English isnt English!

[GrauGeist]

English has some distinct advantages.
No male or female words.
No formal or informal.
No accusative or locative "Romans Go Home!" nonsense.
Try learning Russian and then telling me how hard English is!

Bulgarian, which is similar to Russian, wasn't all that hard to learn, to be honest.

Chinese, on the otherhand...

 

[KiwiBiggles]

English has some distinct advantages.
No male or female words.
No formal or informal.
No accusative or locative "Romans Go Home!" nonsense.
Try learning Russian and then telling me how hard English is!

Plus almost no conjugation, and very little declension. Try rewriting some English as if it were a completely uninflected language - that is, remove all plurals, tenses and verb conjugation. It's still easily understood by any English speaker, even if some of the nuance is lost.

Plus almost no conjugation, and very little declension. Try rewrite English as if is completely uninflected language - remove all plural, tense and verb conjugation. Is still easy understand by any English speaker, even if some nuance lost.

 

[The Basket]

Another plus for English is basic sounds.
Listen to some languages and there are plenty sounds which are not in the English language and so that's why English speakers cannot say 'Loch'.
In my view the ability to learn and speak a language is inate. Since English has none of the more complex gramme rules or complex sounds it should be much easier than Russian.

However, English is not phonetic and the spellings can be all over the place and this is where the fun begins. Also certainly in parts of the UK accents make understanding English impossible! How non natives can understand a Glaswegian accent I'm sure I don't know.

 

[ODonovan]

Bi-weekly – is every two weeks while Bi-annually is twice a year
The game DONKY KONG features a MONKEY. Shouldn't it be called MONKEY KONG.

Actually, twice a year is semi-annually. Bi-annually is every two years.

Donkey Kong was named in Japan. They were trying to call it "Dumb Kong" but whoever looked up dumb found a reference to a donkey being dumb and stubborn, so that's what they thought the word donkey meant.

My favourite American usage divergence: momentarily. As in, "This is your Captain speaking. We will be leaving the ground momentarily". The actual meaning of the word is "for a short moment". I do hope he's wrong.

Actually, it has both meanings. A dictionary definition is also "at any moment; imminently."


What I love about British English is that it started as a put-on. Around the time of the American Revolutionary War, the Brits sounded a lot like the Yanks. However, at some time between then and more modern days, some British commoners started affecting a made up "posh accent" to appear more well educated and I presume more employable. That spread until it's now the most common accent in England.

Brits are also VERY inconsistent with their rules of pronunciation.
Brits say schedule as shed yool but school as skool. I learned how to say schedule as sked yool. I learned it at school (skool, not shool). Sch makes an sk sound in both words.
Brits say jaguar as jag you ahr but equal as eek wal. I say jag wahr and eek wal because ua makes a wa sound in both words.



-Irish

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Sentence structure is backwards compared to a lot of languages, and inconsistent spelling/pronunciation. How do you pronounce Polish? How about if its at the beginning of a sentence?
Not to mention the examples Mike posted.
These inconsistencies become a lot more obvious as my son learns to read...

English is still easier to learn as a 2nd language than most other languages.

German, Russian, Italian, Mandarin, Arabic, etc., are all more difficult. Most are more difficult.

 

[pbehn]

What I love about British English is that it started as a put-on. Around the time of the American Revolutionary War, the Brits sounded a lot like the Yanks.

It may be true that some Brits sounded like Americans but few Brits sounded like each other. Regional variations were much more pronounced as people generally didn't move far from where they were born and there was no radio and TV to hears anything else. This was the same all over Europe and most of the world. My Chinese translator couldn't understand our driver when she spoke to her husband in their own dialect and was frequently stumped in shops not being able to find someone who could speak Mandarin. The Curious Case of the American Accent

 

[mikewint]

Bi-annually is every two years.

bi·an·nu·al /ˌbīˈany(o͞o)əl/ adjective
occurring twice a year.
"the biannual meeting of the planning committee"

 

[mikewint]

we should have given them to Canada.

 

[buffnut453]

What I love about British English is that it started as a put-on. Around the time of the American Revolutionary War, the Brits sounded a lot like the Yanks. However, at some time between then and more modern days, some British commoners started affecting a made up "posh accent" to appear more well educated and I presume more employable. That spread until it's now the most common accent in England.

You clearly have no concept of British dialects and how they continue to vary across the country. It's only in recent years, since the advent of TV and the general "rush to the bottom" that "Estuary English" has become so common with other local accents becoming rarer...but to suggest that Estuary English is posh would be ridiculed in all parts of the UK. Certainly, growing up in the 1970s, local accents and dialects were still very common indeed.

 

[mikewint]

No male or female words.
No formal or informal.

Male/Female - not in the sense that the Germans (among others) do. Woman is female and Man is male - So the woman SHE and the man HE and objects like pencils are Neuter - So the pencil IT. BOATS are always Female for some reason. Cars can be female at times as well.
The MALE-FEMALE-NEUTER nouns in German made so little sense at times. Woman(FRAU) is female but GIRL(MADCHEN) is Neuter?? The Girl IT??
Walls, Ceilings, and Doors are Female but the Floor is Male?? Chairs are Male but the Couch is Female. And a German Boat is Neuter.

