on Mon, 20 Oct 2003 01:40:19PM +0200, David Jardine insinuated:
On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 12:56:37AM -0700, Erik Steffl wrote:
csj wrote:
[...]
Because everybody from the poor war orphan "Hey, Joe, eat!" to the UN Secretary General speaks it, English has become a rather tolerant language. But if the same standard for proper German is applied to what one considers proper English, then yes, German is easier to learn. It's a purer, therefore more consistent language, than the French-infected English.
purity has nothing to do with it (not sure what you mean by
pure).
good point -- languages by definition evolve, and the notion of a "pure" language is utterly ridiculous and meaningless.
not sure what your agenda is. english is a a lot simpler than
german,
in what sense? to learn? to master? to write basic sentences in? to write novels in? to read novels in?
in all of these senses. but my original claim was that english is better suited to be a computer language than lot of other natural languages.
the two are apples and oranges, my friend, especially when you're
dealing with something that no one can have an objective point of view
on, given different native languages.
??? you can measure how much information you need to understand/parse each of the languages... that doesn't have anything to do with language being native or not...
and, contrary to popular belief, you can easily compare apples and oranges...
the usage of words is simple, the grammar is simple.
Depends what you mean by purity. By European language standards it's fairly pure in the sense of not being cluttered up with things like redundant inflections, but this is probably because it is impure in the sense of having been knocked around by neighbouring languages and dialects until there's not much left of it apart from what's really necessary to communicate.
you're kidding, right? if i read you right, you're stating that
note that the 'you' above and the 'you' far above refer to different people
"there's not much left of [English] apart from what's really necessary to communicate"? on the contrary -- it's one of the richest, least threadbare languages there is!
erik
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