Re: Error rate, Circumlocution, and Cappucino

Quoting Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>:

> Am I alone in hating this kind of linguistic journalism completely lacking
> any kind of linguistic know-how?
>
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4248494.stm
>
> However, the (mostly lay) commentary at
> http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=1684424 has put me in
> mind of a few questions. One commenter argues that English tolerates a far
> higher error rate (while remaining understandable) than French -- whether
> this relates to grammatical, morphological, lexical or pronunciation
> errors (or something entirely else) is not stated.
I suspect there's a cultural difference here, with anglophones generally more
willing to exert themselves to try and make sense of error-ridden speech.

> What can you say about the acceptable error rate within your conlang(s)?
> Does it easily tolerate sloppy grammar, or unusual accents, or poor
> articulation?
Hard to tell. In several of my conlangs, I can think of specific errors which
could impair communication pretty badly - eg, English-style conflation of [o:]
and [ou] would kill the perfect/imperfective distinction for a large class of
Meghean verbs - but it's hard to tell how much such vulernablities mean in the
great scheme of things.

> The main thread of the arguement is that other languages are clearly
> superior to English due to the fact that they have words for things you
> cannot express in English -- ignoring the fact that the article itself
> expresses each term in English quite clearly. The commentary on Fark.com
> also provides several English examples shorter and simpler than the
> foreign examples in the article.
>
> What monomorphemic (or compound) words in your conlang(s) need to be
> circumlocuted in English? Likewise, what single words in English (or your
> native language) have to be circumlocuted in your conlang(s)?
It's always annoyed me that English have no straightforward single-word
equivalents to Tairezazh _krazol_ "independent state", _krazan_ "pertaining to
an independent state".

As you'll have guessed, the words are bimorphemic - _kraz_ is the root for
"independent state", _-an_ is a (somewhat unusual) adjective-former, and _-ol_
an old dimunitive ending that adds nothing to meaning here - historically, it's
there because after the breakup of the old federation the successor states were
considered statelets.

                                               Andreas

Reply