Not the only one here

I'm feeling bad because Windows has problemos and I change nickname a lot and
some users call me of-topic-no-quoting troll and I'm not smart with english
software but my natural language has extingished. And I don't have no one who
understands my dialogs.

my bike has flat tires.

"Ken1943" escreveu na mensagem
...

On Sun, 14 Sep 2014 17:57:39 +0100, "Jose" wrote:

I'm feeling bad because Windows has problemos and I change nickname a lot and
some users call me of-topic-no-quoting troll and I'm not smart with english
software but my natural language has extingished. And I don't have no one who
understands my dialogs.

Go someplace where someone may give a ****.

Jose wrote:
I'm feeling bad because Windows has problemos and I change nickname a
lot and some users call me of-topic-no-quoting troll and I'm not smart
with english software but my natural language has extingished. And I
don't have no one who understands my dialogs.

What is/was your mother-tongue, then?

Ed

My natural idiom is also portuguese. I learned my basic english listening
records and using computer software. Reading your posts it's a good thing to
me even I don't grow up very much in terms of literature.

"Ed Cryer" escreveu na mensagem ...

Jose wrote:
I'm feeling bad because Windows has problemos and I change nickname a
lot and some users call me of-topic-no-quoting troll and I'm not smart
with english software but my natural language has extingished. And I
don't have no one who understands my dialogs.

What is/was your mother-tongue, then?

Ed

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

Of course, we Englanders think *everyone* should speak and write
English. It is, after all, the One True Language.

ObSmilie: Yes, that *was* a joke.


Two comments:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

2. If I were mysteriously granted my wish, and everyone spoke English
and no other language, it wouldn't turn out to be what I wanted. In a
few hundred years the world again be filled with multiple languages as
variants of English appeared in different parts of the world, just as
today, some people speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French,
Italian, Romanian and Romansh instead of Latin. And as today people
speak English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian instead of
German.

And even thinking about the many different people in different parts
of the world who speak English, what many of them speak is already
different enough from what I speak that it is very difficult for me to
understand. As a single example, I remember a young woman who worked
in my office who once said something to me about "flahs." Even though
she repeated it multiple times and was really getting ****ed off at
me, I didn't understand what she was saying until she wrote it down
for me: "flowers." I was a New Yorker and she was from North Carolina.

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

Of course, we Englanders think *everyone* should speak and write
English. It is, after all, the One True Language.

ObSmilie: Yes, that *was* a joke.


Two comments:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

2. If I were mysteriously granted my wish, and everyone spoke English
and no other language, it wouldn't turn out to be what I wanted. In a
few hundred years the world again be filled with multiple languages as
variants of English appeared in different parts of the world, just as
today, some people speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French,
Italian, Romanian and Romansh instead of Latin. And as today people
speak English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian instead of
German.

And even thinking about the many different people in different parts
of the world who speak English, what many of them speak is already
different enough from what I speak that it is very difficult for me to
understand. As a single example, I remember a young woman who worked
in my office who once said something to me about "flahs." Even though
she repeated it multiple times and was really getting ****ed off at
me, I didn't understand what she was saying until she wrote it down
for me: "flowers." I was a New Yorker and she was from North Carolina.


I live in little old England, and I claim that within the UK itself
there are wider variations of our native language than from USA to
Australia.
Geordies from Tyneside are bad enough for me, but Liverpudlians, Irish
and urban Scots wander sometimes into incomprehensibility.
Not that I hate them for that; I kind of love some of the dialects and
accents. My favourites are Highland Scots and West Country Englanders.

We have a saying "Queen's English"; or sometimes "BBC Announcers'
English". But very few of my fellow countrymen come close to that.

I'm a Northerner, but my accent has been dulled and softened over the
years by having moved around the country a lot. I'm now back in the
North, and I'm not too sure just how the locals place me.

Ed

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:05:51 +0100, Ed Cryer
wrote:

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

Of course, we Englanders think *everyone* should speak and write
English. It is, after all, the One True Language.

ObSmilie: Yes, that *was* a joke.


Two comments:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

2. If I were mysteriously granted my wish, and everyone spoke English
and no other language, it wouldn't turn out to be what I wanted. In a
few hundred years the world again be filled with multiple languages as
variants of English appeared in different parts of the world, just as
today, some people speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French,
Italian, Romanian and Romansh instead of Latin. And as today people
speak English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian instead of
German.

