On Sunday 11 October 2009 19:02:07 Peter Humphrey wrote: > On Sunday 11 October 2009 15:55:47 Alan McKinnon wrote: > > Well, at least now we know that English contains at least one word that > > is less ambiguous than the German equivalent. > > > > I would not have thought it could be done. > > English contains many ambiguities, but if you know the current idiom they > all disappear, or at least recede. The difficulty is in keeping up with > the idiom. Personally, I prefer to rely on what I've known for the last 60 > years or so and to hell with the trendies. > > Things like "its" = "belonging to it"; "it's" = "it is". >
English is a mess. As a language it's worse than a pig's breakfast and makes almost no sense whatsoever to non-native speakers. Mind you, it makes about as much sense to native speakers as well :-) I had to take 5 years of Latin study in high school to understand how my own mother tongue works. Sad indictment for a language wouldn't you say? I heard once that Perl is modelled after English. Pah! I reckon that's BS - Perl makes much too much sense for that. Brainfuck is the one modelled after English :-) -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
