How do Tamarians.....

[Count Zero]

I'm not sure whether you're really serious, but anyway, I'll try to explain.

I dont understand how anyone can say that English spelling is nonsensical, in English the word is spoken like it is spelt unlike French for example where some letter e's can have a different pronunciation etc etc or Polish where many of the letters are completely silent.

I think you didn't quite understand what I meant. You're right that there aren't as many silent letters in English words as they are in some other languages (but more than in German, I think). But in English the same letter or combination of letters can be pronounced very differently. And this different pronounciation can't be derived from the way the word is written. Example: they or grey, but key; by but lady and so on. I can't really tell from just seeing the word how it is pronounced, I never would have guessed the right way to pronounce "byzantine".

English by comparison is yes more complex and vast a language but much easier because of it. With English you can create any sentence you want by simply fitting together the necessary words, in other languages depending on the sentence you have to use completely different wording especially with Arabic.

Yes, because their vocabulary is different from English and the words have different connotations than in English.

Go to a translator website and try translating sentences and you get nonsense back from it, other languages just dont have the same freedom as English.

Yes, translation software has the tendency to give you back nonsense, no matter what language you feed it, because it is incapable of understanding the meaning of the sentences. That's not specific to English.

Take this translation for example:

English: she said she was not going to go to the park but she changed her mind and went anyway.

French: elle a dit qu'elle n'allait pas aller au parc mais elle a changé d'avis et est allée de toute façon.

When you translate it back you get this:

it said it wasnt going to go to the park but it changed opinion and went in any event.

WTF?

and look at all the unnecessary (') symbols and dodgy e's there are, now thats why english is better.

Yes, translation software is dumb. It just goes through the dictionary and chooses one of the meaning of the words without understanding of the meaning of the sentence. That doesn't really prove anything about French or English and can be reproduced with any language.
And the symbols aren't unnecessary at all, the apostrophes signify the shortening of words (just like in English but I see that you don't seem to use them there, either ), and the accents on the e signify a different pronounciation (actually, French is pretty good at showing how to pronounce a word you don't know without hearing it).

 

[Christopher]

I dont understand how anyone can say that English spelling is nonsensical, in English the word is spoken like it is spelt unlike French for example where some letter e's can have a different pronunciation etc etc or Polish where many of the letters are completely silent.

Spoken like it's spelled????? Through, though, bough, rough, cough. And you want silent letters? Debt, indict, sign, hour, knock, calf, mnemonic, condemn (two "mn"s with a different silent letter in each), colonel, psyche, island, nestle, and the list goes on.

These spellings only seem normal to you because you're used to them. But the relationship of spelling to pronunciation in English is wildly erratic compared to many other languages. For instance, in Japanese, there's basically only one way to pronounce each symbol of their syllabic script. A Japanese speaker hearing a word will immediately know how to spell it, and on seeing a written word will immediately know how to pronounce it. But the only reason we need spell-checkers in English is because there are so many possible ways to spell a given sound or pronounce a given letter.

In fact, English is spelled like it was pronounced when the first dictionaries were compiled. And the same goes for French and most other languages. Pronunciations evolve over time, but dictionaries standardize spelling, locking it into an archaic form -- at least until someone decides to engage in modernization of the language, like Noah Webster did. The reason British and American spellings are often different (gaol/jail, realise/realize) is because Brits use the spellings from Samuel Johnson's dictionary and Americans use the "modernized" spellings from Noah Webster's.

 

[cultcross]

I dont understand how anyone can say that English spelling is nonsensical, in English the word is spoken like it is spelt unlike French for example where some letter e's can have a different pronunciation etc etc or Polish where many of the letters are completely silent.

Good lord! silent letters?! good thing we don't have any of that gibberish!
hour, comb, science, psalm, gnome, debt, subtle, Wednesday, have, heir, night; all given their full phonetic value are they? In fact, every letter in English is silent in at least one word.

Letter e can have, depending on the source you cite, between 80 and 200 distinct pronunciations in English, way more than the French (or indeed anyone else) have. Just look at the sentence I just typed. I can count 7 ways before the second comma. Just because we don't specify them with accents doesn't mean they're not there. And in fact makes them harder to spot to a person not used to them.

English is anything but pronounced as spelt. In fakt, ryeting inglish az yu pronowns it will mayk most reedrs stumbul.
English spelling is ludicrously non-phonetic, I can't believe you don't see that. All of our letters, and particualrly our vowels, can stand for literally 100s of different sounds, often 4 or 5 for the same sound, and quite often are just soundless space fillers.

English by comparison is yes more complex and vast a language but much easier because of it. With English you can create any sentence you want by simply fitting together the necessary words, in other languages depending on the sentence you have to use completely different wording especially with Arabic.

