Request for Beginning Japanese Texts
Brian Peterson
Does anybody have any recomendations of good books for
teaching oneself Japanese? Please reply by mail, since
I don't usually read this group often.
Brian Peterson
...!ucbvax!apteryx
dnichols@ti-csl
>/* Written 4:54 pm Dec 2, 1985 by apt...@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU in ti-csl:net.nlang */
>/* ---------- "Request for Beginning Japanese Text" ---------- */
>References:
I'm not sure about teaching oneself, but I am taking a class
which uses a set of books by Naganuma. They seem to be quite
good. They can be obtaineed through the Kinokuniya Book Stores
in Los Angeles or San Francisco.
I have seen another 2 vol. set - Beginning Japanese by Jorden
which I think are good and they have tapes that go with them.
(The tapes are expensive, though, and I understand the books
are very intense grammar-wise). They can be obtained at
Kinokuniya also.
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>which I think are good and they have tapes that go with them.
>(The tapes are expensive, though, and I understand the books
>are very intense grammar-wise). They can be obtained at
>Kinokuniya also.
That's a *3* volume set if you wish to include "writing Japanese".
The text is programmed to begin at about lesson 9 of the first
volume of Beginning Japanese. While I have not been a terrifically
assiduous student of Dr. Jordan's texts (having had some contact
with her at Cornell), my impression is that her method *might* be
difficult to do alone, since the classroom situation she uses in
her own FALCON (Far East Asian Language CONcentraion) program uses
two teachers-one of whom *only* speaks Japanese and does no explanation
of grammar, and one who does the actual explication in English. I
have little to go on but my impressions of the students her program
produces. The year-long intensive Japanese program seems to have
impressive results indeed.
--
She lost her luck/She lost her red shoes/she lost her wallet
but she never lost her nerve./She wasn't lonely/no not much.
-the Golden Palominos----------------------------------------
Gregory Taylor/...!uwvax!astroatc!gtaylor /Madison, Wisconsin
mark edwards
The best way to learn Japanese is to go to Japan. You can not
divorce the Japanese culture from the langauge. You can't learn
levels of politeness from a book, even if all the words are
there.
The first year course at UW - Madison uses a book published by
the Japan Times ( I think the name is BEGINNING JAPANESE ).
The second year course uses the grey set published by Havard Press
or something like that. Its written by Hibbet and Saka??.
3 and 4 year uses no main text book but many short stories.
Best advice is quit while your ahead! I took the last 2 1/2 years
here. The work is equal to any of my senior level computer science
classes ( Compilers, Operating Systems ....).
In the people who lasted until the 4 year (2 from the original
1st year course) all execpt one had been to Japan and he went
during the 4th year.
You can learn Spanish or French in a fraction of the time
necessary for Japanese.
You can't learn Japanese without learning their Chinese characters.
There are 2000 general educational characters, with another 5,000
others.
A teacher of Japanese once said to friend of mine who took a semester
of Japanese literature which required 3 years of Japanese (he had
four years of Japanese), " You have a good start now. Don't quit".
Where as I think you probably could learn Spanish from a book, I
think a native or a fluent speaking person in the language is
necessary to learn Japanese. (The profs here are Japanese Nationals)
Good Luck.
thomas breuel
> Best advice is quit while your ahead! I took the last 2 1/2 years
> [of Japanese]
> here. The work is equal to any of my senior level computer science
> classes ( Compilers, Operating Systems ....). [...]
No, that is not good advice. Learning any foreign language is a
rewarding experience, and it is likely to give you a new perspective on
your own language and culture.
I also disagree that Japanese is in any sense more 'difficult' than,
say, French or German. Certainly, you can learn how to 'get by' in
Germanic or Romanic languages much more easily than in Japanese. This
is (presumably) because you can reason about 'sound shifts' and
'grammatical similarities'.
To learn to express yourself fluently in a foreign language and to use
it correctly in different social contexts is an entirely different
matter. This takes years of study, instruction by native speakers, and
familiarity with the foreign culture and society, regardless of what
language your native language is and what language you are studying. If
the previous poster were studying German instead of Japanese, the same
comments would apply. After four years, I would say to him: you have
got a good start, don't give up now, you may soon be able to appreciate
some of the classical German literature. And even after many more
years, he could probably still be spotted easily as a foreigner in even
the simplest dialogue, and he would probably still not be able to
understand the meaning and relevance of, for example, a German fairy
tale fully.
The grammar of colloquial Japanese is certainly not responsible for its
reputation as a 'difficult' language. It is, in fact, simpler than the
grammar of most European languages. Many classes of words don't change
at all, and those that do, change in a very regular manner. Compare this
to the grammar of, say, German. You must match gender, case, and
number in well formed sentences. The German verb has a large number of
forms, representing different persons, modi, and times. Often, the
pronounciation of a word changes significantly when the word is used in
a different grammatical context. There are different levels of
formality in German, but they are distinguished mostly by the choice of
vocabulary and alternative grammatical constructions, not by fixed,
regular verb derivatives as in the case of Japanese. And there are lots
of other examples why the German language can be a nightmare for
foreigners. Nevertheless, German also has many features that make up
for this grammatical complexity, and, altogether, German is probably not
any more difficult to learn than any other foreign language.
Likewise, there are, of course, features of the Japanese language with
which foreigners have considerable problems. Most of these problems
probably relate to the phonetic structure of the language. The number
of syllables used in spoken Japanese is very small. This has
(presumably) led to the introduction of a large number of multisyllabic
words and, on the other hand, to the presence of a large number of
homophones. Perhaps to make up for the length of the words, Japanese
is spoken very rapidly, and, in addition, a number of euphonic
changes are made. For the beginner, spoken Japanese is therefore
difficult to follow and difficult to pronounce at the 'correct' speed.
The frequent complaint that the use of Chinese characters in the
Japanese written language makes it 'impossible' to learn is, on the
other hand, not correct in my opinion. Chinese characters (Kanji) are
composed from a relatively small number of constituents (radicals) with
semantic and phonetic content. From the radicals present in a Chinese
character, one can often not only derive its meaning, but also its
pronounciation. Admittedly, the formation of Chinese characters is
irregular, but probably not more so than the spelling and composition
from roots of English words.
Altogether, I would say: YES, go ahead an learn Japanese. If you can,
enroll in a good language course taught by native speakers. If you
can't, then try to learn the pronounciation from tapes and records.
Get some good books on grammar and writing (there are some listed at
the end of this article). Make notes in Japanese, try to read Japanese
newspapers, &c. When you talk to people in English, think about how you
would have expressed yourself in Japanese.
But be warned. Unless you will live in Japan for several years, you
will probably not master the language. This is true for any language
and should not discourage you, just be aware of it.
Let me just say a few words about my personal experience with learning
foreign languages. My native language is German. Like any German
high-school student, I began studying English in 5th grade. Later I
took several years of Latin, French, and Russian. Currently, I am
taking Japanese (incidentally, we are using Beginning Japanese by
Jorden). I am now a fluent speaker of English. I began to acquire
fluency only when I began using the language outside the classroom.
Fortunatly, there are many opportunities to read English documents and
to listen to English broadcasts in Germany. But most important for my
ability to speak and write English were several visits to America, and
my time as an undergraduate at Harvard. I found it to be a very
rewarding experience to learn a foreign language. It has not only
allowed me to communicate with more people, to read technical documents
and fiction in the original, but also to begin to understand the
cultural and social structures in a foreign country.
Thomas.
Well, this is also my first year of Japanese. The following is a list
of books that I found interesting and/or useful. As a beginner, I
cannot tell you much about the quality and style of the language used
in the textbooks (our teacher says that even Jorden makes occasional
lapses in style).
Dictionaries:
Takahashi: Romanized English-Japanese, Japanese-English Dictionary.
Very useful dictionaries. Entries are entirely in Romanized
form, but Japanese Kana and Kanji spellings are listed.
Kawamoto: English-Japanese, Japanese-English Dictionary.
More comprehensive than Takahashi, but less convenient to use
for the foreigner.
Schwarz, Ezawa: Everyday Japanese.
Not really a dictionary. It orders Japanese words by social
context and also gives some cultural background.
Kanji dictionaries:
Nelson.
This is the standard Kanji dictionary.
Rose-Innes: Beginners' Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese Characters. (Dover)
This is a classic, but slightly out of date. I like it, though,
and it is very cheap. If you are lucky, you can get the old
edition which contains the written forms of the characters.
Pye: The Study of Kanji. (Hokuseido)
A very helpful book. It points out phonetic relationships
between Kanji.
Wieger: Chinese Characters. (Dover)
A classic, but applicable only to a limited extent to the
modern forms of the Japanese Kanji. This book deals mostly with
semantic relationships.
Karlgren: Analytic Dictionary of Chinese and Sino Japanese.
Good if you know Chinese or are interested in the
phonetic relationships between Kanji and Chinese, but otherwise
not very useful.
Courses and Readers:
Jorden: Beginning Japanese. Jorden: Reading Japanese.
Good and intensive course of colloquial Japanese.
Unfortunately, the textbook uses Romanization, and the books
are very verbose.
Ogawa: New Intensive Japanese.
I like this reader. Unfortunately, there seem to be no
cassettes to go with it.
Ono: Japanese Grammar.
A useful book, but more advanced than the others.
Lewin, Yokota, Fujiwara: Einfuehrung in die Japanische Sprache.
Good introduction, mostly to the standard written language.
You have to know German, though :-).
mark edwards
I originally wrote :
>> Best advice is quit while your ahead! I took the last 2 1/2 years
>> [of Japanese]
>> here. The work is equal to any of my senior level computer science
>> classes ( Compilers, Operating Systems ....). [...]
>
>No, that is not good advice. Learning any foreign language is a
>rewarding experience, and it is likely to give you a new perspective on
>your own language and culture.
>
>I also disagree that Japanese is in any sense more 'difficult' than,
>say, French or German. Certainly, you can learn how to 'get by' in
>Germanic or Romanic languages much more easily than in Japanese.
>years, he could probably still be spotted easily as a foreigner in even
>the simplest dialogue,
You are spotted as a foreigner (if you are a caucasian) before you
attempt to speak. On occassion, even if you are speaking Japanese to
a native, the person will say "no speaking English", meaning that he
thinks that because you are a foreigner you are speaking English !!!
