Stupid Terroists.

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My country speaks a very mispronounced american English, with their own Filipino dialect.... "Taglish"
 
My two cents (and it may piss some of you off) : I think English (herm... from England, not English-Canadians) are hard to understand.

I mean, they have a nice accent and I like watching British movies being broadcasted here on CBC. But "real" English isn't like in British TV shows or movies. On TV, they ar-ti-cu-la-te. But in real life, they sounds like if they had some kind of jaw desease... They doesn't articulate at all !

Most of the time, I'll understand any American/Canadian or even Australian talking to me. But with English... I understand approximately 40% to 60% of them (depending on the area they are from).

As you know, I work in a touristic area. So I meet a lot of English-speaking persons. But it happened three or four times in the past that I just gave up with British. I couldn't understand them !

Once a girl (who was approximately 15) told me : "You know, you're hard to understand... You have a kind of American accent mixed with a French one."

I thought to myself : "Did you heard your classmates ? Some of them talk like if they had a hot potato in their mouth." But I couldn't say that... I was working.
 
P38 Pilot said:
You sure?
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P38 of course he is sure, we invented it, so we speak the correct version.
 
There's so many different accents and dialects in Britain it's hard for British people to understand other British people a lot of the time. While in Germany, with Chris, it was quite easy to understand each other. Although, I did notice that they had a problem understanding my girlfriend at times.

You can't go around saying "English people are hard to understand," when there's so many different accents in England. I agree that a lot of English accents are terrible, and some I can't understand. But there's accents and dialects in Canada, USA and Australia that are hard to understand too.

And, lanc is right, it's impossible for the English to speaking wrong. We're English, we invented the language.
 
plan_D said:
You can't go around saying "English people are hard to understand," when there's so many different accents in England. I agree that a lot of English accents are terrible, and some I can't understand. But there's accents and dialects in Canada, USA and Australia that are hard to understand too.
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I met a lot of Americans and Canadians (plus one Australian) and I never had any problem understanding them.

But I also met a lot of British (a lot of English high schools plan trips here to ski during winter (generally, they are around 1,500 peoples every years)) and I can say that we are far from what we hear on TV. I don't have any problem with their accent, I have a problem with the way most of them articulate.

I saw a good exemple of it on the British army site... I can't link it directly, but go to the following link, find Private Hart and click on him. You'll see a short movie of him. I couldn't understand a single word of what he said.

Infantry Microsite

However, if you click on the guy next to him (Private O'Malley) you'll see that this one is much easier to understand.

Ah, and by the way, there is only four types of English accents for an average French-Canadian like me : English, Scottish, American and Australian. I can't distinguish a guy from Mancester from an other one from Wales only by hearing their accent.
 
plan_D said:
There's so many different accents and dialects in Britain it's hard for British people to understand other British people a lot of the time. While in Germany, with Chris, it was quite easy to understand each other. Although, I did notice that they had a problem understanding my girlfriend at times.

You can't go around saying "English people are hard to understand," when there's so many different accents in England. I agree that a lot of English accents are terrible, and some I can't understand. But there's accents and dialects in Canada, USA and Australia that are hard to understand too.

And, lanc is right, it's impossible for the English to speaking wrong. We're English, we invented the language.
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I totally agree, and alot of English words actually came from the German language.
 
Well, in fact it comes more from Danish/Norwegian... Since Vikings invaded England and Ireland somewhere within the Viking's Middle-Age (500 - 1500).

And, as far as I know, Germany never succeeded in invading England.

By the way, how in the hell do we still continue to give credit to Colomb for discovering America when there is evidences that Vikings from Denmark landed in New-Foundland 500 years before Colomb even left Europe ?
 
Hussars is right, actually. A lot of English words came from the German language, not through invasion but through colonisation. England is made up a lot of different European races, but most of us are Germanic.
 
In few years, most of you are Pakis... Sorry to say...
My country speaks a very mispronounced american English, with their own Filipino dialect.... "Taglish"
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Yeah, it's fascinating, I've seen a TV screening about it. Basically you learn it since you're born, right?
 
