Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2007 May 19

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May 19

Learning a second language online.

Aside from Esperanto and Frisian, which languages would be easiest to learn for an English-speaker who doesn't have access to a native speaker for coaching? Down M. 01:57, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

You should definetely look into Italian. It is a beautiful language and many languages can use bits and pieces so that you may be able to connect to other. 71.207.14.184 05:05, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I'll go along with that, though I'm biased, having been exposed to Italian from an early age. It's relatively easy for us to pronounce. If your English vocabulary is good, you'll recognize many Italian words from Latin roots. You have to learn verb endings and adjective agreement, but there are no noun cases, and the syntax is pretty familiar once you learn to put adjectives after nouns and object pronouns before verbs. – Castilian also comes to mind. Its grammar is similar to that of Italian. Its pronunciation is a bit easier, but Latin roots may be a bit harder to recognize, having mutated somewhat further. —Tamfang 05:25, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I'd just like to point out that the fact that Frisian is English's closest relative does not actually make it easy for English speakers to learn. In theory it's probably no easier than Dutch or the Scandinavian languages, and in practice the comparative lack of learning materials probably makes it more difficult. According to the Defense Language Institute, the easiest languages for English speakers to learn (among the languages they teach there) are Afrikaans, Danish, Dutch, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swahili, and Swedish [1]. Of those, the ones that (in my opinion) are probably easiest to pronounce without a native-speaker coach are probably Italian, Spanish, and Swahili. —Angr 08:42, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Interlingua, definitely. ¿SFGiДnts! ☺ ☻ 19:43, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I've found that Frisian is very easy to not only learn, but self-teach, but that's just me. If on a 1-10 scale you would rate reading Chaucer a 3, then Frisian would be a 4. For me, Frisian is easy to learn if you know enough about literature, past and present to know how to "think outside the box". What I do is read it aloud and think what English words it reminds me of, think of multiple meanings, keep in mind the continental vowels, pronounce it in several ways to get a feel for what English word it might be (for example "advokaat" is "advocate", which means lawyer, "seniorekaart" means is seniorcard, or senior citizen pass, "simmermoarn" sounds like summermorn (which it means), "maitiid" sounds like maytide, and tide can mean time, and maytime is a folksy nickname for springtime), and I've found that by treating it like English and not another language (like literary students are often told to do with Chaucer), I've found that I can understand more than 75% of it without actually "learning" it, and its immediate intelligbility from an English perspective has allowed me to gain a "bluffer's knowledge" of Frisian. It feels as natural as reading Chaucer would. Best to approach it like a varied but folksy version of the Middle English in The Reeve's Tale. MVillani1985 (talk) 00:47, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Portuguese is very regular, and enjoys a reputation as a good thing for underqualified student athletes to major in. That said, are you *really* somewhere where everyone speaks only English? I can't imagine such a place exists anymore. --TotoBaggins 22:59, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I'm surprised no one has yet indicated: 1) this (and any of its several close variants) is a RefDesk FAQ; 2) if you have reliable internet access, you have access to non-English speakers; 3) finding one of those people to "coach" you is possible, given that there are sites specifically designed to match up people who are willing to trade language skills; and 4) there are all sorts of low-to-zero cost resources for self-instruction in language skills as you will notice if you just look around a bit.

Instead of asking which language is "easiest", perhaps you should be asking what resources exist, and which ones most closely coincide with your personal habits and level of motivation. Unless you make it a routine, language proficiency is not likely to come "easily" unless your aspirations are no higher than the likes of pig latin. dr.ef.tymac 14:39, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Walter Dean Myers

Grammatical form in question. I am currently reading The Righteous Revenge of Artemis Bonner. I have noticed some strange capitalizations during the text. I am assuming that he is using capitalization to identify the idioms in his text. Can anyone give me any information about this? 71.207.14.184 05:03, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Your guess may be as good as mine; this is not standard usage with a conventionally agreed-upon meaning, and I see no unifying aspect of all uses. It makes me think of the capitalization of "Good Thing" that some people love to use. Perhaps the capitalizations in the text serve to identify and emphasize things that are not so much idioms as labels for concepts in the narrator's mind that have an emotional or other special significance to him. Occasionally they seem to take the role of "ironic" quotation marks; other cases may be more whimsical than anything else.  --Lambiam^Talk 09:56, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

kashrut

How is pareve (פרווה) pronounced in Hebrew? It's not in my little Hebrew-English dictionary (which shows both points and a crude pseudo-English pronunciation). The nearest big English dictionary has it as /parəvə/, deriving it from Yiddish parev – and I don't know enough about Yiddish phonology to guess exactly what that e means. I'm pretty sure the first Jew to mention the word to me (in 1979) pronounced it pretty close to /parv/, but my current staff expert on Hebraica insists on /pari:v/. —Tamfang 05:08, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