>The grammar of colloquial Japanese is certainly not responsible for its
>reputation as a 'difficult' language. It is, in fact, simpler than the
>grammar of most European languages.
No disagreement here.
>Likewise, there are, of course, features of the Japanese language with
>which foreigners have considerable problems. Most of these problems
>probably relate to the phonetic structure of the language. The number
>of syllables used in spoken Japanese is very small. This has
>(presumably) led to the introduction of a large number of multisyllabic
>words and, on the other hand, to the presence of a large number of
>homophones. Perhaps to make up for the length of the words, Japanese
>is spoken very rapidly, and, in addition, a number of euphonic
>changes are made. For the beginner, spoken Japanese is therefore
>difficult to follow and difficult to pronounce at the 'correct' speed.
I never had any problem with the phonetic structure. The speed is no
greater than any other language, it just sounds faster because you
don't understand it. Homophones are difficult but mostly when you
read Japanese with out the Kanji (Chinese characters). If You are
speaking it, usually there is some contextual clue that gives the
correct interpretations of it.
>The frequent complaint that the use of Chinese characters in the
>Japanese written language makes it 'impossible' to learn is, on the
>other hand, not correct in my opinion. Chinese characters (Kanji) are
>composed from a relatively small number of constituents (radicals) with
>semantic and phonetic content. From the radicals present in a Chinese
>character, one can often not only derive its meaning, but also its
>pronounciation. Admittedly, the formation of Chinese characters is
>irregular, but probably not more so than the spelling and composition
>from roots of English words.
>
This is the root of the problem in Japanese and why I say quit while
you are ahead. KANJI is probably the reason that makes Japanese so
hard to learn. In order to read the Japanese newspaper a Japanese
native child must go as far as 9th grade to get the basic Kanji,
into high school to get the rest of the 2000 general Kanji just
to learn to read the langauge!!!!! This is not true with english
or probably any other western langauge. ( It is often heard noted
about the American with the 6th grade Education.)
Kanji can not be seperated from Japanese. If one tried Japanese for
the japanese would be equally impossible. The problem is the
homonyms. Look in a Japanese - english dictionary under the k's
for koo, kikan, kikai, .....
A single Chinese character in chinese has one phonetic reading.
A single Chinese character in Japanese has usually at least two
and the common (irregular or sort of) characters have multiple
readings !!!! Some are often bizarre. Many of the Japanese
versions of the characters have lost their original meanings.
If you are into abuse, try learning peoples names, place names
and historical names in Japanese. Many of these are no longer
general kanji.
>Altogether, I would say: YES, go ahead an learn Japanese. If you can,
>enroll in a good language course taught by native speakers. If you
>can't, then try to learn the pronounciation from tapes and records.
>Get some good books on grammar and writing (there are some listed at
>the end of this article). Make notes in Japanese, try to read Japanese
>newspapers, &c. When you talk to people in English, think about how you
>would have expressed yourself in Japanese.
>
Thomas admits to being a 1st year student (1st year first semester ??).
Typically the first year is the confidence builder. Especially the
1st semester. The 3rd and the 4th year are what seperates the gung ho
from the curious. Not many surive past the second year . Even fewer
after the third year.
Whats my execuse ? Two years in Japan (knew nothing before I went).
(nihonjin no kanajo ga iru mo.)
thomas breuel
||say, French or German. Certainly, you can learn how to 'get by' in
||the simplest dialogue,
|
|You are spotted as a foreigner (if you are a caucasian) before you
|attempt to speak. On occassion, even if you are speaking Japanese to
|a native, the person will say "no speaking English", meaning that he
|thinks that because you are a foreigner you are speaking English !!!
That's a social problem. Most Americans are easy to spot just by their
appearance in almost any country of the world. Likewise, Americans
are generally considered not to be very good at foreign languages
(because they are not strictly required to learn them in school). It
is therefore reasonable for any foreigner either to try to speak with
you in English (since he is likely to speak English much better than you
speak the foreign language), or to communicate to you that he doesn't
speak English and that you should therefore ask someone else.
From an American point of view, this behaviour must look strange, of course,
since all tourists that Americans encounter in their country speak English,
and it is therefore usually not necessary (or even possible) to try to
communicate with a foreigner in his language. In addition to this, Americans
tend to be more tolerant of different accents and different ethnic
origins, simply because the American population itself is very inhomogenous.
|I never had any problem with the phonetic structure. The speed is no
|greater than any other language, it just sounds faster because you
|don't understand it.
I guess that's more a matter of opinion. When learning English
or French, I had the impression that they were pronounced 'slowly' in
some sense, as opposed to Italian, Spanish, or Japanese.
|Homophones are difficult but mostly when you
|read Japanese with out the Kanji (Chinese characters). If You are
|speaking it, usually there is some contextual clue that gives the
|correct interpretations of it.
Of course you disambiguate by context. That is not the point. The
point is that (I believe and feel that) homophones make it more
difficult to learn a language.
|This is the root of the problem in Japanese and why I say quit while
|you are ahead. KANJI is probably the reason that makes Japanese so
|hard to learn.
This is the root of the problem in English and why I say quit while
you are ahead. Spelling and pronounciation is probably the reason that
makes English so hard to learn, even though its grammar is so simple.
Seriously. The English language, which is considered one of the easiest
languages in the world, has, in some sense, many of the same 'problems'
that Japanese has: its writing system is not strictly phonetic, spelling
is highly irregular, it is full of words borrowed from foreign languages,
and its vocabulary is huge (something English speaking people always seem
to be proud of). Nevertheless, you would not recommend me not to learn
English just because it is difficult to acquire the same vocabulary
that an educated native speaker of the language has.
|Thomas admits to being a 1st year student (1st year first semester ??).
|Typically the first year is the confidence builder. Especially the
|1st semester. The 3rd and the 4th year are what seperates the gung ho
|from the curious. Not many surive past the second year . Even fewer
|after the third year.
Yes, I just finished my first semester. Our teachers announced in the
very first lecture that they did not plan on making the first semester
any easier than the ones to come, simply because they don't want students
to waste their time by just taking a single term or year of Japanese.
Yes, my Japanese language course is intense when I compare it to other
language courses that I have taken in the past. That doesn't mean that
Japanese is more difficult, it just means that I'm spending more time
on it to learn it faster. I cannot compare it personally to other college-level
language courses, but from what I hear, the same is true for, say,
German language courses.
Altogether, I think that your expectations are simply too high.
For any foreign language, 2 1/2 years of intensive study is a
pretty short time if your goal is to become fluent, to speak without
a major accent, and to be able to read every-day publications without
a dictionary. To be able to write in a foreign language takes
even longer.
Why am I saying all this? Well, I don't think it is good to recommend
someone not to learn a foreign language simply because you find it
difficult. The reasons why people want to learn foreign languages are
as diverse as the difficulties they encounter in doing so. Japanese
is no different in this respect. The most that you can say is: 'if
you want to learn Japanese to become a member of Japanese society,
don't try, it will probably not work'. You can also say that: 'some
Japanese don't understand that foreigners learn their language and
have a rather limited view of people from outside their country: they
think that all foreigners are Americans'. And, finally, you can point
out your personal problems with learning the language (e.g. Kanji),
but that doesn't mean that other people will have the same.
Altogether: I maintain: if you have a good reason for learning
Japanese (even if you are 'just' interested in the culture and
would like to read books in the original), go ahead an do it.
Like learning any foreign language, it will be a lot of work,
but it will also be very rewarding.
Thomas.
mark edwards
>|greater than any other language, it just sounds faster because you
>|don't understand it.
>
>I guess that's more a matter of opinion. When learning English
>or French, I had the impression that they were pronounced 'slowly' in
>some sense, as opposed to Italian, Spanish, or Japanese.
I guess that's also a matter of opinion. When I was learning French ,I
had the impression that French was spoken fast.
>|This is the root of the problem in Japanese and why I say quit while
>|you are ahead. KANJI is probably the reason that makes Japanese so
>|hard to learn.
>
>This is the root of the problem in English and why I say quit while
>you are ahead. Spelling and pronounciation is probably the reason that
>makes English so hard to learn, even though its grammar is so simple.
English has only 26 upper case and 26 lower case letters. Japanese uses
two alphabets with fifty or so characters a piece. These alphabets are
used in conjunction with the KANJI. But that is a completely different
topic. English's spelling problems are equivalent to where the kanji
sounds stop and where the japanese alphabet starts.
>Yes, I just finished my first semester. Our teachers announced in the
>very first lecture that they did not plan on making the first semester
>any easier than the ones to come, simply because they don't want students
>to waste their time by just taking a single term or year of Japanese.
>
How many of the 2000 general kanji have you learned ? (I assume you
can read and write both hiragana and katakana.)
>For any foreign language, 2 1/2 years of intensive study is a
>pretty short time if your goal is to become fluent, to speak without
>a major accent, and to be able to read every-day publications without
>a dictionary. To be able to write in a foreign language takes
>even longer.
I had 4 years of Japanese classes for the record and use the language
practically everyday. To read a Japanese Newspaper I think I will
always need a dictionary, but given equal experience in French or
Spanish I think I could fake it better. (Any one out there have
4 years of Spanish ? What do you think ?)
>And, finally, you can point
>out your personal problems with learning the language (e.g. Kanji),
>but that doesn't mean that other people will have the same.
Well my personal problem was expressed by every one in my 3rd, and
4th year class. (Even more so in the lower levels.) Personally I
don't find kanji difficult. What I find difficult is finding the
time to memorize the 2000 + 5000 with all their meanings and readings
as well as just increasing my vocabulary.
=================================================================
Sorry to drag on a well done subject.
mark.
thomas breuel
my basic point is that there is no need or reason to discourage
someone from learning any foreign language, be it Japanese,
French, or German.
I am sure that whoever requested the references for introductory
Japanese language texts in the first place had a good reason to
do so, and it would probably have been more helpful had you answered
his question rather than trying to scare him away with 'how difficult'
Japanese is.
