Steve said: “About English, I was encouraged that many of the traditional ideas are gaining acceptance, in theory. The teachers still take great pride in knowing what grammar is, although most fluent speakers of English, native and non-native, have never heard of it. What disturbs me at is the fact that so many people, in learning English, are forced to ingest the very culture that I avoid in my native American dominated modern pop culture.
Who here would be prepared to record themselves talking about their lives and their countries in English, or interviewing others in English? If you feel your accent is too bad can you provide some interesting content in written English for someone to record. We could create a corpus of general English for English language learners to listen to and read that might distract some people from bad habits.”
Thank you Steve, I have met this name on http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/auxlang I am not sure if you are the same person. At 2002, I have written a book From the Linguistic Law to ‘The International Intelligent Language’. After many years’ discussing in the internet forum, I found many content of that book have to change and I am still trying to find out what is the most important thing in the world’s understanding about language.
What I found is that most so-called linguists don’t know anything about math and information science. If only they know something about technique, they would understand what I have said long time ago and I have no chance to speak here.
Another problem; maybe the key issue is that how to count the number of English sound. For this reason, English invented so many words as ‘syllable’, ‘phoneme’, ‘CV tier’, ‘articulation’ ‘chronome’ etc. but none of them reflect the reality properly.
The confusion is that there are so many vowels in English being ignored. The problem is that English has only 26 letters, anyone use English to describe its sounds should make mistake between human voice and letter voice. The human language is not just five vowels, yet in our alphabetic letter, it just has five symbols for their representative. Sometimes we can assign few vowels into one symbol, for instance we use A to represent at least four vowels as æ, ei and ә. But other times, we use a group letters to represent vowels such as ‘en’. This mistake will be unacceptable. For until now most English speaker believes ‘en’ is a VC structure not a single vowel. My explanation is that if you think ‘en’ is a VC structure not a single vowel, then you may compare with ‘ten’ and ‘ted’ both of them could be CVC under your explanation. Now, repeat both of them twenty times quickly and clearly. You may find that you repeat ‘ten’ in five seconds but repeat ‘ted’ in seven seconds, if you utter the‘d’ very clear. This prove that ‘en’ play a role of vowel. It is just because we have no letter to represent it, and the combination of ‘e’ and ‘n’ is close to the pronunciation of this vowel so we us them to represent it. In English, there are many such vowels as ‘an’, ‘ang’, ‘on’, ‘oon’ and ‘in’ etc. Yet, since they have no formal name (symbol), phonologists still call them as VC or VCC structure. With 26 letters we want to create all words, the combination maybe various, coincidently ‘e’ followed ‘n’, at beginning we may pronounce them as e—n but later people mixed them as ‘en’ that is to say at the beginning we create a word didn’t think about its pronunciation but later, people using an easy way to pronounce it and it already play a role of vowel yet phonologist don’t recognize them. So before an investigation of English, we have to measure the time of every syllable.
We know computer can update the hardware in order to accelerate the running speed and increase the memory but human being could not do this on their brain. What we can do is exploit our sense, especially the hearing sense to do the same thing, if only we understand how it works.
Who here would be prepared to record themselves talking about their lives and their countries in English, or interviewing others in English? If you feel your accent is too bad can you provide some interesting content in written English for someone to record. We could create a corpus of general English for English language learners to listen to and read that might distract some people from bad habits.”
Thank you Steve, I have met this name on http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/auxlang I am not sure if you are the same person. At 2002, I have written a book From the Linguistic Law to ‘The International Intelligent Language’. After many years’ discussing in the internet forum, I found many content of that book have to change and I am still trying to find out what is the most important thing in the world’s understanding about language.
What I found is that most so-called linguists don’t know anything about math and information science. If only they know something about technique, they would understand what I have said long time ago and I have no chance to speak here.
Another problem; maybe the key issue is that how to count the number of English sound. For this reason, English invented so many words as ‘syllable’, ‘phoneme’, ‘CV tier’, ‘articulation’ ‘chronome’ etc. but none of them reflect the reality properly.
The confusion is that there are so many vowels in English being ignored. The problem is that English has only 26 letters, anyone use English to describe its sounds should make mistake between human voice and letter voice. The human language is not just five vowels, yet in our alphabetic letter, it just has five symbols for their representative. Sometimes we can assign few vowels into one symbol, for instance we use A to represent at least four vowels as æ, ei and ә. But other times, we use a group letters to represent vowels such as ‘en’. This mistake will be unacceptable. For until now most English speaker believes ‘en’ is a VC structure not a single vowel. My explanation is that if you think ‘en’ is a VC structure not a single vowel, then you may compare with ‘ten’ and ‘ted’ both of them could be CVC under your explanation. Now, repeat both of them twenty times quickly and clearly. You may find that you repeat ‘ten’ in five seconds but repeat ‘ted’ in seven seconds, if you utter the‘d’ very clear. This prove that ‘en’ play a role of vowel. It is just because we have no letter to represent it, and the combination of ‘e’ and ‘n’ is close to the pronunciation of this vowel so we us them to represent it. In English, there are many such vowels as ‘an’, ‘ang’, ‘on’, ‘oon’ and ‘in’ etc. Yet, since they have no formal name (symbol), phonologists still call them as VC or VCC structure. With 26 letters we want to create all words, the combination maybe various, coincidently ‘e’ followed ‘n’, at beginning we may pronounce them as e—n but later people mixed them as ‘en’ that is to say at the beginning we create a word didn’t think about its pronunciation but later, people using an easy way to pronounce it and it already play a role of vowel yet phonologist don’t recognize them. So before an investigation of English, we have to measure the time of every syllable.
We know computer can update the hardware in order to accelerate the running speed and increase the memory but human being could not do this on their brain. What we can do is exploit our sense, especially the hearing sense to do the same thing, if only we understand how it works.