Favorite Pasta Dishes

Originally posted by tmetzler
That was what the wifey whipped up this week. But like I said its standard fare around here, just not always with the sausage. I think have instructions typed up somewhere, I'll try to dig em up later.

Very good looking dish indeed. When I saw the pic the wife walked in with a seed pack to grow our own broccoli raab this spring. I'd love your recipe to have ready for the first crop! The plate looks like what one would find in Forli.

Originally posted by FMF
And so it goes on. Well worth a read in its entirety for anyone who does - or does not, for that matter - continue to propagate the myth about the dastardly difficult English language.

Only native English speakers say that. I think English is a very easy language to learn, but a relatively difficult one to master as the lack of variety in grammar is compensated by a great richness in vocabulary.

Originally posted by Palynka
Only native English speakers say that. I think English is a very easy language to learn, but a relatively difficult one to master as the lack of variety in grammar is compensated by a great richness in vocabulary.

Nailed it! I seldom see foreigners write English credibly because there are so few native English speakers who do so. No language has more vocabulary than English.

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
No language has more vocabulary than English.

Actually it isn't quite as clear-cut as it may seem. I agree with the author of this article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/06/counting_words

Originally posted by Nordlys
Actually it isn't quite as clear-cut as it may seem. I agree with the author of this article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/06/counting_words

English has 600,000+ words and growing.

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
English has 600,000+ words and growing.

Did you read that article?

Originally posted by Nordlys
Did you read that article?

I did and it is competely spurious. We could do the same with English compound words and voila, back to square one.

http://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_statistics.htm

Originally posted by scacchipazzo
I did and it is competely spurious. We could do the same with English compound words and voila, back to square one.

http://www.vistawide.com/languages/language_statistics.htm

I think you missed the point of the article. It doesn't try to prove that Turkish or German have a larger vocabulary than English. It shows that counting words isn't very meaningful, especially between languages that are constructed in very different ways.

If you'd rather like to hear it from Oxford: http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/page/94

By the way, English isn't unique in having been influenced so strongly by another language from a different language family either. For example, a large portion (about 50%, I think) of the Japanese vocabulary is of Chinese origin.