OT: flaming Keth?

Heill Keth,

My friend, I don't want us to exchange flames. I mistakenly wrote a
rather aggressive reply to your comments on various things today.
It's not appropriate for me as a moderator in a group meant for the
study of a specific subject, not of general linguistic discussion, to
promote threads like this one. I thought that by my apology you would
refrain from replying like you have done now.

Let's cut it out, please :)

(those who aren't interested in flaming linguistic discussion should
stop reading now)

> > > (btw "hail" in English can't be all that bad. At lest I grew up
> > > singing "hail, hail rock 'n roll", and that was Chuck Berry, and
> > > no one thought any "German" thoughts)
> >
> > No, English isn't all bad at all. In fact it's no worse than any
> other
> > language.
>
> Actually, I was talking about "the word hail in English"

Hmm, I admit that I misread that. Sorry :)

> > > I'd like to add that in my opinion German has a much better

vowel

> > system than
> > > English, because the English vowels are really distorted, and
> hardly
> > > correspond to the signs used to describe them. In German, the
> vowel
> > signs

> > I'm sure you know that, scientifically, there's no such thing as

a

> > "better" vowel system.
>
> I was talking about how well the "signs" (=letters)
> used to describe the sounds fit the sound.
> For historic reasons, English has kept a very old spelling
> that is centuries behind the way words are actually
> pronounced.

Now you're being very slippery, mate. I'm so immersed in phonetics,
remember, that "vowel system" and "vowels" mean to me, by default,
the spoken sounds, not the writing. With any due respect to me, you
should not accuse me of misreading this paragraph, because it really
did make sense to read it as I did.
But as to English spelling, that is, for the first, one subject I
shall kindly ask you not to discuss here. Because it's a very
flammable subject to discuss. And anyway, you're no better off this
way, because saying that English spelling is centuries behind
pronunciation is, IMHO, still offensive enough to the Anglophones on
this list. It's just a different twig of the same branch I was
arguing against.

> It makes sense to describe diphtongs by TWO letters,
> because that is what they are. Yet "I", which is
> pronounced like "ai" (a diphtong) is represented
> by only one sign or letter. Things like that..

Why are you bringing this up? Do the people from all over the English
speaking world who have shown our ancestral language the honour of
wanting to learn it deserve from you to tell them that they don't
make sense when they write? That's one off-topic subject we really
don't need.

> > Linguistics state that: "All languages
> > enable their speakers to communicate any and all concepts that

they

> > have need or want to communicate" (my words); a language is fixed

to

> > the environment and society behind it. An African tribal language
> may
> > not have a word for 'transistor', but it will have a single short
> word
> > for a social concept too complex for the high and mighty European
> > languages to explain except in a paragraph. Norwegian is the

optimal

> > language for Norwegians, Vietnamese is better for Vietnamese than
> > "superior" French, Americans are best off speaking English
> > (even if no other people spoke English).
>
> Don't know if it makes sense to speak about "optimal"
> languages. Of course you simply can't switch
> languages, because it takes time to reorient oneself.
> And you'd have to be born again to know what it's like
> to have a different mothers language. But presumably some
> languages are better suited in certain environments.
> Such as the eskimo language for Greenland.
> But whether English or Russian is the best language for
> technology, might actually be undecided. Maybe Russian
> gives better chess players?

I need to rephrase what I said to you:

A people, living in a certain environment, having a certain way of
life, a certain social pattern, a certain diet, etc, will as a rule
be best served by the medium they have evolved over time to describe
their reality. If all Norwegians were to speak Swahili from tomorrow
onwards, they'd be having problems with certain Swahili words
describing totally alien customs and concepts, and would be lacking
Swahili words to describe their own culture and environment. It's
bound to each generation of people in a community in a given point of
time; right now, Norwegian is the most suitable language for you,
because it contains all the vocabulary, all the nuances and
shortcuts, that you need to optimally describe your local reality to
other members of your community, though not necessarily to any others.

