Re: [frogs] Discourse on the Consumption of Dog Food

[Graham Percival]

On Sat, Feb 07, 2009 at 11:04:30PM +0800, Graham Breed wrote:
> Graham Percival wrote:
>
>> I'm not as sympathetic when they forget to add a "the" or "an" in
>> front of a noun.  English is consistent on that point.
>
> It is not.  Countable and uncountable nouns are already a good hour's 
> lesson.  (I know, I've taught it.)  Then you get to the irregularities, 
> like why you write a piece for piano, instead of "the piano".

Good point!  And that explains why I saw one of the better
students writing "countable?" a few times on another student's
paper.  (I'm pushing peer editing)

... then again, I'm not certain how to explain why it's not
possible to count the number of pianos.  I mean, you never see
more than a dozen pianos at one time (unless you're working for a
seriously huge music shop), and most people can count to a
dozen...

(yes, I'm joking.  I can explain the uncountable nature of
non-specific terms with no more difficulty than explaining how to
make things plural)

>> Really, if any HCI (err, that's Human-Computer Interface, a
>> sub-field of Computer Science) guy proposed "hey, let's invent a
>> new language such that the average first-year university student
>> native speaker doesn't know how to pronounce every single word at
>> first glance", he'd be laughed out of the room.
>
> All natural languages have complexity lurking somewhere. It's to do with 
> us all having the same kind of brains.

Yeah, but some of them are worse than others.  I remember being
stunned at how easy it was to do some things in Turkish, for
example (I took a first-year course on linguistics at some pount).

>> IMNSHO, one of the first rules of an (alphabetized) written
>> language should be that every single word should be pronouncable
>> by a complete novice after 10 hours of study.  Or maybe 5 or 20...
>> but you get the idea.
>
> Sure, and what about languages with a variety of accents, like English?  
> Which one do you base the spelling on?

The Queen's, of course.  ;)
But in a well-designed language, the accents would at least be
consistent -- i.e. if you pronounced "about" as "aboot" (which,
despite the best efforts of the cartoon South Park", I've never
heard any Canadians say), you should also pronounce "though" as
"thoogh", "honour" as "honoor", etc.

The ridiculousness of these examples -- as well as any
uncertainties about exactly what sounds I mean by those
combinations of letters -- is further evidence of the difficulties
of English.

Cheers,
- t'original Graham
whoops, that's a bit dangerous.  Are you older or younger than 30? :)