HUZZAH! Banned from Rentech.com!
Kochanski:
I picked up what has been desribed by local friends as the worst Geordie accent they have ever heard. But when I go home the accent disappears in about a day and I return to the faint Wiltshire accent I used to have interspered with some Geordie expressions.
Edit. Yes my family do laugh and yes I get recognised as a southerner although no one is very good at guessing which part.
Ness:
perhaps that was a slightly dodgy way of putting it...
my mother (dutch) always told me that dutch was similar to both english and german, but english and german are not really similar at all... I can get the meaning of more dutch than I can german - despite the fact that my mother and her family have not spoken dutch since she was 6 and I spent two years at school learning german... I knew it wouldn't make sense when I originally posted, and I'm still not sure that it makes a lot of sense now.
Ness
ZephyrZodiac:
I think I follow you. Now, since the original language of the Saxons was of Germanic origin, and the original language in Holland was also of Germanic origin (hence the English name for Hollandisch is Dutch, whereas the German name for German is Deutsch!) all three languages are very much bound up together, but obviously different influences came to bear on them and they changed, English probably the most, due to the influence of first the Scandinavian languages and then Norman French. In a sense, English is the most advanced in that the original inflexions, cases, genders etc. have been largely lost due to the continuing evolution of the language (and possibly the linguistic laziness of it's speakers!), whereas both German and dutch represent a purer form of the language.
When one considers how many languages have gone to make up what is present-day English, it's strange how difficult most English children find learning a foreign language as closely akin to their own as French or German, yet Chinese or Japanese children, whose language could hardly be more different from ours, seem to learn to speak English well. At a school where I used to teach, we had a couple of sisters from Hong Kong who arrived speaking no English at all. the elder one was conversing with other children by the time she had spent 3 months in the school, the younger one, who was more reserved, hardly spoke at all for two years, then not only did she speak English nearly perfectly (apart from her accent, as some sounds she did find difficult) but did so well at learning German that she was awarded the German Prize!
Isn't it amazing how far we digress from the original thread! Anothr English characteristic, digression......
Ness:
Is that a characteristic of english people (from england), or just english speakers... ;)
Ness
Liss:
Quote from: Brynne on 2005 August 17, 07:34:30
Quote from: Liss on 2005 August 16, 21:00:06
But when I'm typing on the net I do have a tendency to not use capital letters. LOL
Did you intentionally capitalize LOL? :D
LOL to me is a short, burst of laughter. lol is just a giggle ;) what i mean is i usually type in all lower case, not capitalizing the beginning of sentences, or names, or i's. hehe
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