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[Bralbaard]

If someone tries to tell you there are rules in english, they're wrong. English consists of making vaguely englishy sounding noises and hoping that people can figure them out.

As a non native speaker I can confirm this. My trick for learning English was to throw away all instruction books, and learn instead by playing computer games and watching movies.
Trying to learn the rules made my results worse.

[scriver]

I don't know many rules or know the ones I know well but I can often tell how things is just instinctively. Instinctively sounds like the wrong word (ironically), but you know, like a sense. Lingstinctively? That's how I realised the whole i before e thing actually makes lot more sense than people who claim it is nonsensical think.

Anyway my point is that if I can sense it this way then there has to be a lot of rules that can be sensed and thus it has to be a very rule-following language. I think english-speakers often have a big overestimation of how "exceptional" their language is (a lot like how Swedes often think Swedish is hard to learn despite it being very simple).

This probably leads to a lot of donning Krueger stuff though where I think I am right but is actually wrong but don't realise it because I think I have a good sense for language. But that's just the price of being me.

(Also a lot of time I deliberately bend words wrong so please don't think all the nonsense I write is dunningkreuger nonsense that would make me embarrassed

[JoshuaFH]

(Also a lot of time I deliberately bend words wrong so please don't think all the nonsense I write is dunningkreuger nonsense that would make me embarrassed

Don't worry, English has no qualms with adopting anything and everything into its collective consciousness. If it sees a foreign word from another language, it's happy to say "This is mine now." or if some teenagers make up some gibberish that catches on, English is happy to say "Fuck it, add it to the dictionary."

[King Zultan]

So English is like the Borg of languages?

All words will be assimilated?

[Imic]

Supposedly, the word ‘Quiz’ comes from a Dubliner who bet that he could introduce a word to the English language, so he wrote Quiz on walls all over the city and it became synonymous with questions and mysteries, such as ‘What the fuck does this word mean and why has it been written all over the city?’

[scriver]

That is my only dislike of English (and currently swedish). We shouldn't adopt words, we should translate them. You know, you the language. Adopting words kills languages.

[pisskop]

Well, i dont know about that.

For instance, a lot of words simply have no direct translation, and co-opting the words native language eases treansition.

Like Gestalt is in english.  kind of.  or 'computer' is in italian.

[dragdeler]

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[Mathel]

That is my only dislike of English (and currently swedish). We shouldn't adopt words, we should translate them. You know, you the language. Adopting words kills languages.

This keeps popping up, you clearly never had issues with your gps knowing a location's name in only one language, adopting words without butchering them is good.

Too bad English also has a tendency to butcher the pronounciation of adopted words. Back to the GPS example, who pronounces it correctly? That is, with hard G. It is a Global Positioning System, after all. (Let's skip the fact that "globe" is french for "ball" for now. Correction: The french have it from latin "globus")

[dragdeler]

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[heydude6]

That is my only dislike of English (and currently swedish). We shouldn't adopt words, we should translate them. You know, you the language. Adopting words kills languages.

This keeps popping up, you clearly never had issues with your gps knowing a location's name in only one language, adopting words without butchering them is good.

Too bad English also has a tendency to butcher the pronounciation of adopted words. Back to the GPS example, who pronounces it correctly? That is, with hard G. It is a Global Positioning System, after all. (Let's skip the fact that "globe" is french for "ball" for now. Correction: The french have it from latin "globus")

GPS is an initialism, not an acronym. The difference between the two is their pronunciation. Initialisms are pronounced as if you were reciting the letters from the alphabet which is exactly how most people pronounce it. Compare it to SWAT which is spoken as a regular word.

[delphonso]

In similar phonetic systems, it isn't a huge deal and can help while language learning - most European languages having a lot of words from Latin is real nice for both learning and getting around by signs.

It's annoying (as an English teacher) for languages with vastly different phonetics. Cheese, for example, in Japanese is the loan word chi-zu, close but distinct enough that if someone just said that to you in a supermarket you probably wouldn't catch the meaning without context. In Chinese, the loanword is zhishi which is unrecognizable as a loanword, and so difficult for me to say that I just use the older Chinese word for cheese instead.

Place names, on the other hand, must not be translated. A GPS is one thing, but if you walk up to someone on the street looking for The Forbidden City, the average joe isn't going to guess you mean gugongbowuyuan.

[scriver]

Well, i dont know about that.

For instance, a lot of words simply have no direct translation, and co-opting the words native language eases treansition.

Like Gestalt is in english.  kind of.  or 'computer' is in italian.

I don't know enough about German to do gestalt, but computer? It's literally just means "computer". It computes numbers. There's definitely a word for calculating in Italian.

Compare with the words for computer in other languages. Swedish: Dator -- a verb form of data. (Castilian) Spanish: Ordinador -- Ordinator, ie "Order-er". (South American) Spanish: Computadore -- Computer, in Spanish.

That last one actually makes a good point. I'm pretty sure computer is Latin based. Italian likely has a word to use for it that's more their own than "computer" is English

That is my only dislike of English (and currently swedish). We shouldn't adopt words, we should translate them. You know, you the language. Adopting words kills languages.

This keeps popping up,

No, this is different. This is about words for things not places.

Oh I'm talking full on being in an unknown town and being unable to type in an address because you have to start by the town's name in your language.

This is complete nonsense. You could just google rheinland and Lorraine will pop up for you, if you absolutely have to make your way there in time for the invasion

[ChairmanPoo]

Spanish: Ordinador

It'd be "ordenador" rather.

Btw the reason for the different terminology is that computer science terms in Spanish were borrowed from French: computer=ordenateur=ordenador
Computer science=informatique=informatica

[scriver]

Heh, it's been 15 years, give me a break

I only remember ordenador, bocadillo, y zapato. And most of the lyrics to la Bamba

But anyway thanks for the correction please change the words above from Castilian Spanish to FRENCHIOUS FRENCH