Monday 4 May 2020

English is a weird language and yet they mock others.

I saw this on Sion Jobbin's Twitter page and it got mje thinking

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My first reaction was that it would be interesting opportunity for someone  to write a novel using  writing English phrases in Welsh orthography .

But it then got me thinking further.


As an English monoglot but who has some Cymraeg and understand and find it really annoying when a "comedian" makes up Welsh by speaking gibberish pronunciation whilst using a Welsh accent and some form of his or her act .

Of course they do that with other languages and I often wondered what English sounds like to non-english speakers and how people might use this speaking gibberish using English pronunciation.

Though to some extent it was used to mock English in the BBC comedy seirs Allo Allo

RAF Flight Lieutenants Fairfax and Carstairs (John D. Collins and Nicholas Frankau) (series 1–7, series are Two British airmen who are trying to get back to the United Kingdom, their plane having been shot down. Emerging from where they are hiding, they say "Hello!" with an exaggerated upper-class English accent. When talking to one another, Fairfax or Carstairs always start with the words "I say, Fairfax/Carstairs...". On discovery of the tunnel to the British POW camp, all the café staff are trapped there, including the Resistance and the hostage German officers, who then all have to adopt exaggerated RP accents as POWs, with large moustaches and flying helmets. On inspection by the German camp guards, they stand to attention saying clichés like "Toodle pip! Good Show! Bang on! Old fruit!" Humour is also derived from the French not being able to understand what the British airmen are saying, in order to illustrate this, upper-class English accents and French accents are used to distinguish between the two languages.

Officer (Captain) Crabtree (Arthur Bostrom) (series 2 to 9) – A British spy posing as a French police officer. Unfortunately, his French is weak and he is invariably unable to use the correct vowel sounds, which means that sometimes he is quite incomprehensible, most famously in his usual greeting "Good moaning!" (which he is even heard to use at night). Despite this, the Germans never seem to suspect him. To quote a notable example: "I was pissing by the door when I heard two shats. You are holding in your hind a smoking goon. You are clearly the guilty potty!" Another, during an air raid, is: "They have had a direct hot on the pimps!" "The pimps?" "The pimps! The pimps in the pimping station! No water is being pimped down the poops!" To repair the airmen's air balloon: "You must get your hands on girl's knockers. At least farty, maybe fifty." And: "I am mauving in a ginger fashion becerrs my poloceman's pints are full of dinamote!" He then unbuttons his flies and slowly pulls out several large knockwurst in front of the watching café patrons. After Crabtree is introduced in the series, Yvette frequently announces him as "That idiot British officer who thinks he can speak French". He says, "I admit my Fronch cod be butter." Another example comes when Officer Crabtree mistakes Captain Alberto Bertorelli for a German officer, addressing him with a raised hand and: "Hole Hotler!" (as taken from script) instead of "Heil Hitler!" When Captain Bertorelli points out he is actually Italian, Officer Crabtree responds with: "Hael Missuloni!" instead of "Hail Mussolini!" When Flick and von Smallhausen (in disguise as "vinkle" salesmen) comment on his strange accent, he tells them he's from "Nipples" (Naples). When they can't understand the answer, he frustratingly states "You know...See Nipples and do!". There is additional 'explanation' in S6E6 when Agent Grace, who appears to be Crabtree's girlfriend, explains that when they were both training, 'they trooned us to talk pish', i.e. posh.

The world dominance of English often blinds us to the fact that it is a very peculiar language as this points out


English speakers know that their language is odd. So do nonspeakers saddled with learning it. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn't spoken, there is no such thing as a spelling bee. For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.
Even in its spoken form, English is weird. It's weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. Our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet. Our language feels "normal" only until you get a sense of what normal really is.
There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian. If you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn't hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find Frisian more like German, which it is.
We think it's a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it's we who are odd: Almost all European languages belong to one family — Indo-European — and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders.
More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I'm writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talks — why? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablohablashabla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult?

 Very few actually mock English as a language , perhaps it would do it some good if some did.

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