A few other points. Officially, we learned Katakana, Hiragana, and
roughly 150 Kanji during the first term (3 months). Personally, I
probably know a few hundred Kanji more or less well (meaning that for some I
only know either the Kun or On reading). I don't find learning
Kanji any worse (and in many respects more entertaining) than
learning English, Russian, Latin, or French words. Many characters
have their own history or reveal particular aspects of Japanese
and Chinese culture. Particularly helpful are for example Wieger's
book on the etymology of Chinese characters, and Pye's book on
phonetic relationships. Even if these books are not historically
accurate, they do provide good mnemonic aids.
As you said, you could probably 'fake' reading a French newspaper
more easily after three years of study, but that is not the point, is it?
In order to understand it, you must know the precise meaning of
practically every word or idiomatic expression, and that just
takes much more than three years to learn.
Altogether, what foreign languages one learns is determined by
one's interests and one's needs, not by how 'difficult' that
language may be. In addition, I believe that the difference
in 'difficulty' between Japanese and your average European
language is probably much less than many people claim.
In learning English, I found that the similarities between it and
my native language became more and more of a burden the further
I advanced, and I am therefore doubtful whether any initial advantage
I had in learning English is paying in the long run.
Thomas.
Lee Gold
assumed that my (undoubtedly English-accented) Japanese was some weird
variety of English. I also found out a way around this problem....
You sneak up behind them and say (in Japanese), "Excuse me for bothering
you, but...." Then ask your question.
On another occasion, when a taxi driver looked at me and -- _before I
could speak_ -- said, "No Engrish'" and started to drive off, I babbled,
"Ii des'. (That's nice.)" and quickly told him my destination in Japanese.
He had the engine started when he realized he had indeed understood me --
and opened the door for me.
--Lee Gold
Lee Gold
such. When we were there, one of my husband's co-workers was Doug Abe,
a sansei (third generation American) who spoke a few hundred words of
Japanese -- and couldn't read any, along with his wife (ditto) and their
kids (who spoke even less).
We were based in suites at the New Otani (whose mortgage was held by a bank
which owned part of the company for which the programmers worked, so rooms
were at a discount). Every so often, some hotel employee would realize
in surprise that Abe-san was being given an English language newspaper and
send him the Japanese language paper instead. And poor Doug would have to
straighten things out.
More seriously, one of the kids failed to respond promptly and politely to
an adult who told him to do something or other (he had no idea what) and
got slapped on the street. And Mrs. Abe grunted the wrong way during a
volleyball lesson given by a Japanese coach and was told he wouldn't teach
her any more. He would put up with that sort of rudeness from an American
but she had to no better. (She had to spend quite awhile explaining that
she hadn't meant to insult him when she said, "Oomph.")
--Lee Gold
d...@ucla-cs.uucp
>During my four months in Japan, I also repeatedly ran into natives who
>assumed that my (undoubtedly English-accented) Japanese was some weird
>variety of English. I also found out a way around this problem....
>You sneak up behind them and say (in Japanese), "Excuse me for bothering
>you, but...." Then ask your question.
Yes! A quick "Chotto sumimasen ga ..." before the person turns their eyes to
look at you works wonderfully, and a short phrase like that can be spoken with
essentially no accent, so the double-takes can be fun when they finally see
you; at that point, your accent doesn't matter, since they're listening for
Japanese.
When I couldn't use this trick, I noticed an odd phenomenon. In Tokyo and
Kyoto, most shop clerks, etc., responded to my Japanese in English. But in
Osaka, Kobe, in suburbs, and in the small (pop. 300) village I was
staying in, people responded in rapid-fire Japanese. There was no middle
ground -- I never ran into anyone who thought to speak Japanese *slowly* to an
obvious foreigner who addressed them in American-accented Japanese.
Also, no one *ever* obeyed the request "Moo ichido itte kudasai" ["Please say
that again"] Invariably, they either paused and then tried to say what they
just said in English, or they said it in an entirely different way. I varied
it by sometimes asking people to repeat in the same words, or more slowly,
etc., but no one *ever* did. Why is this? A friend has pointed out that
Americans seem to do this, too (Amer.: "You turn right at the signal, then
go straight for five blocks." For.: "Could you repeat that, please?"
Amer.: "Sure. Go down to the light and turn right; go five blocks and you're
there.").
-- David Smallberg, d...@locus.ucla.edu, {ihnp4,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!das
H. Chai
>composed from a relatively small number of constituents (radicals) with
>semantic and phonetic content. From the radicals present in a Chinese
>character, one can often not only derive its meaning, but also its
>pronounciation.
Well, Thomas, seeing your extensive bibliography at the end of the
article, I'm surprised that you made such a general statement which is
often untrue. Even in the Chinese language itself, trying to guess a
character's meaning and pronunciation from its radicals is often unsafe
and incorrect. The problem doubles with Japanese kanji because
sometimes the original Chinese pronunciation is preserved, but often
the kanji is used (or borrowed) for its meaning only and its
pronunciation bears no relation to the kanji. For example, 'ido bata
kaigii' means "gossip"; the kanji used consists of four characters,
meaning '(water)well top conference' in Chinese. The Chinese
pronunciation for conference is approx. 'wui-ee', so is more or less
preserved in 'kaigii'. But 'ido bata' is Japanese in origin, and to
guess its pronunciation form the kanji would be completely fruitless.
Another trap is that sometimes the kanji used in a word bore no
relation to what they meant in Chinese. My favorite example: 'benkyo',
to study/learn, uses the two Chinese characters (and their
pronunciation) that mean to do something unwilling, or forcing someone
to do something unwilling. (well, you could say there is a very strong
realtionship there :-)
Being of Chinese origin and having studied Japanese, I can claim I am
more aware of the probelms involved in learing the latter language when
it borrows so much from Chinese.
--
Henry Chai, just a humble student at the
Faculty of Library and Information Science, U of Toronto
{watmath,ihnp4,allegra}!utzoo!utflis!chai
michael b maxwell
> I had 4 years of Japanese classes for the record and use the language
> practically everyday. To read a Japanese Newspaper I think I will
> always need a dictionary, but given equal experience in French or
> Spanish I think I could fake it better. (Any one out there have
> 4 years of Spanish ? What do you think ?)
would say that one reason that Spanish is easier than languages
unrelated to English is that lots of the vocabulary of Spanish is cognate.
You can often figure what a word you don't know means, or pretty close,
because it looks like an English word you know. I would doubt that this
happens as much in unrelated languages like Japanese, except presumably in
recent borrowings (such as technical terminology).
--
Mike Maxwell
Boeing Artificial Intelligence Center
...uw-beaver!uw-june!bcsaic!michaelm
michael b maxwell
Says who??? Seriously, how can you quantify that? By making studies of lots
of native speakers of languages X1, X2, X3... trying to learn languages Y1,
Y2, Y3...English, where {X1, X2, X3...Y1, Y2, Y3...English} are all
unrelated languages? I doubt whether anyone has ever done that. (Same
comment for those who say, as I have often heard said, that English is a
very hard language.)
Tetsuo Tomiyama
articles about my language. Although many people are becoming to have
correct information about the language (or about Japan, about its
economy, about its politics, etc.), still there are a little bit funny
things on the nets. I think sometimes we have to say something just not
to be misunderstood. Followings are some examples.
In article <18...@uwmacc.UUCP> edw...@uwmacc.UUCP (mark edwards) writes:
>
> hard to learn. In order to read the Japanese newspaper a Japanese
> native child must go as far as 9th grade to get the basic Kanji,
> into high school to get the rest of the 2000 general Kanji just
> to learn to read the langauge!!!!! This is not true with english
> or probably any other western langauge. ( It is often heard noted
> about the American with the 6th grade Education.)
This is not correct. A Japanese child is supposed to learn about
900 Kanji until the 6th grade. To 'learn' means here to get an ability
both to read and to write. Until the end of the 9th grade, he/she must
read ALL the 'commonly used' Kanji which count about 2500; otherwise,
you cannot read a newspaper. In high school, he/she is supposed to
read and write all of them.
Now, the problem is that he thinks this type of painful learning
never happens in learning Hindo-European languages. But, how do you
explain irregularity of English spellings? It is almost the same as
learning Kanji, in my opinion. This type of just painful learning
SURELY can occur western languages. How about Germans, for example?
You have to learn by heart "der Buch", "das Kind", etc., don't you?
How about English? You have to learn "foot-feet", "man-men",
"woman-women", etc., don't you?
>
> A single Chinese character in Japanese has usually at least two
> and the common (irregular or sort of) characters have multiple
> readings !!!! Some are often bizarre. Many of the Japanese
>
This is not correct. A single Chinese character may have two ways of
pronunciation (but absolutely has single meaning). One may be an
approximation of the original Chinese pronunciation which is very
regular; the other is derived from the meaning and expressed in a
Japanese own way which might be irregular but this is what you have to
remember. Now, the real problem is that there's no linkage between these
two. So, they are not *bizarre* at all as you think!
> If you are into abuse, try learning peoples names, place names
> and historical names in Japanese. Many of these are no longer
> general kanji.
>
Therefore, he is correct in this sense. But, in my opinion it also
applies to English place names. I still remember my hard time in London.
> (nihonjin no kanajo ga iru mo.)
Finally, what is this? I am sorry, but I don't understand this
Japanese-look-like sentence.
So, please don't use funny things, if you are not sure at all.
If he is sure of it, then he must change your teacher.
--Tetsuo Tomiyama,
Interactive Systems,
Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science,
Kruislaan 413, 1098 SJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands,
Telex: 12571 mactr nl, Telephone: +31-20-592 9333,
Usenet: to...@mcvax.UUCP
Dik T. Winter
> practically everyday. To read a Japanese Newspaper I think I will
> always need a dictionary, but given equal experience in French or
> Spanish I think I could fake it better. (Any one out there have
> 4 years of Spanish ? What do you think ?)
>
your article without a dictionary.
To be serious. I think it helps when the script is familiar.
So for you to learn to read spanish is simpler than to read japanese
(or russian).
Reminds me of the following, once I was in Bulgaria and on a sign
I read "onmuka" (this was script, mind). It took me the whole of a
day to realise that it read "optika".
