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

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

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.

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 ?


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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.

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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?
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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.

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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

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

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.

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