"house white the is". i fitted together the necessary words, have i made a correct sentence?
Word order is just as important to coherence in English, it just comes naturally to you because you're a native speaker. And we change word order to change meaning and tense all the time. A simple punctuation mark can make all the difference, and our sentences can be wonderfully ambiguous. The old famous phrase "customers who think the waiters are rude should see the manager" is the perfect example.

Go to a translator website and try translating sentences and you get nonsense back from it, other languages just dont have the same freedom as English.

Leaving aside the crappiness of internet translators, this is one reason why English is so darned complicated. we have subtlety, turn of phrase, some synonyms we use in one context, others we use in others, and a hundred other such stumbling blocks for new learners.

 

[Christopher]

In fact, every letter in English is silent in at least one word.

I've managed to compile a list of those, but I haven't been able to find any words where Q or V is silent. Can you give examples?

EDIT: I Googled this, and found a couple of claims for "lacquer" as a silent-q word, but I don't buy it; I would say that's a silent-c word instead. "Laquer" would be pronounced the same way, but "lacuer" or "lacer" would not. No sign of a silent-v word in my Googling either. Unless you count the word viz., which is pronounced "namely." (It's an abbreviation for the Latin word corresponding to "namely," and there was a time when it was considered proper to use Latin abbreviations for English terms. The abbreviations were meant to be pronounced as the full English words. "Etc." was probably originally read as "And so on.")

Go to a translator website and try translating sentences and you get nonsense back from it, other languages just dont have the same freedom as English.

Leaving aside the crappiness of internet translators, this is one reason why English is so darned complicated. we have subtlety, turn of phrase, some synonyms we use in one context, others we use in others, and a hundred other such stumbling blocks for new learners.

It's not just an English issue. Every language has its distinct idioms, gradations of meaning, variants of structure, etc. that don't exactly correspond to other languages, so every translation is always going to be inexact. A simple, mechanical translation of the words will always come out sounding strange; that's not the fault of either language, but simply the inevitable result of their intrinsic differences. Translation requires judgment, the ability to go beyond the literal and interpret the underlying meaning, or at least choose a phrasing that approximates the sense or effect of the original.

This is something that Trek and other shows with mechanical translators always gloss over. It would never be that easy to interpret from one language to another and allow complete comprehension. Any translation would be approximate, even with the best imaginable AI software doing the interpreting, and so there would inevitably be failures of understanding, or terms or phrases that a speaker of an alien language would use that would have no meaningful translation into English, and vice-versa. "Darmok" was the only Trek episode that came close to realistically depicting the kind of problems we would have communicating with aliens, even if the specifics of it were somewhat iffy.

 

[lovetrek74]

At this point it seems clear that FIRE is pulling our leg. Being ironic. Nobody on Earth could believe that English is pronounced as it is spelled. Well, maybe the guy in the Oval Office, hahaha!

Still, nice thread.

"My posts here, their time at an end."

 

[The Borg Queen]

I dont understand how anyone can say that English spelling is nonsensical, in English the word is spoken like it is spelt unlike French for example where some letter e's can have a different pronunciation etc etc or Polish where many of the letters are completely silent.
English by comparison is yes more complex and vast a language but much easier because of it. With English you can create any sentence you want by simply fitting together the necessary words, in other languages depending on the sentence you have to use completely different wording especially with Arabic.
Go to a translator website and try translating sentences and you get nonsense back from it, other languages just dont have the same freedom as English.

Engrish?

 

[All Seeing Eye]

Engrish?

Wow, i'm rather shocked that theres so much mistranslation going on in the world especially east asian translation to English, is it really so difficult!!

Dear Lord!
http://www.engrish.com/detail.php?imagename=if-you-are-stolen.jpg&category=CHINGLISH&date=2008-02-04

 

[Christopher]

^^Yes, as I said above, it's always challenging to translate effectively from any language to any other, and essentially impossible to do so using automatic translation software. It's not "especially" true with Asian languages to English, except in the sense that those languages are from different families and are thus a lot more different from each other than, say, Spanish and Italian are, or even Spanish and Arabic. But it would be just as difficult to get a good machine translation from, say, Russian to Korean as from Chinese to English. There are just more examples of the latter because Mandarin Chinese and English are two of the three most widely spoken languages in the world (in that order; some sources put English second, others third after Spanish), and because English is probably the most common second language.

 

[cultcross]

In fact, every letter in English is silent in at least one word.

I've managed to compile a list of those, but I haven't been able to find any words where Q or V is silent. Can you give examples?

