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23 Oct 07
Originally posted by AttilaTheHornOh, those are easy.
Let’s talk about “edible” words. What does ‘corny’ mean? (Think about it; that’s not an easy question to answer.)
Is it the Netherlands or is it Holland, and why are they called the Dutch?
Why isn’t the word "fish" spelled “g-h-o-t-i,” (“gh” as in enough, “o” as in women, and “ti” as in caution)?
Corny means the same thing as "melig".
The country is called the Netherlands; two provinces in that country are called Holland; and don't let any big-headed, loud-mouthed Hollander tell you different. We're called the Dutch because you Anglophones are behind the times.
And finally, fish isn't spelled ghoti because George Bernard Shaw was too opinionated (yeah, yeah: I should talk...) to take context into account.
Richard
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23 Oct 07
Originally posted by Scotty70No, it isn't. As you say, rather a lot of native speakers (not just in the USA; you have the reputation, and up to a point deservedly, but there are some really quite bad offenders in the UK, as well) apparently found it rather hard to learn English well; whereas I had not a great deal of trouble learning it as my second language. It may be harder to pick up as a second language, but not much harder than as a first. Probably no more so than most languages.
English is much more difficult to pick up as a second language then as a primary language.
Then again,a great number of people in this country speak lousy English as a native language anyway, look at our own president.
They say Chinese is hard, because vowel tone has meaning, but normal Mandarin has only four tones; Cantonese has eight... and about a fifth of the world's population manages to speak a Chinese language, anyway. If you want a language that is very hard to learn as a non-native speaker, I would guess at Xhosa and the like. All those clicks must be the devil to even learn to tell apart.
Richard
23 Oct 07
Originally posted by Sariph00According to this site http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm , Chinese has > 1100 million primary speakers and 20 million secondary speakers, while English has 330 million primary speakers and 150 million secondary speakers, so Chinese is still on top. If you count the number of countries where the languages are spoken, English wins, of course, but I would say the number of speakers is more relevant for the question how widely the language is spoken.
What you all missed was the fact that he said English was the most "Widely spoken" language - so how many different countries speak Mandarin, (either as a first OR second Language) and how many speak english?