Ponderings about which language is the best for love, chess,
technology, philosophy, poetry, etc, may be entertaining at times but
they are totally unscientific and often laid with chauvinism of some
kind. That was not what I was talking about.

> Sure, we could write it as ®, º, ¿ , õ , ô , ð , ¤ , etc..
> many possibilities.
>
> For me at least "ö" is a "reserved sign" -- it already
> means something else (u-umlaut)
>
> I have seen that the Viking Society uses it in its
> books, but for Scandinavians, Germans etc, this is
> unnatural.

I'll wait for other list members to complain about this problem. If
they do, I will consider solutions, though I don't know right now
what they might be.

> I have heard Americans using German words, like
> "eigenvalue", "zeitgeist", "gestalt", etc..
> I thought "eingebuergert" was a word describing very well
> what I was trying to say. I cannot see why you'd
> see it as "arrogant". In reality it only reflects
> the existence of other languages than English, where
> the appropriate word is not always on the tip of the tongue.
> "Eingebuergert", expressed my thought much more
> accurately than for example "customary". In an international
> forum you have to expect an occasional non-English word.
> Non-native English speakers aren't as good at English as
> those who were borne with it.

Not much comment on this really. Occasional use of German words in
English doesn't mean Americans can take on any German word. I only
understood this word by context, and I consider myself an educated
person. You choose the words to use for your audience, but often the
most polite thing to do is to maintain the most standard and
consistent code possible. It would save me a lot of words to just
always explain everything in full linguistic terms here; I've read
usage of linguistic terms in books, so why wouldn't the audience here
know every single one of the terms?

> The comment was written under the slash /Germans header.

That's a point though, I'll give you that :)

> >I (and I believe Haukur too) do not
> > want any cross-Atlantic bias in this group (especially when we're
> > in-between, hehe :)
>
> What gave you that idea?
> I think it becomes more clear if German is used
> as reference. At least for me it is more clear that way.
> Those who know some German have a very great advantage
> when studying Old Norse. The reason is that the grammatical
> system is similar.

:) :)

Keth, now I'm starting to like you.

But what if you were learning a language whose optimal reference
language (in this case German) were unknown to you? Would you want
your teacher or fellow students to say to you "well that's not our
problem, you should know it, we don't care if you don't"? Most of the
people here wanting to learn are *not* familiar with German. We can't
just exclude them because they don't know it. They're grown up
people, they don't have time for this.

But this won't be a problem. As I said recently, we're going to
have the Americans and Englishmen specific to Haukur, while I
specifically service the rest. The rest, being all or most familiar
with German, will thus get plenty of good reference to German vowels,
orthography, grammar, and all you want.
And that includes you, my friend :)

> > Come to the voice chat, we'll demonstrate :)
>
> Sorry, I don't have the microphone.
> Although think it is an excellent idea,

You don't need the microphone :) You can still hear us speaking, so
by all means come :)

(and actually, mikes are really cheap, they're worth it)

> English, German and Norwegian all have the "j".
> Examples are jazz, just, john, jumbo, jack (English)
> jawohl, juni, justiz, jener, jagd (German)
> joda, jøss, jul, juss, jass, jumper (Norwegian)
> The English "j" differs. We say it is more like a "dzj".
> I have however no idea at all whether Old Norse had "j".
> And you say Icelandic does not have it?
> In Norwegian is a separate sound.

Er...Keth, you're being funny. Of course I know that, I'm not 4 years
old :) And yes, Icelandic has the orthographic character "j", which
represents the sound [j].

> Latin probably did not have it originally.
> Iulius, Iuno, etc

It didn't, no probability involved. I told you that the character "j"
is a later modification of "i", which originally represented both [i]
and [j].

Keth, let's not act like kids anymore. You will get your German
approximations (in fact, you already have some of them). You won't
have to look at the English approximations at all. If you don't like
English orthography, by all means write to me in Norwegian (but only
personally), and you'll get a reply in good Danish with references to
good German. Haukur and I are in this to provide good service to both
sides of the Atlantic, and I hope it doesn't bother you that the
other sides also will get service :)

Óskar