Understandability of English

Guest   Sat Aug 15, 2009 7:55 am GMT
I have heard it said around here that it is easier to understand people with bad accents and bad grammar in English than it is in other languages. Is this really true? If so, why would that be?
Ayoeti   Sat Aug 15, 2009 10:56 am GMT
Yes, that's right
eng   Sat Aug 15, 2009 1:50 pm GMT
Because English doesn't have much in the way of noun cases, verb conjugations, etc.
Woozle   Sat Aug 15, 2009 10:57 pm GMT
Actually, it is harder to understand someone speaking poorly enunciated English than someone speaking just about any other European language, and the primary reason is the LACK of grammatical endings and the general er.. "monosyllabicity" of the English language. The dropping of final consonants in rapid or sloppy speech or during singing is a frequent occurence in all languages and is perfectly natural - we cannot pronounce consonants when we run out of breath, which we often do at the end of a syllable. The problem is that English has nothing to buffer the final consonants of the roots of words from this occurrence, and thus, it is prepositions and articles that go before that tend to be clearly enunciated, whereas the bare roots of words that follow - the carriers of essential information - can become mangled. Light, lime, like, likes, liar, life, lice, lies, line, live become homophonous with lie/lye; side, sight/site, psych with sigh (I've just yesterday heard someone speak of 'River-sigh'); fight, fine, file, find etc. can be heard as 'figh'. You get the idea. Putting less essential information AFTER the root (through flections, post-positions, etc.) greatly aids the comprehensibility of rapid and sloppy speech.

On the upside, it is harder to speak broken English, precisely due to the lack of flections.