I've noted a certain type of spelling error becoming very common in stories.
There are a lot of verbs that occur in pairs where the second one is the first one wioth an E on the end.
hop, hope
rat, rate
slop, slope
And many more.
There's a rule about how the past tense of these words is spelled. You double the final consonant on the ones that don't don't end in E before adding the -ed.
Like this:
hop, hopped
hope, hoped
rat, ratted
rate, rated
slop, slopped
slope, sloped
Comments
Exceptions sound bibliical...
throw, throwed (threw)
but
stow, stowed
and some even stranger
spend, spended (spent)
but
expend, expended
Why would they be different? They are even from the same root.
How on Earth do non-native speakers learn English?
As my old English teacher used to say
Most languages have rules and exceptions.
English has exceptions.
Seriously though - not withstanding the numerous quirks of English it's quite easy to START speaking, especially given that most people accept errors since those errors seldom change meaning.
People learn English quite
People learn English quite easily. Remember, at the core, English is a trade language. That means that despite there being clear rules of grammar that haven't changed in 1600 years, people that violate those rules can be understood.
With 160-200 words of English, even without proper tense, you can make yourself understood well enough to ask short questions, buy things, and sell things. "How Much this thing?" "Bathroom Need I go?"
So, Japanese is hard to _learn_. English is hard to _master_.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
On learning to spell and speak English
English is a complicated language with many more synonyms or near synonyms than most. Non-native speakers learn English with great difficulty. At least that was my experience, but most people are very understanding and tolerant. It helps that there are huge numbers of native English speakers that have a not too good grasp of the finer points of the language themselves. Too, no native speaker ever manages to grasp their own language with the precision of a gifted foreigner. The best speaker, and writer, of Swedish I ever came across was a post graduate linguist whose native tongue was Italian. She spoke the language with a precision that was musical, and to me who'd spoken the language, amongst others in use in the school playground, from an early age it sounded most peculiar.
Decades later I still get pulled up about my writing and my speech in English. I just let it go and I wouldn't dream of correcting any one unless directly asked to do so. To me it's an enjoyable thing to discuss and I can still become excited about learning new words and linguistic structures, but alas the language changes with time faster than I can keep up with it. I replied to a comment made by Dorothy Colleen a while back because the humo(u)rous (dictionary says both are good) point she was making escaped me. I understand what she meant now, but unfortunately conversation, even by comments, takes place faster than my understanding.
Regards'
Eolwaen
Eolwaen
English is rather simple.
Try German or French or if you are after something really difficult traditional Mandarin Chinese. My father used to say that a really educted European knew something like 6000 to 6500 words compared to 65000 words in Chinese and he spoke it, as well as German and English, and could at least read French.
The more interesting question is not how, but when. I learned English at thirteen in a student exchange and simply soaked it up. French I only learned at the age of 47, again living in the country and it was a lot harder. While English at thirteen actually took me no more than 6 months, French took me almost ten years to still not reach quite the same level as English.
Monique S
Sorry.
But German seems easy to me. French, I read but do not speak having not learnt oral French. I just started reading Saint-Exbury books with a dictionary at hand. I will never, ever successfully speak a pitched language so that lets out Mandarin.
I will agree that hearing a language as a child makes an immense difference.
Ah, but none of your examples
Ah, but none of your examples fit the pattern I was talking about. Namely where you have a legit word ending in a consonant and a *second* legit word which is the first word with an "E" added to the end.
Brooke brooke at shadowgard dot com
http://brooke.shadowgard.com/
Girls will be boys, and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world
"Lola", the Kinks
yes
But it was a comment not a criticism
English grammar and other stuff.
English's main problems arise because English has mainly two generic roots namely old german and latin. Germanic words tend to keep their old germanic style spelling but losing their germanic pronunciations because our mainly latin alphabet cannot accomodate the many inflexions found in old german. Consequently Modern English employs the notorious variable vowel sounds assisted by the busy 'ee' that keeps springing up mostly at the ends of words. Words like tough (strong or hardy), dough (bread), bough (branch of a tree), cough (irritated throat) are perfect examples of a latin alpabet trying to accomodate old-german words. I won't even bother trying to correct transatlantic grammar errors because they are legion. There just two that particularly grate on my ear and they are as follows.
1 The English get off their horses but Americans get off of theirs. The word 'of' is totally superflous!
This a modern idiosyncracy because even John Wayne ordered the baddy to 'Gerr-off yer horse par'dner!
2 Americans invariably fail to leave the suffix 'ly' off the ends of their adverbs.
E.G. 'It was done proper', should read 'It was done properly.'
