Talk:English as a second or foreign language
I believe the claim that English has the most words of any language is untrue and shows that the article gives English some kind of superior quality to other languages.
Since I am pressed for time I will simply paste this bit of text which poignantly makes the point for me from http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/lang/vocab.html
If you pick up a large general dictionary of English, it will most probably contain the words “fiancé” and “sauna” and “vice versa”. Now are these actually English words, or French, Finnish, and Latin words (perhaps pronounced in a weird way by English-speaking people), which are just often used in writing and speech that is otherwise in English? If you say they’re English, well, I might say that similarly any English word that Germans often use (say, “computer”, perhaps spelled “Computer”) is a German word. You get the idea? Foreign words can be taken into temporary use at least, and there is a continuous spectrum from such usage to fully adapted and adopted loan words.
I will conclude with a proof that Finnish has an infinite number of words. In Finnish, there is a derived word for any numeral, corresponding in meaning the words in the sequence simple, double, triple, etc. You take the numeral, make it one word, and append the word -kertainen possibly after some changes to the stem. Thus from tuhat viisi ‘1005’ we get tuhatviisikertainen. And generally, there is the sequence of numerals yksinkertainen, kaksinkertainen, kolminkertainen and so on – literally ad infinitum.
Someone probably argues that I just proved a ‘potential’ infinity, not an actual one. But this is really irrelevant to answering the question under discussion. What matters is that if you make any quantified claim, saying that language X has N words, I can easily construct a set of Finnish words, containing surely more than N words. And this proves little about Finnish; there are similar examples in any sufficiently analytic language. What this proves is that the question “Which language has largest vocabulary?” is pointless.
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Bit of a radical edit, don`t you think?User:andycjp
There's clearly been a problem with external links on this page. Since any number of good external directories of ELT resources exist, I think it would make sense to limit ext. links to directories only. Otherwise users will forever be trying to turn this page into What Wikipedia Is Not. One directory which should be listed here is the Open Directory's page . However, since I am somewhat invested in the ODP language-teaching structure, I will refrain from making the change myself. Visviva 02:07, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)
No please, link it.User:andycjp
- I've added an ODP link. I'm not sure whether the existing three links are really needed here. Angela. 13:54, Nov 9, 2004 (UTC)
Who uses EAL as acronym
This is the first time I have seen the term English as Additional Language (EAL) used. It makes logical sense, referring to both EFL and ESL, but I have never seen it used elsewhere.
And what about the field of Second Language Acquisition whose acronym is always SLA. Do you propose to change that to ALA?
Misc responses and comments
1. Regarding the number of words: Get serious. English may not have the most words (though I think I does,) but your argument proves nothing. Also, the English words you reference are English words of foreign origin.
2. Regarding links – Again I disagree, I have used similar links on the Korean and Chinese language pages and they are invaluable. I have also used non- wikipedia resource summaries and found that they are never as comprehensive or current as the ones on the wikipedia because they are not maintained by a community. This is exactly the type of thing that wikipedia is and should be. If you strongly disagree then lets make it a seperate page.
3. Regarding the EAL Acronym. I hope we are not making up new acronyms! If “EAL” is not commonly used (I dont think it is, but maybe it is within the profession) I would substitute “ESL/EFL"
Finally, we need to add the reasons why English is difficult to learn. From my experience:
a. Spelling – due to the many foreign adapted words there are many confusing pronunciation rules. Knowing the spelling does not tell you the pronunciation and (much worse for learners) knowing the pronunciation does not tell you the spelling making it difficult to look up in a dictionary jcp 10:49, 25 July 2005 (UTC)