PD is correct on this. The English Language is actually a German Language and is derived from the German Language. Ever noticed how the original British were called the Anglo-Saxons? The Saxons came from Germany. The first to use the original English Language were the German Tribes.

Here is an interesting artical about it from Merriam-Websters dictionary:

The historical aspect of English really encompasses more than the three stages of development just under consideration. English has what might be called a prehistory as well. As we have seen, our language did not simply spring into existence; it was brought from the Continent by Germanic tribes who had no form of writing and hence left no records. Philologists know that they must have spoken a dialect of a language that can be called West Germanic and that other dialects of this unknown language must have included the ancestors of such languages as German, Dutch, Low German, and Frisian. They know this because of certain systematic similarities which these languages share with each other but do not share with, say, Danish. However, they have had somehow to reconstruct what that language was like in its lexicon, phonology, grammar, and semantics as best they can through sophisticated techniques of comparison developed chiefly during the last century.

Similarly, because ancient and modern languages like Old Norse and Gothic or Icelandic and Norwegian have points in common with Old English and Old High German or Dutch and English that they do not share with French or Russian, it is clear that there was an earlier unrecorded language that can be called simply Germanic and that must be reconstructed in the same way. Still earlier, Germanic was just a dialect (the ancestors of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit were three other such dialects) of a language conventionally designated Indo-European, and thus English is just one relatively young member of an ancient family of languages whose descendants cover a fair portion of the globe.
Merriam-Webster Online
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That is why when you compare English to German about 75 percent of the words are very very similar. Example: Kindergarden (English) Kindergarten (German), House (English) Haus (German), Shoe (English) Shuh (German), Apple (English) Apfel (German), Beer (English) Bier (German), Son (English) Sonne (German), Sun (English) Sohn (German), Cannon (English) Kanone (German), and School (English) Schule (German). Do I need to make more examples? :lol:


If you actually made a list of Germanic Languages it would look somethign like this:

Germanic
Anglo-Frisian
Old English
Middle English
Modern English (with a significant influx of words from Old French)
Cayman Islands English (not a creole)
Early Scots
Middle Scots
Modern Scots varieties
Frisian (descending from Old Frisian)
West Frisian - Friesland, Netherlands
East or Saterland Frisian - Germany
North Frisian - Germany
Low Saxon-Low Franconian
Low Franconian
Dutch
Hollandic (in the Netherlands)
West Flemish (in West Flanders and nearby areas of Belgium, Zeeland in the Netherlands, and France)
East Flemish
Brabantic in Belgium and the Netherlands
Zuid-Gelders (in Germany and the Netherlands)
Limburgish (in the Netherlands, Germany, and Belgium) including Limburgs
Afrikaans (in South Africa and Namibia)
Low Saxon
West Low Saxon
Westphalian (in Westphalia, in Germany)
Northern Low Saxon (in East Frisia / Eastern Friesland and other parts of Germany)
Eastphalian language
Dutch Low Saxon
East Low Saxon
Mecklenburgisch-Pommersch (in Mecklenburg)
East Pomeranian (in Brazil)
Brandenburgisch (in Brandenburg)
Low Prussian
High German languages
Standard German
Central German
East Central German
Lower Silesian
Upper Saxon
West Central German
Luxembourgeois
West Central German
Pennsylvania German
Upper German
Alemannic German
Swabian German
Low Alemannic German
Alemán Coloneiro
Alsatian language
Basel German
High Alemannic German
Bernese German
Zürich German
Highest Alemannic German
Walliser German
Walser German
Austro-Bavarian
Bavarian
Cimbrian (with a heavy influx of words from Italian)
Mocheno
Hutterite German (spoken by Hutterites)
Yiddish (with a significant influx of words from Hebrew and Slavic languages and written in the Hebrew alphabet)
Wymysojer


As you can see most of you speak a form of German! :lol:

Oh and a good website to look up this info is:

Harvard Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures
 
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