About Languages

A place to discuss how we communicate.

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Saw several news stories recently on expanding use of sign language in multiple countries. They included creating dedicated news networks, expanding the type of announcements used in transportation services, and increasing education through lessons for children and adults:

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I posted this in another thread, but I think it belongs here.

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I’ve seen this myself as well. They’re starting to roll out BSL travel information on the UK rail network.

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In Finnish, we actually pronounce all the letters we write. They also always sound the same.

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My favorite English words/languages fellow on youtube once said, “The French lose interest before the end of a word.”

Having taken 2 years of high school French, I LMAO tophat-rofl tophat-biggrin

I’d love having a pronounce-able language.
tophat-wink

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From what I have seen of other languages, the worst feature of English is its orthography. The best is not wasting everyone’s time memorizing grammatical genders.

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Le hibou ou la chouette? :thinking:

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Finnish only has two or three huuhkajat (huuhkaja) [horned owls/eagle-owls], pöllöt (pöllö) [true owls] and pöllöset (Pöllänen) [Scops owls].

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There’s a whole lot of dodgy assumptions in that paper, that could probably produce whole papers on power, imperialism and social “class” in UK society today. Take this line from their methods section:

We used the following accents: northeast England, Belfast, Dublin, Bristol, Glasgow, Essex and received pronunciation (RP), commonly understood as standard British English.

The idea that the strained tones of RP are (a) anything like commonly used by a significant section of the UK public today, and (b) represent a “standard” form of English, from which all other pronunciations are deviations, are highly contentious premises to lay out, while at the same time giving the reader a clue as to why they found speakers of some forms of English were very attuned to mockery of their voices.

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