Kevin's Watch

Well, having met up with a Japanese friend of mine yesterday and having got chatting about the issues of learning English as a foreign language, I was reminded of the below-quoted poem for the first time in years. Hey... I figured that linguistics is kind of a science, so therefore the Loresraat would be the most suitable place to post this.

Personal disclosure first. I am by education primarily a linguist, so this sort of thing invariably piques my interest. It also no doubt explains why I am such a compulsive spelling and grammar Nazi.

I'm also going to seize the moral high ground for myself, being a born and bred UK national. If forced, I'll grudgingly admit that you citizens of the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand don't make too bad an attempt at using the spoken and written language - but I perhaps should be more charitable. The language itself is called English - as in England - so what real hope do all you ex-rebels and colonials have?

Anyhow, back on point... English is as we know the international language (unlucky, Esperanto ). It's considered - at least by native English speakers - to be particularly easy to master. It's certainly true that English has a single gender (neuter), as compared say to French's two (masculine and feminine) and German's three (masculine, feminine and neuter). It's also true that English has effectively only one case (the nominative). Purists will argue that there is also an accusative, but that only applies to certain pronouns - "I" becomes "me", "he" becomes "him" etc etc - and a genitive form does just about exist when indicating possession - the car's bodywork, the members' topics etc etc. When necessary, all other cases in English are created by the addition of a preposition to precede the noun, which hence remains in nominative form - e.g. I gave it to the cat, you ate a slice of ham, he ran away from the lion. When comparing English to German for example, the latter is monstrously more complex, with four distinct and separate cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) to go with its three genders. Take into account the plural and this gives German sixteen different versions of the word "the", only one of which will be correct dependant upon usage - yes, really.

My Japanese friend politely listened in agreement, but then pointed out the core difficulty with English for foreigners - and that's pronunciation, especially of vowel sounds. Trying to place myself in his shoes and thinking about it for a while, he was absolutely right. Consider the simple English construction "ough" for a second. That can be correctly sounded in at least six different ways, to rhyme with "uff", "ooo", "owe", "off", "ow" and "awe", dependant solely upon the word in which it's appearing. That's not simple at all - there's no logic or rule and hence this can only be learned by memory.

All of which brings me to the following small poem by Bennett Cerf, a mid-20th century English humourist (yes, "humourist" does have a bloody "u" in it!), which I thought I'd share:-

Bennett Cerf wrote:The wind was rough
And cold and blough.
She kept her hands inside her mough.

It chilled her through,
Her nose turned blough,
And still the squall the faster flough.

And yet although
There was no snough,
The weather was the cruellest fough.

It made her cough,
(Please do not scough).
She coughed until her hat blew ough.

It shook the bough.
I don't know hough
She got warm again - the silly cough.

I'm not by any stretch a linguist but this brings to mind a recent post from the Economist on the difficulty of English to learn.

Would it be possible, though, to describe a language's “difficulty” in the abstract? If so, what would it look like? English-speakers often point to a language like Latin or Ancient Greek. Next to them, in one important respect, English is easy. The distinction involves a language's “inflectional morphology”, or the bits and pieces added to a noun or adjective or verb to make it match up with other pieces in a sentence. An English verb has a maximum of five forms (speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken), whereas verbs in Spanish or Latin can take dozens of forms. An English noun usually has only two forms (singular and plural), whereas the Greek or Russian noun takes numerous forms showing grammatical gender, number and case.

This kind of inflection is not a terrible proxy for that slippery idea of "difficulty". Where are the world’s hardest languages, then? Is English one of them? One study, by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale in 2010, looked closely at inflection. It found that highly inflected languages tend to be spoken by a small number of speakers, and have few neighbours. But languages with big groups of speakers, or many neighbouring languages, systematically tend to have fewer inflections. Why is that? The hypothesis is that as a language spreads over centuries, it is learned by many non-natives (trading partners, conquered subjects and the like). Adults, learning a foreign language imperfectly, avoid using non-necessary endings. And many endings in any language are non-necessary, if other clues (like word order in a sentence) can be recruited to do the same things that word endings do—say, distinguishing the subject of a sentence from its direct object. As languages spread and grow, they are more likely to rely on clues like word order than on word-endings. So “big” languages are “simple”. Under this schema, English fits both criteria: relatively big and relatively simple.

That’s one way of determining relative “hardness”, apart from the starting point of a given speaker’s native language. The problem is that this is far from a perfect measure. Sure, lots of verb-endings are hard for a learner, especially a learner who is not used to them. But where the English verb lacks endings, it makes up for this simplicity in other ways. When to use the various auxiliary verbs is far from obvious: How would you explain to a learner the use of do in the following? “I don’t normally drink, but I do like a crispy lager on a hot summer’s day.” The first use is simply standard with negative statements: we say “I don’t drink” rather than “I drink not.” But the second do, just a few words later, is quite different. It is emphatic, stressing the unusual behaviour on a hot summer’s day. These and other wrinkles can be mind-bending for learners of English.

Here's a list of 10 common problems for Spanish speakers in learning English.

...But the "a" in "bat" and "bank" is exactly the same?

I'm Murrin wrote:...But the "a" in "bat" and "bank" is exactly the same?

No it isn't. In "bat" it's a single sound. In "bank" it is a diphthong that BEGINS with the short "a" sound and glides through long "e."

re the difficulty of a non speaker learning English, can I cite the following:-

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

q.e.d.