I'm very sorry, Glenn.I'm a typo, I know that this is very impolite.

NO don't worry I wasn't shore what you where saying no problem

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I'm very sorry, Glenn.I'm a typo, I know that this is very impolite.

NO don't worry I wasn't shore what you where saying no problem

pardon me, but for our Chinese friend's sake I'll remove the typoes ;)
I suppose he and his translation engine have enough of a hard time already without looking up completely different words :D

'Don't worry I wasn't sure what you were saying'

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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. (Mark Twain)

I'm very sorry, Glenn.I'm a typo, I know that this is very impolite.

NO don't worry I wasn't shore what you where saying no problem

pardon me, but for our Chinese friend's sake I'll remove the typoes ;)
I suppose he and his translation engine have enough of a hard time already without looking up completely different words :D

'Don't worry I wasn't sure what you were saying'

I mean I made the mistake of Glenn spelled Gleen.

Translation software really has a lot of problems, mistakes in grammar, sentence order, and the meaning. It gives me a headache sometimes.

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Be able to endure loneliness, will be very close to success, wealth and career will be away from us, but thought eternal.

I'm very sorry, Glenn.I'm a typo, I know that this is very impolite.

Zhao, personally, I don't mind your typos because you're just learning English. I hope you'll appreciate it if I give you an occasional correction.

NO don't worry I wasn't shore what you where saying no problem

I do mind Glenn's typos because he (presumably) has spoken English all his life and should know better. I can make allowances for 'Strine slang, but basic spelling and grammar errors drive me batty.

BUT... I will leave it at that. I don't wish to get into an argument about it.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

SeH waw' Hoch maHvaD

Plug that into http://bing.com/translator to see what it says.

Okay, so I just tested it myself and it autodetects as German, not Klingon. Still, try it and see if you can figure out what I started with in English.

(Maybe not a good idea for someone whose English is still as weak as Zhao's.)

translation = All belonged to the us, it was scorched;

I think it got it a bit wrong All belonged to the U.S, it was scorched ?

Actually, I started by translating "all your base are belong to us" from English to Klingon.

This is an excellent example of the limitations of automatic translators. Even when it's an artificial language and the translator can be programmed with every bit of human knowledge of it, it still comes out a total mess.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

Actually the Incans had no written language of any sort, which includes hieroglyphs and ideograms, they relied on memory and on knotted strings to remember something from what I've read.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Please forgive me for coming to this thread late, I've been busy.

Chris, Canada has AT LEAST 2 official languages, sometimes 3 or 4 depending on where you are. What do we all speak when we are confused? English. Why? Because English has a long history of flexibility, and incorporating the best of other languages.

Years ago, I worked for a German company that merged with a French company. There was a lot of history behind the selection of a common language to work in. The final solution? The company now officially works in English.

Zahoa, your English teachers may not agree with me, but English is becoming a blend of everything else. On the one hand, this makes it hard to learn: strange spellings, strange grammar, unless you understand that is takes bits and pieces of everybody else's spelling and grammar.

On the other hand, I predict that this means we (all the people of the world) will one day speak a common language sort of like English (but not exactly like English). I know that the Chinese speakers outnumber us, but I think their base language lacks the flexibility to become every one's language.

Meanwhile, in a certain French speaking part of Canada, the government tried to force local restaurants to find a French word for "pasta". Nobody could think of one. To me, this is just another sign that French (and a number of other languages) are on their way out, to be replaced by New Blended English.

PS: the Canadian English word for "pasta" is "pasta". I like mine al dente. I assure you that 99%+ of Canadian English speakers know what that means.

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I'm really confused by you, how many kinds of English, in addition to British English and American English?
And Canadian English, Australian English?

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Be able to endure loneliness, will be very close to success, wealth and career will be away from us, but thought eternal.

Zhao -- Hello, from Lexington, Massachusetts.

If I may recommend a good book on languages (the top twenty, anyway):

"Empires of the Word", by Nicholas Ostler. Nicholas is a linguist,
living south of London, as I recall.

Enjoy,

jm

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Slang

Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's language or dialect but are considered acceptable in certain social settings. Slang expressions may act as euphemisms and may be used as a means of identifying with one's peers.

Zhao, the types of English that have been mentioned all have their own types of slang.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

It is more than slang. My wife used to teach English as a Second Language, and she tells me that many of the English speaking countries of the world have their own local versions of English. Some are quite official, like in India, with their own government approved rules and grammars. The main point is that one English speaker can usually figure out what another English speaker is saying, even if the languages are not completely identical.

As Winston Churchill said many years ago, "England and America are two countries separated by a common language".

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I'm really confused by you, how many kinds of English, in addition to British English and American English?
And Canadian English, Australian English?

The various forms of English are similar to the various forms of Chinese, only maybe less different from each other than the Chineses.

