Random Thoughts...or...What's on Your Mind?
- Thread starter Sibyl
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I’m not sure cursive is a good measure of literacy. It’s legitimately less important in a world where everyone has computers and hand letter writing is considered an anachronism mostly invoked to project sincerity.
I am rewatching all the Babylon 5 seasons, and I can't find a place to talk about it on here, do I need to start my own thread or is there one on here??
There's an active one here:
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/babylon-5.277345/
Just be warned, it's 157 pages deep at this point!
okay let's just discard all the handwritten notes then - who needs history?
... that's a bit like not learning foreign languages as everybody speaks english nowadays
he's born in '90 (like my middle daughter) and his mom, an ardent trekkie, named him jean-luc
I partially agree. English is indeed a quite simple language as far as its grammar is concerned. But it can drive a non-native speaker completely insane with its vocabulary. Every shade of a meaning has its own word. I discussed that phenomenon with a board member the other day and randomly picked "Geist" as an example: my dictionary lists 31 possible translations into English, the range spanning from intellect to spectre.
Posting here is a continuous fight to hit on the correct word and more than once have I gotten into trouble for picking a wrong one. People tend to automatically assume that anyone who has a flawless command of the grammar must necessarily also be perfect in the use of the vocabulary. However, it's rather like walking on a tightrope: knowing how to walk on solid ground doesn't keep you from losing your balance on the rope.
okay let's just discard all the handwritten notes then - who needs history?
... that's a bit like not learning foreign languages as everybody speaks english nowadays
That's a poor argument. By extension you could say "Why aren't we teaching our kids to use type writers? HISTORY!!" Cursive is maybe worth learning as a historical artifact but not as a core part of first grade education. Cursive is less like Spanish, more like Latin.
The thing about Engilsh is the basic grammar is simple but there's a lot of subtle weird rules and exceptions we learn by experience without being told. Nobody ever taught us it's the big red car instead of the red big car.
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so if you stumble across your great grandmother's diary you hire someone to read if for you?
A) When I was in 1st grade, I wrote regular letters just with lines connecting them, and my teachers thought I somehow learned cursive. It's not rocket science.
B) We're not discussing whether it has zero utility whatsoever in historical studies. We're discussing whether it's so fundamental it should be considered a basic part of functional literacy for elementary school children.
C) If you ever were in a situation where you wanted to read your grandmother's letters, and somehow you were unable to deduce that a p with a line coming out of it was in fact, a p, you could Google it and learn it in 15 minutes.
as a matter of fact i transscripted 62 diaries of family members (going back to the early 18th century) and not all of them used latin letters
... there was a lot of stuff in those diaries i wouldn't have wanted an expert to find before i did
yes, i think learning to write (and that's not using print fonts) is essential to one's education - they learn to thumb their smartphones on their own time easily
There are still cardboard boxes that I haven't opened since my moving... Well, it's sort of a struggle between my laziness and the need to have some items on shelves and hanging on walls. It's mostly aesthetic, almost everything (there are always exceptions) that I find useful is already where it's supposed to be.
Wordplay on pants, i.e. trousers, along with the unexpectedness of seeing a sound effect in the subtitles when it's expected that they will only display dialog.
Kor
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According to this, the average native English speaker only uses about 5000 words in their regular day-to-day speaking and writing. So I would guess that anyone who knows most of those 5000 would be able to get by just fine. (The same article notes that English has approximately one million words, but the average adult only knows 20 000 of them, with it going up to around 40 000 for university graduates. That's a lot of words available that most people probably don't even know!)
You appear to have an excellent command of the vocabulary, as far as I can tell.
Funny, there was just an article related to adjective order that came up on my Pocket feed on the weekend:
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/gr...derson-mark-forsyth-cambridge-dictionary.html
I certainly don't recall being taught any specific order. Their example is a little unfortunate, though, because when I first read it, I read it with two colours that both came in different locations. I realized that "silver" was supposed to be the material, rather than a colour, but it would have been clearer if they had just gone with "metal" instead. But I have to say, the example they gave of a jumbled order doesn't really sound that off to me, except for moving "whittling" away from "knife". If they had left that part alone, it doesn't really strike me as much of a "word salad" as the author attests.
What I noticed in the last 20 years is that even native speakers tend to not use the correct tenses of irregular verbs anymore but treat them as if they were regular ones.
The same goes for other cases where words undergo a change depending on time and likeliness. Quite a lot of writers use 'may have' (present tense) as a past tense, even though it ought to be 'might have'. And even one of my favourite writers, Terry Pratchett, was unable to distinguish between need and had to. "He found that he needn't do something" makes you cringe. "He found that he didn't have to do it" would be not only correct but also so much more elegant.
Alas, there are quite similar trends in German. As an avid reader and connoisseur of beautiful language, it hurts me to see the native tongues of poets like Byron, Poe, Swift, Herder, Eichendorff and Musaeus losing their beauty and sophistication and become mere shadows of themselves, a sort of lowest common denominator (or language for dummies..)
The same goes for other cases where words undergo a change depending on time and likeliness. Quite a lot of writers use 'may have' (present tense) as a past tense, even though it ought to be 'might have'. And even one of my favourite writers, Terry Pratchett, was unable to distinguish between need and had to. "He found that he needn't do something" makes you cringe. "He found that he didn't have to do it" would be not only correct but also so much more elegant.
Alas, there are quite similar trends in German. As an avid reader and connoisseur of beautiful language, it hurts me to see the native tongues of poets like Byron, Poe, Swift, Herder, Eichendorff and Musaeus losing their beauty and sophistication and become mere shadows of themselves, a sort of lowest common denominator (or language for dummies..)
I think it's too bad that Esperanto is not spoken by more people. It's really a very astute language and very easy to learn. I'd say at least four times easier than any other language I know. I hear we're about two million speakers around the world. Enough to make a small country if we were all in the same place but far from impressive compared to the seven billion people that are thought to inhabit our planet.
In many case, it may be true for several reasons. Language change. There may be words and phrases we wouldn't recognize or misinterpret. Also, writing styles change, especially cursive. IIRC, one of the movie nitpicks regarding Indiana Jones and the last crusade was that Hitler wouldn't have signed Indy's journal the way we saw in the movie as it was uncharacteristic of someone who learned cursive in late 19th Century...
Not to mention the great-grandmother may write in a different language.
Subtitles and closed captions usually include descriptions of sounds. They even might identify the music playing, including who wrote/sang it. They've done so for decades.Wordplay on pants, i.e. trousers, along with the unexpectedness of seeing a sound effect in the subtitles when it's expected that they will only display dialog.
Kor
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