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#271
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 23:24:25 +0200, Dave Frightens Me
wrote: On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 18:05:53 +0200, B wrote: On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 19:05:13 +0200, Dave Frightens Me wrote: In much of London the 't' is completely omitted! It's still there, it's just a different "stop", probably a glottal stop. "Goat" isn't pronounced the same as "go", for example. That's about right. They usually just give it a throatal halt (if you know what I mean). Yep, that sounds like a glottal stop. So you can't say the "t" is not pronounced, it's just pronounced differently. -- Barbara Vaughan My email address is my first initial followed by my surname at libero dot it I answer travel questions only in the newsgroup |
#272
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 08:12:49 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote: Stephen Dailey writes: Spanish is almost completely 100% phonetic; there are very few cases where a sound can be represented by more than one letter ('ch,' 'll', and 'rr' can be considered single letters for this purpose). I get it: If there are any inconsistencies, just use the "consider these a single letter" argument. With that technique, every language is 100% phonetic. However, there are no inconsistencies in this case. "ch", "ll" and "rr" are always pronounced the same way. Linguistically, they are phonemes that are represented by double letters because the Roman alphabet doesn't have enough letters to represent all the phonemes in the language. The Italian "gl" and "gn" are other examples. The "gn" is the same phoneme that is represented in Spanish by n-tilda. -- Barbara Vaughan My email address is my first initial followed by my surname at libero dot it I answer travel questions only in the newsgroup |
#273
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On 28/08/06 21:15, in article ,
"Hatunen" wrote: Black English is substandard. No more "substandard" than any other dialect. And it is not classed substandard by linguists. It is socially substandard. But linguistically it has its own rules ` see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African...acular_English What is disturbing to standard English speakers are grammatical errors like in "He goin" where the "is" is dropped out. Some of the grammatical features of Black English showed up in the speech of poor southern Whites years ago. But verb drop out is common enough if "normal" speech He is going to the store" contracted to He's goin to the store" with the "s" sufficiently slurred to come out "He goin" and maybe drop of of the "to "and the "the", so that said quickly might become "he goin de store". One finds the same verbal contraction in all languages. Years ago I noticed an educated French colleague saying "sil plait" for "s'il vous plait" to a café waiter. In both examples the basic information is still there after the drop out so represents an economy of speech. |
#274
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Dave Frightens Me wrote:
Do they reply with verb "fare" and with the noun "cosa" ? :-) 'Fare' is easy, coz it's basically the same as do/make. Just to start, you've spotted that "fare" covers both "do" and "make", but is also commonly used as a flat synonym for many other words ... one of the favourite game of teachers in school is (was?) to compel the pupils to use the proper synonym ... And what about cosa, but also coso, cosina, cosino and even cosare ? -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- is a newsreading account used by more persons to avoid unwanted spam. Any mail returning to this address will be rejected. Users can disclose their e-mail address in the article if they wish so. |
#275
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Mxsmanic wrote:
I get it: If there are any inconsistencies, just use the "consider these a single letter" argument. With that technique, every language is 100% phonetic. Not true. A convention is such if applied systematically. E.g. the "h" or "i" in groups ch gh /k/ /g/ or ci ce /tSi/ /tSe/ in italian is essentially working like a diacritic. The digrams used in spanish, italian and portuguese to indicate the same sound are other examples (n-tilde gn and nh, ll gl and lh). In this respect italian is less consistent because some words of greek origin (gnosticisimo, glia) do not respect the convention (pronounce g-n and g-l). Some other languages even use compound groups of more letters. German systematically uses tsch for /tS/ and dsch for /dZ/, the latter being used only in foreign words. Russian uses d-zh for the same (where zh is however a single letter in cyrillic). Next to that there are rules used systematically only in partial context. The italian mute h (when not used in digrams) in verbal forms ho ha hanno is an example. The russian genitive termination in "-ogo" pronounced "-ovo" is another (so systematical to be applied etimologically to a word like "segodnja", today, literally "of this day" genitive). But a group like "ea" or "gh" in English can have many unpredictable pronounciations. I can write a lot of words of which I know the meaning but which I've never heard, and therefore I am unsure of how they are pronounced. In part this occurs in languages which preserve an etimologic spelling, like English, French, Irish. It even occurs in some dialects (one of the possible spelling of Milanese dialect is mimicked on French and there is a surprising difference between written and spoken). I do not know enough French to be sure however the alterations are systematic, while they definitely aren't for English. I would be curious to know if they are systematic for Irish (Padraig around ?). I had a look to the "Teach yourself Irish" book and was intimidated by the vowel groups ... and the absence of an IPA transcription. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- is a newsreading account used by more persons to avoid unwanted spam. Any mail returning to this address will be rejected. Users can disclose their e-mail address in the article if they wish so. |
#276
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 10:17:56 +0200, Giovanni Drogo
wrote: On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Dave Frightens Me wrote: Do they reply with verb "fare" and with the noun "cosa" ? :-) 'Fare' is easy, coz it's basically the same as do/make. Just to start, you've spotted that "fare" covers both "do" and "make", but is also commonly used as a flat synonym for many other words ... one of the favourite game of teachers in school is (was?) to compel the pupils to use the proper synonym ... And what about cosa, but also coso, cosina, cosino and even cosare ? I've never heard of the last four, but cosina is fairly obvious (cioé una piccola cosa). What on earth could cosare mean? Is it a verb? -- --- DFM - http://www.deepfriedmars.com --- -- |
#277
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
On Tue, 29 Aug 2006, Dave Frightens Me wrote:
And what about cosa, but also coso, cosina, cosino and even cosare ? I've never heard of the last four, but cosina is fairly obvious (cioé una piccola cosa). What on earth could cosare mean? Is it a verb? All expressions quite used in familiar speech (also in offices !). And yes is a verb, maybe not recorded in dictionaries, but widely used as a catch all for some more complex expression one does not remember at the moment. -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- is a newsreading account used by more persons to avoid unwanted spam. Any mail returning to this address will be rejected. Users can disclose their e-mail address in the article if they wish so. |
#278
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
B writes:
On Fri, 25 Aug 2006 14:57:04 -0700, Hatunen wrote: Old languages are generally much more complex that modern languages. Certainly, Old English is more complex than Modern English. Most languages tend to get simplified over time. Both Chinese and English illustrate this pattern, as do other Germanic languages and Romance languages. No they don't and no they don't. Chinese is arguably acquiring some morphology and English phrasal verbs are notoriously confusing to non-native speakers. Chinese is simple in that it doesn't rely on case endings and declensions and such. It once had a much more complicated grammar. Inflectional morphology isn't all of grammar, and Chinese syntax isn't considered simple by Sinologists. Des |
#279
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
Dave Frightens Me writes:
On Sun, 27 Aug 2006 15:31:29 +0200, B wrote: On Sat, 26 Aug 2006 18:40:56 +0200, Dave Frightens Me wrote: The closeness is indiscernible. In some parts American pronounciation misses out other consonants anyway, like the 't' in boat. That "t" is there, it's just softer than in the British pronunciation. Americans but their tongue in "t" position, which "stops" the vowel. They just omit the little puff of air that the Brits add at the end. In much of London the 't' is completely omitted! s/omitted/replaced by a glottal stop Des |
#280
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Bilingual in Europe versus USA
Evelyn Vogt Gamble (Divamanque) writes:
Have you listened to Ameircan teen-agers, lately? They seldom seem to give even an audible "nod" to final consonants. I haven't noticed a difference between teenagers and adults. Inaudible release for consonants like /t/ isn't unusual in English, in any age group. -- Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail. |
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