Ergh. A lot of those words
Ergh. A lot of those words (bow, bough, slow, slough, dough, house, draught, draft, etc ) are victims of the Great Vowel Shift. (Which is apparently still going on in parts of New York, for example) 'House' was apparently 'hoose'. (hoo went to how) We only know this for sure because there was an early scientist/researcher who wrote how things were changing at the time he was living. Different areas stopped at different vowel points - which is why Geordies talk so strangely :)
(Not to mention the Newfies! )
(quick edit to fix a couple of positional errors)
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Also French
Norman French is also a root language. For a couple hundred years French was the court language, Latin was the religious language, and Old English (from German) was the language of commoners.
Dawn
Specifically, it the House of
Specifically, it the House of Plantagenet. They were Norman. (Normandy was actually British. The French lost many wars having this proved to them over and over again. )
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Normandy
I set a whole novel there! I actually studied in Caen...
The Normans were Norwegians who were allowed to settle in that part of what is now France, after swearing fealty to the French king. Thus, the Duke was subordinate to the king.
When the Bastard (spits in disgust) took England, it made him a king, and thus the equal of the French one. He was still the Duke, though, so in theory still a subject of the French ruler. Confusion, counterclaim and war ensued. And don't forget that the Angevin empire of England also included Aquitaine/Gascony.
Similar geographical oddities were common, such as that of the Hapsburg family, who ruled Austria. And Spain. And the Low Countries. The War of the Spanish Succession was fought largely in NW Germany...
Anyway, while the Normans were of recently Norwegian ancestry (Nordmann actually means a Norwegian) they spoke Old French, in the same way as the 'Gaelic' people in the Western Isles are actually the descendants of Norwegians who took over Dublin and adopted the local language...
English is a thief language
We steal words from every other language adlib. The really hard to learn languages are the tonal ones.
BAK 0.25tspgirl
It is indeed
Words were added from all over the world. If there was no word already in English to describe something and there was an existing local word then why not use it.
Bungallow and Veranda come from Hindi.
Mind you we aren't the only one. The Russian word for Restauarant (Pektopah) is pronounced exactly the same as it is in French.
English evolves. Some languages don't move with the times. For example Quebecois. This is basically 17th Century French. I was once in a meeting in Quebec with some locals and two people from the Haute Savoir (Annecy) in France. The french speakers could not properly understand each other so we had the meeting in English.
Samantha
It's the first time I see
It's the first time I see such transcription of Pektopah=Ресторан. There is maybe some visual similiarity actually.
Amen to that
Etymology is a subject that interests me because I'm a bit anal. When I see a word I don't know, I usually look it up and I'm interested in where the word comes from and what the root word means in that language. I don't know why it's important to me, but it is. As a result, I'm amazed by the number of words that come from other languages. What's more distressing is that the modern meaning of the words are often very divergent from the word they were taken from.
What makes things worse for the poor soul whose native language isn't English is that on both sides of the pond we use terms to mean things that have nothing to do with the dictionary meaning. (Slang) The worst part of slang is that we often make it up on the fly, resulting in colloquialisms indigenous only to a certain sector of the country. Add to that trade jargon that has words or phrases that apply only in that trade, but often have a broader meaning in the general population.
It's enough to make a grown man cry. I've often said that English is the only foreign language I've studied. 74 years and I've still not mastered it.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Native speakers
I am a linguist by education and qualification, so this sort of thing has been meat and drink to me for decades. I shall try not to lecture...
Some languages and/or spelling change because of evolution, some are deliberately altered. For example, I hear many USA people defend their spellings as "The antique form" when they are not. 'Centre', 'theatre' and similar words, for example, are French loanwords (the technical term for 'stolen from another language'). The correct spelling is thus that of the origin, and not that current in the USA. A lot of US spellings were deliberately changed by people like Noah Webster, who demanded a cut in ties to the colonial language, and 'rational spelling' campaigns, which tried their best to impose such horrors as 'thru' and 'nite'.
English itself started out as an inflected language, like Latin, and then collided with Norse, which used conjunctions and prepositions. The result was that the inflections (word endings denoting case and person) mostly disappeared, to be replaced by 'joining words' such as 'in, on, by, with'. That became Middle English, which settled down, largely due to the printing press, to become modern English. There have been all sorts of odd campaigns over the centuries to 'purify' the language, including a couple that demanded the removal of all words of Latin or Greek origin. Icelandic actually has rules like that, which lead to odd neologisms using ancient Norse. France tries every so often to clean up its vocabulary, and German has hiccups where it tries hard to produce a Teutonic cognate for a modern word (e.g. 'Fernsprecher' for the Icelandic word 'Simi'. Both mean telephone)
Something I find amusing is when an old language retains original words for modern things, such as the Greek word for bus stop, which is 'hiatus'. A really fascinating aspect is when a word drifts to a different pronunciation, which changes the spelling, but leaves the original behind, so that one original word now delivers two or more different but related meanings. Ship/skiff/skip*. Sharp/scarp. Moot/meet. Grave/grub (the verb). Fly/flee.