It of course started in England, then started to change in Britain's colonies. America in particular seems to have made an effort to change its language, mostly spelling, just for the sake of not being British. The Irish and Scottish variants, as I understand it, are mainly different from the Queen's English by their heavy accents, with a lot of their respective forms of Gaelic mixed in (I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong). Canadian is probably the closest to its parent of any place that isn't in the British Isles, but it has also absorbed a lot of American just because it's so close (the Canadian accent is almost the same as in the northern US). American English has probably absorbed more words from other languages than British, although since transatlantic communication became instant instead of requiring a two-week sea voyage, and especially since the advent of TV, a lot of the foreign stuff in American has gotten back across to British.

Australian (sometimes called Strine for the way the word "Australian" is pronounced in that country) and Kiwi (New Zealand), I believe, were influenced by the fact that Australia was a British penal colony, therefore its earliest settlers were those who tended to use the poorest English and the most slang. There's also the fact that they're on the opposite side of the planet from England. Still, they have certain things in common with British that American doesn't.

We can all understand each other, though, as long as we can get through heavy accents and don't use too much slang. (Accents can even be a problem within the same country, such as the Deep South here in America.)

(English is not the only example of different countries speaking different dialects of the same basic language. The are just as many differences, probably more, between the Spanish dialects spoken in Spain, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and most of the other countries in Central and South America. There is, I'm sure, also a difference between the Portuguese they speak in Portugal and that of Brazil, and between the French of France and of Haiti, French Guyana, and various other French possessions (or former ones) around the world.)

Several years ago, we were having some work done on our house, and the contractor hired two guys with poor English. One was Polish, the other Romanian. What language did they use for their conversation while they were working? Russian.

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David
Sitting on my butt while others boldly go,
Waiting for a message from a small furry creature from Alpha Centauri.

N9jfe I am sorry my English is not good or my grammer it is one thing that I have had a lot of problems with .I'm 50 and still can't get it right . I do try I am even re reading the posts and using a dictionary or spell checker but still comes out wrong I look up the word say it to myself then come back to post it and still spell it wrong . My eye sight is not the best and I do suffer from dyslexia so sorry again but we will all just have to put up with it . believe me when I tell you that even I get very frustrated too . Having what I call brain blocks with words I do know but just can't seem to remember when i'm typing really pisses me off at times and so when it is really bad it means i'm having a bad day and every word I try and type is giving me a brain block and i'm going back and forth checking spell and then I just give up .

so sorry if it annoys you ,it does to me

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The European Community has 27 different languages to deal with. In my opinion they should have chosen a simplified form of Latin as as common language, as Israel has done with Hebrew, and English as a second language, again as Israel has done.
Tullio

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I'm really confused by you, how many kinds of English, in addition to British English and American English?
And Canadian English, Australian English?

Hey, don't forget South African English.

We have eleven official languages in South Africa, and scores more unofficial ones.

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N9jfe I am sorry my English is not good or my grammer it is one thing that I have had a lot of problems with .I'm 50 and still can't get it right . I do try I am even re reading the posts and using a dictionary or spell checker but still comes out wrong I look up the word say it to myself then come back to post it and still spell it wrong . My eye sight is not the best and I do suffer from dyslexia so sorry again but we will all just have to put up with it . believe me when I tell you that even I get very frustrated too . Having what I call brain blocks with words I do know but just can't seem to remember when i'm typing really pisses me off at times and so when it is really bad it means i'm having a bad day and every word I try and type is giving me a brain block and i'm going back and forth checking spell and then I just give up .

so sorry if it annoys you ,it does to me

Wow. It takes something to be honest about ones shortcomings or disabilities.

Spellcheckers of course don't catch phonetic equivalents (e.g. here/hear).
What is most annoying about native speakers getting it wrong, is that you end up with the impression that they are deliberately not putting effort into correct spelling and grammar ('should know better').
I think in your case Glen, you're excused the mistakes - even if your posts require quite a bit of extra attention on my part. But hey, if that's the way the cookie crumbles, I'm sure we can all deal with it.

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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. (Mark Twain)

I'm really confused by you, how many kinds of English, in addition to British English and American English?
And Canadian English, Australian English?

Hey, don't forget South African English.

We have eleven official languages in South Africa, and scores more unofficial ones.

Afrikaans resembles Dutch a lot. Different nuances though...

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

I understand all of what's said here, oh I do make mistakes here and there sometimes and yes I do have a spellchecker in the browser, sometimes I foul up on My spelling and I don't automatically fix a misspelled word, but then I'm a self taught typist.

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The T1 Trust, PRR T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, 1 of America's First HST's

Thank you for your recommendation, I will go to have a look this book.

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Be able to endure loneliness, will be very close to success, wealth and career will be away from us, but thought eternal.

Slang

Slang is the use of informal words and expressions that are not considered standard in the speaker's language or dialect but are considered acceptable in certain social settings. Slang expressions may act as euphemisms and may be used as a means of identifying with one's peers.

Zhao, the types of English that have been mentioned all have their own types of slang.

Yes, and my translation software is usually not the correct translation of slang.

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Be able to endure loneliness, will be very close to success, wealth and career will be away from us, but thought eternal.