Tuesday, June 28, 2005
I guess my colleagues do speak a little English...
An English instructor came in just now and asked me how to translate "kintantis skiemuo," which literally mieans "changing syllible," but actually means something like "an accent that switches from syllible to syllible." i suggested she translate it as "fucked up pronounciation," at which point my other colleague, who doesn't speak English at all, burst out laughing and said "Jo jo, tik parasyk 'Fuck You' ir pamatysi kas bus!"
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10 comments:
It's "syllable," not "syllible," a mistake you managed to make three times in one post. Which wouldn't be so bad except that you're supposed to be an, um, English teacher!
Congratulations on the promotion and the five-year gig. I presume that no one at your workplace is aware of the blog.
yeah..too bad there's no spell check on blogger. i don't fault my students for spelling mistakes, unless it's something we've specifically gone over (saw vs. sow, heart vs. hart, dear vs. deer...). i only fault them for not using the spell checker (-1 "F7").
no, no one know about my blog. although, until a couple months ago, i would have said "my parent? no, they don't know about my blog!"
in fact, there is a spell check in blogger, it's just not in real time. you just have to click on the check mark with "abc" above it after you're done typing your entry that's full of mistakes.
by the way, no one is singular.
also, your example of hart vs. heart brings my thoughts back to high school poetry readings. good show.
ha ha, you're an English teacher and you misspelt pronunciation!
Congratulations on the promotion though:-)
like i mentioned, two comments up, spelling doesn't matter! who the hell cares about spelling? it's stupid. byby dejau ant any non-phonetic language!
Who cares about spelling? Why stop there? Who cares about grammar? It's too darn hard! Communication, that's the only really important part. And math, there's a great area for simplification. I'd like pi to be equal to 3.14, or maybe 22/7, this whole irrational number business seems way so unnecessary.
Man, life's gonna be so kewl when it gets so much simpler. Oh, wait . . .
as a matter of fact, i've been thinking lately that there must be something fundamentally wrong with a number system that has irrational numbers. the whole point of numbers is the rational measurement of the universe. there's gotta be a system that allows for a rational pi. i'm halfway through a brief history of time...hopefully stephen hawking will mention one by the end.
the thing about spelling, actually, isn't that it's hard, it's that it's irrational. lithuanian grammar is harder, but at least its spelling is rational.
yeah, lithuanian is one of the phonetic languages. i also occasionally make spelling mistakes, but it's because i don't know how words are pronounced...i'm tone deaf, and the difference between dvibalses and tribalses is sometimes lost on me too.
You can usually get questions involving pi right on the sat by rounding down to 3...the again, if you actually use long math on those types of questions, you'll probably only answer 1 question per 10 minutes.
lithuanian is rational, but i don't think that that is necessarily better in all cases. through its rationality it has so many more rules than a less rational language would have. in other words, i feel like in languages, there's a trade-off. the less rational a language is, the less rules it has (obviously). but i guess that's part of what makes languages so interesting. one's ability to master a language is never comprised of just knowing all the rules by hart:) but also the finesse involved in placing words interestingly and doing something for which almost no rules exist.
i always find it interesting that e.b. white (author of charlotte's web and The Elements of Style, which is "the most compact and lucid handbook we have for matters of basic principles of composition, grammar, word usage and misusage, and writing style") also wrote my favorite short story, The Door. Read it here: The Door, by E.B. White.
dariau,
"the less rational a language is, the less rules it has (obviously)."
english may have less rules, but having an average of 100 exceptions per rule makes it a mute point: it doesn't end up being simpler if you want to be correct always.
e.g. i before e except after c ...and except for 'neighbor', and 'leisure' and 'seizure', and words that rhyme with 'weigh' (including when you add a 't' to the end of the aforementioned, as in "weight and "height"), and don't forget 'weird', and words of Germanic origin like 'weiner' and 'abseil'...
(http://www.hipforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=89597&page=1)
i've heard there's actually a rhyme that covers all exceptions in a nice neat rule. it's seven pages long...that's a good trade off? i prefer ten times more rules that are simple with few exceptions.
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