Re: Off Topic: English Grammar, Spelling, colloquialisms, etc.
- Posted by AndyDrummond Apr 11, 2012
- 4397 views
Bad grammar and poor spelling is not a sign of originality or individuality but of laziness. Possibly of ignorance, but that smacks of being insulting which I do not intend.
None of this is true for a person who has learned English as a Second Language in adulthood. That person can make every effort to speak, pronounce, and write perfect english, but it is a rare case when that person's grammar is perfect or when that person's accent is identical to a native speaker's.
What is your view on typos?
I nearly added a codicil on typographical errors, but I felt that there would be a more exciting response if I left the whole question hanging.
Yes, people who have learnt English (or whichever language in being considered) as a second language are not going to know the grammar, syntax, vocabulary or idioms. It's the Tower of Babel syndrome; we can't understand each other without considerable work.
I am having an exciting email correspondence with a Chinese lady. Believe me when I say that the difficulties of communication are considerably worse when you don't even have a vaguely related orthography, let alone a commonality of perspective. But it is highly eductational, though more for her than for me. I merely use Babelfish or similar. She actually writes English!
But there is a similar problem when you use several different computer languages. I began with Mercury Autocode in 1968, progressed to Fortran, Basic, Intel 4004 assembler, many other assemblers, C, Cplusplus (which I persoanlly hate), and, of course, Euphoria. In each case there is a significant re-learning exercise. I find I add semicolons on the ends of statements in Euphoria (which it complains of) or use slash-slash comment delimiters. And so it goes on. Flexibility in a computer language can make the transition much easier, and aid the new programmer in picking up the language and running with it. The best of Euphoria is the sequence idea (nice one, Rob!) because it separates you from a lot of strictly unnessary extra coding and simplifies the use of arrays and structures.
