¤ milky moon ¤

Alas no

Ooh, putul. That's interesting, because obviously his notion of the phonetic values of letters is influenced by his accent - a British child would only write pudel, I think, because our Ts are very distinct from our Ds and our Us are, I think, the vowel that least often neutralises to a schwa. In my accent "puddle" would be /'pʌdəl/, where as "putul" would be the quite different /'pʌʔʌl/.
We used to learn a kind of phonetics-by-brute-force (chanting tables of words again and again, in the format, "c-ca-cat, cat; d-do-dog, dog" as a class) that seems to have taught me how to spell.
Weirdelves, that might be the case for English As She Is Spoke, but grammatical constructions are formally very flexible and there are a lot of them that most native speakers aren't aware of and don't use properly (like our subjunctive mood). Additionally, in terms of vocabulary, fluency is far more difficult due to the sheer number of words we have and actually commonly use. It's easy to reach a point where you can have a conversation with someone, but the gap between that and being a full-blown master of the language is vast, compared to, say, the same in Latin.

Ah, I remember in middle school my one cousin had this moronic boyfriend and my other cousin and I were trying to convince her that he was an idiot by slipping somewhat-complex words into conversation...
The most ridiculous one I remember that he didn't know was "facade."

I have the best linguistic discussion with Jordie. I have such a natural ear for languages though. I am especially good with accent. My Swedish (aside from being bezarre Sjolunden cult swenglish where I say phrases that are AMerican or english, only in swedish-like, \'cheesy\' isn\'t a thing there.) has a perfect accent. Like perfect. I am also very good at picking up distinct accents. I can hear the difference between Boston and Rhode Island accents.
Also, ann, dahlink, do you want to meet my li\'l bro? He loves the Titanic. He is very funny. Sometimes he\'ll say to me \'I got you a pear, Sara. You know, peach plum pear.\'

Also, my favourite letter sound in the whole world is the Finnish Y. If one makes an \'eeeeeeee\' sound and then rounds one\'s lips into an O, it makes the Finnish Y and it\'s so cool! Language is awesome. I really wanted to get into sociolinguistics before I decided academia was not for me.
Sorry for the double post.

That's also a sound in Ancient Greek, Ursala. It's how the y in words like cybernetic (from kubernetikos), hysteria, Syracuse and psyche was originally pronounced.

Yeah, there are languages that are more intuitive. A lot of the Slavic languages had their spelling reformed so that it reflected the pronunciation better - look at Polish, which wasn't reformed, and then look at something like Czech. There are some aspects of the way English is written that aren't very intuitive at all, mostly because our vocabulary is so diverse and comes from so many places, and we've never reformed the language to make the spelling correspond to the pronunciation. Words like "is" and "egg" and "that" are perfectly sensible (if you know that it's a 'soft' th rather than a hard 'th' at least), but words light "eight" and "ate" you would expect to be pronounced "aikht" and "a-teh", based on the way a lot of other languages are written.
But iv wī rōt ðə lāŋgwəj az it's spōkən, it wūd lūk verē od, and wī'd bī bīəŋ a lot mōr preskriptiv abaot pronunsīašən in aor speliŋ.

Portugal recently overhauled its entire spelling system to make things simpler as well no?

Portuguese just sounds like drunk spanish. In Norway, in the mid 19th century, this guy decided that traditional Norwegian was too old-fashioned, and he want\'ed to keep up with Sweden\'s cutting edge. SO he took standard Norwegian (bokmaal, or book writing) and replaced a bunch of words with more Swedish-y words. Nynorsk (new norwegian) isn\'t nearly as commonplace. They are mutually intelligible, though, like all of the Scandinavian languages except Danish, because danish isn\'t a language, it\'s a throat condition.

My Asperger\'s presents itself in very strange ways. I am exceedingly good at language related things, and not much else.

When I went to Portugal I always thought it looked more like French than Spanish. I'd done five years of French, so combined with my Latin I could actually read some signs in Portugese. My Norwegian friend was saying that he can barely understand people from some parts of the country who have really strong regional dialects, and that some people actually struggled to understand him when he moved from Kopervik on Karmøy to Bergen.

Didn't know that, Tom - looking it up, it seems that they've changed the rules for hyphen use, removed the trema diacritic (¨) from the language entirely, dropped silent letters and simplified a few diphthongs in certain situations. Not very extensive, but it also appears that they've been reforming the spelling system for years - a little bit at a time is the best way to go about it, I guess.

