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If you're going to deride my native language, at least spell Portuguese right. Portuguese is actually quite an interesting native language. It is Latin based,

If you're going to deride my native language, at least spell Portuguese right. Portuguese is actually quite an interesting native language. It is Latin based, so you pick up French, Spanish, Italian and Romanian easily. Plus, since it is a periphery language, it has evolved less and is thus complex. Impossible grammar, irregular verbs all around and lots of phonemes. Top it off with a stress timed prosody and unstressed vowel suppression. If you grok European Portuguese, you can grok anything. (anything other than German. "Das Mädchen". Seriously? Das???)

outside1234 12y ago
i don't think he was deriding it. he just doesn't understand that 260M people speak it and that, given that, it was a bad example. French (74M) or Italian (60M) would have been a better examples.
- jasode 12y ago
  >i don't think he was deriding it. he just doesn't understand that 260M people speak it Right, I wasn't deriding anything. It was just an analogy comparing something quantitative. I know Portuguese is spoken by many millions but it's still much less than 1 billion Chinese or English. I probably chose Portuguese at random instead of Swedish or Swahili because of the recent World Cup. In any case, my point is that measuring economic reach of Portuguese in isolation as "inefficient" is absurd because there are other efficiencies of parenting (unrelated to whatever language they happen to speak) that wasn't counted.
  - sergiosgc 12y ago
    You did deride it, albeit without any ill intention. I also do not feel overly offended by your argument, which is not totally baseless. My comment, read with some distance, came out too harsh. It's just that the metric of speaker headcount/native economic power is not the sole metric for universal language selection, and it is one I do not think is the best. Headcount would have us all speaking mandarin, a language with little really global world reach, and really foreign to all westerners because of its tonal characteristic. English is probably the best option. Huge cultural reach globally via Hollywood, easy phonology and an easy grammar. If spelling could be simplified (or at least made sane) it'd be almost perfect.
eru 12y ago
> (anything other than German. "Das Mädchen". Seriously? Das???) Die Kartoffel.
nhaehnle 12y ago
> (anything other than German. "Das Mädchen". Seriously? Das???) It certainly seems silly, but this is actually an example of one of the few rules in German. The "chen" in "Mädchen" means that it is a diminutive form (of the same word that is known as "maid" in English), and diminutive forms are always neutral in German.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  I know the reasoning. Das Mädchen is one of my pet peeves, largely because of personal cultural bias. Portuguese has no neutral gender, and I got introduced to neutral genders when learning English. Because of English, my association is that neutral is for inanimate stuff (and, strangely, pets). It fits poorly on little girls :-) Now, imagine the fun in Portuguese, without neutrals: Every noun is either masculine or feminine, with near zero rules. A bike is feminine, a car is masculine, as is a plane or a boat, but a speedboat is feminine. Bottle is feminine, but glass isn't. Fork is masculine, unlike knife. I couldn't learn this today if I hadn't learned as a toddler. For all the cursing I say at German when learning, we're in no position to criticize...

outside1234 12y ago

i don't think he was deriding it. he just doesn't understand that 260M people speak it and that, given that, it was a bad example. French (74M) or Italian (60M) would have been a better examples.

jasode 12y ago
>i don't think he was deriding it. he just doesn't understand that 260M people speak it Right, I wasn't deriding anything. It was just an analogy comparing something quantitative. I know Portuguese is spoken by many millions but it's still much less than 1 billion Chinese or English. I probably chose Portuguese at random instead of Swedish or Swahili because of the recent World Cup. In any case, my point is that measuring economic reach of Portuguese in isolation as "inefficient" is absurd because there are other efficiencies of parenting (unrelated to whatever language they happen to speak) that wasn't counted.
- sergiosgc 12y ago
  You did deride it, albeit without any ill intention. I also do not feel overly offended by your argument, which is not totally baseless. My comment, read with some distance, came out too harsh. It's just that the metric of speaker headcount/native economic power is not the sole metric for universal language selection, and it is one I do not think is the best. Headcount would have us all speaking mandarin, a language with little really global world reach, and really foreign to all westerners because of its tonal characteristic. English is probably the best option. Huge cultural reach globally via Hollywood, easy phonology and an easy grammar. If spelling could be simplified (or at least made sane) it'd be almost perfect.

eru 12y ago

> (anything other than German. "Das Mädchen". Seriously? Das???) Die Kartoffel.

nhaehnle 12y ago

> (anything other than German. "Das Mädchen". Seriously? Das???) It certainly seems silly, but this is actually an example of one of the few rules in German. The "chen" in "Mädchen" means that it is a diminutive form (of the same word that is known as "maid" in English), and diminutive forms are always neutral in German.

sergiosgc 12y ago
I know the reasoning. Das Mädchen is one of my pet peeves, largely because of personal cultural bias. Portuguese has no neutral gender, and I got introduced to neutral genders when learning English. Because of English, my association is that neutral is for inanimate stuff (and, strangely, pets). It fits poorly on little girls :-) Now, imagine the fun in Portuguese, without neutrals: Every noun is either masculine or feminine, with near zero rules. A bike is feminine, a car is masculine, as is a plane or a boat, but a speedboat is feminine. Bottle is feminine, but glass isn't. Fork is masculine, unlike knife. I couldn't learn this today if I hadn't learned as a toddler. For all the cursing I say at German when learning, we're in no position to criticize...