Re: Beeching Report

Ian G Batten said:

Or a language rather like English, at least. It'll be heavily
simplified, and also actually quite difficult for a native English
speaker to (a) understand and even more (b) be understood in. The
claim's often made that non-native speakers speak language `better' than
native speakers, because they've learnt the `rules' formally. That
argument's wrong, though, because the `rules' constructed for adult
learners are often things that a native speaker simply wouldn't do.

Many foreigners speak better English than single examples of natives
because so many of the natives speak it so very badly.

Mixing with many foreign students and academics as I do, I come across a
lot of people using English as a second language. Their abilities range
from difficult to understand (more typically those used to non-European
languages such as Arabic and Chinese), through clear but mannered, to
basically undetectable as not native bar from a trace of accent (and
being a native with a natural accent that is often taken for antipodean
for no obvious reason I can tell, I take that as "effectively native"😉.

Pete.
--
Peter Clinch Medical Physics IT Officer
Tel 44 1382 660111 ext. 33637 Univ. of Dundee, Ninewells Hospital
Fax 44 1382 640177 Dundee DD1 9SY Scotland UK
net [email hidden] http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~pjclinch/

"Ian G Batten" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

You might find this:

http://kdictionaries.com/newsletter/kdn10-9.html

an interesting read in general, and it also touches on Sinclair's theory
of naturalness which is relevant here. A quick search didn't find a
more general introduction to Naturalness, but I could easily fish one
out.

Thanks. I had a brief scan through it. One of the things that I find odd is
the tendency to make up words which wouldn't normally be used by a native
English speaker. "Normalcy" is one I recall creeping into the language from,
I think, the African colonies. Some of the Indian English idioms also take a
bit of understanding. "Doing the needful" is one such. All part of the rich
pageant of language.
--
Terry Harper, Web Co-ordinator, The Omnibus Society
75th Anniversary 2004, see http://www.omnibussoc.org/75th.htm
E-mail: [email hidden]
URL: http://www.terry.harper.btinternet.co.uk/

"Terry Harper" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Thanks. I had a brief scan through it. One of the things that I find odd

is

Quoted message said:

the tendency to make up words which wouldn't normally be used by a native
English speaker. "Normalcy" is one I recall creeping into the language

from,

Quoted message said:

I think, the African colonies.

Anybody remember the 'people against goodness and normalcy'?

cheers,
clive

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004 09:48:32 +0000 (UTC), Ian G Batten
<[email hidden]> wrote (more or less):

Quoted message said:

In article <[email hidden]>,

Terry Harper said:

Of course, what you find is that if you put any two non-English-speaking
nationals of different countries, with different native tongues, together,
they converse in English.

Or a language rather like English, at least. It'll be heavily
simplified, and also actually quite difficult for a native English
speaker to (a) understand and even more (b) be understood in.

That's not my general experience. I'm trying hard to recall an
instance where it was not true, and failing.

(My favourite incident was in streetside cafe in Spain where, due to
crowding a Dutchman, a chilean and a Rusian squeezed into the same
table, and were using English as their Lingua Franca).

Quoted message said:

The
claim's often made that non-native speakers speak language `better' than
native speakers, because they've learnt the `rules' formally. That
argument's wrong, though, because the `rules' constructed for adult
learners are often things that a native speaker simply wouldn't do.

You might find this:

http://kdictionaries.com/newsletter/kdn10-9.html

an interesting read in general, and it also touches on Sinclair's theory
of naturalness which is relevant here. A quick search didn't find a
more general introduction to Naturalness, but I could easily fish one
out.

ian

--
Cheers,
Euan
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Smalltalk links (harvested from comp.lang.smalltalk) http://html.dnsalias.net/gawnsoft/smalltalk