For the Hebrew pronunciation: The Oxford English-Hebrew Hebrew-English Dictionary (ed. Ya'acov Levy; Kernerman Publishing, for OUP, 1994) shows the vowel segol (= /e/) for the second syllable, so the pronunciation would be /PAR·veh/ (sorry, I don't do IPA). The contemporary Hebrew dictionary Rav-Milim: Ha-Milon ha-Shalem agrees. Aside from the printed form, I would offer a speculation that the pronunciation may reflect Modern Hebrew's inability to represent a vowel between CVC-CVC syllables (for which the Yiddish uses one or more letters, in this case, 'ayin). The Yiddish, per Weinreich's Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968), has both /PAR·ev/ and /PAR·e·ve/, though this may come from the m/f forms [caveat: uninformed conjecture on my part]. Note also that the pronunciation in the Encarta World English dictionary indicates /pa'arvə/ as secondary to /pa'arəvə/, noting the Yiddish derivation. Your initial Jewish informant, if a native speaker of English with only acquired Hebrew, may be using the word as it's been adopted into the English language. -- Deborahjay 06:55, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I believe (but I could be mistaken) the distinction between parev and pareve in Yiddish is not masculine/feminine but rather predicative/attributive, i.e. "This food is parev" but "This is a pareve food". I also believe (but could again be mistaken) that unstressed e in Yiddish is pronounced as schwa, thus parev and pareve are phonemically /parev/ and /pareve/ but phonetically ['parəv] and ['parəvə]. Etymologically, this is an interesting case of Hebrew borrowing a word from Yiddish, rather than the other way around; no source I've seen has been able to determine what the ultimate origin of the Yiddish word is. It doesn't seem to come from any of the languages Yiddish usually gets its lexicon from (Middle High German, Slavic, Hebrew, Aramaic). —Angr 08:35, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

In this Glossary of Kosher Terms the pronunciation is given as PAHR-vuh. Curiously enough, in Hebrew there is a word פרווה‎ meaning "fur"; I don't know its vocalization.  --Lambiam^Talk 09:34, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Both syllables have the vowel patakh (short [a]), stressed on the last syllable: /par·VAH/. I don't know the etymology. -- Deborahjay 09:57, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Americanism: "write you"

The Americanism "write you" always seems to grate a bit for me as sounding like really bad grammar. E.g. "I'll write you when I get there", "she wrote me last Tuesday.". To me it should be "write to you" as you are clearly not writing "you".

Is this actually considered proper grammar in the US or bad grammar and just often used? It is the sort of phrase that I would expect to hear spoke from a British poorly educated working class person (possibly from Yorkshire or something) but I've heard it used formally in the US. --- Caffm8 20:41, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

What do you mean by "bad grammar"? From a linguistic point of view, if people are using it, it's not bad grammar. From a more sociological point of view, if you're asking whether it has enough prestige that it would be used in formal contexts, you've answered your own question. So I'm a bit confused as to what you're asking. Marnanel 20:53, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Obviously there are formal rules for grammar. I'm asking if there is then a difference in the formal rules in British and American English. I'm only assuming it is formally accepted in American (I have heard it in often in Amercian English and very seldom, and usually in informal contexts, in British).

Or are you implying there is no such thing as "bad grammar" and it is only what majority of people use? Caffm8 21:05, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

In answer to your question, yeah, in America "write you" is the standard. As for your second point, see prescription and description.--Estrellador* 21:10, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

That's the way a linguist would use the word, yes. From Grammar:

With the advent of written representations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of usage that are developed by observation. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often creates a gulf between contemporary usage and that which is accepted as correct. Linguists normally consider that prescriptive grammars do not have any justification beyond their authors' aesthetic tastes. However, prescriptions are considered in sociolinguistics as part of the explanation for why some people say "I didn't do nothing", some say "I didn't do anything", and some say one or the other depending on social context.

