linguoboy wrote:"Children learn any kind of spelling without question. As evidence, I offer up an anecdote about a 48 year-old I know with no details relevant to the question at hand."
Ah, no - I didn't mean this as proof relating to the statement in question. It was meant as illustration of what happens later on with people who have learnt non-etymological spelling in the beginning.
linguoboy wrote:Woods wrote:English is the one that does it right - the grammar is simple, modern and as easy to handle as possible, while words keep their original spelling!
Honestly, this statement is so completely shot through with misconceptions about language that it feels like satire.
Explain what you mean cause I don't get it
Johanna wrote:My take on this discussion is that we should respell things so that they fit Swedish phonology.
I know
Actually is there anyone here who thinks like me indeed?
Did you check out that 18-century book I linked to in my topic from yesterday? The spelling looks so beautiful, if modern Swedish looked like that I would be studying it like crazy!
Johanna wrote:Honestly, you shouldn't have to learn the spelling rules of German, French and English just to be able to spell our most common loans.
Actually you should cause English is compulsory in Sweden (isn't it?) And you kind of need to know a little bit about how French works if you want to get this one right. I don't know anything about German loans in Swedish since my level is not that high in either, and they're both Germanic so I would have no idea whether the word is borrowed and which way, I would normally expect them both to come from the same place. Are there really that many loanwords from German and from English?
Johanna wrote:how are students of Swedish to know that in this system with strictly etymological spelling, race is from French and pronounced /rɑːs/, instead of from English and pronounced /rɛjs/?
by learning the spelling and the pronunciation at the same time, or both one after another. The former carries the meaning, the later also gives information about which language the word was borrowed from, and from there - you can also make a guess about when it happened, since borrowing from French was common before and now borrowing from English would be more likely. All this information would be lost if you respell it as "ras"! And as awrui pointed it and I have many times before - why not try to come up with a Swedish word?
Johanna wrote:Heck, in Danish, they had no idea how to actually pronounce it, so the -e isn't silent unlike in French.
The thing with the e is that it's not silent in French. It can be or not, depending on the speaker and how clear or formal or well-pronouncing they want to be. Danish does exactly the same with the e's at the end of their words, so it matches perfectly.
Johanna wrote:I'm talking about the noun that has to do with phenotype, which in Swedish applies to breeds of domesticated animals first and foremost. The noun that is about who traverses a certain distance in the least amount of time is still spelled like in its source language English, and pronounced accordingly.
Maybe because the first meaning entered the language earlier, when less people knew the original language, but now that everybody learns English, it's hard to keep this absurdity?
But I see words like "mejl" etc. (to which my first reaction is always to think there's something wrong with this country, and the second - to be so happy that there is Danish which I can resort to when I want to write something to a Swedish-speaking person).
awrui wrote:The finns do much better at PISA than norwegians, that's no secret.
It doesn't prove corelation.
awrui wrote:the names of some weird little foot bones have NOTHING to do with latin as a language. They're just words. You can as well use the swedish, aymara or chinese word for it, it really doesn't matter. Latin anatomy words are just a relict of time, preserved to make the profession feel special- there are similar phenomenons in any profession, really.
Well, it's good to have an international convention in such an important domain as of which language's names to use - imagine somebody used Swedish and then read a Dahish text and hop - a false friend, we cut off the wrong bone and killed the patient!
awrui wrote:if I was the boss, everyone would learn an non-indoeurpean language from grade 5, and another one from grade 8
Why?
I'd start with removing English as compulsory and leaving it up to the students what languages to learn and where and how (I had no English classes whatsoever till age 15 and then I could still skip them if I wanted to).
awrui wrote:I speak three germanic languages fluently, and have looked into some more. Trust me, the different spelling of some foreign words doesn't make any any difference.
Well, I don't think you should count English as a Germanic language for the purpose of this discussion.
Everything is important - spelling for keeping meaning and history, pronunciation for fitting into the new environment, grammar for making your sentence come through.
awrui wrote:I wish it would work like that
Me too.
awrui wrote:Woods wrote:Well, I think it's also a good idea to know as much about which word comes originally from one's own native language, or its language family, and which one was borrowed, from where and for what purpose.
I agree. There is a time and a place for that- which is university, for people with special interest.
Unfortunately not everyone has extra five years to catch up on something that could have easily been explained during a decade of schooling, in order to make up for a broken writing system and dumb teachers.
awrui wrote:Woods wrote:English is the one that does it right - the grammar is simple, modern and as easy to handle as possible, while words keep their original spelling!
Have you seen native speakers of english write in english? It makes my eyes bleed.
Uh... yeah? For some reason, all native English-speakers I've come in contact with spell everything wonderfully. Maybe your experience is different. The French have a huge problem with the grammar (cause five things that are pronounced the same are spelt in five different ways - but again this is the part that English does not have. The French also tend to spell the non-grammar related words fine. So I guess if French reforms the nonsensical spelling of the grammar and keeps nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs as they are, its speakers will also do just fine. And for the English-natives, if they have a problem as you're saying, maybe it comes from not learning enough languages? I guess it's something they should work on, for we don't know how long English will be number one and I don't think the United States will continue to dictate the rules worldwide for too long.
(I mean Trump doesn't want it, and Joe Biden will give free way to the Chinese to take over.)
By the way, I hope it does not come out as rude, but in English you should capitalise the names of languages and nationalities.