Elfhelm25 said:
Where are you from, what
languages can you speak, and would you care to give us a sample of that fine language.
Even if it's English ! What KIND Of English do you speak ?
Ah, languages! I'm afraid I am not nearly as gifted in them as most of the rest of the posters in this thread! The only two languages I speak fluently are English and Profane.
However, I took some Spanish in high school, back in the Jurassic Age,
aber Deutsch war meiner Nebenfach ins Universität. I took it a bit farther when, after two years of lower-division German, as a sophmore at UCLA, I studied the German "fate plays" (
Schicksalspielen) of the 19th century, the Romantic Era.
Es ist Schade, daß ich hab' es fast alles vergeßen haben, und ich hatt immer schwer Problemen mit die Grammatik und die Rechtschreibung — besonders jetzt! Ach! Gott in Himmel!
When I started teaching however, I was forced to teach myself to speak "Self-Defense Spanish"
porqúe tengo muchos estudiantes de otros campos, y no es posíble para hablar inglés con ellos. Most of what I said was in the present tense no matter what, but I could make myself reasonably understood. It was much easier for me to "transmit" than to "recieve."
As for my English — ah, what shall we say about
that?! I am an unabashed word lover. I have an unabridged dictionary squatting upon my desk which I use with astonishing frequency compared to the average American
zhlub. I have internet subscriptions to Word A Day, Word Doctor, and World Wide Words.
All during the year I cull interesting words from these sources and compile them into an ever-growing "private dictionary" of my own favorite words, which I email each January to my friends — at least those who like words as much as I do!
(One of the things I appreciate about TTF is the opportunity stretch out and actually
use more of my functional vocabulary than ordinarily.)
I suppose I speak with a "Standard American" accent — that is to say, like what you hear from most American radio and TV announcers. When I was stationed in the South 50 years ago, I began to soak up all the southern accents and could tell what Gulf Coast town a native was from simply by listening to him speak.
I have done some voiceover work — not much — in L.A., which was a lot of fun, so I suppose my pronunciation is decent. What
galls me however, is what I consider to be the degeneration of American English (which was never the equal of British English) over my lifetime.
Some of my pet peeves: "I go/he went" instead of "I said/he said". "Snuck" instead of "sneaked." "Snuck" was once considered simply wrong —
a non-word. But what really annoys me intensely is what has happened to the pronunciation of the word "the".
The word is correctly pronounced "thee" before nouns beginning with vowels, and slides into the noun
with no glottal stop. ("the apple" becomes "theeyapple" — smooth — no glottal stop. "Flows like oil," as Mozart would say.)
It is properly pronounced "thuh" before nouns beginning with consonants. These days however, it is "thuh" for everything, and nothing sounds more grotesquely awkward than to say "thuh apple; thuh ingredient" with that damned glottal stop everywhere!
It's a good thing I don't have to make a living as a grammarian; I'd have fatal ulcers. The truth is, language shifts and changes. It both both evolves and
devolves, depending on the direction in which society is heading — which, ultimately is down.
I was actually very carefully
taught the proper use and application of "the" clear back in grade school — as early as the third grade! They say one of the primary laws of physics is that everything runs down. That is certainly the unfortunate situation with modern English!
Gee — I feel
much better now!
Barley
