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Post by Sniffles on May 30, 2014 1:39:58 GMT
It's funny how a simple grammar mistake can change the meaning of a sentence. In my defense, I speak French and English is my second language...lol. No ridicule intended! My abject apologies! It is a fact the 4th year and above European ESL students speak much better English that American high school graduates. I was more making fun of one of English's many foibles where simply transposing the nouns and verbs and adding a sprinkling of punctuation can completely alter the meaning of a sentence. One I learned in college I never forgot: On the chalk board one morning was written: There are 16 ways in the English language to write the following sentence. Without altering the location of the words, using punctuation and expressed or applied nuance, write all 16. "What is this shit stew" (Hint, being fluent in French and versed in new latin and UK English is almost mandatory. In English, what is what. Mostly a pronoun as used here. Now look at it in French: jusqu'à quand, quoi! (exclamation), quoi; quel; ce qui, ce que; combien; jusqu'où? quoi; quel; dans quelle mesure? jusqu'à quel point?que, qui, quel, quelle, quoi; que. Each of those 5 words is similar, having a vast number of differing uses.) |
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Post by jgf on May 30, 2014 18:19:20 GMT
Well, no disrespect intended to anyone; just a little fun with grammar and syntax. Such a sentence is difficult even for those to whom English is native ...and my sense of humor kicked in when I read it. I'm always amazed at how many people around the world speak English along with their native tongue; come to the US and you'll find half the people barely speak decent English, much less any other language. And when you throw slang into the mix things become even more confusing. A friend in France was telling me about one of his neighbors and, not knowing the English term, threw in the French. I looked this up, and a literal translation informed me his neighbor was "a pot of glue". Hmm, that can't be correct. As it turns out, the best translation of this French slang was that his neighbor was a pest. English is also so riddled with homonyms that communication is frequently unintentionally humorous. A lady in Canada, fluent in French and English, recently told me her sister had been elected mayor of her burro. ?!? Of course she meant "borough". And of course I had to tease her, "Did you mean 'burrow'? Your sister lives underground?" This latter is perfectly illustrated in this old clip from "I Love Lucy": www.youtube.com/watch?v=g10jFL423ho |
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Post by wotan on May 30, 2014 20:15:01 GMT
Doesn't 'burro' mean donkey? Can't remember which language it is, though.
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Post by Sniffles on May 31, 2014 1:13:48 GMT
We need to keep in mind English is the worst polyglot in the world with none even coming close to it. Being nowhere even close to a true, primal language almost everything can be written or spoken to mean different things. Then throwing Americaneeze and gutter limey slangs and idioms into the wash and you end up with the linguistic equivalent of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Thus the very best spoen and written English today comes from European ESL students who are rigidly taught precise sentence structures. German ESLs are the best as Western Europe is a little looser and more forgiving as a rule, but all are far far better than American glurp and blurt hi-skool talk.
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