Of English grammar and common trends.
The ancient greek language is so totally awesome. It just rocks.
Not because it sounds sophisticated for me to say that I know it, not because some lame lazy butt philosopher who sat around while they thought up ideas spoke it, not (totally) because Greeks are the awesomest people on the planet, not because The Odyssey was written by a guy named after a character on The Simpsons. Nay I say, for although these are all valid and sufficient reasons, they striketh not the prime reason on the nose.
It is because English stinks. It has to be the most bloated and uncoordinated language on this planet. Everything about it is filled with exceptions, ambiguities, misuses of terms, awkward spellings, and forms that don't make any sense. If I had a nickel for every stupid idiom and phrase and group of words that don't make any sense together but are used anyway, I would have a butt load of nickels.
English has had hundreds of years to skew, corrupt, and wreak havoc on itself. Centuries upon centuries of stupid people to contort something logical into something short handed, regional centric, and context oriented. Years and years of immigrants misusing pronouns and slaying standards. People mashing many good words into one generic "catch all" word that has no specifics to it at all. No uniqueness. No definitiveness. You need tons of context in order to have any idea of what I am saying.
When I say, "bow", you have now idea of what I am talking about. It could be a noun, or a verb, or maybe even an adjective, or essentially anything you want it to be, if you are so inclined. Talk about ambiguous.
I could say, "DUDE!, that dude is totally a dude, eh dude?"
"Dude" in that sentence was used as a reflexive exclamatory remark (on the same level as the "Ouch!"), a noun, a pronoun, and an adjective. There were nine words in that sentence, and four of them were the word "dude". Case in point.
Unfortunately the above sentence, or variants thereof, are a frequently manifested sentences in common English.
I feel bad for all those little Indian and Chinese kids who have to learn English so that they can work their phone tech support jobs for major companies based in the United States.
Greek is superior also in the area of word order. Yes, there are some standard placements for certain constructions, but, for the most part, things can be placed where ever you want to place them for reasons of emphasis. It allows, what I like to call, "Yoda talk".
You think something is important? Put it at the beginning of the sentence! Simple as that! And effective too! And, not only that, but it sounds really cool! Something that, if you do it in English, gets you strange looks and automatically pegs you as a Starwars freak, whether or not you actually are.
Or
maybe I am approaching this from the wrong direction. I am a fair guy, and I give everything its fair chance, until I decide that it is stupid and deserves to die a slow and painful death.
Maybe the "dude" movement has something going for it: a whole language that is so developed and so sophisticated in its makeup that any possible thought or meaning can be expressed by one single word and its accompanying inflection. "Dude".
eg. "Dude dude, dude dude dude dude dude, dude dude dude".
Translation, "Pardon me sir, but I believe that your presupposition is falsified by the morphosyntactical use of the minor premise of the enthymeme that you chose to employ"
Of course, this is hard to understand over the internet without proper inflection being made to the statement. But, if this usage of the language would abound in the public, a common knowledge of inflection would occur so that one would be able to read it over the internet.
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A bit of my Greek homework. There should not be too many heresies in there. I don't think that I had many in the first place, and whatever was left, I corrected out this morning (pen in blue). I enjoyed doing this passage.
1 John 5:1-6 and the flip side,
1 John 5:7-12.
Note:
I don't claim to be a grammer expert, as is evidance by my above writing. Don't look at me though. It is the stupid English language that forbids me from any professional attempt at writing mastery.
Not because it sounds sophisticated for me to say that I know it, not because some lame lazy butt philosopher who sat around while they thought up ideas spoke it, not (totally) because Greeks are the awesomest people on the planet, not because The Odyssey was written by a guy named after a character on The Simpsons. Nay I say, for although these are all valid and sufficient reasons, they striketh not the prime reason on the nose.
It is because English stinks. It has to be the most bloated and uncoordinated language on this planet. Everything about it is filled with exceptions, ambiguities, misuses of terms, awkward spellings, and forms that don't make any sense. If I had a nickel for every stupid idiom and phrase and group of words that don't make any sense together but are used anyway, I would have a butt load of nickels.
English has had hundreds of years to skew, corrupt, and wreak havoc on itself. Centuries upon centuries of stupid people to contort something logical into something short handed, regional centric, and context oriented. Years and years of immigrants misusing pronouns and slaying standards. People mashing many good words into one generic "catch all" word that has no specifics to it at all. No uniqueness. No definitiveness. You need tons of context in order to have any idea of what I am saying.