--
dik t. winter, cwi, amsterdam, nederland
UUCP: {seismo,decvax,philabs,okstate,garfield}!mcvax!dik
Lambert Meertens
year) gave up. Having neither the inclination nor the time to sit for
years in classes, I attempted some kind of do-it-yourself method. With
other languages, reading a lot once I had acquired enough knowledge to
decipher (with the aid of a dictionary) the meaning of what I read turned
out a good method. Initially, the effort is large (you have to look up a
*lot* and you still miss quite a few things), but if you take to it, you
catch on fast and the effort gets less and less. At least, that's the way
things worked out for me. Although it may be true that, in order to
acquire fluency in language X, nothing can replace living for some time in
an X-speaking country, I dare to venture that this comes close to it if one
has the knack of incorporating vocabulary and idiom in one's "active
knowledge" without being forced to actualize that knowledge.
Now why didn't this work for Japanese? In the first place, the effort of
looking up a kanji character in a character dictionary is sooo much larger
than looking up a word in an alphabetized dictionary. As an experiment, I
just looked something up:
ON reading: SAI SHIN KAN EI JI TEN
Kun*: Sai-shin Kan - Ei Ji-ten
time (sec): 64 23** 160 0*** 43 20**
English: Up-to-date Japanese - English Dictionary
*) The kun reading (Japanese pronounciation) is accidentally the same here
throughout the phrase. This is normally not the case.
**) The organization of my dictionary (Nelson) is such that subsequent
characters making up one word can be found more readily.
***) I managed to remember this one!
The time needed was more than the sum of these times, because I also have
to write everything down, or else I have forgotten the start when I come to
the end. All in all, it took something like ten minutes. Before I gave
up, I was much more proficient, but this would still have taken me several
minutes, for just four words. Imagine plodding through a novel at this
pace.
Now this wouldn't have been so bad, but the discouraging thing was that I
kept looking up the *same* characters over and over, like, I *know* that I
have looked this one up umpteen times before, and even just a few minutes
ago, but what was it again? Try what I might, I could not keep that
mapping from characters to readings in my long-term memory. I also tried
to do it with memorizing cards (character on one side, reading on the
reverse side), but after memorizing character #11 I would forget #1.
Different people have different abilities on this type of tasks, and it may
be the case that my performance on this score is exceptionally poor, but I
surmise that it helps a lot in its development if you start practicing it
at an early age, which is precisely what Japanese kids do, and that if you
start too late, it will never become what it might have been. (It may also
be the case, as some researchers suggest, that the Japanese are endowed
with a greater *innate* potential ability for the task.)
For Japanese school children it is also helpful that they can already speak
Japanese when they learn to read. So the "readings" fit in with a great
deal of knowledge they have already. They have, therefore, no need for the
mnemotechnics like (often false, but still helpful) explanations of the
"picture" hidden in the character. Unfortunately for me, these
mnemotechnics don't work too well either.
For some time I tried reading a children's book written in hiragana
(Sarukani, The Monkey and the Crabs). Boy, was that a mistake! Apart from
the completely minor problem that hiragana has been specially designed to
maximize confusion in my perceptual system (a/wa, e/n, ki/ma/ha/na/ta,
te/ko/to, ke/se, ne/re, nu/me, u/ri/ra/ro/ru), a problem that I didn't
encounter in the Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets, it turned out that
about every other word had ten possible meanings, which kind of explodes
combinatorially. (At least the words had spaces in between, which is not
the normal practice; without spaces, the tree of possibilities spreads out
much faster.) Of course, if you already know Japanese, you would not find
this a problem at all for a children's tale. For serious writing, it is
unacceptable--too many ambiguities--which explains why the Japanese will
still stick to kanji after China has romanized (assuming they ever will).
I am not trying to discourage anyone from learning Japanese. The language
per se is not particularly hard. But it is impervious to the method of
learning it by reading it. (There are of course *some* difficult things in
Japanese, just as in any other natural language, such as counting and
politeness modes, and idiom is hard in *all* languages.)
To conclude, some data on the number of kanji characters learned in
subsequent grades (source: Nelson):
Grade Number Accumulated
1 46 46
2 105 151
3 187 338
4 205 543
5 194 737
6 144 881
> 969 1850
N 29 1879
There are 969 characters in general use in addition to the 881 learned in
grades 1-6. These 881 have, of course, been selected as the most important
ones and you can possibly manage without the other 969 in the same way many
English-speaking people manage without knowing the meaning of words like
"recondite" or "obsolescence". Together, these 1850 form the "To^yo^
kanji", as established by the Japanese government (except that for
practical purposes the press has made a few substitutions, bumping the 28
least frequent characters in favor of 28 more useful ones). The final 29
characters are "approved" characters for use in writing proper names.
--
Lambert Meertens
...!{seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!lam...@mcvax.UUCP
CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science), Amsterdam
mark edwards
>> hard to learn. In order to read the Japanese newspaper a Japanese
>> native child must go as far as 9th grade to get the basic Kanji,
>> into high school to get the rest of the 2000 general Kanji just
>> to learn to read the langauge!!!!! This is not true with english
>> or probably any other western langauge. ( It is often heard noted
>> about the American with the 6th grade Education.)
>
>This is not correct. A Japanese child is supposed to learn about
>900 Kanji until the 6th grade. To 'learn' means here to get an ability
>both to read and to write. Until the end of the 9th grade, he/she must
>read ALL the 'commonly used' Kanji which count about 2500; otherwise,
>you cannot read a newspaper. In high school, he/she is supposed to
>read and write all of them.
Sorry about that. I guess what really was trying to emphasize
is that it is easier for a young native english speaker to read
a common everyday Newspaper then it is for a young native Japanese.
In addition a typical Japanese student goes to school more ( 6 days
a week) may have juku ( after school lessons) (I also beleive the
school year is longer ??) and probably actually studies.
The first time I actually had to study was in College.
>
>Now, the problem is that he thinks this type of painful learning
>never happens in learning Hindo-European languages. But, how do you
>explain irregularity of English spellings? It is almost the same as
>learning Kanji, in my opinion. This type of just painful learning
>SURELY can occur western languages. How about Germans, for example?
>You have to learn by heart "der Buch", "das Kind", etc., don't you?
>How about English? You have to learn "foot-feet", "man-men",
>"woman-women", etc., don't you?
>
In old england the spelling of a word changed with the pronunciation.
It no longer does. I agree the spelling iregularities should be
resolved. The pain may just as great but not knowing how to correctly
spell a word does not prevent you from correctly reading it. I don't
know how many times I've looked at a familiar Kanji, Kanji that I can
write, but can't place the meaning to it, or sound. The trouble is
not learning it, the trouble is keeping the meaning the sound and how
to write it all at the same time. Japanese also have similiar concepts.
Take for instance "okane" (money with polite marking) and "gokinjo"
( neighborhood with polite marking). The difference in the markings
are resolved by where the word originated (usually). I forget the
exact details but I think one is for Japanese words and the other
is for chinese words. Still not knowing whether its der, die or das
usually does not prevent you from writing or reading the main word.
Try writing the wrong kanji for the word, does the same still hold
true ? No. I think not.
>>
>> A single Chinese character in Japanese has usually at least two
>> and the common (irregular or sort of) characters have multiple
>> readings !!!! Some are often bizarre. Many of the Japanese
>>
>
>This is not correct. A single Chinese character may have two ways of
>pronunciation (but absolutely has single meaning). One may be an
>approximation of the original Chinese pronunciation which is very
>regular; the other is derived from the meaning and expressed in a
>Japanese own way which might be irregular but this is what you have to
>remember. Now, the real problem is that there's no linkage between these
>two. So, they are not *bizarre* at all as you think!
I said some are often bizarre (not all). Sometimes parents in thinking
of a name for there child will create totally new readings (sounds)
for a particular kanji(s) (is this not bizarre ??).
Some characters were taken from chinese only for sound. Some kanji
do have multiple readings. For instance the word for sun (hi) can be
read as "ni" as in "nihon" or "nichi" as in "nichiyoobi", or as
"ta" (??) as in "ashita" or "o" as in "kyoo" (meaning today), and
there are more.
>> (nihonjin no kanajo ga iru mo.)
>
>Finally, what is this? I am sorry, but I don't understand this
>Japanese-look-like sentence.
>
Forgive my romanji japanese. Writing japanese in romanji is as strange
to me as it probably is to you. But this brings out another point,
the typical american understands poorly spoken english, and heavily
accented english. I don't believe this is true for the typical Japanese.
Ima watashi no kanajo wa nihon ni modotte, juku o oshiete iru. Kanajo
wa mochiron nihonjin desu. Kanajo wa sugu america ni kaette kuru to
omoimasu.
e.c.leeper
> that again"] Invariably, they either paused and then tried to say what they
> just said in English, or they said it in an entirely different way. I varied
> it by sometimes asking people to repeat in the same words, or more slowly,
> etc., but no one *ever* did. Why is this? A friend has pointed out that
> Americans seem to do this, too (Amer.: "You turn right at the signal, then
> go straight for five blocks." For.: "Could you repeat that, please?"
> Amer.: "Sure. Go down to the light and turn right; go five blocks and you're
> there.").
There is a good reason for this. Many people with hearing difficulties have
difficulty with only certain sounds--perhaps a sibilant 's' for example.
Changing the words used to express something can make the content intelligible
where simply repeating oneself might not. (This is what many doctors recommend
these days in dealing with older people.) Also, someone dealing with
non-native speakers/listeners may think they have used a word the other person
never learned and try to re-phrase what they say for that reason.
Evelyn C. Leeper
...ihnp4!mtgzz!ecl
thomas breuel
> >Chinese characters (Kanji) are
> >composed from a relatively small number of constituents (radicals) with
> >semantic and phonetic content. From the radicals present in a Chinese
> >character, one can often not only derive its meaning, but also its
> >pronounciation.
