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[Flying Dice]

Is English actually the language with the most redundancy?

I don't know about "the most", but apparently so; I was rather surprised when I first heard that as well. That said, I can sort of see where it's coming from, given that just about any word or phrase in English (that isn't a conjunction or something) will have multiple synonyms or alternate and equivalent forms of expressing the same sentiment with slightly different implications.

That's true for downright every natural language there is. Is overestimating the complexity of their language some sort of national pastime among English-speaking individuals? Because it seems to be a very widespread phenomenon (chiefly among monolinguals, to my great amusement).

Eh, I've heard it repeated from a lot of ESL students I've worked with, and it matches my own experiences with Spanish. Which is, y'know, why I added that clause suggesting that it wasn't necessarily "the most" redundant.

That said, I can see some argument for it in no small part because English isn't a national or regional language--it's a de jure or de facto official language in ~60-70 countries and a double handful of territories beyond that, and is spoken fairly widely outside those compared to most languages. It's got a mongrel base drawing on three different language groups and is now a highly international language--both of these result in the accumulation of phrases and slang which mean similar things in different places.

I do like, though, the assumption on your part that redundancy is flatly good. It's nice for writers and annoying in just about every other situation. Who needs to describe the state of a person's condition as "okay" using any of... acceptable, adequate, agreeable, all right, amiable, average, common, cool, copacetic, decent, fair, good, good enough, half-decent, hunky-dory, moderately acceptable, okay, passable, peachy keen, reasonable, respectable, satisfactory, so-so, standard, sufficient, tolerable, unobjectionable, or unexceptional? Writers, and damned near nobody else. And that's just off the top of my head.

I mean granted, I think it's nice because you can pay more attention to the flow and sound of your composition as well as accounting for finer shades of meaning, but I'm a (hack) writer.

[KingofstarrySkies]

I do not have school until Tuesday. 5-day-weekends are always a good thing.

[TD1]

I only have "class" 8 hours a week.

I win

[Rolan7]

Japanese anime voice actors are just so soothing that they eased the pain of you having to watch The Great Gastby.

Japanese anime voice actors are just so soothing

I wish to state my disagreement with this statement publicly.

I mostly find my enjoyment of Japanese/English Voice actors entirely dependent on which I watched first.
So Gurren Lagann is better in English while Kill La Kill's English trailers sound retarded as shit. And Attack on Titan's English VO turned the show into fucking comedy.

Totally happened for me with Disgaea.  I played in Japanese-with-Subtitles first, and the impression I got was "These kids have young kid voices, but they also sound kinda regal.  Badass and driven."

Then one day I checked the English dubs.  Never again
I don't know if the voice actors did a bad job, but it just ran so counter to my headcanon.  These characters I thought were so cool were squeaky brats.
I say headcanon, because I'm pretty sure that a native speaker would have heard the same sounds I did and realized "Oh, they're just whiny brats".  At least for the first 3/4 of the game.

I prefer my headcanon better though, where they were just pompous dicks instead of annoying babies.

Edit:  Also I just watched Kaz's date with Snake recently (Peace Walker I think).  Kaz's VA sounds incredibly manly compared to the English one in Phantom Pain.  Which made an already amazing situation so much better.

[Avis-Mergulus]

-snip-

In my semantics class, one of the talking points was that there is actually no redundancy in natural languages (in a synchronous perspective, as in, in the language's current state at a given time), or at least, there is a tendency toward elimination of redundancy.

Now, that may seem to contradict my previous bit about redundancy being everywhere, but you seemed to interpret redundancy as having multiple words referring to the same thing, but differing by degrees of meaning, and I just went with it. What I mean here is that there is a tendency toward reduction of true redundancy - words that refer to the same thing and have no difference in degrees of meaning, attached value judgment, stylistics, etc. As in, with every usual (I mean "which is in use", dunno if this is the English term) pair of words with seemingly similar meanings, there's going to be at least one context where one is acceptable from a native speaker's perspective, while the other is not. So, there's no word pairs that have a completely identical range of acceptable contexts. If such a pair was to appear, one of the words in it would fall out of use, is what I've been taught. It seemed quite convincing.

Redundancy as you're describing it (the multiple shades of meaning thing) is just an universal for any natural language, and as such I have no strong feelings towards it one way or another. It's just how things are. I am, however, a second-year ling student, so I'm just approaching it from a less artistic perspective because that's what I'm supposed to do... I guess. I haven't figured it out completely yet.

[Graknorke]

http://soundsfromdeusex.tumblr.com/
This site is exactly as advertised.

[SealyStar]

http://soundsfromdeusex.tumblr.com/
This site is exactly as advertised.

They don't have "FUCKING GUNSHOTS" in there.

[XhAPPYSLApX]

I got my very first job today and it's NOT at a McDonalds

[BFEL]

Finally got an all-around maintenance guy. House shall be less shit in the coming months.

[Putnam]

the decline of English

what

[Sirus]

Confirmed: I'm psychic.

Well, okay, probably not. I was listening to the radio earlier today during the time slot where people could call in with their music requests. During one song that I wasn't particularly fond of, I began singing "Stop Dragging My Heart Around" to myself as a distraction.

The very next song requested? "That one with Tom Petty and Stevie Nyx". So I got to sing it again

[penguinofhonor]

.

[Tawa]

the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the

TTTT

[Rolan7]

Obligatory

A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

[BFEL]

Dammit, I got all of that except the last sentence.