*In this sense, a skip is similar to what may be called a dumpster in the USA.
The comment above about subtlety and synonyms for non-native speakers is spot on. I wrote an entire novel (Cider Without Roses) in the voice of a French woman who thinks she speaks the English currently.
Yabbut
Theater and center were accepted spellings when America was founded; later Britain went back to using only the French spellings deliberately, discarding the -er endings that had been London innovations. So both opinions are correct from their own point of view. Antique for Americans has a different scale than for the British. :)
A similar sequence happened with the -or/-our and -ise/-ize endings and whether the last letter of the alphabet is Zee or Zed. The spelling reformers in the US had more luck in making their changes stick but almost all of their innovations began in London.
The fact is that mainstream British English has changed much more in ~300 years than American English, which like most regional dialects in a larger language continuum, is essentially conservative. It's just, having started as a splinter, we conserved different choices than the language main branch across the pond. :) London remains the metropole of the English language empire, despite influencers like Harlem and Hollywood.
BTW, I'm also a linguist by training and avocation and I'm loving the dialect and slang in your Lifeline story. It's like opening someone else's toybox and finding neat stuff. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Another piece of the slang
Well you don't overuse them. Some authors (mostly British) make their writings hard to understand.
appen
Tha's tekin't uriine!
Tha kent folla real English like? Mebe we should try yer out on sum Scouse, the langauge not the food, like.
Mads frum weur English started
Interesting fact - the oldest example of written English for public consumption can be found in the 7th Century church in Kirkdale near Kirkbymoorside. It's often overlooked in favour of Beowulf and the Anglo Saxon Chronicles as it's only a two line inscription. Previous to this everything was written in Latin - not surprising as very few outside of the church could read let alone write.
Providing they speak slowly, I can understand a lot from the Nordic languages - spotting the meanings when written is a whole other matter!
Local proverb - a generous Tyke (Yorkshireman) will only charge a shilling to stroke 'is whippet.
I'll si thee
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Dialect
It's quite mild in Lifeline. I have Lorraine speaking a sort of generic Potteries/NW Midlands speech, which uses 'love' a lot. Ken is from the East Midlands, where the usual salutation is "Midduck" (my duck) or simply "Duck". In Cornwall, the equivalent is "My lover".
At University, about five miles from Ken's origins, we had Spanish catering staff, who spoke Spanish among themselves, but filtered through Leicestershire. A typical exchange would be "Thethetheth fethetheth fethetheth tortilla Iglesias y tu mama tambien, midduck".
Maddy talks about the Norse languages (some of which are tonal; I speak three) and they have a huge influence on English dialects, and, as I have said, are the basis for the structure of Middle English. Vast chunks of the vocabulary from Lincolnshire through to Northumberland are Scandinavian, such as laik, lop, gansie, short (an upper garment). sark, shields/shieling, kist, keek, dale, force (waterfall), fell, gissie or coo.
I came up with an exchange in 'Ride On' that I was rather pleased with, where Eric says, in response to Jimmy's impenetrably broad Geordie:
"Sorry. I'm from London. We hear funny there"
Bloddish
I created a language called Bloddish in my story Bian. It is spoken by the Bloddings, Norse invaders of England in an alternate timeline. I based it on Old Norse mixed with Anglo-Saxon and some pure fantasy. It was a lot of fun. :)
I also have another language invented for another (unfinished) story, "Pillow of Stone". A sentence from that language "Gemedü Thelaru Palan" translates as "he has made a pillow for himself of this stone." The language is called "Heliru Taímirujü" — "The speaking words of the world not of itself." :)
Did you know that Jimmy Doohan (Scotty in Star Trek) was the original inventor of Vulcan and Klingon? They later hired a professional linguist to develop them but Doohan created the first words and the sounds of the two languages. :)
Hugs,
Erin
= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.
Artificial language
... would be interesting to read or listen when it's based on a language you know perfectly. I can't say this about English or German. Russian and Polish would be another case, but Polens are too serious to engage in something like artificial language while Russians had some. Those are not complete though.
I guess Star Trek is something about space travel.
my
Polish friends wouldn't know what a polen was! They are Polish or collectively Poles and they certainly do have a sense of humour - well they must do to be friends with me!