>
> Well, Thomas, seeing your extensive bibliography at the end of the
> article, I'm surprised that you made such a general statement which is
> often untrue. Even in the Chinese language itself, trying to guess a
> character's meaning and pronunciation from its radicals is often unsafe
> and incorrect. The problem doubles with Japanese kanji because
> sometimes the original Chinese pronunciation is preserved, but often
> the kanji is used (or borrowed) for its meaning only and its
> pronunciation bears no relation to the kanji. For example, 'ido bata
> kaigii' means "gossip"; the kanji used consists of four characters,
> meaning '(water)well top conference' in Chinese. The Chinese
> pronunciation for conference is approx. 'wui-ee', so is more or less
> preserved in 'kaigii'. But 'ido bata' is Japanese in origin, and to
> guess its pronunciation form the kanji would be completely fruitless.
I did not intend to imply that you can read or understand a Japanese
text if you only know radicals but have never learned the Kanji.
Similarly, a knowledge of all English roots, suffixes, and prefixes
would not allow you to read or understand an English text.
I just wanted to point out that the Japanese writing system does not
consist of a few thousand unrelated characters, but that it also contains
a lot of semantic and phonetic information, just like the English
writing system. This doesn't help you very much if you encounter an
unknown Kanji, but I find it of great mnemonic value that certain radicals
have certain meanings or suggest certain pronounciations.
Thomas.
thomas breuel
> >Seriously. The English language, which is considered one of the easiest
> >languages in the world...
> Says who??? Seriously, how can you quantify that? By making studies of lots
> of native speakers of languages X1, X2, X3... trying to learn languages Y1,
I was not trying to make a quantitative statement. In talking to quite a
number of foreigners, I frequently heard it said that English is one of
the easier languages to learn. The reasons cited were numerous: opportunity
for frequent use (active or passive) of the language, its lack of
complicated grammatical constructs, the large number of non-native speakers
and the tolerance of the native speakers, and the fact that it combines
the Germanic and Romance vocabularies.
If you followed my argument, you should have noticed that I was arguing
against the validity of such assessments. I believe that English appears
to be easier because a student familiar with another European language
is likely to have some vague notion of the grammar and to be able to
derive the approximate meanings of unfamiliar words. Ultimately, however,
if you want to speak the language fluently and if you want to be able
to express yourself clearly in writing, you must spend as much effort
on studying English as you must on studying any other foreign language,
since these abilities require speed and precision, not just a vague
understanding. If all a foreign student is aiming for is some basic
ability to communicate, then I would personally agree, though, that
English is easier than, for example, Japanese or German. But 'basic
ability to communicate' can hardly be called 'learning a laguage',
can it.
Thomas.
Lee Gold
can't find it. What's more confusing, you seem to be using "Nihonjin"
(Japanese person) to mean Japanese language ("Nihongo"). You also use
plain-form iru as a sentence ending verb, which ends up not only being
slightly rude but somewhat confusing as I don't know if you mean imasu
(there is/are) or irimasu (need). Could you give us a translation of what
you're trying to say. I'd like to have a go at translating it into
Japanese to see if our Nihonjin Usenetter will be able to decipher my try.
--Lee Gold
Michael Ellis
>Says who??? Seriously, how can you quantify that? By making studies of
>lots of native speakers of languages X1, X2, X3... trying to learn
>languages Y1, Y2, Y3...English, where {X1, X2, X3...Y1, Y2, Y3...English}
>are all unrelated languages? I doubt whether anyone has ever done that.
>(Same comment for those who say, as I have often heard said, that English
I think there are many criteria by which a language can be judged `easy'
or `difficult' to learn. Is the written representation logical? If
there are inflections, are there a large number of inflectional
categories or only a few? Are there many exceptions? Does the language
carry `excess baggage', like grammatical gender, or nominal classifiers?
Are logical relations transparently represented in the form of the
language?
Artificial languages, like Loglan or Esperanto, for example, are
genuinely `easy' languages according to all of the criteria above,
although no doubt they seem more natural to europeans than they
would to anyone else.
Except for Chinese and (formal) Japanese, English is clearly one of the
most difficult languages to write. Our spelling is quite abominable;
in its defense, the orthography of the international european wordstock
is preserved at the cost of uncertainty about pronunciation. This
may provide some clue to the foreigner as to the meaning of new
vocabulary.
However, I think that we must conclude spoken English IS easy with
respect to most of the other criteria.
English nouns are very simple indeed -- the vast majority are of a
single type (plural in -s); we have neither gender, nor classifiers.
Our verbs admit more complexity, but even the few irregular ones are
still simpler with 3 stems {see(-s,-ing), saw, seen} than any
european language I know. Most astonishing is the huge number
of aspects/moods/tenses that can be generated from the
single Chomskian formula:
VP => Tense + (Modal) + (HAVE + EN) + (BE + ING) + VERB
We might also judge a difficulty of a language according to phonetic
peculiarities relative to the world languages. For example, the central
vowels in French or German are more likely to present difficulty than
the 5 cardinal vowels in Japanese or Greek. The opposition between
palatized and nonpalatized consonants in Slavic or Gaelic are also
likely to cause difficulties. The tones in Chinese or Thai can be a
particularly difficult obstacle for those whose native languages lack
such features.
English, with 7 vowels, 7 diphthongs, a strong emphasis on the major
syllable (with all others approaching schwa), and a propensity for
closing open syllables, is a bit unusual. I suspect our initial and
final consonant clusters (as in `strengths') are problematic for most
newcomers, as are the initial sounds of {the, thin, at, up}. Nonetheless,
I do not think these qualities are any more unusual than say, vowel
harmony in Turkish.
I have heard that the slavic languages are, in fact, particularly
difficult for even native children to learn, requiring an extra year
before children have to proficiency to enter public schools. I can
testify as to the enormous difficulty of Russian/Polish nouns -- there
are many different nominal inflexions and declensional categories! I
found Latin and Greek nouns much simpler in contrast.
-michael
Lee Gold
realized that kanajo wasn't some esoteric type of kana but a misspelling
of kanOjo (meaning "she").
That makes "Nihonjin no kanajo ga iru mo" probably mean "I once had
a Japanese lady."
Problems (as analyzed after some desultory study of Japanese for ten years)
Kanojo is a pronoun, not a noun -- and so doesn't take adjectival
constructions.
Mo- goes at the start of a sentence, not the end. The verb (in
polite form goes at the end.
Ga is an emphatic particle.
Your verb is present form, not past.
I'd write that sentence as "Mo- nihonjin no musume wa imashita."
>Ima watashi no kanajo wa nihon ni modotte, juku o oshiete iru. Kanajo
>wa mochiron nihonjin desu. Kanajo wa sugu america ni kaette kuru to
>omoimasu.
This group seems to mean, "Now my lady has returned to Japan; I am studying
at a private school. She was certainly Japanese. I think she will someday
return to America."
Problems (besides those cited above)
You seem to be confusing modoru (to return) and kaeru (to go back
to one's proper place, to go home).
You seem to be confusing the progressive (e.g. I am teaching) with
the passive (e.g. I am being taught). Combined with a misuse of -o, this
means you said you were teaching a school instead of learning AT a school.
I'd rewrite that group as "Ima kono musume wa nihon ni kaete ga
juku ni naraimashita....Sugu ni kanajo wa amerika ni modotte to omoimasu."
Comments from native speakers would be greatly appreciated.
--Lee Gold
d...@ucla-cs.uucp
>>Ima watashi no kanajo wa nihon ni modotte, juku o oshiete iru. Kanajo
>>wa mochiron nihonjin desu. Kanajo wa sugu america ni kaette kuru to
>>omoimasu.
>
>This group seems to mean, "Now my lady has returned to Japan; I am studying
>at a private school. She was certainly Japanese. I think she will someday
>return to America."
No, I think he means that his girlfriend is teaching at a private school.
There's something weird going on here. I, a native speaker of English, knew
almost immediately what he was saying when he said
>(nihonjin no kanajo ga iru mo)
despite the errors, while a native speaker of Japanese didn't understand it.
Perhaps the context helped -- remember, he was explaining why he was
studying Japanese:
> Whats my execuse ? Two years in Japan (knew nothing before I went).
> (nihonjin no kanajo ga iru mo.)
Now, why did I recognize "kanajo" as a mistransliteration of "kanojo", while
a native speaker did not? And how come despite the syntactic error of his
using a pronoun instead of a noun, I keyed on the semantic essence, "female",
and understood what he meant, while a Japanese was confused?
Would a native English speaker be confused by the following written exchange,
or would s/he understand it despite the errors?
Q: So why are you studying English, Taroo?
A: I lived two years in America. (too, there is an American she.)
[This is a written exchange, so Taroo's not raising his little finger. :-) ]
Someone postulated that English speakers understand malformed English because
there are so many English speakers for whom English is not their native
language. Is there some way that this linguistic "forgiveness" carries over
to English speakers using other languages, then?
Lee Gold
for easy languages. I think this is like trying to establish criteria
for "transparent" computer languages. A language seems easy (or transparent)
if it's like the one you first learned.
As I undertand it, there IS a pattern that all creole languages (languages
formed by a cross between two different languages) tend to fall into. You
could probably claim this pattern was objectively easy for human beings.
I forget what the creole pattern is though. Perhaps someone out there
remembers. In any case, the logically unnecessary features Ellis mentions
(gender, etc.) are part of the necessary redundancy of a spoken language.
English's pattern of adding -s to the third person singular is a redundant
pattern too. One of my Linguistics professors claimed that ALL languages
ended up having the same degree of redundancy; apparently humans need it
to decode voice input.
Anyway, Ellis seems to be confusing spoken and written English in a number
of his points. Written English indeed uses a standard -s for most of its
plurals. Spoken English, however, uses -s, -z, or -uz (schwa z) for
plurals, depending on the word. (The plural of "cat" is "cats"; the plural
of "form" is "formz"; the plural of "dish" is "dishuz".)
English nouns are divided (in a distinction no native speaer ever notices,
but poor foreigners have to learn) into mass nouns and count nouns.
Mass nouns are counted with counters; count nouns are counted with
numbers. Dish, glass, computer are count nouns. However, you don't
count one bread, two breads, three breads. You count bread (or toast) with
slices, milk with glasses, scissors (and shoes) with pairs, etc.
One aspect of English that those whose native langauge lacks it find VERY
hard to learn is the article. When does a noun take no article, the
definite article (the), or the indefinite article (a)?