EDIT: I Googled this, and found a couple of claims for "lacquer" as a silent-q word, but I don't buy it; I would say that's a silent-c word instead. "Laquer" would be pronounced the same way, but "lacuer" or "lacer" would not. No sign of a silent-v word in my Googling either. Unless you count the word viz., which is pronounced "namely." (It's an abbreviation for the Latin word corresponding to "namely," and there was a time when it was considered proper to use Latin abbreviations for English terms. The abbreviations were meant to be pronounced as the full English words. "Etc." was probably originally read as "And so on.")

lacquer was the example I had for Q as well (arguably the whole 'qu' there is unnecessary, but granted you could also argue it is the 'c'), the example for 'v' was also a bit of a stretch - the village of Elvedon in Suffolk is (or at least "correctly", i.e. historically) pronounced "eld'n" but I accept that this is rather obscure, and the alternative "wrong" pronunciation with the 'v' sounded is becoming more and more common, I did, i notice, miss out 'j' - my apologies, reword my original post accordingly unless you can think of an example still, I can find at least one example for all other letters, and most of these are pretty common words.

 

[Christopher]

I don't think proper names should count, since that opens the door for foreign names of Americans, for instance, and that's kind of cheating.

My silent-j word is marijuana. That seems like a loan word from Spanish, but it's found in English-language dictionaries under the pronunciation "mar-uh-wan-uh," and apparently the Mexican-Spanish form is actually spelled marihuana or mariguana, with the J in the English form being by folk-etymological association with the given name Maria Juana. So it's definitely an American English word in which the J is silent.

Aww, just for the heck of it, here's my whole list, understanding of course that the majority of these have multiple possible choices:

A: bread
B: debt
C: indict
D: adjutant
E: fore
F: halfpenny (pron. hay-p'nee)
G: gnat
H: hour
I: business
J: marijuana
K: knock
L: calf
M: mnemonic
N: condemn
O: colonel
P: psyche
Q: ----
R: metier
S: island
T: nestle
U: guild
V: ----
W: whole
X: roux
Y: eyrie
Z: pince-nez

Okay, a number of loan words that have retained their foreign pronunciations, but all found in English-language dictionaries. Where possible, I've chosen words where removing the silent letter gives a valid homophonous word (bred, for, nat, our, nock, gild, hole, Erie).

Personally I think that adjutant and other adj- words (adjective, adjust, adjoin, adjure) are borderline cases; at least in the case of the words stressed on the second syllable, I tend to pronounce them with a bit of an audible D sound. But the dictionaries say the D is silent. I chose "adjutant" because that's the one that I, at least, pronounce with the least of a D sound.

And I'm reluctant to include viz. in my list, since it's properly a written abbreviation for the word "namely" rather than a distinct word in its own right.

 

[cultcross]

Good list, a few of those were what I was thinking of. And good catch with marijuana, being British that didn't cross my mind, even though I'd considered the 'Spanish connection' as a source of unusual 'j' words!
Agreed about viz., I thought my placename was a bit of a stretch but, if you want to find words pronounced in ludicrously unphonetic ways, English placenames are a good spot to start

 

[Lynx]

First, some amusing Star Trek examples.

ask for a drink of tea?

Picard, his Earl Grey hot.

say engage warp drive?

Episode, when the credits roll.



Seven regenerates.

say what time is it?

Scotty, making estimates.

And so on.

The concept of the Tamarians on TNG was bonkers, ive never watched such drivel in my life, how can any society communicate like they supposedly do?

Now this is a problem, but not for the reason you elucidated. The reason is for these metaphorical stories to have value by shorthand, they would have to have been told in the first place. Were all the metaphors explained by metaphors? How does one explain Darmok without saying Darmok? The meaning of the entire lexicon of metaphors must have been explained somehow.

I love your translations here!

When I go to the place where I use to drink a cup of coffee and meet some friends on Saturday, I will step up to the counter and attack the poor woman behind it with a request for:

Lynx, last Saturday at this place!

Since one of my friends are a devoted TNG fan, I'm sure that he'll have the laugh of the day.

 

[cultcross]

I love your translations here!

When I go to the place where I use to drink a cup of coffee and meet some friends on Saturday, I will step up to the counter and attack the poor woman behind it with a request for:

Lynx, last Saturday at this place!

Since one of my friends are a devoted TNG fan, I'm sure that he'll have the laugh of the day.

Then when the coffee woman doesn't understand, look dejected and say 'shaka, when the walls fell'.

 

[The Borg Queen]

Then when the coffee woman doesn't understand, look dejected and say 'shaka, when the walls fell'.

What about Shaka?

What happened when the walls fell?

 

[Christopher]

What about Shaka?

What happened when the walls fell?

My "Darmok"-sequel story in The Sky's the Limit actually answers that...

 

[cultcross]

What about Shaka?

What happened when the walls fell?

My "Darmok"-sequel story in The Sky's the Limit actually answers that...

Temba, his arms wide...?

(see, the Tamarians can ask for free book copies without a hitch - great language )

 

[Christopher]

Cultcross, at the bookstore, with wallet. A guy's gotta make a living...

 

[cultcross]

Cultcross, at the bookstore, with wallet. A guy's gotta make a living...

Christopher at TrekBBS, his heart miserly