Re: Messy orthography (Re: Sound change rules for erosion)

Roger Mills wrote on Saturday, November 22nd, 2003, 07:37am:
>> In my contacts with German and Dutch speakers of English, I've  noticed
that
>> they too sometimes mix up "when" and "if" (perhaps because _als_ can mean
>> both, also the resemblance of Grm. _wenn_ 'if' to Engl. when)...?
As for German, "als" means "when" and "wenn" means "if" (the conditional
one, the other one which you can replace with "whether" is "ob"). I don't
know how that is in Dutch, but I guess it's similar (if not even the same
words). The same goes for "to become" and "to get": "bekommen" means "to
get" and "werden" means "to become" ... very confusing! When I had a
conversation with a young Swede who was perhaps one or two years older than
me last year's summer during my holidays in Vårdnäs in the near of Linköping
(Sweden), I was quite unsure about the right use of those two words, too.
I'm certain I mixed them up fairly often because I was so excited - you know
I've never had an oral conversation in English before outside of English
class. It was difficult to express myself sometimes, especially when you've
learned very many words that you actually don't use too frequently in normal
speech, like the canonical example I always give: tele-objective (I learned
it in the second or third year - as if a tele-objective could save your life
when you're in danger when you're name is not James Bond!). If everything
failed, I managed to make myself understood with hands and feet. He
understood me most of the time though because his English was much better
than mine ... I should stop now before this thread gets even more OT.

Carsten

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