And even thinking about the many different people in different parts
of the world who speak English, what many of them speak is already
different enough from what I speak that it is very difficult for me to
understand. As a single example, I remember a young woman who worked
in my office who once said something to me about "flahs." Even though
she repeated it multiple times and was really getting ****ed off at
me, I didn't understand what she was saying until she wrote it down
for me: "flowers." I was a New Yorker and she was from North Carolina.


I live in little old England, and I claim that within the UK itself
there are wider variations of our native language than from USA to
Australia.


I've heard a lot of what you are talking about, so I believe you. For
example, when I saw the film "The Full Monty," I couldn't understand
more than every third word (and that word was "fook").

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 22:05:51 +0100, Ed Cryer
wrote:

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

Of course, we Englanders think *everyone* should speak and write
English. It is, after all, the One True Language.

ObSmilie: Yes, that *was* a joke.


Two comments:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

2. If I were mysteriously granted my wish, and everyone spoke English
and no other language, it wouldn't turn out to be what I wanted. In a
few hundred years the world again be filled with multiple languages as
variants of English appeared in different parts of the world, just as
today, some people speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French,
Italian, Romanian and Romansh instead of Latin. And as today people
speak English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian instead of
German.

And even thinking about the many different people in different parts
of the world who speak English, what many of them speak is already
different enough from what I speak that it is very difficult for me to
understand. As a single example, I remember a young woman who worked
in my office who once said something to me about "flahs." Even though
she repeated it multiple times and was really getting ****ed off at
me, I didn't understand what she was saying until she wrote it down
for me: "flowers." I was a New Yorker and she was from North Carolina.


I live in little old England, and I claim that within the UK itself
there are wider variations of our native language than from USA to
Australia.


I've heard a lot of what you are talking about, so I believe you. For
example, when I saw the film "The Full Monty," I couldn't understand
more than every third word (and that word was "fook").


I send my apologies on behalf of fellow country men.

Ed

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 23:36:36 +0100, Ed Cryer
wrote:


I've heard a lot of what you are talking about, so I believe you. For
example, when I saw the film "The Full Monty," I couldn't understand
more than every third word (and that word was "fook").


I send my apologies on behalf of fellow country men.


Thanks very much for the apologies . vbg

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

That is a *perfect* example of your skill. Many native English-users
use "complement" and "compliment" interchangeably, you picked the
correct one for the context. They also mix up "principle" and
"principal". They also misuse "pore" and "pour" and complain like
rabid badgers when corrected, as well as "your" and "you're" and the
triplet of "there", "their" and "they're". Also "then" and "than" but
that could often be a typo.
Worse by far than any of those is "should of" instead of "should
have". That grates on my ears.
To be fair, their teachers, and the teachers of those teachers
probably never learned the differences, either so it is not entirely
the fault of the person involved.

The nature of many of these common mistakes becomes a lot clearer if
you see them printed than if you only know how they sound. A little
knowledge of grammar is helpful too, so that you know, for example,
that "of" isn't a verb, and why you need one, so that you understand
why phrases like "must of" and "should of" are meaningless.

I think a very strong contributing factor, even if it isn't the sole
cause, must be a decline in the recreational reading of books, and I
wonder if the increase in popularity over the past couple of
generations of spending hours watching banal sub-literate rubbish on
screens instead could have something to do with this.

Rod.

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 02:43:07 +0100, John wrote:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

I don't doubt this. However, Chinese wins as a first language. By
"Chinese", I mean Mandarin, of course. If you include all the Cantnese
and other "languages" it wins with no possibility of argument.
Mandarin might even win as a second and third language as it is
possible that many non-Mandarin-speaking Chnese can follow it simply
because its use so overwhelms the use of their own dialect or
language.

A lot of people may speak Chinese, but if most of them live in China,
what use is that? Maybe we should devise some parameter that includes
a measure of how widely distributed a language is, as well as the
number of speakers. That would seem to be a better indication of
suitability as a "World language".

Rod.

Third language in the world is spanish and they are poor.

"Roderick Stewart" escreveu na mensagem
...

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 02:43:07 +0100, John wrote:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

I don't doubt this. However, Chinese wins as a first language. By
"Chinese", I mean Mandarin, of course. If you include all the Cantnese
and other "languages" it wins with no possibility of argument.
Mandarin might even win as a second and third language as it is
possible that many non-Mandarin-speaking Chnese can follow it simply
because its use so overwhelms the use of their own dialect or
language.

