eheheh, thanks for your confirmation... I plan to get there this summer, and I'll HAVE to ask somebody how to get to HoustOun

conjugation happens in english too, pretty much to the same degree that it happens in romance languages. but we're intuitively ingrained into using english that we dont notice it.

also, english is alot more flexible in its usage than many other languages. (at least, from what i've seen.)

after all, it's only in english that you'll see something as complicated as "buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." and still be able to consider it a sentence.

source

Not quite.

Its.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Seemingly the capitals in those places make it a valid sentence, totally weird untill you read the meanings of each word in the context that is explained.

---

Ambiguity

If the capitalization is ignored, the sentence can be read another way:

Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.

That is, bison from Buffalo intimidate (other) bison from Buffalo that bison from Buffalo intimidate.

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Andy

i dont recall capitalizing any letters in any of my sentences

When going to the island it's pronounced "Lon Gisland."

If you're having trouble pronouncing this simply get drunk and do 80 mph on the Belt Parkway, it comes right out just fine.

Lon Gisland. Say it with me now.

I understand that how I pronouce "water" is as effective as GPS in locating my point of origin in the US.

I don't think I completely got what you wrote... are you already doin' 80 on the freeway while drinking?

Is there a wrong sign on the belt, reporting Lon Gisland instead of Long Island, or this isn't the main point?

fuh-ged-ah-bow-tit

ok

Its the local dialect.

How does one pronounce "Cwmcarn".? To be fair this is a trick question, its Welsh, but still, how does it sound when said "correctly" (i.e. in a dialect from Wales) vs how I would guess how to say the word.

"Kwum-carn" is how I would best define the sound that came out of my mouth, but how it is supposed to sound.?

"The Welsh placename of Cwmcarn came about in 942 when Llywarch ap Cadogan gave Villa Treficarn Pont ('estate near the bridge over the Carn') to a Bishop of Llandaff named Wulfrith with King Cadell's guarantee, i.e the place where the Carn meets the Ebbw (now Cwmcarn)."

Fantastic and bizarre language, got to love the Welsh accent as well always makes me smile whenever I'm not frowning.


Andy

I figured you need to do this to be able to pronounce Lon Gisland because that's just what all the natives do.

How come the Boston basketball team is pronounced sell-tix when they are Kell-tick? :/

Nice try, Andy, but that's obviously not Welsh because even though it's 90% consonants there's not 14 Ls and it's not at least 50 letters long.

From Omniglot and Wikipedia, it looks like it'd be something like "Koom-carn" as a very rough approximation.

Abstracting from the definition of "better" English*, it occurred to me this might be a twist on confirmation bias. Non-native English speakers have to have the motivation and have to put time and effort into learning the language, so it's logical most of them would be more motivated to write well. Making sure you're understood is likely another factor, as is the strong focus on spelling and grammar in much of formal English language education.


* E.g., I would personally consider "definitely" to be better than "definately", but "where you at" and "imma" not necessarily worse than "where are you" and "I'm going to".

You're right, I can see a lot of italians writing really bad on the forums because they don't put much effort into writing correctly, but write in the same way they speak and/or use wrong modes of verbs (the most common error in written and spoken italian), while I know an english living in Oz who writes in a really formal way (even too much) just because he's learning italian from scratch (let alone the mistakes due to inexperience) (http://twitter.com/cosadici).

Well, having grown up in Ohio, it has always been a little strange, being in the eastern time zone and all. In a sense it's really more terrain based, most people in the northeast part of the state, where you're in the foothills or up by the lake, it really feels more 'mideast' that midwest, and in the southwest part of the state where it's all flat it's really feels more midwest there. But for some reason 'mideast' hasn't really caught on. Technically, since Ohio was part of the Western Reserve before it was a state, it has been considered 'western', but the pull of the east coast has always been strong. That's kind of why it's become a swing state, Ohio is more diverse than people think.

For me (a Brit), the term "Mid West" evokes an image of a particular type of landscape and way of life. I don't take it as being a literal definition of an area of land. Rather like the way that the "sixties" is often considered to have begun around 1963 and ended around 1974, the term has come to mean something different to it's literal meaning.

http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/ ... stbugs.png


Andy

the U.S. is like that.

Has anyone noticed the hudson making new england and eastern new york an island?

