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From: antonyg@planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au (George Antony Ph 93818)
Subject: Re: Esperanto? The EU? (Very, very long)
Message-ID: <D5IrEB.G15@planet.mh.dpi.qld.gov.au>
Organization: Qld Department of Primary Industries
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Date: Thu, 16 Mar 1995 06:01:23 GMT
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djohnson@tartarus.ucsd.edu (Darin Johnson) writes:

>Two things are big here, first, lots of ambiguity.  This is especially
>bad in an international language, and English has had plenty of bad
>experience with ambiguities in the international arena.  Some of it
>is the giant vocabulary such that native speakers tend to pick a word
>for subtle meanings that non-natives don't pick up on.  

This "giant vocabulary" is being repeated as mantra.  All natural 
languages have a large vocabulary, most of which is only used by the
educated few anyway.  For everyday use, a bare couple of thousand
words is quite sufficient.  In this respect, English is just dandy.

If you want a language where the ceiling of total vocabulary is low, 
then you have to go for an artificial language such as Esperanto.  But,
as I keep pointing out (and is being ignored consistently), the size
of the total vocabulary in natural languages is a red herring. 

>Second, English seems to have many more auxiliary words, and these
>words themselves can have inflections and irregularities just like
>verbs.  For instance "have + verb", "had had + verb".  English just
>seems to have much more of these.  

Much more than what ?  I'd say that Romance languages are just as
bad as English in this respect and so is German.  Russian is better,
but all the above are much worse than English in their more complicated
grammar.

There is also a looseness to word
>order and negatives, which can lead to confusion if the listener has a
>stricter native language.  That is, double negatives are common in
>English, and commonly understood (of themselves, double negatives
>aren't ungrammatical, but current grammatical rules says no), and a
>native English listener will usually understand a double negative
>sentence as equivalent to one with only one negative - but a
>non-native listener may assume the sentences have very different
>meanings.

Having come from a linguistic background where double negatives are
the norm, I never got confused.  Having observed others from similar
backgournds learn English, they did not get confused either.  For sure,
getting used to NOT using double negatives needs attention, but that is
all and it is far from the most problematic part in learning ENglish.

>Do other languages commonly have *college* level grammar books
>filled with page after page of syntax diagrams?

Perhaps not, but certainly with endless conjugation and declension 
tables.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
                       The opinion of George Antony 
    NOT the opinion of the Queensland Department of Primary Industries