Formal/Informal - again in English sort of but not commonly: THEE - THOU - THY - THINE still exist but very seldom in common speaking. Replaced buy the formal YOU - YOUR - YOURS

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Actually, twice a year is semi-annually. Bi-annually is every two years.

Donkey Kong was named in Japan. They were trying to call it "Dumb Kong" but whoever looked up dumb found a reference to a donkey being dumb and stubborn, so that's what they thought the word donkey meant.



Actually, it has both meanings. A dictionary definition is also "at any moment; imminently."


What I love about British English is that it started as a put-on. Around the time of the American Revolutionary War, the Brits sounded a lot like the Yanks. However, at some time between then and more modern days, some British commoners started affecting a made up "posh accent" to appear more well educated and I presume more employable. That spread until it's now the most common accent in England.

Brits are also VERY inconsistent with their rules of pronunciation.
Brits say schedule as shed yool but school as skool. I learned how to say schedule as sked yool. I learned it at school (skool, not shool). Sch makes an sk sound in both words.
Brits say jaguar as jag you ahr but equal as eek wal. I say jag wahr and eek wal because ua makes a wa sound in both words.



-Irish

Actually Bi-Annual means twice per year.

Biennial means every two years and is often confused with Bi-Annual.

 

[mikewint]

Chris, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: When we describe something as biannual, we can mean either that it occurs twice a year or that it occurs once every two years. So how does someone know which particular meaning we have in mind? Well, unless we provide them with a contextual clue, they don't. Some people prefer to use semiannual to refer to something that occurs twice a year, reserving biannual for things that occur once every two years. This practice is hardly universal among English speakers, however, and biannual remains a potentially ambiguous word.

So we'uns both be correct depending - tis what makes English F U N!!

 

[vikingBerserker]

I always thought there was a difference between "bi-annual" and "biannual".

 

[pbehn]

Bi weekly and Bi monthly mean the same thing in different parts of the world (every two weeks), I worked with a guy who used both for the same thing just to avoid repetition. he sometimes threw in "fortnight" for amusement.

 

[gumbyk]

Chris, from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary: When we describe something as biannual, we can mean either that it occurs twice a year or that it occurs once every two years. So how does someone know which particular meaning we have in mind? Well, unless we provide them with a contextual clue, they don't. Some people prefer to use semiannual to refer to something that occurs twice a year, reserving biannual for things that occur once every two years. This practice is hardly universal among English speakers, however, and biannual remains a potentially ambiguous word.

So we'uns both be correct depending - tis what makes English F U N!!

Maybe in American....

 

[buffnut453]

From the Oxford Concise Dictionary:

Biannual - Occurring twice a year
Biennial - Lasting 2 years or occurring every 2 years

Seems pretty clear to me.

 

[mikewint]

I always thought there was a difference between "bi-annual" and "biannual".

Not that I have been able to determine in fact accord to my old English Grammar Blue Book the HYPHEN is only appropriate when the root word begins with the letter i. The hyphen separates the two letters i. So semiannual but semi-independent. It's a Biplane not a Bi-plane.
So annual starting with an a is Biannual not Bi-annual

Clearer in German:
Semiannual – halbjährlich – Half – year - ly
Biannual – halbjährlich
Biennial – zweijährlich Two – year - ly

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

From the Oxford Concise Dictionary:

Biannual - Occurring twice a year
Biennial - Lasting 2 years or occurring every 2 years

Seems pretty clear to me.

Exactly...

 

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

And the Webster Dictionary says the same...

 

[swampyankee]

Male/Female - not in the sense that the Germans (among others) do. Woman is female and Man is male - So the woman SHE and the man HE and objects like pencils are Neuter - So the pencil IT. BOATS are always Female for some reason. Cars can be female at times as well.
The MALE-FEMALE-NEUTER nouns in German made so little sense at times. Woman(FRAU) is female but GIRL(MADCHEN) is Neuter?? The Girl IT??
Walls, Ceilings, and Doors are Female but the Floor is Male?? Chairs are Male but the Couch is Female. And a German Boat is Neuter.

Formal/Informal - again in English sort of but not commonly: THEE - THOU - THY - THINE still exist but very seldom in common speaking. Replaced buy the formal YOU - YOUR - YOURS

Grammatical gender has very little to do with social or biological gender; it seems to be more that the Indo-European languages that retain gender (English doesn't, except for some edge cases like blonde/blond: a man's.is blond, but a woman is blonde) have a masculine/feminine/neuter split that's close to biological gender. The World Atlas of Language Structures (wals) is a great source.

Another area is verbs becoming irregular, like sneaked becoming snuck or hair-splitting dfferences: a picture was hung, but a murderer was hanged.