I never got around to taking Teaching English as a Second Language or I
could probably write a book on the difficulties of English, both spoken
and written, instead of merely the few paragraphs above.
English spelling is NOT abominable. It was, of course, rather more phonetic
when it was set, back in the days that the distinction between the open
and closed e had not disappeared and so was preserved by spelling one
"ie" or "ee" and the other as "ea" (or so claimed my Linguistic professors).
However, English is best regarded as a morphonetically spelled languaged.
Its spelling shows you the origin of a word and its relation to other words.
For instance, "sign" and "signify" are related in spelling though totally
unrelated in pronunciation.
Moreover, consider the horror of an English spelled phonetically.
According to whose pronunciation? British (Oxcam? Yorkshire? Devon?),
American (Virginian? Bostonian? Californian?), Australian? I had an
Australian friend phone me once to tell me (seemingly) that he wouldn't be
writing me for awhile because the mile was on strike. I asked how the
kilometer was working, then realized he meant the mailmen were striking.
I shudder at the thought of reading letters written in phonetic
Australian.
--Lee Gold
Neal D. McBurnett
There are certainly many ways of counting, but I think it is closer
to 12 vowels and 8 diphthongs, at least with my accent:
bean, bin, Ben, ban, bun, barn, Bonn, born, burn, boon, good, banana
say, no, fly, how, fear, care, poor.
At some Esperanto conferences in Germany and Hungary last summer, I had
very little difficulty with the variations in Esperanto accent among
speakers from, e.g., France, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, and China.
The letter with the most variation was "r".
I had much more difficulty with the variation in English accent
among English speakers from England, Austrialia and the southern US.
I attribute this mostly to the relative simplicity of the vowel system in
Esperanto (which has the same five vowels as Spanish, Serbo-Croatian,
Japanese, and many other languages).
-Neal McBurnett, ihnp4!druny!neal
Col. G. L. Sicherman
> that again"] Invariably, they either paused and then tried to say what they
> just said in English, or they said it in an entirely different way. I varied
> it by sometimes asking people to repeat in the same words, or more slowly,
> etc., but no one *ever* did. Why is this? A friend has pointed out that
> Americans seem to do this, too (Amer.: "You turn right at the signal, then
> go straight for five blocks." For.: "Could you repeat that, please?"
> Amer.: "Sure. Go down to the light and turn right; go five blocks and you're
> there.").
Repeating something in the same words for mnemonic purposes is a tool of
oral-aural cultures. The U.S. doesn't qualify! Neither, I suspect, does
Japan.
Paraphrase is more popular in writing-cultures. If you didn't understand
it one way, maybe you'll understand it another. Books and Americans don't
say the same thing twice.
--
Col. G. L. Sicherman
UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel
CS: colonel@buffalo-cs
BI: csdsicher@sunyabva
Michael Ellis
>In any case, the logically unnecessary features Ellis mentions
>(gender, etc.) are part of the necessary redundancy of a spoken language.
>English's pattern of adding -s to the third person singular is a redundant
>pattern too.
However, this feature is totally regular (modulo modal auxiliaries; even
3s of to be => `iS', probably the source of 3s -S, BTW). If this be a
difficult qulaity of English, it is a particularly easy one to learn,
alternating as it does between `cat meowS' and `catS meow'..
>Anyway, Ellis seems to be confusing spoken and written English in a number
>of his points. Written English indeed uses a standard -s for most of its
>plurals. Spoken English, however, uses -s, -z, or -uz (schwa z) for
>plurals, depending on the word. (The plural of "cat" is "cats"; the plural
>of "form" is "formz"; the plural of "dish" is "dishuz".)
Phonetically, English plurals are easer to form than written:
X => X + 0z / X = sybilant {s, z, sh, zh, ch, j}
=> X + s / X = unvoiced {p, f, t, th, k}
=> X + z / otherwise
Wherever -s is the proper ending, this rule admits practically no
exceptions, and recurs for, plurals, 3rd person singular verbs and
nominal possessives.
Spoken English is clearly more regular than written, especially
regarding the rules for verbal inflections -- why is `exitting/exitted'
incorrect vs `subitting/submitted'? The phonetics is easy, the
orthography difficult..
>English nouns are divided (in a distinction no native speaer ever notices,
>but poor foreigners have to learn) into mass nouns and count nouns.
>Mass nouns are counted with counters; count nouns are counted with
>numbers. Dish, glass, computer are count nouns. However, you don't
>count one bread, two breads, three breads. You count bread (or toast) with
>slices, milk with glasses, scissors (and shoes) with pairs, etc.
>One aspect of English that those whose native langauge lacks it find VERY
>hard to learn is the article. When does a noun take no article, the
>definite article (the), or the indefinite article (a)?
This difference (definite vs. indefinite) is not common to all
languages, but it is nonetheless common enough that I'd hesitate to call
it `unusual'. And it is deeper than just mass nouns vs count nouns;
given our fixedness on singular vs plural, we treat plurals somewhat
like (singular) nouns of quality or actions {I like (cats, scissors, salt,
silliness)}.
There are many other features in common among those cases
where we'd say `an X' vs `the X', and they tend to be as categorizable
as cases where most languages would disallow or allow the introduction
of a new referent or compel anaphoric pronoun reference (eg: "There
goes (John, A person). Isn't (he, THE person) quite visible?").
Regardless of the rules of English regarding article usage, I believe
that they are quite organized according to semantics. Admittedly, English
rules are different from, say, French (which prefers definite articles
before abstract nouns, for instance, where we do not).
>I never got around to taking Teaching English as a Second Language or I
>could probably write a book on the difficulties of English, both spoken
>and written, instead of merely the few paragraphs above.
>
>English spelling is NOT abominable. It was, of course, rather more phonetic
>when it was set, back in the days that the distinction between the open
>and closed e had not disappeared and so was preserved by spelling one
>"ie" or "ee" and the other as "ea" (or so claimed my Linguistic professors).
OK. It is our pronunciation that is insane. Repeat after me..
cause COW - seh
preserve preh - SAIR - veh
annihilate ah - NEE - he - LAH - teh
etcetera et - KEH - teh - ra
- michael MEE - kha - el
Lee Gold
"Mo ichi-do itte kudaisai" (please say that one more time) is somewhat
rude in Japanese. As in English, the polite request form is a negative
question ("kudasaimasen-ka"). Of course, asking things politely in
Japanese is complicated by the fact that one answers logically.
So "O-cha wa nomimasenka" (Won't you drink some tea) is answered
"Iie, nomimasu" (No, I will drink)
or "Hai, nomimasen" (Yes, I won't drink).
--Lee Gold
mark edwards
>
>a Japanese lady."
>
>Problems (as analyzed after some desultory study of Japanese for ten years)
> Kanojo is a pronoun, not a noun -- and so doesn't take adjectival
>constructions.
> Mo- goes at the start of a sentence, not the end. The verb (in
>polite form goes at the end.
> Ga is an emphatic particle.
> Your verb is present form, not past.
>I'd write that sentence as "Mo- nihonjin no musume wa imashita."
First of all please don't put words in my mouth. The only error as
I see it is "kanajo" (Should be kanojo). I showed the romanji sentence
to a Japanese native and she looked at it uncomprendingly. Then I read
it to her, the light went on.
The Japanese often add things at the end of spoken sentence, and
since my spoken is much better than my written, it comes across that
way. As for the plain verb, I learned to speak in Aomoriken or hicktown
Japan.
>
>>Ima watashi no kanajo wa nihon ni modotte, juku o oshiete iru. Kanajo
>>wa mochiron nihonjin desu. Kanajo wa sugu america ni kaette kuru to
>>omoimasu.
>
>This group seems to mean, "Now my lady has returned to Japan; I am studying
>at a private school. She was certainly Japanese. I think she will someday
>return to America."
>
> Problems (besides those cited above)
> You seem to be confusing modoru (to return) and kaeru (to go back
>to one's proper place, to go home).
> You seem to be confusing the progressive (e.g. I am teaching) with
>the passive (e.g. I am being taught). Combined with a misuse of -o, this
>means you said you were teaching a school instead of learning AT a school.
>
>I'd rewrite that group as "Ima kono musume wa nihon ni kaete ga
>juku ni naraimashita....Sugu ni kanajo wa amerika ni modotte to omoimasu."
Again you are putting words in my mouth. I know the correct use of kaeru
and modoru. If you think of them in my frame of mind, her real home is
here, thus kaeru. And she has temporarily returned to Japan. Oshiete iru
means oshiete iru. She has a teaching license and is teaching juku.
================================================================
But since I do not always spell english correctly or utter well formed
english sentences, is it possible to do the same in another language?
Can I sue my grade school teachers and school for lack of a good English
education ??? I'd make millions.
mark
d...@ucla-cs.uucp
>
>rude in Japanese.
Well, yes and no. With a softer tone of voice and an appropriately plaintive
facial expression (sorry I can't demonstrate), I think it's fine. For me.
Of course, since you're a woman, you're right, the "kudasaimasen-ka" phrasing
would be better. For you. Especially if talking to a man.
Which reminds me to warn men who learn Japanese from a woman (be she a teacher
or a girlfriend ("ne-jibiki" [sleeping dictionary] as Seward notes)): Get
away from the habit of always using the polite forms, or you'll sound
effeminate. Learn when the polite forms are necessary, and when they're not.
Also, watch out for the feminine sentence-ending particles.
Michael Ellis
>> English has 7 vowels and 7 diphthongs
>
>There are certainly many ways of counting, but I think it is closer
>to 12 vowels and 8 diphthongs, at least with my accent:
> bean, bin, Ben, ban, bun, barn, Bonn, born, burn, boon, good, banana
> say, no, fly, how, fear, care, poor.
There are indeed many ways of counting. I'd arrange those words
according to their vowels as below:
pure +y +w +r
i bin bean - *beer
e Ben say - care
ae ban - how -
aa bun - - (burn)
ao +bond fly - barn
o +pawn *boy no born
u good - boon poor
Notes:
(+) `Bonn', as a German name, is pronounced in a variety of ways,
sometimes more like `pawn', other times more like `bond'. These
are clearly two different phonemes in most English speech I hear.
