|
|
| Author |
Message |
| 25 new of 111 responses total. |
atticus
|
|
response 83 of 111:
| 
Jul 28 21:33 UTC 1998 |
I am here too ;-)
|
e4808mc
|
|
response 84 of 111:
|
Aug 6 23:11 UTC 1998 |
I'm here sometimes too.
|
keesan
|
|
response 85 of 111:
|
Aug 7 00:40 UTC 1998 |
Hi Catriona, it is not very crowded on grex this evening.
|
davel
|
|
response 86 of 111:
|
Aug 7 11:44 UTC 1998 |
With the net link down, of course not.
|
miri
|
|
response 87 of 111:
|
Mar 22 22:29 UTC 1999 |
hola!!!!!!! alguien quiere hablar en eap;ol
Espa;ol
|
kami
|
|
response 88 of 111:
|
Mar 23 04:36 UTC 1999 |
Si! Hay "item" para discutir sobre o en espanol, tambien.
Buenvenido a Grex
|
sidhub
|
|
response 89 of 111:
|
May 8 08:18 UTC 1999 |
Hi everyone....I am from INDIA...
|
sidhub
|
|
response 90 of 111:
|
May 8 08:21 UTC 1999 |
Is here anybody in this room ???????
|
davel
|
|
response 91 of 111:
|
May 8 14:59 UTC 1999 |
Um, this isn't a real-time chat.
|
albaugh
|
|
response 92 of 111:
|
Oct 26 16:32 UTC 2000 |
To the lang cf's fws: You may wish to link fall agora's item #97 to this cf.
|
fparisi
|
|
response 93 of 111:
|
Jul 18 19:33 UTC 2001 |
I'm from Italy. I'd like to improve my bad English. Is there anyone so kind
to help me?? I could help you to improve your Italian. Thank You!
|
keesan
|
|
response 94 of 111:
|
Jul 18 20:32 UTC 2001 |
Your English is not at all bad. The only small thing I would change is 'so
kind as to help me' (an idiom) and use one ? not two. I wish I had some
Italian to improve. Non comprendo italiano. Come va?
|
rcurl
|
|
response 95 of 111:
|
Jul 19 15:45 UTC 2001 |
Ciao! Also "sempre avanti" (I learned that from a woman I gave a ride
to on the back of my motorcycle in Rome - I knew no Italian and she knew
no English, but we had an enjoyable day pointing at things and laughing).
|
fparisi
|
|
response 96 of 111:
|
Jul 21 15:50 UTC 2001 |
Sindi thank you for the help.
I would change "Non capisco l'italiano" that also sounds better
than "Non comprendo italiano".
I wonder how I could learn "idiomatic" expressions which are (for me) a
great obstacle...because I can't translate it.
I don't understand expressions like "gonna" or "gotta"...what's mean?
it's slang?
Rane..."sempre avanti"...."go still forward"...I think it's the
translation..it's only used to give informations to seek a street,
place etc.
Thank you!
|
blaise
|
|
response 97 of 111:
|
Jul 22 13:47 UTC 2001 |
'gonna' and 'gotta' are slang -- they are informal contractions of "going to"
and "got to".
|
orinoco
|
|
response 98 of 111:
|
Jul 22 14:18 UTC 2001 |
(....which are themselves a little slangy. "I am going to" means "I will,"
and "I have got to" means "I need to.")
|
keesan
|
|
response 99 of 111:
|
Jul 22 15:47 UTC 2001 |
I am going to, according to my neighbor who teaches English, implies intention
or plan. It cannot be used everywhere. 'I'll see you tomorrow' is correct,
but 'I am going to see you' is not correct. 'It's going to rain' is correct,
but nobody says 'It will rain tomorrow'. I cannot figure out the rules behind
which to use when. 'I'm going to eat breakfast now' 'Breakfast will be ready
in a few minutes'.
|
rcurl
|
|
response 100 of 111:
|
Jul 29 23:12 UTC 2001 |
"I'm going to see <so-and-so> tomorrow" is quite correct.
