Words in other languages.

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Ignore the spelling, Harbourboy.

poke & poke = sack & jab

 

But they don't sound the least bit the same.

hAHHHHHHve vs hARRRRRRve

 

Perhaps it's you're accent. Have and halve do sound alike.

Are you kidding? He's Polish.

 

Chev might have a US accent when he speaks English, e.g. I find that most Germans sound like they are from California when they speak English.

What amazes me most is how much better non-English speakers speak English, than native speakers.

 

Now that is crazy. Have = hAHHHHHHve and Halve = hAHHHHHHLve

Really, they sound almost exactly the same in Canada.

Also, the Have vs Of thing, not an issue. We just enunciate.

 

Apart from those that speak American

 

What is this have/of thing? *confuzzled*

 

Yeah I'm confused too, Why someone would confuse the two?! They aren't pronounced to same and the spelling is completely different!

 

The pronounciation becomes very similar when you consider that most people are in the habit of dropping their "h"s, and the "f" in "of" is a harder sound, much like a "v". Thus, it's common for people to mix have and of in everyday speech, most typically after the word "should": often, "I should have ..." ends up as "I should of ..." Which, if you know how wrong it is, can be worse than the sound of nails being scraped across a blackboard!

 

have /h ae: v/

halve /h a: v/ ( [a:] as in arm)

It's a problem the British don't have. Americans too often opt for the easy [ae:].

 

I'm struggling to see how 'have' and 'of' could ever sound the same....

 

Chev is Polish?!?! He speaks better English than anyone I know. Hmm, my mistake. When a person, down here anyway, says would've, could've, should've or even shouldn't've, it sounds like of cause we're lazy speakers. well, I am anyway. Harve?? You talk funny. Over here they sound exactly the same. This thread is fun!

to/too/two/tutu- people confuse the first three all the time when they write, which gets on my nerves and would probably drive Chev out of his mind, especially if he's a teacher and read what high school and college students are writing these days.
I/eye- me and what you see out of
read and red- past tense of read- never thought about this, but stuff like that must really throw non-native speakers when they are first learning english-and a color

Anybody know if Russian has words like these?

 

@Harbourboy: just try not to call your mother a horse.

I just thought of some other uses for "ma", but they depend on words around them. I'm sure some of you heard of the game "mah jong". Same sounding ma, this time referring to the game. And there's also the phrase for twin girls or twin boys, where "ma" means twin.

 

The 'have' vs 'of' thing, in NZ, anyway is not about them sounding the same. It's about them sounding completely different but being used incorrectly. All the kids nowadays say:

"Oh man, you really should of seen his car!"

They are clearly saying 'of' instead of 'have' and they know it, but are oblivious as to why there is anything wrong with that. So it's a grammar problem, rather than a pronounciation problem.

 

It all comes from "should have" being abbreviated to "should've", which is fine in informal speech... but can sound like "should of." This gets picked up on, and becomes an 'accepted' alternative among the ignorant.

The number of authors I've seen writing "should of" throughout their whole damned novels is infuriating.

 

Oh, it happens the same with spanish, people lately tend to cut words and they sound really bad: instead of ilusion is used ilu; and there are even more that are wrongfuly used.
When I got here it amazed me that people speaks worst spanish than we down in South America cosidering the fact that the language born here.

 

There would be less confusion if people just used proper grammar, pronunciation and enunciation. Oh, don't forget spelling.

But I must admit that English is one of the hardest languages to master. Here are some reasons:

1. pluralization

a. different forms of pluralization

house - houses
mouse - mice
man - men
doberman - dobermans

b. same form for singular and plural

moose
deer

c. inclusion of Latin words

radius - radii
forum - fora

d. technological words

mouse (for computers) - mouses

I'll have to confirm that last one though.

2. tenses

a. different forms

present past
knead kneaded
read read
lead led

b. number of tenses
past
present
future

present perfect
past perfect
future perfect

present progressive
past progressive
future progressive
present perfect progressive
past perfect progressive
future perfect progressive


3. order of adjectives

ex. a big red brick house

In other languages, the order of the three adjectives would not matter. In English it does. If you switch the order, it would sound strange. In English, if it sounds strange it's probably wrong.

 

ahm, but those problems are there with any foreign language you learn. Or, otherwise said, nothing you cited is an English speciality. In particular as that's German (house -> houses Haus -> Häuser) and French ( order of adjectives and change of meaning). In short, nothing unusal there. The thing that some (particular people who speak a roman-language) people tend to have problems with, is the duality between German and French in English. If its French, it's handled French, everything else stays exactly the same as in German. It's always 50-50. No speaker of a Germanic language tends to have a problem with learning English and it's the opposite with romanic speakers. In general, that is.

But acutally, we had the same thing one year ago, and you err still. You shouldn't rely on typical problems of Spanish speakers. You should compare them to problems Portuguese and Italian speakers have, compared to Dutch and Germans.

[ May 06, 2005, 14:34: Message edited by: Iago ]

 

No way, English is perhaps the easiest of the European languages. All the examples you gave, exist in the majority of the languages and in most complicated forms. In german and greek the nouns have cases and each case has different ending depending on the gender and on the last syllable of the noun. For example the word "anthropos" (human) in greek is conjugated as following:

SINGULAR
Nominative: anthropos
Genitive: anthropou
Accusative: anthropo
Vocative: anthrope

PLURAL
Nominative: anthropoi
Genitive: anthropon
Accusative: anthropous
Vocative: anthropoi

Also, as far as the verbs are concerned, their conjugation produces different endings in french, german and greek. For example the verb make in english is conjugated as following:

SINGULAR
I make
You make
He/She/It makes,

PLURAL
They make

while its german counterpart "machen" is conjugated like this:

SINGULAR
Ich mache
Du machst
Er/Sie/Es macht

PLURAL
Wir machen
Ihr macht
Sie machen

And these examples are just the top of the iceberg, I could write millions examples about adjectives, articles, tenses, syndax etc. So, believe me, English is one of the easiest languages to master.

 

In spanish we change the last letter of the verb so we don't need the personal pronoun: como (I eat); come (he, she, it eats); comen (they eat), comes (you eat) so maybe is hard to other language speakers. So for de future and the past is the same, we change the last letters. For plural we just add a 's'.