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Z niemcami tuż obok? Pani
Z niemcami tuż obok? Pani żartuje chyba. BTW isn't the pole the same as the beam or the place at the very North? Kidding, you're right.
I figured Polen made you
I figured Polen made you sneeze.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
English
I'd like to learn to speak English someday (perhaps by immersion in a pub type environment) but I am unfortunately only fluent in American.
NPR fresh air program
A few minutes after I posted that the show came on. They are talking about the differences and history of American/British English. Those who ae interested can find the program on the National Public Radio website.
But perhaps you should have...
But perhaps you should have checked your own spelling, as well, hmm.
Sophie - that well known pelling expert :)
what abou
Contractions?
Just sayin' that you could've been slap'd, hop'd etc.
I can recall there was a convention when I was at school that insisted written work not include contractions. However the exception is in speech, even the Queen doesn't pronounce every word as it's written, if it's good enough for Her Maj, its good enough for me, a mere pleb (contraction of Plebian of course!)
To paraphrase the Two Ronnies, It is good night from myself - and goodnight from him.
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
English versus American
There are also many words that have different meanings in English and American.
The worst that I know of is the verb "table", which has diametrically opposite meanings in English and American. During World War II, a screaming argument broke out in a Combined Staff meeting when the English suggested that some proposal be "tabled". It took a while before both sides realized that they agreed. To Americans, "tabled" is synonymous with "pigeonholed"; to Britons, it means to be brought forward for consideration.
Pigeonholed
Actually, in English it means assigned (overzealously, perhaps) to a particular category. Think of an actor being typecast.
If you want a word with a radically different meaning, I offer you 'fanny'.
i reckon
Someone got that back to front!
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
pigeonholed
In a Pigeon Loft or Dovecot there are roosting holes. These are typically 6in x 6in by about 8in deep. Each bird has space to roost.
Then in the late 19th century/early 20th in large organistations people would have a place where correspondence for them could be left for collection. These were the same shape and size of the 'pigeon holes' used for birds. The name stuck.
Then the term pigeonholed came to mean a thing that people were known for. Hence the prediction for Hollywood to cast Brits as the bad guys and some like Boris Kharloff etc became renowned for it. Typecast is a modern name for being pigeonholed IMHO.
To me tabled is a totally different thing. In Poilitics, motions are tabled which means put up for discussion.
What gets me going is the use of the word 'Inked'. To me that means getting a tattoo not signing a document.
"Inked sealed and delivered" does not really work does it. Why can't the word signed be used? Pah!
Anyone saying inked to me gets the response 'Oh! Where are you getting the Tat then?"
It is hot and extra grumpiness is everywhere!
Samantha
certainly
Warm today - trying to cool off a bit under a tree - last time I checked it was 34c, add in the stiff breeze and it's not much fun this afternoon on the bike.
There are some fantastic, ornate and old dovecotes, I was going to say around here as I've ridden past them but they are actually down in the Trent and Witham valleys near the A1.
Tabled - yes it means put out for discussion but root is actually that documents were literally 'put on the table' as a precursor to being discussed. So to table a motion in parliament originally meant you were putting the document (the motion) on to the table and hence into the arena of discussion. TBH it all gets a bit messy especially as things work somewhat differently these days but the terminology has remained.
Well i'm going to melt my way home, maybe grab an ice cream on the way.
Mads
Madeline Anafrid Bell
Inked meant that it was
Inked meant that it was signed indelibly. Pencil, even the early leads, could be rubbed off of the document. Ink soaked in. Remember that the early documents were parchment - you can only remove ink by scraping off the stained leather. So, critical documents would be charcoaled or penciled, then inked. Comics and cartoons were the same way. Penciled, then inked, to form the lines.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Two countries separated by a common language
I recently PMed an author over my conception on mis-distinction between (and misuse, to me) "ensure" and "insure". She very politely pointed out that American usage allows the use of both interchangeably, and that since she was writing the narrative from a from her own and her character's (American) viewpoint, it was justified. What I have superficially researched on-line, does not seem to uphold this, and one of the examples she quoted seemed to be from an Elizabethan (17th century) text when spellings were much less formalised, I accepted her point, but reluctantly.
American usage does _not_
American usage does _not_ allow them interchangeably. Ignorant people use them interchangeably, but I will guarantee that you will not find anyone in the insurance industry who is ensuring their client. Unless it's ensuring their clients _pay them_. Now, there are assurance policies, which I'm still not clear on the difference between that and an insurance policy, but apparently there is one.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.