I think many people say "It will rain tomorrow", though often within
a longer sentence, such as "I think it'll rain tomorrow".
|
davel
|
|
response 101 of 111:
|
Jul 29 23:32 UTC 2001 |
I was just going to say that *I* say (rarely but with no linguistic pain) "It
will rain tomorrow." Being the worrier that I am, I normally hedge, but
that's just because I hate to make a flat statement like that when I can't
be absolutely sure.
|
rcurl
|
|
response 102 of 111:
|
Jul 30 01:11 UTC 2001 |
Re #96: right - she was directing me to her apartment.
|
rockie
|
|
response 103 of 111:
|
Jul 3 04:37 UTC 2002 |
I think, as a Spanish user from Argentina, that the English is a good language
but I like the Spanish because is more expresivve... When you are trying to
say something that you do or feel (for example) many times you cant say it
because there`s no words for that in English.. That`s what I think!...
|
keesan
|
|
response 104 of 111:
|
Jul 3 14:24 UTC 2002 |
Perhaps if you grew up speaking English you would be able to find the proper
words. What type of subject can you not talk about in English?
|
davel
|
|
response 105 of 111:
|
Jul 3 17:26 UTC 2002 |
Heh. My Hebrew teacher (years ago), a native Israeli, complained that English
had too many words - specifically, too many words "for the same thing". An
example that comes to mind was "silly", "funny", "crazy", & a couple of other
(approximate) synonyms that slip my mind.
|
orinoco
|
|
response 106 of 111:
|
Jul 5 21:16 UTC 2002 |
I seem to remember seeing statistics that showed that English really does have
more words than most other languages. I believe the measure they used was
the number of words in an average adult's working vocabulary. The explanation
given in the article was that English tends to have a lot of near-synonyms.
I'll try to find the source for this.
|
jlawler
|
|
response 107 of 111:
|
Sep 15 00:31 UTC 2002 |
No, not really. English is just the kind of language (called "analytic" --
Chinese is another example) that has to have separate words for everything,
instead of using morphology to modify old or create new words on the spot
that everybody understands.
That's part of why English always comes up high in "number of words" -- it
doesn't recycle its roots. So you have to learn "chair" and "couch"
instead of just using "silla" and "sillon".
Another reason is that English has ranked doublets or triplets in many
areas -- Germanic guts vs Latin intestines; Germanic foot-fall vs Latin
ped-estrian vs Greek pod-iatrist; English one-horn, Latin uni-corn, Greek
mono-ceros; Gmc swine vs Fr pork, Gmc cow vs Fr beef, Gmc calf vs Fr veal,
Gmc sheep vs Fr mutton; etc. These either mean something different
(animal vs meat, for instance) or are appropriate in different registers
("guts" vs "intestines", for instance).
In a language at the other end of the typological spectrum
(Synthetic --- Analytic)
like West Greenlandic Eskimo, there aren't even words to count.
In a *really* synthetic language like Eskimo, there's no difference
between a word and a sentence. Everything is done by inflection, endings,
paradigms, applied to a lot of roots. A single word in Eskimo can mean
"Don't you think you really ought to consider going down to Inuvit this
winter?" It's all done by hitching endings and paradigms to a particular
root with a very abstract meaning, at the same time paring it down
semantically and elaborating it in a number of referential dimensions.
Finally, English is by far the best-studied and most thoroughly
lexicologized language in the world. That means that we have such
resources as the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage
Unabridged Dictionary, so we have much more of our vocabulary, even
passing nonce forms, written down for later study. That makes a *big*
difference.
Anyway, the moral of this story is that "number of words" is not a good
measure of anything about a natural language except what kind of language
it is. Since English is at one end of the spectrum, descriptions tend to
favor English. But you shouldn't take them seriously unless they specify
their criteria for different wordhood and their data source (British
National Corpus vs Oxford English Dictionary, for instance).
Just this once, my first response here, I'll use my Usenet .sig
-John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a - Edward Sapir
mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations." 'Language'
|