Re: New to the list

Well, I dont know. I see what you mean, and I guess it would be for easiness
to speak. I will have to think about it, I got a 4 day break coming up and
will work on it a bit then.

Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoon Ha Lee" <yl112@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2000 8:49 PM
Subject: Re: New to the list


> On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, Patrick Jarrett wrote:
>
> > Okay okay, I sit corrected. It is a natural language, but from my
experience
> > in Latin speaking the language is very tedious, and I wish my language
to be
> > more fluent, easily spoken.
>
> IMHO "easily spoken" depends on what language you come from!  Since
> English has lost most of its cases (pedants like me who use "whom,"
> things like "whose," etc. remain), English speakers may find case
> language problematic.  But I bet people used to free word order and cases
> find more analytic languages with their tiresome word-order rules a pain
> to learn.
>
> If you don't like cases, sure!  But when you say "easily spoken" I have
> to wonder: easily spoken by *whom*?
>
> From my experience with working with foreign-language native speakers at
> Cornell's Writing Walk-in Service, "easy" and "hard" are very relative
> terms when it comes to language.
>
> Some generalization-examples:
>
> Most Asian language speakers find the English article system
> nigh-impossible to learn perfectly.  I've been able to give them
> rules-of-thumb (in half-hour sessions) that let them use it correctly
> some 80% of the time, but that last 20% is the killer.  And yet native
> English speakers may make any number of "mistakes" (depending on how
> prescriptive your grammar is) but they rarely make the kinds of
> article-use errors that these foreign speakers do.
>
> Chinese-native speakers seem to have trouble with various verb
> conjugations, aspects, what-have-you when they're starting out.
>
> I've known English speakers to run into real trouble with the topic vs.
> subject particles in Korean.  I'm betting the same happens with English
> speakers learning Japanese.
>
> I'm sure examples could go on and on.
>
> So the question is, again: for *whom* is your language supposed to be
easy?
>
> YHL

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