we don't want them to.

If you consider just the standard variety within each country, that is generally far more mutually intelligible on any level, and so any difference (as you pointed out) is more of a difference within the individual country anyway, rather than between countries.

But everythings grey anyway (or should that be gray? )

You ever spoken to or heard a Geordi?

tell me about it Happy