Re: Advanced English to become official!

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 11:16:31 -0400, Pascal A. Kramm <pkramm@...> wrote:

>"Problem is, Pascal's German, so it's bound to be imperfect." -> that's a
>rather crude and very unpolite sweeping stake about all Germans being
>retarded (or otherwise being mentally incapable) and thus it's impossible
>that they can come up with something really good.
Joe's critique was not meant to be crude or unpolite. However, I'd say it
was inconsiderate. The critique of Pascal's attempt is justified: It really
reminds of the stereotype German accent. But I strongly disagree that any
English spelling by a German is bound to be imperfect. The system of English
phonology can be mastered very well by foreigners. There's plenty of
material, and with an RP-ish accent (few phonemic mergers) and RP
dictionaries at hand, you have a good start.


>About being a native speaker or not - that doesn't say ANYTHING about the
>proficiency of the person in question! It's very well possible that a
>non-native speaker is better than a native one.
Not in the fluency and not in the language intuition, that is. However,
someone who learns English as a second language will be less biassed by the
traditional English spelling than a native speaker who isn't interested in
linguistics (none on this list), simply because he already knows another
spelling system (most probably a more regular one).

I'd even affirm that someone who's learned a language at school will
probably make less orthography errors than an avarage native speaker not
interested in language matters (though the native speaker will hardly ever
make wording errors which are most abundant in foreigners' language). This
is a result of how the rules are learnt: Foreigners consciously learn the
spelling rules at the same instant they learn the language, whereas native
speakers don't need any explicit rule knowledge. Spelling is taught to
native speakers at a very early age before the mind develops the ability of
dealing with an explicit rule, so many of those who aren't interested in
language won't ever learn the spelling rules but write intuitively.

Take for instance the Spanish accent mark: The rules are easy to learn, and
most foreigners will place all the accents correctly. Many native speakers,
however, who have learnt to write a couple of words with accent mark in the
first school years, won't ever know the rules and will place the accent
marks more or less at random for their entire lifes. The same with the
silent final _s_ in French: Foreigners have learnt the rules and will place
them correctly, whereas many native speaker just place them intuitively and
thus often wrongly.

In cases like these, many non-native speakers are better than many native
ones (and of course, there's also plenty of similar cases in English).


kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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