http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=776455


in reply to Re^2: "Question" vs "Doubt"
in thread Regular Expression Doubt

> However I still notice it. And I guarantee that others do as well.

Sorry, and actually I personally really don't care!

  1. Linguists agree that "correct English" is extremely hard to speak, because of an unfavorable factor of exceptions per rules.
  2. Spelling and phonetics are a mess (... do you know why "island" is spelled with an s? Because educated English scholars in 17th century decided that it should more look like the Latin word "insula".)
  3. I'm fluent in 4-6 languages (depends where I spend my last holidays 8), so how many languages does the average educated English speaker speak fluently?
  4. English neither has a standard pronunciation ...
  5. ...nor a standard spelling.
  6. The English vocabulary is the biggest in the world just after Chinese.
  7. English is subject of a massive decentralization, nowadays in India alone 60 Million speakers consider English as their mother tongue.
  8. Maybe one day Bollywood might replace Hollywood in importance. Will it still help to know words like breakdance if everybody wants to dance bhangra?
  9. And last but not least English is subject of a massive creolization. (I know what a New Yorker means with "be a mensh", but do Brits understand this?)

Sorry if I sound offensive, I really like speaking languages correctly and I'm constantly struggling to improve my "expressiveness" (had to look this word up ;) but speaking correct educated English is just mission impossible without spending at least a year in Britain or the US, but I hope you got my points.

It's important to be understood, I don't care if I sound uneducated. And those who are not understood just won't get much help ... personally I'm just ignoring those posts.

"Just putting this node here so I can refer to it in the future. Thanks for the opportunity."

Cheers Rolf

BTW: The best strategy to sound "educated" in English is to occasionally integrate some French words (or Latin, Greek or even German). People will look puzzled and suspect they missed to look up this special expression in the 17th volume of Collins dictionary ... ;-)