Tuesday November 09, 2004 Kids use of English
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As anybody who has English as a second language knows, it's not an easy language to learn. Let's ignore slang and idioms for now, and all those occurances of words which have more than one meaning; just the ridiculous number of irregular verbs is enough to drive you crazy. Even then, there are differences between English and American (dived and dove for example). Argh! |
What I've noticed from our son (who's currently six) though is that as he's learning the language, he says the most obvious way that a word should be said. For example:
I swimmed in the pool all afternoon.
One of my favorites from when he was about 3 went like this:
Dad: Would you like another drink?
Son: Yes please, I'm really drinkable.
Or course, what he meant was "thirsty", but he didn't know that word at that time, so he said the most obvious substitute.
To learn more about all things related to the English Language, check out The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.
Also consider the Oxford English Dictionary,
the accepted authority on the evolution of the English language over the last millennium.
In printed form, this comes to twenty volumes. It's also available via CDROM and online. How many words are there in the English Language? It varies, depending upon how you define the question.
So why do we persist in having such a hard to use language? What can be reasonably done to simplify English. Is it something that's just too hard to fix? Wouldn't it be great to try to do reduce the number of words in the language that could be "standardized" by variants on other existing words? Maybe shades of Newspeak from the novel 1984? I encourage your comments on this matter. Especially from people who've tried to learn English as a second language. What sort of things helped you?
I'll leave you with a humourous attempt at simplifying English.
( Nov 09 2004, 12:52:02 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [11]
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