Some minimal pairs: tot/taut, bottom/bought'em, are/or, doll/tall
(*) `boy' and `beer' seem to be omitted in your list.
(1) Due to ascii lossage, the digraphs /ae,aa,ao/ are employed here
to represent `pure' vocalic sounds in most english I have heard.
(2) /ur/ (usually spelled `oor') has dubious ontological status,
and is often (usually?) indistinguishable from /or/. This confusion
could be brain damage on my part.
(3) The sounds /iy,uw,aar/ (bean,boon,burn) are arguably `pure long'
vowels. There is no question that, if they are considered to be
compound sounds, the preceding vowel is modified considerably
from its pure sound.
In most american english dialects (especially that heard on TV),
postvocalic /r/ (as in barn, care..) is a retroflex glide that is quite
distinct from the preceding vowel. Should I count vowel + /r/ as
a diphthong? If so, why stop there? Why not also count vowel + /l/
as well? Not to mention vowel + /n,m,z,k.../?
Anyway, if I exclude the r-compunds, I count a total of 7 vowels
and 7 diphthongs, excluding unaccented schwa(s).
If /iy,uw/ are pure vowels, the total is 9+5; adding /aar/ as pure
and 5 r-compounds, the total is 10+10, a sum which equals your 20.
British english and certain eastern american dialects differ from the
above scheme somewhat, since the final-r's either form schwa-diphthongs,
or result in compensatory vowel lengthening (I have heard that this is a
later development that occurred after the colonial period). There is
also considerable divergence in the vowels of (pawn,pond,pan/path) from
the dialects I am familiar with.
I suspect that my /ar,or/ => /a:,o:/ in your speech (whereas /ir,ur,er/
=> /i0,u0,e0/ (where /0/ represents `a' in sofa)). This would transfer
two more r-compounds into the pure category, thus redistributing 10+10
=> 12+8, in perfect agreement with your count. Do you have a british or
east-coast american accent?
-michael
thomas breuel
> Japanese is complicated by the fact that one answers logically.
>
> So "O-cha wa nomimasenka" (Won't you drink some tea) is answered
> "Iie, nomimasu" (No, I will drink)
> or "Hai, nomimasen" (Yes, I won't drink).
For polite questions this is, I believe, not true. See the following
quote, which agrees with what we have been taught in class:
"As shown in example (2) above, 'iie' used as a response to a
negative question usually corresponds to 'yes'. Thre are
some cases, however, where 'iie' used as a response to a negative
question corresponds to English 'no'.
(3) A: Genki-soo ni natta ja arimasen ka.
You are looking much better, aren't you.
B: Iie, mada dame na n desu.
No, I'm not well yet.
The above question, though negative in form, is actually
affirmative in spirit. What the question really means is
'You're looking much better, and that's great!' Speaker
'B' therefore says 'iie' to show disagreement."
[Quoted from 'Japanese Words and Their Uses', by Akira Miura]
Thomas.
Alex Colvin
Kay Dekker
>To be serious. I think it helps when the script is familiar.
>So for you to learn to read spanish is simpler than to read japanese
>(or russian).
Yes, but it's even easier to learn Dutch if you're English (as I know; my
father's Dutch) and vice versa, as my cousins in the Netherlands tell me;
both being descended from the same Low German. Frisian seems to be even
closer to English.
What did/do you find hardest about learning English? Having learnt (alas!
all too briefly) a couple of languages with at least a reasonably regular
grammatical structure (Latin & Greek), I'd imagine that English grammar
(such as it is) would be quite hard to absorb.
Kay.
--
This .signature void where prohibited by law
...ukc!warwick!kay
michael b maxwell
>>>Seriously. The English language, which is considered one of the easiest
>>>languages in the world... - Mike Maxwell
>>Says who??? Seriously, how can you quantify that? By making studies of
>>lots of native speakers of languages X1, X2, X3... trying to learn
>>languages Y1, Y2, Y3...English, where {X1, X2, X3...Y1, Y2, Y3...English}
>>are all unrelated languages? I doubt whether anyone has ever done that.
>>(Same comment for those who say, as I have often heard said, that English
>>is a very hard language.) - Thomas Breuel
assume) the first is Breuel's!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
> I think there are many criteria by which a language can be judged `easy'
> or `difficult' to learn. Is the written representation logical? If
> there are inflections, are there a large number of inflectional
> categories or only a few? Are there many exceptions? Does the language
> carry `excess baggage', like grammatical gender, or nominal classifiers?
> Are logical relations transparently represented in the form of the
> language?
>
> Artificial languages, like Loglan or Esperanto, for example, are
> genuinely `easy' languages according to all of the criteria above,
> although no doubt they seem more natural to europeans than they
> would to anyone else.
German, Slavic, Gaelic, Thai, Turkish, Russian, Polish, Latin, and Greek each
present different difficulties wrt writing, pronunciation, irregularities,
multiple conjugations and declensions, etc.]
You're proving what I'm saying! Each language has its own peculiarities (and
I fear I'm proving how peculiar English spelling is :-). Some of those
pecularities may be problems for native speakers of some languages (e.g.
tone), but not for speakers of others. That's why I said any study hoping to
prove that language X was more difficult (for adult learners, which was what
the original posting was about) than language Y would have to take large
numbers of native speakers of languages A,B,C... and teach them X and Y under
controlled conditions. I seriously doubt whether this has ever been done.
Furthermore, who can say whether irregular verbs are more of a problem for
native speakers of language A learning language X than unusual syntax?
I find syntax and phonology easy in second language learning,
irregularities more difficult, and vocabulary a drag. Other native speakers
of English have different easy/hard ratings. At best you might come up with a
statistical results: 43% of the speakers of A found X harder than Y, 37% found
Y harder than X, and the rest found both equally hard. And that assumes
you can come up with some kind of criteria for judging language acquisition
that is equitable for both X and Y (not an easy task).
As for such excess baggage as grammatical gender, one might make a case for
the usefulness of such "baggage"--e.g. in disambiguating antecedents of
pronouns, etc. You might say that this has no relationship to the difficulty
of learning the language, and you might be right, but maybe not... What about
the redundancy such "excesses" provide?
And of course man-made languages are supposed to be easier, but as you say,
this is likely to be true only for speakers of languages cognate to the
native language(s) of the designers of the artificial language.
A different question, and one you allude to, is the ease of first learning.
Here again, I fear that most evidence for the relative difficulty of learning
language X is anecdotal. What would be meant by the claim that children
learn language X faster than children learning language Y? That they learn
vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, semantics, ...? They probably progress
faster in language X in one area, and slower in another. How does that give
you an index of accomplishment? My three-year old son handles relative
clauses quite well in English, but insists that the first person singular
nominative pronoun is "my." ("My wanna go to the store that my went to
yesterday!") A mystery: can we really say that relative clauses are easier
in English than getting case right on the subject pronoun? It's certainly
more complex! Of course, we're wired to get syntax right... BTW, one of the
early studies of language acquisition in older children was done by Carol
Chomsky in the early '60s (yes, Noam's wife). And no, I don't believe she did
any comparisons with children learning other languages; but you might be
surprised what they didn't know...
Try m/c ACF6
>English is definitely the easiest language. I'm surprised that this
>isn't obvious to everyone; it's simply incontestable that English is
>the only language which is perfectly suited to typewriter keyboards.
>
>As for spoken language, it has been proven that English is the easiest
>language because all other languages are derived from it. This was
>
>Donn Seeley University of Utah CS Dept do...@utah-cs.arpa
>40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W (801) 581-5668 decvax!utah-cs!donn
I am surprised to find that people think that English is the
easiest language to learn. I guess it is because that is what is spoken
in the US and children are always listening to it.
Also most European Languages are derived from English and have
a large number of words from common roots. Even many Esparanto words seem
to be having European roots.
However, I beleive that Indians have extraordinary
difficulty in learning English if they are not taught it from childhood.
It is because of the extremely non phonetic nature of English whereas
most Indian Languages are phonetic in nature.
When we start learning and start with the simple words,
we immediately get confused on thef pronounciation of words like
<put,but>,<no,know>,<now,know>...
Mukul Agrawal
agrawal@csd2
J.HALLE
English may have infiltrated in Europe, but it is really more the other way
around. Spoken English is primarily of Germanic origin, and the Germanic
languages in Europe are older. English also has roots in the Romance
languages, but these occurred after 1066. And much of Europe speaks languages
that are of yet other origins. In fact, the only European country that speaks
a language that can even remotely be said to have been derived from English
is Great Brittain.
Trevor J. Smedley
>>language because all other languages are derived from it.
> Also most European Languages are derived from English and have
>a large number of words from common roots.
All other languages? Most European languages?
"All other languages" is simply false. Chinese, Russian, Finnish and
Hungarian certainly are not derived from English.
As for "Most European languages", I am no expert, but I was under the
impression that there were no languages *derived* from English, except,
perhaps, Esperanto to a certain extent. I would find it very hard to
believe that any one of German, French or Italian was derived from
English. They all have some roots in common, but to say that any one
is derived from any other seems rather unlikely.
In any case, this would not be an argument for English being the
easiest language. Using this argument, you would have to say that
Latin is easier than Italian, or that Icelandic is the easiest of the
Scandinavian languages, and I doubt that anyone would agree with that.
If you said that English was easy for many people because it takes
things from a wide variety of languages and language types, well, I
might agree with that.
Trevor J. Smedley University of Waterloo
{decvax,allegra,ihnp4,utzoo}!watmum!tjsmedley
Karl Tombre
>>isn't obvious to everyone; it's simply incontestable that English is
>>the only language which is perfectly suited to typewriter keyboards.
???? I really hope you are joking! Of course english is the only language
perfectly suited to ENGLISH typewriter keyboards!!!
>>As for spoken language, it has been proven that English is the easiest
>>language because all other languages are derived from it.
Again I wonder! This must be a joke! English is a very mixed language
derived from german, latin, french, scandinavian and saxon roots!!!
> Also most European Languages are derived from English and have
>a large number of words from common roots.
!!!??? Well sincerely, gentlemen, tell me, am I too stupid to understand a
joke? It seems to me that both of you are serious??? OK, there are common
roots in many european languages, but those roots are not english!!!
