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Have you ever read Tense Present by David Foster Wallace? If you haven't, find a copy online and enjoy! Based on your other comments, you'll appreciate DFW. Sh
by hluska 13y ago
Have you ever read Tense Present by David Foster Wallace? If you haven't, find a copy online and enjoy! Based on your other comments, you'll appreciate DFW.
Short answer is that you should pardon my language, but English is fucked. So fucked that those of us native speakers should apologize for the state of our language. Not only is English constantly evolving (in different ways, in different English speaking countries), but the limited 'rules' are contradictory.
So, to answer your question about stats, we could take 10,000 English experts and lock them in a room until they write the English spec. In actual practice, they would die before they would ever agree on a set of rules. And then, even if they did come out with a spec, most famous writers would violate the spec at certain times.
- mnx 13y agoI think you under-appreciate how simple English is. Sure, creating a set of rules for perfect writing is probably impossible, and in German you could probably fit them on a single page (I'm exaggerating, I don't speak German well enough to precisely judge that). But getting to a decent level of English is probably the easiest of all widely spoken natural languages. That is if we forget your atrocious non-existing spelling and pronunciation rules.