A lot of people may speak Chinese, but if most of them live in China,
what use is that? Maybe we should devise some parameter that includes
a measure of how widely distributed a language is, as well as the
number of speakers. That would seem to be a better indication of
suitability as a "World language".

Rod.

Roderick Stewart wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

That is a *perfect* example of your skill. Many native English-users
use "complement" and "compliment" interchangeably, you picked the
correct one for the context. They also mix up "principle" and
"principal". They also misuse "pore" and "pour" and complain like
rabid badgers when corrected, as well as "your" and "you're" and the
triplet of "there", "their" and "they're". Also "then" and "than" but
that could often be a typo.
Worse by far than any of those is "should of" instead of "should
have". That grates on my ears.
To be fair, their teachers, and the teachers of those teachers
probably never learned the differences, either so it is not entirely
the fault of the person involved.

The nature of many of these common mistakes becomes a lot clearer if
you see them printed than if you only know how they sound. A little
knowledge of grammar is helpful too, so that you know, for example,
that "of" isn't a verb, and why you need one, so that you understand
why phrases like "must of" and "should of" are meaningless.

I think a very strong contributing factor, even if it isn't the sole
cause, must be a decline in the recreational reading of books, and I
wonder if the increase in popularity over the past couple of
generations of spending hours watching banal sub-literate rubbish on
screens instead could have something to do with this.

Rod.


A lot of it is due to the abandoning of teaching grammar. The do-gooders
thought it was unnecessary and maybe inhibited children. Which has left
lots of people without knowledge of the patterns that hold true.

In addition the USA with its simplified spelling (to which so many kids
have access on the Net these days) must carry a bit of blame. And then
there's text-lingo ("I c u r 2 Is 4 me" sort of thing).

Ed

Ken Blake, MVP wrote:
On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 23:36:36 +0100, Ed Cryer
wrote:


I've heard a lot of what you are talking about, so I believe you. For
example, when I saw the film "The Full Monty," I couldn't understand
more than every third word (and that word was "fook").


I send my apologies on behalf of fellow country men.


Thanks very much for the apologies . vbg


You're welcome. ema

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 02:43:07 +0100, John wrote:

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 12:44:48 -0700, "Ken Blake, MVP"
wrote:

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 19:56:30 +0100, John wrote:

Of course, we Englanders think *everyone* should speak and write
English. It is, after all, the One True Language.

ObSmilie: Yes, that *was* a joke.


Two comments:

1. I think the world would be a better place if there were only a
single language and we all spoke it. And even though I am USAan rather
than an Englander, I think that single language should be English. Why
English? Not because it's *my* native language, but because it's the
language that more people know (not necessarily as their first
language) than any other.

I don't doubt this. However, Chinese wins as a first language.


Yes, I know.


2. If I were mysteriously granted my wish, and everyone spoke English
and no other language, it wouldn't turn out to be what I wanted. In a
few hundred years the world again be filled with multiple languages as
variants of English appeared in different parts of the world, just as
today, some people speak Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French,
Italian, Romanian and Romansh instead of Latin. And as today people
speak English, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian instead of
German.

That would only happen were TV, radio and the Internet to die.


I've thought about this a lot, and I think it would happen even with
TV, radio and the Internet, although perhaps a little more slowly.


And even thinking about the many different people in different parts
of the world who speak English, what many of them speak is already
different enough from what I speak that it is very difficult for me to
understand. As a single example, I remember a young woman who worked
in my office who once said something to me about "flahs." Even though
she repeated it multiple times and was really getting ****ed off at
me, I didn't understand what she was saying until she wrote it down
for me: "flowers." I was a New Yorker and she was from North Carolina.

To me, an Englander from English-land who speaks what we jokingly
call "Real English", that sounded like she was talking about the
vertical stages of a tall building: floors. What Yankees call
"stories".



Perhaps "floors" is more common in the USA than "stories," but both
are used here.


I made
the mistake of asking him exactly how to spell the name of that
particular official rank. He looked at me as though I was deaf, dumb,
stupid, mentally challenged and several degrees below the IQ of a wart
on a toad and slowly said: "Ell-Owe-Are-Dee-Esse".
Oh. "Lords". Got it.


Both in the USA and the UK, some people who speak English are rhotic
(lords) and some are non-rhotic (lawds). In the USA, generally people
on most parts of the east coast are non-rhotic (for example, it's easy
to recognize New Yorkers because they say "New Yawk"), but the rest of
the country is mostly rhotic. Parts of the UK are also non-rhotic, but
you probably know where they are much better than I do.