Graham Percival wrote:
I mean, in Japanese there's no pluralization of nouns. Given the
writing that I see from the graduate students here, I gather that
Chinese doesn't pluralize nouns either. Now how can I explain to
them how to do something as simple as saying "one foo" and "two
foos" ? There's nothing /approacing/ a firm rule for this. I
just have tons and tons of special cases (subconsciously)
memorized, so I instantly recognize that "In the morning, I pulled
my beet onto my foots" is wrong.
Chinese doesn't pluralize nouns. But it does have measure
words, and different measure words go with different nouns.
Of course you have to learn the irregular plurals. Like you
have to learn the words in the first place.
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".
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.
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?
t'other Graham
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