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I think English should have an official word for "you" (pl.). I personally say "y'all", but some grammar freaks would claim that this is "improper".

I also think English should have a word for "you" (personally), or that "one" should be more prominent. Compare:
'You are always doing that'. - personal
"You [One] cannot speak poorly of Kim Jong-il in North Korea." - general usage

Another thing, in Swedish, we have two words for his/her/its blahblah. Compare:

Hon sa att hennes son levde fortfarande. - She said that her son was still alive. (another woman's son)

Hon sa att sin son levde fortfarande. - She said that her son was still alive. (her own son; the mother of which we are speaking)

I think too much.
D'y'all have any more to contribute?

There is no word that describes a person without knowing their gender..other than "it" which is very rude and incorrect to use. "they" can also be used but again...it's not a good substitute. Many languages offer a word to allow such a thing.

Examples:

She is saying hello to you.
They are saying hello to you.

They is too obscure describing one person or possibly many.

Personally I think an adotion of a third gender term is needed.

Example:

Heshe is waving at you.

"Heshe" could be a term used to describe one person who's gender is not known.

I agree, Omni. Such a word would be especially useful if you were referring to a person whose name's gender wasn't obvious to you. For example, I was referring to an author of a .pdf file whose name was of Indian origin the other day, and I didn't know whether his name was masculine or feminine. So, I went with feminine and said 'her', and apparently offended the author. Go figure.

(10-17-2009, 09:52 PM)Elektrisk Wrote: [ -> ]I think English should have an official word for "you" (pl.). I personally say "y'all", but some grammar freaks would claim that this is "improper".

I also think English should have a word for "you" (personally), or that "one" should be more prominent. Compare:
'You are always doing that'. - personal
"You [One] cannot speak poorly of Kim Jong-il in North Korea." - general usage

Another thing, in Swedish, we have two words for his/her/its blahblah. Compare:

Hon sa att hennes son levde fortfarande. - She said that her son was still alive. (another woman's son)

Hon sa att sin son levde fortfarande. - She said that her son was still alive. (her own son; the mother of which we are speaking)

I think too much.
D'y'all have any more to contribute?

You're completely correct, and for those of us who choose to take the corrective ways when it comes to grammar and everyday language, this would probably help enhance the English language.
Believe it or not, it's said that the English language is one of the (if not the) hardest languages to learn (foreigner or not). I think that adding more words would complicate things for others trying to learn English.
I do like where you're coming from, though. I hope this thread stays alive - perhaps we can update it regularly.

Quote:Believe it or not, it's said that the English language is one of the (if not the) hardest languages to learn (foreigner or not). I think that adding more words would complicate things for others trying to learn English.

I think that this is somewhat of a myth. Yes, English has its hard parts, such as no where near regular pronunciation, but its grammar is relatively easy (or so I've been told). English is my native language, so I guess I can't say, but I know that most people don't like being told that their native language is easy, which might explain this whole "English is one of the hardest languages to learn" things. I used to think it was, too, before I learnt about other languages.

Here is the most difficult language to learn for a native English speaker (in my opinion):

Finnish. The language of the Finns, whose only relatively similar language is Estonian. Even then, it does not contain the same mutual intelligibility that Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, English/Scots, Spanish/Catalan, Serbian/Bosnian, ect have. The reason that Finnish would be so difficult is that it utilizes FIFTEEN of the 18 grammatical cases (ablative, nominative, genitive, ect), whereas English only uses one or two, which have only really been retained in pronouns. Okay, so clearly the grammar is complicated, because adjectives & nouns are inflected to agree with the conjugation of verbs. Let's look at an example sentence:

Itämerensuomalaisten kielten, joihin suomikin kuuluu, yhteistä oletettua kantamuotoa, kantasuomea, puhuttiin Suomenlahden molemmin puolin jo ennen ajanlaskumme alkua.

I have no ****ing clue what that means, so don't ask me! But, we can obviously assume that the reason the words are so long, is because of all the suffixes implemented so that they agree with each other. For example (THIS IS TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL), let's assume that "-u" means "of". Let's assume that "yhteis" means "cat" and "tä" represents the definite form of the noun. So, if we assume that "kuulu" means "house", we can see that "kuuluu yhteistä" means "[the] house of the cat". A bad example, but since I don't know Finnish, I can't explain it more thoroughly.

Okay, grammar aside, what else is important when analyzing a language? Its pronunciation. Personally, I find Finnish to be a very bland language pronunciation wise, much like English. Perhaps that's because I'm used to Swedish, which contains unique prosody wherein words are pronounced with a regular up-and-down voice alongside its actual pronunciation. You can hear Swedish here (btw, that is the original version of the film 'The Invisible' which Hollywood of course had to make a remake of because apparently they think Americans can't read subtitles.). Anyway, my point is, I didn't find any difficulties with Finnish pronunciation. However, my findings may be a bit unfair to everyone else, because I know English, Swedish, and German pronunciation.

Spelling might be difficult at first, but once one remembers all of the case prefixes/suffixes, it should be easy to plug them into the base word. If one learns the spelling when they learn the word's meaning, they should have no trouble.

