RE: Linux on PS/2?

["Boland, John" <user=1483@nabble.blu.org>]

 whenever I stumble across bad grammar, improperly written or poorly 
constructed sentences, mentally I do stumble and have to re-read the 
passage again and attempt to guess at what the writer meant. 

can't say as I agree with russian being a difficult language to learn. 
back in the dawn of pre-history I was in the marine corps and attached 
to a certain three-letter organization that is currently at the heart of 
a scandal with at&t. 
I learned russian at the defense language institute.  I found russian to 
be logically constructed and it made sense.  fairly well defined rules 
for plurals, conjugating verbs, setting tenses.  but then again, I took 
latin in high school (and french and italian). 
over the years, I've known and met many non-native english speakers. 
all agree that english has too many exceptions to the basic rules.  like 
plurals, usually add an 's', sometimes an 'es'.  then there are all the 
weird words like child/children, hippopotamus/hippopotami, sheep/sheep. 
the number of exceptions is greater than the number of protons in the 
universe! 

must ... stop ... now! I ... can ... feel ... a ... rant ... coming ... 
on. 

to mangle a line from "Blast from the Past", using manners is not 
because you're better than someone else it is because you respect them. 
same thing applies with language. 

  

-----Original Message----- 
From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf 
Of Seth Gordon 
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 11:35 AM 
To: BLU 
Subject: Re: Linux on PS/2? 

Eric Chadbourne wrote: 
>> English is badly made.  It seems unnecessarily complicated.   
>> After one year of Spanish I could pretty much read and write. 
>>  Try that with English. 
> 
> I just told my Russian speaking coworker that I thought English to be 
> difficult and he laughed at me.  So I looked online for a simple 
> comparison of language complexity and didn't find anything.  Anybody 
> know where I can get more info?  Thanks, Eric. 

I think all languages are equally complex, it's just that their 
complexity appears in different areas.  English, for example, doesn't 
have the complicated verb and noun forms that you see in Russian or 
Hebrew, but it has a very large vocabulary and it does weird things with 
modal verbs. 

If you're talking about complexity from a native English speaker's point 
of view, the DOD has four categories for languages based on how 
difficult they are; the higher the category, the longer it takes for a 
student to become fluent.  E.g., Spanish is Category I, German is 
Category II, Russian is Category III, and Arabic is Category IV. 


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by 
MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. 

_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and 
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is 
believed to be clean. 

_______________________________________________ 
Discuss mailing list 
[hidden email] 
http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss