English Lesson

[wenwilder]

Let's face it: English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant or ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins were not invented in England or french fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies, while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write, but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce, and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So, one moose, 2 meese? One index, two indices? Is cheese the plural of choose?

If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?

In what language do people recite at a play, and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell?

Park on driveways and drive on parkways?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

When a house burns up, it burns down. You fill in a form by filling it out and an alarm clock goes off by going on.

When the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it?

Now I know why I flunked my English. It's not my fault -- the silly language doesn't quite know whether it's coming or going.

[wenwilder]

Plain English
Having chosen English as the preferred language in the EEC, the European Parliament has commissioned a feasibility study in ways of improving efficiency in communications between Government departments.
European officials have often pointed out that English spelling is unnecessarily difficult - for example, cough, plough, rough, through and thorough. What is clearly needed is a phased programme of changes to iron out these anomalies. The programme would, of course, be administered by a committee staff at top level by participating nations.

In the first year, for example, the committee would suggest using 's' instead of the soft 'c'. Sertainly, sivil servants in all sities would resieve this news with joy. Then the hard 'c' could be replaced by 'k' sinse both letters are pronounsed alike. Not only would this klear up konfusion in the minds of klerikal workers, but typewriters kould be made with one less letter.

There would be growing enthusiasm when in the sekond year, it kould be announsed that the troublesome 'ph' would henseforth be written 'f'. This would make words like 'fotograf' twenty per sent shorter in print.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reash the stage where more komplikated shanges are possible. Governments would enkourage the removal of double letters which have always been a deterent to akurate speling.

We would al agre that the horible mes of silent 'e's in the languag is disgrasful. Therefor we kould drop thes and kontinu to read and writ as though nothing had hapend. By this tim it would be four years sins the skem began and peopl would be reseptive to steps sutsh as replasing 'th' by 'z'. Perhaps zen ze funktion of 'w' kould be taken on by 'v', vitsh is, after al, half a 'w'. Shortly after zis, ze unesesary 'o' kould be dropd from words kontaining 'ou'. Similar arguments vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.

Kontinuing zis proses yer after yer, ve vud eventuli hav a reli sensibl riten styl. After tventi yers zer vud be no mor trubls, difikultis and evrivun vud fin it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drems of the Guvermnt vud finali hav kum tru.

[Narasinha]

LOL!

I guess we might be better off learning Esperanto!

[matauri]

I guess we might be better off learning Esperanto!

Funny you should say that. When I was in my early years of high school (ummm...25yrs ago!) we did 2 years of learning esperanto because aparently at the time it was going to be a platform language.

Wonder what ever happened to that?

I know..it was the English...they wanted to win at that too ;-) If so, who got the knighthood for that? ;-)


Everything she said up top

You never cease to amaze me mate :-)



Cindy

[Narasinha]

Funny you should say that. When I was in my early years of high school (ummm...25yrs ago!) we did 2 years of learning esperanto because aparently at the time it was going to be a platform language.

Wonder what ever happened to that?

I know..it was the English...they wanted to win at that too ;-) If so, who got the knighthood for that? ;-)

Yeah, high school was nearly that far back for me too. Interstingly enough about Esperanto, even Google is available with an Esperanto interface. Just go to http://www.google.com/intl/eo/ to take a look.

There was a mention of Australian/British/American/Canadian English in another forum. There are a lot of language codes available for use in Microsoft products:

en English
en-us English (United States)
en-gb English (United Kingdom)
en-au English (Australia)
en-ca English (Canada)
en-nz English (New Zealand)
en-ie English (Ireland)
en-za English (South Africa)
en-jm English (Jamaica)
en English (Caribbean)
en-bz English (Belize)
en-tt English (Trinidad)

For standard ISO 639-1 two-letter language codes, such as those used in HTML for the 'lang="xx"' attibute, check out http://www.unicode.org/onlinedat/languages.html. Esperanto's code is "eo". There are a lot of pages in Esperanto out there!

**EDIT**

I just found that Google is available in a couple other interesting formats:

Google in "Bork-Bork-Bork!" (Swedish Chef fans rejoice!)
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-bork/

Google in "Elmer Fudd"
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elmer/

Google in "Hacker" (just for us L33t P30pL3!)
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-hacker/

Google in "Klingon"
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon/

Google in "Pig Latin"
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-piglatin/

[Greyhawk]

Sinde ven r u gong to lern English it ze onle vay to b. Get ovr it grl ose lost to ze best tem.

Greyhawk