Okay, I don't know why I just wrote all that, but I have nothing more to say about it for now. Say what you will :b

(10-18-2009, 12:31 AM)Elektrisk Wrote: [ -> ]I think that this is somewhat of a myth. Yes, English has its hard parts, such as no where near regular pronunciation, but its grammar is relatively easy (or so I've been told). English is my native language, so I guess I can't say, but I know that most people don't like being told that their native language is easy, which might explain this whole "English is one of the hardest languages to learn" things. I used to think it was, too, before I learnt about other languages.

Here are the two most difficult languages to learn for a native English speaker (in my opinion):

Finnish. The language of the Finns, whose only relatively similar language is Estonian. Even then, it does not contain the same mutual intelligibility that Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, English/Scots, Spanish/Catalan, Serbian/Bosnian, ect have. The reason that Finnish would be so difficult is that it utilizes FIFTEEN of the 18 grammatical cases (ablative, nominative, genitive, ect), whereas English only uses one or two, which have only really been retained in pronouns.

Gonna finish this later.

Some interesting points.
I study Japanese at school and my Japanese teacher has a PHD in English so she's always telling us about the English language. I think one of the reasons why it's more difficult for foreign students to learn English is the fact that many words have alternative meanings and can be confusing to many.
The online translators cannot even comprehend the English language's difficulties, but this is to be expected.
An example of what I was saying above could be the word, 'there'. Or 'their'/'they're'. Pronounced the same way, yet grammatically incorrect if used in the wrong context. I see it almost everyday.
I live in Australia and my teacher wrote a sentence: 'There going to sit over there'. I pointed out his mistake and he attempted to correct it: 'Their going to sit over there'. Wrong.
Perhaps it's not the hardest language to learn, but it's certainly not easy.

(10-18-2009, 12:55 AM)SupportMaster Wrote: [ -> ]Some interesting points.
I study Japanese at school and my Japanese teacher has a PHD in English so she's always telling us about the English language. I think one of the reasons why it's more difficult for foreign students to learn English is the fact that many words have alternative meanings and can be confusing to many.
The online translators cannot even comprehend the English language's difficulties, but this is to be expected.
An example of what I was saying above could be the word, 'there'. Or 'their'/'they're'. Pronounced the same way, yet grammatically incorrect if used in the wrong context. I see it almost everyday.
I live in Australia and my teacher wrote a sentence: 'There going to sit over there'. I pointed out his mistake and he attempted to correct it: 'Their going to sit over there'. Wrong.
Perhaps it's not the hardest language to learn, but it's certainly not easy.

I see where you're coming from. I didn't experience anything like this when learning Swedish, because very rarely do words have double meanings. The only time I've encountered something like that is with the word "ande", which can either mean "spirit" or "duck" depending on how you say it. Oh, and "full" (drunk) and "ful" (ugly), but that's just because my pronunciation sucks. So, I used the word 'rusig' for 'drunk' to avoid calling myself ugly ^^

In fact, English's tendency to have a million meanings for one word made Swedish slightly difficult in that sense. The words 'tänka', 'tycka', and 'tro' all mean "think", but had distinct meanings. The same with "faktiskt" and "egentligen" which both mean 'actually', aning/idé which both mean 'idea', att/som/det där, which all mean 'that', and so on

PS: I edited the post.

English is the easiest language in the world.

I personally find Hindi harder and I'm an Indian.
in Hindi there are only 2 genders. Male and female.
No neuter. Even non-living things are catagorized into male and female.
For example, the Sun is said to be male and a rose is supposed to be female.
But that's not it, you've got genders for chairs, footballs etc.
I always make grammatical errors in Hindi and my grades are horrible.

Sanskrit is even harder. It's like Finnish. Extraordinarily long words.
You've got suffixes for every damned thing. I used to fail in Sanskrit.

I am more fluent in English than my mother tongue, and I suck at all Indian languages.
So all this nonsense about English being hard is bullshit.

Quote:So all this nonsense about English being hard is bullshit.

Well, while it may not be the HARDEST language, it certainly isn't the easiest. I think the reason that so many foreigners find it an easy language to learn is because it is EVERYWHERE! Not to mention that it is THE most popular language of the Internet. In fact, you can't even use characters not found in common English in URLs. In a lot of countries, subtitles are preferred over dubbing when displaying English programs/movies on T.V. This holds true in all Scandinavian countries and many other European countries, as far as I know.

There're an impossible amount of resources to learn English online. Not to mention, that in almost every country, pupils begin learning English at the age of 6 or 7. It also doesn't help that English is an official language of India ^^ But, don't get me wrong; I don't doubt that difficulty of Sanskrit. I've read a lot of articles on it, and seen some Wiki articles written in the language; it doesn't even use the same alphabet as English!

I still think that the idea of a universal language is a good idea. The language is still implemented today, but very rarely.
According to a particular source (http://www.lexiophiles.com/english/top-l...s-to-learn), the hardest languages to learn in order from hardest to easiest are as follows (top ten).

1. Basque
2. Hungarian
3. Chinese
4. Polish
5. Japanese
6. Russian
7. German
8. Korean
9. English
10. Swahili

While all this is strongly based upon opinion and personal experience, we shouldn't get too far off the topic of the English language's problems. Still, it's interesting to know.