I don't think I'd like English spelling to be reformed. For one thing, it'd eliminate some of the poetic quality of the language, I think - I like being able to see where a word came from by looking at it, it gives it another aspect that you can play with. Also, it'd necessarily prescribe Received Pronunciation in the UK and General American Pronunciation in the USA, since if you're going to reform spelling to reflect pronunciation it'll need to reflect a certain standard of pronunciation. That wouldn't be good for regional phonological diversity, I think - at the moment, the orthography so tenuously reflects the phonology that no one really pronounces the language as it's written, so it's sort of dialectically neutral. Look at French, where the standardisation and centralised control of the language have wiped out and continue to wipe out regional dialects and minority languages. Also, can you imagine living in the Yūnaitəd Kiŋdəm ov Grēt Britən and Norðərn Airlənd or the Yūnaidəd Stēts ov Amerikə? It'd be weird.

I think one of the most beautiful spoken languages is Basque.
Second is Portuguese.
I want to learn Spanish at some point as a sort of base for such languages, then learn them,
but I'm still in French for now.

I can understand spoken and written Norwegian, some written Icelandic, some spoken and written German, and written danish. But I can;t understand a word of Danish spoken. In Sweden, we say that danish is;t a language, it\'s a throat condition. The sort of speak as thought they have a large lump of phlegm in their throats at all times. And AALand Svensk, the kind they speak in Finland, (everybody in Finland speaks Swedish and Finnish, it\'s a requirement), is so flat and monotonous. Like if Ben Stein were to speak Swedish, you\'d have Finnish Swedish. I think Icelandic is very beautiful because it has remained essentially unchanged for 800 years. And because it\'s very tongue-heavy, if that makes sense. And Japanese. If I could afford it, I\'d do an exchange in Tokyo.

Japanese is a beautiful, flexible, insanely difficult and complex language. (I don't mind! I'm starting my Ph.D. in Japanese Literature in the fall.)

I have a good friend who I met because of the Japanese Camp in Minnesota. I am just very intimidated by writing system.

I must say, I'm loving this thread. It has reawakened a lot of interests that have lain dormant for ages.

I thoroughly endorse Ursulabear's comments on the Nordic languages. I visit Åland annually, and enjoy immersing myself in Swedish language for a week, picking up a few new words each year, and reminding myself of last year's. And there I too have the same thing said about the Danish lanuage being a throat condition!

I've been 'ticked off' by Faroese people for using the letter "ø" ... "it's too Danish", they complain. "We prefer "ö" now". And I once went to a cultural night at Tóshavn's Nordic House, in which a guy doing a tri-lingual recital (Faroese, English, Danish) was almost booed off during the third part!

Icelandic is indeed the most beautiful language, for me. Written or spoken. The eth is such a delight on the printed page (); the capital thorn looks wonderfully dark-age (), and the breathy thing they do when they speak is a delight: I could listen all day, even if I've no idea what's being said! I made a brief attempt at learning some Icelandic once ... isn't it great that they have not only a singular and a plural number, but a dual, too? Oh and it's wonderful, too, that their 'phone book is in first name order!

I enjoyed Jordan's phonetics. I used to collect phonetic symbols and their meanings, but somehow that was easier in handwriting than with a keyboard. I enjoyed the musings on how a language would reform. Unless you happened to speak with a 'standard' dialect / accent, I guess a reform would not only NOT make text match speech, but would introduce a lot of odd looking letters that I like, but most would find difficult. And cursive would be a problem too! I don't agree with simplified spelling, as it would remove a lot of the fascinating 'history' from our language. When you see or hear the Swedish word jakt, our own spelling yacht makes a lot for sense, for example. And seeing how an unfamiliar word is spelled can often give a good clue as to its meaning. That said, I also have an interest in the 100% regular (well, 99% maybe) Esperanto, and as a teenager was able to get a grounding in it from a library book - most of which I have now sadly lost.

Ann's comments about tutoring were interesting too. I see both sides of the 'English is easy / English is hard' argument, and as a native speaker of course it's hard to be objective. I had to learn German and French at school, and found French easier because it is more regular and less inflected. With German, you get bogged down just chosing the right word for "the" or "a" from a table of 16 cells, and worrying how to produce a simple plural. However, when it comes to speaking, German (like Swedish) wins hands down, because it is crisper and more 'natural' for an English speaker, and French comes burdened by a nauseating slur / accent. [Some say this is 'sexy', but give me Icelandic any day!] This slurring also makes guessing French spelling from a dictated word much harder than in German, because French has so many redundant letters I was also reminded of sitting on a train in northern Finland, watching a mother helping a youngster with his reading. I don't know about the child, but I'd have baulked at some of the 15-letter monstrosities, filled with öös and ääs, even if they were printed in large, child-friendly letters!

I was tempted to learn a bit of Cornish once, but realised that, like Welsh, the beginnings of words were subject to changes, making the use of a dictionary harder than usual!