I could guess it has been there a long time. Not exactly a trickle of water from the st.lawrence...

mention the word portland, west of ohio, and nobody knows there is one in maine...as the biggest city of the state..

lagrange texas..lagrange maine... there is all kinds of lack of communication for variety. somebody was thinking real quick when states were mapped out.

One of the more interesting OT threads I've seen for a while.. no political/religious flamebaiting!

Anyway, to throw my two cents in and possibly veer the thread off course again, I think that English pronunciation is highly irregular compared to most languages. Written English is definitely not phonetic. A common example is words ending in "ough". The words through, bough, rough, though, cough and thought are all pronounced differently.

My language learning experience is limited to Japanese, but that language is almost completely phonetic. Spoken Japanese uses far fewer sounds than English (although not a strict subset - Japanese does include a few sounds which English doesn't). This makes learning Japanese pronunciation relatively straightforward for English speakers once you learn the basic set of sounds.

In English, names of places in particular tend to have unusual pronunciations. I don't know, but I guess this might be because place names tend to be centuries old or more, and their pronunciation might not keep up with the relatively fast pronunciation changes in the rest of the language.

For example, place names in England tend to follow a fairly regular set of pronunciation rules, regardless of the major regional variation in accents. Yorkshire and Hampshire are pronounced the same, although most natives of those counties pronounce other words quite differently.

Interestingly, we Strayans (Australians) have deviated from the standard English place name pronunciations. For example, our cities Rockingham and Derby are pronounced phonetically here (there is a pub in RockingHAM called "The Swinging Pig"), while in England they would be said more like "Rockingum" and "Darby".

-That probably explains why my uncle dislikes OH so much, "Damn commies!" ...Id probably love it.( Sorry , TCMBruce..)

but you can't.

find me a word that starts with GH and doesnt use the hard G.

most of those "created words" break usage laws regarding spelling. to use gh=f, it has to be preceded by something. ti=sh has to be followed by something.

i dont know why there's such a confusion regarding ough. that one gets me.

It's not consistant though - an Australian will pronounce Melbourne as "MEL-burn", with heavy stress on the first syllable, and the second clipped to the point where the vowel sound hardly exists. A Brit on the other hand will probably pronounce it phonetically as "Mel-borne" (cf. "Sittingbourne", a town in Kent), generally to the amusement of native Ockers.

I suppose if you take the suffix "--bourne" as deriving from "--burn" (a small stream), the first pronunciation is actually more likely to be the correct one.

When I was a kid, one of my aunts married an American airman based in England; his pronunciation of Gloucester was 'Glow-cesster' with the 'Glow' rhyming with 'cow'. (It's pronounced Gloss-ter)
Well it used to amuse me anyway, as did his accent in general. He was from California.
Odd to think that I have American cousins that I wouldn't even recognise if I passed them in the street.

Same for me, I couldn't recognize mine in Newark... 60 years have passed, how sad.

Curious to say, I'd pronounce "Glow-cesster" (a little bit like Manchester), while I asked my sister who studies English culture at the uni., and she said "Gloss-ter".
I've seen that words such as the names of the UK regions have a particular pronunciation (even Yorkshire is not so easy to pronounce for us neolatin, it should sounds like "York-sciah" while I'd say "York-sh-ai-r"), and sometimes I can mistake them.

New case:
Greenwich, UK -> ɡri (eee) nɪdʒ
Greenwich village, NYC -> grEnɪdʒ, with a wide open "E"

A friend of mine told me... is that correct? I can't see the reason, anyway.

Here in Massachusetts we pronounce the English place names just like they do in England ....... except that we mangle it.

For instance, Worcester is pronounced Wuss-ter instead of Wor-ses-ter, but most of the locals pronounce it Wista.

Maybe New England is more conservative, speaking of formal english, or maybe that pronunciation is peculiar of NYC.

i always called it more wor-shes-er.

:/

that shit always confused me.

damn you english with your stupid spellings and pronunciations.

i prefer it here in california with our mangled spanish place names. at least this shit makes sense. least we're not completely skipping syllables here.

The English obviously got tired of trying to twist their tongues around tortured names like Leicester and started pronouncing it "Lester" instead.

And, hey, I'm from Worcester, and if I ever hear of you pronouncing it wrong again, you'll get a ticket to Pismo Beach!