Re: ESL Chauvinism
- From: Matthew Huntbach <mmh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2006 11:22:13 +0100
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Lars Eighner wrote:
Has anyone else noticed how many of the obvious ESL questions we get seem to
have an explicit or implicit charge that English is illogical. Never mind
consistency in spelling, are the native languages of the ESL posters really
so logically consistent? Or, do you think perhaps these sorts of criticisms
come from people who have not looked too closely at their native languages?
Certainly, plenty of native speakers of English have similar prejudices,
believing etymology is definition and there is exactly one correct answer to
every issue of punctuation, and rejecting that "could care less" means the
same thing as "could not care less."
No, I don't see this at all. In fact quite the opposite. I'm impressed
by some of the detailed grammatical points which many of these ESL
questions raise, often things that we so take for granted that it is a
revalation to have them revealed and get one thinking "Hmm, yes, just
why do we do it that way and what exactly do we mean by it?".
One thing it quite comprehensively shows is that a language does not
have to be heavily inflected to be complex. The English tense system,
which gets a lot of this sort of questions, is quite amazingly complicated.
I'm still thinking about the difference between "it starts raining" and
"it starts to rain", and why "it stops raining" is ok and "it stops to rain" is
not.
Matthew Huntbach
.
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