German or English? Which is harsher?

Sander   Sunday, June 05, 2005, 20:27 GMT
Tu comprends mon Francais un peux?
greg   Sunday, June 05, 2005, 20:34 GMT
Oui, j'utilise le bon Google. That only raises the question of Google's reliability...

Oui, je comprends ton français, Sander. Sans aucun problème.

Just one thing, though : if you write Fr <Français> then it means En <Frenchman> while Fr <français> is En <French>. In French capital letters are for people nouns, excluding languages and adjectives.

Fr <le français est une langue latine> = En <French is a Latin language>.
Fr <aucun Français> = En <no French>/<no Frenchman>.
Sander   Sunday, June 05, 2005, 20:37 GMT
Yeah I know,its just didn't know the 'hotkey' for the 'ç'.You know I like French because its a 'no-nonsens' language (well,except for all the accents etc)
Yann   Monday, June 06, 2005, 15:58 GMT
Sander,
what do you mean by "a 'no nonsense' language"?
Sander   Monday, June 06, 2005, 16:07 GMT
Well,Germanic languages (except English) put a lot of little words in their sentences to let it make sense,when I was (trying to) learn French it occured to me that French doesnt translates a lot of (in this case Dutch)'little' germanic words,not that its a 'simple' language because French makes perfect sense this way.It just a difference between a Germanic and a Romance language.
Travis   Monday, June 06, 2005, 16:54 GMT
Nah, English is the same way, when it's spoken. One gets words like "well", "say", "like", the requisite heavy use of "sorta" and "kinda" (even though "sorta" and "kinda" aren't strictly single words, but host word-clitic pairs), and so on in informal spoken English. The main thing though is that these aren't used in formal written English, just like one normally doesn't see "ja" in the middle of a sentence, "doch", "na", or like in formal written German as well.
Sander   Monday, June 06, 2005, 16:55 GMT
I hate when you say 'nah'...
Travis   Monday, June 06, 2005, 17:00 GMT
Why? It's just a variant on the word "no", like other variants like "nope", "neah" (pronounce like "yeah", except starting with /n/), "naw", and like, just like words like "yeah", "yep", "yah" (pronounce like German "ja"), and so on are variants on the word "yes".
Sander   Monday, June 06, 2005, 17:03 GMT
Don't take everything litterally...
zarafa   Monday, June 06, 2005, 21:38 GMT
Travis, maybe Sander doesn't like "nah" because it looks like it should be pronounced /na:/ rather than /n@/. (I'm assuming you do pronounce it /n@/ like most Americans.)
Travis   Monday, June 06, 2005, 21:42 GMT
No, I myself do pronounce "nah" as /nA/ (slight difference from /na:/, in that a back rather than central vowel is used, and there is no phonemic vowel length contrast) rather than as /n@/, which'd probably just end up being written as "na" or maybe "nuh".
Tiffany   Monday, June 06, 2005, 21:50 GMT
I myself pronounce it with the same "a" in "father". How would that be transcribed?
Travis   Monday, June 06, 2005, 21:53 GMT
It depends on what dialect one speaks, but it'd probably be either /A/ (which is what I use for such) or /A:/.
zarafa   Monday, June 06, 2005, 22:00 GMT
Everyone I know says /n@/ (same vowel as in "cat").
Travis   Monday, June 06, 2005, 22:06 GMT
What you've been writing above is quite confusing, as you're clearly not using X-SAMPA, SAMPA, or Kirshenbaum for your transcriptions here, but rather that rather limited non-standard system that Antimoon recommends, but which practically no one actually uses. I myself have been using X-SAMPA, in which /@/ indicates a schwa, and not the vowel that you're referring to whatseover, which is /{/ in it and SAMPA, and /&/ in Kirshenbaum. I would write what you're saying as /n{/, and that's what I wrote as "neah" above, to go along with how /j{/ is normally written "yeah".