When I say, "bow", you have now idea of what I am talking about. It could be a noun, or a verb, or maybe even an adjective, or essentially anything you want it to be, if you are so inclined. Talk about ambiguous.
I could say, "DUDE!, that dude is totally a dude, eh dude?"
"Dude" in that sentence was used as a reflexive exclamatory remark (on the same level as the "Ouch!"), a noun, a pronoun, and an adjective. There were nine words in that sentence, and four of them were the word "dude". Case in point.
Unfortunately the above sentence, or variants thereof, are a frequently manifested sentences in common English.
I feel bad for all those little Indian and Chinese kids who have to learn English so that they can work their phone tech support jobs for major companies based in the United States.
Greek is superior also in the area of word order. Yes, there are some standard placements for certain constructions, but, for the most part, things can be placed where ever you want to place them for reasons of emphasis. It allows, what I like to call, "Yoda talk".
You think something is important? Put it at the beginning of the sentence! Simple as that! And effective too! And, not only that, but it sounds really cool! Something that, if you do it in English, gets you strange looks and automatically pegs you as a Starwars freak, whether or not you actually are.
Or
maybe I am approaching this from the wrong direction. I am a fair guy, and I give everything its fair chance, until I decide that it is stupid and deserves to die a slow and painful death.
Maybe the "dude" movement has something going for it: a whole language that is so developed and so sophisticated in its makeup that any possible thought or meaning can be expressed by one single word and its accompanying inflection. "Dude".
eg. "Dude dude, dude dude dude dude dude, dude dude dude".
Translation, "Pardon me sir, but I believe that your presupposition is falsified by the morphosyntactical use of the minor premise of the enthymeme that you chose to employ"
Of course, this is hard to understand over the internet without proper inflection being made to the statement. But, if this usage of the language would abound in the public, a common knowledge of inflection would occur so that one would be able to read it over the internet.
***********************************************************************************
A bit of my Greek homework. There should not be too many heresies in there. I don't think that I had many in the first place, and whatever was left, I corrected out this morning (pen in blue). I enjoyed doing this passage.
1 John 5:1-6 and the flip side,
1 John 5:7-12.
Note:
I don't claim to be a grammer expert, as is evidance by my above writing. Don't look at me though. It is the stupid English language that forbids me from any professional attempt at writing mastery.
posted by Cyphoid at 10:38 AM
5 Comments:
Possibly since english seems to be a "harder" language, maybe those english speaking people are smarter than those ancient Greeks.
Don't get me wrong, I am just posing a question. I actually think the Greek alphebet is the most awesome ever.
And by the way, maybe you think Greek is easier, but do you know that Turksih has only one irregular verb? Although, you might hear it pretty regularly in Turkey.
(Actually, I think Turkish is pretty hard. I think the reason it doesn't have many irregular verbs is that you tack on different suffixes and prefixes to subjects and nouns creating very long words.)
I didn't say that Greek was easy. I was saying that it was more logical. English is harder in that it doesn't make any sense.
Japanese has only two irregular verbs too (with minor exceptions). That doesn't necessarially make it an easy language.
Um... You should of probably said that previous statement you made, "English is harder in that it doesn't make any sense." in greek, because that was totally illogical. If english didn't make any sense, then I couldn't of understood that sentance. I don't know if you can say greek is more logical just because it has a verb, or whatever before a such and such unlike english. If you really want a logical language, try boolean algebra. But I'm just nit-picking. :-)
Actually, english is probably one of the most influenced languages. I hear that it has the most words for any language. The most ways to say one thing. But indeed it is crazy, particulary with spelling. Although, while in french class my teacher remarked that english grammer is better than french.
But remember, just like a sword is as dangerous as the person who weilds it, so is a language as bad as the person's use of it. It is indeed possible to speak well, very logical english. Its just some people butcher it.
(I can actually boast that I am bilingual. Er, I can write in several languages... programming languages that is. heh)
Well , thats the reason a spoken language has expression so that you can express the same thing in different ways ..so that you can COMMUNICATE .. unlike C++.
Ah, how wrong you are. C++ does indeed have expressions. You can also indeed express things in different ways. Also, you _can_ communicate. In fact, C++ has streams of communications. I mean, if you couldn't communicate via the output stream cout, it would be pretty hard to send text to the console.
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