English language has many origins. Consider those examples:
- words like "table", "observation", "principle" and so on have latin or even
french roots.
- words like "room", "follow" ... are more typically german
- other words have specifically scandinavian origins: "husband", "town",
"garden" ...
This is obviously due to many historical reasons (the history of England
through all centuries, also before America was (re)discovered by Columbus!
--
--- Karl Tombre @ CRIN (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Nancy)
UUCP: ...!vmucnam!crin!tombre or ...!inria!crin!tombre
COSAC: crin/tombre
POST: Karl Tombre, CRIN, B.P. 239, 54506 VANDOEUVRE CEDEX, France
Les plus desesperes sont les chants les plus beaux,
Et j'en sais d'immortels qui sont de purs sanglots.
Alfred de Musset.
Don Steiny
> >>As for spoken language, it has been proven that English is the easiest
> >>language because all other languages are derived from it.
> ^^^
> > Also most European Languages are derived from English and have
> >a large number of words from common roots.
>
> All other languages? Most European languages?
>
> "All other languages" is simply false. Chinese, Russian, Finnish and
> Hungarian certainly are not derived from English.
>
The original posting was a joke about transformational grammar and
the author stated that it was a joke in the posting. Someone took
him seriously and now more people are.
The original posting joked that all languages were derived
from English because Noam Chomsky did his original work on TG on
English and postualted a structure (S => NP VP) for all languages.
Some papers (Pullum) have shown that this is not universal. The
author of the original posting is a competent linguist and was
commenting on chauvinism, not suggesting that all languages
were derived from English.
--
scc!steiny
Don Steiny @ Don Steiny Software
109 Torrey Pine Terrace
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
(408) 425-0382
Alex Colvin
> >>language because all other languages are derived from it.
Please! This is clearly a :-)
Mitchell Marks
As Don Steiny points out, those familiar with the generative grammar scene
might well conclude that all languages derive from English, or at least
that Universal Grammar _resembles_ English grammar. Now an important news
flash: a group of Native American languages have now been shown to be
genetically related to the Indo European family, on classic philological
grounds. ---
The English word for `house made out of ice' is "igloo".
And the Eskimo word for the same thing is 'illu'.
(Using conventional orthography in both cases. The "ll" is an
unvoiced lateral.)
The English word for `small boat made of animal skins stretched over a
structural frame of local materials' is "kayak".
And the Eskimo word for the same thing is "kayak" or "kayaq".
This discovery should be credited to Jerry Sadock, who also has developed
the following radical simplification of Government and Binding theory:
'Phrase structure' component: w*
(i.e., any number of words).
Transformation: move-alpha
(as in usual GB)
Surface filter: the gamma criterion
where the gamma criterion filters out all sentences except those grammatical
in English.
A question from the audience asked Sadock to explain, under his theory,
why "Jean a vu Marie" was considered an acceptable sentence (in French).
He pointed out that people in France have slightly different phonological
adjustment rules, and the example sentence passes the gamma criterion
because "John has viewed Mary" is a grammatical sentence of English.
--
-- Mitch Marks @ UChicago
...ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!mmar
Michael Ellis
>>>language because all other languages are derived from it.
> ^^^
>> Also most European Languages are derived from English and have
>>a large number of words from common roots.
>
All languages REALLY come from Phrygian. This was proved long ago
when children raised by tongueless parents were observed to cry
bekos!
..as the word for bread.
-michael
Bill Wyatt
> >>language because all other languages are derived from it.
[ mass quantities of flames from various authors about this statement ]
Come on now! Isn't there *anyone* out there who has a sense of humor? Did
Donn Seeley have to bracket his entire article in smiley faces to prevent
people from taking this seriously?
--
Bill UUCP: {seismo|ihnp4|cmcl2}!harvard!talcott!cfa!wyatt
Wyatt ARPA: wyatt%cfa....@harvard.HARVARD.EDU
chri...@kuling.uucp
References: <7...@druhi.UUCP> <355...@csd2.UUCP> <1...@crin.UUCP>
Reply-To: chri...@kuling.UUCP (Christer Johansson)
Followup-To: net.nlang
Organization: (Studying CS at the) University of Uppsala, Sweden
Keywords:
In article <1...@crin.UUCP> of Sat, 15-Feb-86 04:24:49 GMT
tom...@crin.UUCP (Karl Tombre) writes:
> OK, there are common
>roots in many european languages,
>
>- other words have specifically scandinavian origins: "husband", "town",
> "garden" ...
What is the origin of "town"? The origins of 'husband' and 'garden' are obvious
(at least if you speak a scandinavian language.)
--
SMail: Christer Johansson UUCP: {seismo,seismo!mcvax}!enea!kuling!christer OR
Sernandersv. 9:136 chri...@kuling.UUCP
S-752 63 Uppsala Phone: Int. +46 - 18 46 31 54
SWEDEN Nat. 018 - 46 31 54
Jeffrey Goldberg
> I hope that this nonsense does not continue to propogate.
>The original posting was a joke about transformational grammar and
>the author stated that it was a joke in the posting. Someone took
>him seriously and now more people are.
>
> The original posting joked that all languages were derived
>from English because Noam Chomsky did his original work on TG on
>English and postualted a structure (S => NP VP) for all languages.
>Some papers (Pullum) have shown that this is not universal. The
>author of the original posting is a competent linguist and was
>commenting on chauvinism, not suggesting that all languages
>were derived from English.
>
>--
>scc!steiny
>Don Steiny @ Don Steiny Software
>109 Torrey Pine Terrace
>Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
>(408) 425-0382
There was a later posting that didn't look like a joke.
Anyway, it is is clear that the "Universal Base Hypothesis" has been
rejected as either silly or having no consequence (utterly
unfalsifyable), and while this is the opinion that is expressed by
Pullum he is not to be given the credit for showing the problems with
the UBH. Peters and Rithie (1969) ["A note on the UBH" J of Ling, 5]
should be given the credit. Notice that 1969 was a long time ago, and
generative linguistics may have grown up a little bit since then.
Nonetheless, there is a joke.
For the sake of the joke please assume that 1 is a prime number.
A man who is ignorent of such things has heard the conjecture that all
odd numbers are prime. He goes and asks a mathematician if this is
true. To which she responds, "Well, one is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is
prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime. The conjecture is proved false by
counterexample."
Our hero isn't satisfied because he knows that mathematicians have
their heads in the clouds and aren't tied down to reality. So he asks
the physical chemist who has to actually do lots of calculations. The
chemist says, "One is prime, three is prime, five is prime, seven is
prime, nine is uh not prime, eleven is prime, thirteen is prime. Yes,
they are all prime. We just have some experimental error."
[The joke has an engineer and a computer programmer part, but it is too
long so I will get on with the point.]
Finally, after getting conflicting and inconclusive results from all
of the above he goes to the genertive linguist. (He has learned that
they get pretty mathematical at times. After all, they use lots of
alphas and betas, and they don't know Greek.) So he says to the
linguist, "I have heard that all odd numbers are prime. Is this true?"
The linguist thinks for a moment and says, "Well, one is prime. Yes,
it must be a universal!"
I would have posted this to net.jokes, but I don't think that it would
have been sufficiently appreciated.
--
/*
** Jeff Goldberg (best reached at GOLD...@SU-CSLI.ARPA)
*/
MKR
Not only that, but I think English should be the standard language
for the whole world because the Bible is written in English.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Please! This is clearly a :-) <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
--MKR
MKR
I think the problem here (that Bill Wyatt and others who expressed
similar sentiments are overlooking) is that there really *are* people who
have the most *bizarre* and *asinine* opinions and beliefs. (If you
don't believe me - try reading some of Ted Holden's postings in net.origins)
Without knowing someone personally, it is very difficult to tell if he or
she is joking or merely an idiot.
--MKR
Kim Fabricius Storm
>>- other words have specifically scandinavian origins: "husband", "town",
>> "garden" ...
>What is the origin of "town"? The origins of 'husband' and 'garden' are obvious
>(at least if you speak a scandinavian language.)
"Town" comes from the old scandinavian 'tun' which meant an area enclosed
with a fence, or a farmyard. It exists in danish town names like Tune and
Galten (from Galtatun: Galt = hog (pig) + tun = fence, i.e. a pigsty).
------------------
Kim F. Storm, Inst of Datalogy(=CS), U of Copenhagen
UUCP: mcvax!diku!storm, <st...@diku.UUCP>
Karl Tombre
>tom...@crin.UUCP (Karl Tombre) writes:
>
>> OK, there are common
>>roots in many european languages,
>>
>>- other words have specifically scandinavian origins: "husband", "town",
>> "garden" ...
>
>What is the origin of "town"? The origins of 'husband' and 'garden' are obvious
>(at least if you speak a scandinavian language.)
Well town comes from "tun" I believe (as in gaardstun)
And for those who don't speak a scandinavian language:
husband <-- hus-bonde (~~ the master in the house)
garden <-- gard (farm, piece of land)
Lenge leve Skandinavia!
Cheers,
lam...@boring.uucp
> "garden" ...
According to the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, garden comes from
Old Northern French gardin, a variant of jardin, which might come from a
hypothetical Romanic form *gardino derived from a hypothetical
(reconstructed) Common Germanic word *gardaz, *gardon, whence also
Scandinavian gard, Dutch gaarde, German Garten and English yard. It is
cognate to Russian gorod and -grad in Petrograd. Dutch gaarde is somewhat
obsolete, surviving in poetry and in the words gaardenier (gardener),
boomgaard (orchard < ort-geard) and wijngaard (vinyard).
According to the same source, town comes from Common Germanic (except
Gothic) *tunaz, *tunam, whence also Norse tun, Dutch tuin and German Zaun.
A cognate Celtic dun- survives in some town names: Autun, Leyden.
The original meaning was the same as garden: enclosed land. Note that
Dutch tuin still has this meaning: the normal translation of garden is
tuin. German Zaun now means the fence or hedge enclosing the garden.
--
Lambert Meertens
...!{seismo,okstate,garfield,decvax,philabs}!lam...@mcvax.UUCP
CWI (Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science), Amsterdam