Steve, if you're interested in Esperanto you should look into Lojban. I've learnt a little about it, and it seems to me to be a truly exceptional constructed language - it's based ont the idea that a language should be able to express every idea clearly, concisely and unambiguously. It's almost the opposite of English - one word for every concept, and as concise as possible. There's some discussion here of a 'most beautiful' language. Honestly, I think it's English, because of its remarkable versatility and the extreme breadth of its vocabulary. We can say anything, because we've borrowed words from everyone, and we can say it almost in whatever order and in whatever way we like. It lends itself so perfectly to poetry, offering the writer the broadest imaginable range of equipment with which to communicate - I consider myself fortunate to have been born with it my native tongue.
Latin and French were the languages I learnt in school, and I found both quite easy. The one shortcoming I could identify in English is the absence of the Latin gerundive, which is my favourite grammatical peculiarity. The gerundive is like a one-word optative mood - it expresses in a nominal or adjectival form that something ought to happen to thing being talked about - e.g., an apalmandus is a male someone who deserves a good slap, Amanda is a girl you ought to love. Given our rather clunky way of expressing the same thing, I think we could really do with a construction like that - but thanks to the informality of poetic language in English, I suppose "needs-a-slap" serves the same purpose almost as concisely.
There's a sketch I really love abut the English language where they're talking about whether or not it could support Hitlerian rhetoric, or if it's just too ironic to begin with to permit that kind of overstated sincerity. I think they have a point - our language is so easily malleable to comic purposes, it's so tonal in spite of its atonality and so laden with constructs that can easily be adapted to humour that a speaker can hardly help but speak every third or fourth sentence ironically. I feel so much like Stephen Fry's character in this sketch about the English language. You couldn't hope for a better tool with which to express yourself.
I'm very much supportive, too, of innovations in English. I can't stand the prescriptivist attitude that our language should be static - clarity of meaning is only enhanced, not reduced, by an increased range of acceptable styles. For example, Ryan North's has contributed to the Internet, among other innovations in the English language, heavily sarcastic capitalisation. Almost anywhere on the Internet, if you type "THANKS VERY MUCH GUYS THAT WAS VERY USEFUL", you'll be identifiable not as an idiot, but as someone sarcastically aping an idiot - "Thanks very much, guys, that was very useful" written as above indicates that you're being aggressively sarcastic, which I think is a wonderful addition to the range of techniques available to speakers. We have, after all, lacked an irony mark where it would be most necessary for some time, and attempts at creating one (like the interrobang and other irony marks) have failed, but the ironic capital seems to have stuck in Internet English. It's a joy to see Internet innovations in how the language is written creeping into how the language is spoken.

Bang on. English is such a beautiful language. I had a module last year where we translated poetry back and forth between French and English and although the tutor was a real bitch the work itself was fascinating, being able to understand the key differences underneath the language and the peculiarities of atmosphere and emotion that are so much easier in one than the other. For example the English language deals much more in concretes to the abstract concepts of French, that's why we have Shakespeare and they have Racine, why we have Mill and Wollestonecraft and they have Proust and Sartre.

And when you begin to understand the complexities of language and begin to think about how it rules and influences cultures, and the inevitable shortcomings of language in terms of expression (one of my favourite quotes is in Huxley's Doors of Perception when he says that since existants are constantly mutable and changing and language is fixed, "language petrifies existence" until it changes in slang etc.) - language just becomes almost too beautiful and complex to possibly compute.

But obviously we're all language lovers here. We're hardcore Newsom-fans, and although her music and voice are beautiful, he language is absolutely transcendent in its beauty and concision, I come across phrases whenever I listen to her and I think "Fuck. That could literally in no way be expressed better than what she's done here. What a horrendous genius. How come she gets to exist."

Mmhmm. There are just moments when you think, "Oh god, that's completely perfect. That's exactly the best way to put words together to mean that."
About that Huxley quote, I think that's the best thing about the modernist influence on the English language - the liberation from the petrification of existence. Because we can now say things that make no sense according to established standards of grammar and semantics, we don't need to depend on the artificial stasis of words to express ourselves. Rather, we can exploit their visceral qualities, and what they mean in a certain moment, a certain context. The word itself becomes the essence of a word - a sound by which we mean something - rather than the word as frozen in the dictionary - a sound by which we mean exactly this thing. I always think of the neurotic woman in A Game of Chess in Eliot's The Waste Land. There's nothing in the words that suggests the impression that you get, it's all in the frantic, desperate rhythm of it, which is barely innate to the words either, but more suggested by their setting. Because of the unsettling wasteland landscape you've just read your way through, you can't help but hear pressured speech with a tremble in the voice.