So on the one hand we have the linguistic concept of "grammar", where whether a sentence is grammatical or not is decided by whether a native speaker would be able to produce it. From this point of view, "I ain't done nothing" (for example) is entirely grammatical in certain dialects of English. So you can't really have meant grammar in the mainstream linguistic sense.

Thus, I was assuming you meant what Grammar goes on to describe as "prescriptive grammars", a sociolinguistic idea, which depend on social context. Your question thus reduces to "Is 'write you' accepted in formal English writing in the United States?". Yet you yourself say that you've heard Americans use the phrase formally. Marnanel 21:14, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

I meant grammar in the "If I write this in an an exam would someone put a little red mark next to it." This is probably how most people mean when they ask about "correct grammar". (And as this is how most people use the term it's obviously correct, therefore).

I've heard people use lots of things formally even though they are not "correct" :). That was indeed my question which you have answered. I suppose I also had some generally questions I was hoping someone would give me some background on. Such as is "write you" an omission in the form of "I write you [a letter]" or just an omission of "to"? Caffm8 21:20, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

An alternate definition of "write" is to communicate with in writing, so "I'll write you" means "I'll communicate with you in writing". There's really no problem here. I remember being nonplussed at a 1970s edition of Strunk & White's advice to avoid writing "contact" as a verb, as in "I'll contact you", which seems very natural today. I guess the ignorant won again! --TotoBaggins 23:06, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

Ah, so this is not a 'grammatical' difference, just a vocabulary difference, i.e. British use "write" as a to mean the physical act of writing and American "communicate with..". That's what I wanted to know and that there is not a general tendency to drop prepositions, so you don't say "I'll eat you" to mean "I'll eat with you"! Caffm8 23:42, 19 May 2007 (UTC)

This British dictionary suggests otherwise. [2] Maybe through shear chance you've only ever heard Americans use it like that, and so made a reasonable, yet erroneous connection? My well-educated friend went through 35 years of life before hearing the word "melancholy" spoken aloud. She said "muhLONkuhLEE", and still gets ribbed about it. Truth be told, her way's better.  :) --TotoBaggins 01:07, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

Maybe I am misinterpreting either you or the British dictionary, but I don't see how it suggests otherwise. It appears to me to be stating that She hasn't written me recently is US use, and that the UK use is She hasn't written to me recently.  --Lambiam^Talk 08:05, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I think it is definitely ungrammatical in current UK usage (in the you would get marked down in a exam for using it type of way). But the OED[3] does give a citation under the "communicate via writing" definition from 1632 as:

J. SARIS Voy. Japan (Hakl. Soc.) 94 This daye Mr. Cocks writt me a letter

So perhaps it is just archaic usage of the word "write" which fell out of fashion but kept in the US Caffm8 12:03, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

But note that in this quote the verb to write is used in its transitive sense, unlike in She hasn't written me recently.  --Lambiam^Talk 12:18, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

What about "write me", is that normal in the UK? And "made you" as in "made you a pie"? A.Z. 06:18, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

"Write me" is ungrammatical in the UK (though "write 'me'" -that is, writing the word "me", is, obviously). "made you a pie" is grammatical. --Estrellador* 08:16, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

It seems to me that the American use of the verb lost the adposition (if that's the right word), but the UK one kept it. As whether a verb has an adposition or not in English is pretty random, this seems plausible enough. "Call" - in the sense of 'telephone' - lost it in both UK and US, whilst "speak" kept it in both.

Both those have an interesting counterexample - "call to" means something subtly different, the actual shouting, whilst "speak" instead of "speak to" is a (somewhat archaic) nautical term - if you hail another ship, you are said to "speak them". Shimgray | talk | 14:22, 20 May 2007 (UTC)

I think "write you" versus "write to you" might be a preference-based thing, seeing how this discussion's gone so far. I've been told I have impeccable grammar (though I'm fairly certain it's been going downhill lately), and I'd say "write you", as in your original examples, is wrong. However, "I'll write you a letter" is correct. (On the other hand, "I'll write a letter to you." Anyone who leaves out that "to" will get a very funny look.) People around here seem to be dropping prepositions all over the place lately, maybe differences like that are the reason? The theory about the "communicate in writing" definition just sounds too bizarre to me. Maybe that is what some people mean, but I wouldn't bet on it being even nearly the majority. -Bbik 05:52, 23 May 2007 (UTC)