7 thoughts on “The English Language”

  1. I looked into Esperanto once. As an artificially constructed language, it is supposed to be “easy” by having a very regular system of word endings. My dad told me he taught it to himself as a young adult when he was laid up after wrenching his knee skiing and he had nothing better to do.

    I thought about it for a while. I looked at a text for which I was familiar with the words since childhood — the Lord’s Prayer — in English, Spanish, French, Esperanto, and Interlingua (another Esperanto-like language which at one time was promoted for scientific interchange in the way that Esperanto had a political motivation as a common language to advance Socialism).

    Much as I had stumbled through French in high school and in college and learned a smattering of Spanish in grade school and from adult friends and learned some church Latin from a choir director in Pasadena, CA, the French text looked “easier” as in more naturally familiar to me.

  2. I’ve been studying Norwegian for about four days now and can already read quite a few online comments, some of them quite long. I had been studying some Icelandic after learning that they’ve recently produced 3 Miss Worlds out of a population of 300,000. Both are English that took a different path.

    Unfortunately I’m learning Norwegian by reading comments on Emilie Nereng’s Instagram and blog, and half of those are telling her how beautiful she is (Playboy just did an Insta-crush section on her and she’s never even shown cleavage despite posting 17 trillion photos on Instagram), so if I’m ever in Norway trying to order some eggs and waffles I’ll probably try out one of fifty of the most familiar phrases and end up married to the waitress.

    1. That’s what I am saying. Learn a language by reading material you are thoroughly comfortable with . . .

    2. Um, only the language is “easy” — don’t get the wrong impression regarding Scandinavian women . . .

  3. I like the guy who is promoting “Globish”, which is a pared-down version of English, with a restricted vocabulary and minimal “weirdly spelled” words, and thus also a restricted set of grammar rules. It gets wordy sometimes, because you have to avoid using some more descriptive or appropriate words, but the idea is to be able to communicate business ideas in as clear a method as possible. It’s an interesting idea, and the website has some very good examples to give an idea of how to use it. http://www.globish.com

  4. The article pretends every other language on earth has a phoneme-based alphabet like ours. The eastern half of Asia was not reached for comment.

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