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I have a suggestion. I noticed, many non-native English speakers try to translate their sentences into English, but they not always perfect in it. It adds some wrong sentences to the English corpus, but, in the other hand, those English translations can help to learn another languages.
So, I suggest to create "Simple English" or "Internation English" corpus, where anyone, who knows English about Intermediate and better, can contribute. These sentences wouldn't mix with the sentences from the main English corpus and wouldn't deteriorate it. Then, English corpus maintainers could transfer good and natural sounds sentences into the main English corpus just by changing the flag, if they like.
It would be possible to create similar auxiliary corpuses not only for English, but for other languages, if there a number of non-native speakers, who wants to contribute and be cheked and corrected.
I agree. Wikipedia has it. Why not Tatoeba? Yay for en-simple code.
I borrowed this idea from Esperanto. There are some people on Tatoeba, who speaks Esperanto, and they can freely contribute in this language.
English is spoken by more people, than Esperanto, and it's used by most people on Tatoeba as an international language. So, everybody should be able to translate their sentences into English as well.
Esperanto is an excellent replacement for English as a common second language, and it especially has great value here. It’s easy to learn, there are no natives who are naturally the only ones speaking it perfectly, and many members understand it and enjoy translating from it, which helps get sentences translated into other languages.
and it's far easier to pronounce than English...
Ever heard Europeans speak English to Japanese ?
English is just not practical as an international language. It works only for natives to speak to the world, not for non natives to comprehend each other.
Personally I have better understanding, when Slavic people speak English, than when natives do it.
P.S. It seems, I've just written my answer in the wrong place. It should be here.
Of course, because you're slavic yourself ! But speaking a second language as a lingua franca is not supposed to help Russians and their dominions to understand each other ( for this, they use Russian...) but to understand people from all over the world...
I'm French and I understand 100% of what David Cameron or Barack Obama say, but I understand 20% of what Russians or Poles say in English...
I listened to the Indian Prime Minister Mahommand Singh, speaking in English, and although he is part of the anglophone elite of India, I hardly understood a few words...
English has 30 vowel sounds, most of which don't exist or differentiate in most other languages.
Esperanto has just 5, that most other languages have...
Wonder...
Not all Slavic people understand Russian. Slavic languages are very different, but generally Slavic accentes in English is more understandable for me, than native English accentes.
Actually, native English accentes are not the most understandable. I even understand better non-native European speakers (like Germans). I think, that's why their fonetics is more similar to Russian, and they use simpler vocabulary, than natives do.
I should notice, that I have more listening practice with non-native english speaking, than native. I think, if you listened to Spanish, or German, or Italian accent of English all the time, it would be the most understandable accent for you.
But even though I am very familiar with Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch and even Hungarian accents in English, there is still around 10% of ambiguity owing to mainly to the vowel pronunciation and the different accentuations they have. And these missing 10% are most often key to the understanding of complete sentences, and so the whole meaning gets lost in pronunciation...
My long experience of English as an international language, outside singing the Beatles, has shown me it is useless, especially professionally, as a tool to communicate with non natives.
I prefer that Russians speak German to me than English, although my English is far better than my German, because the way Russians pronounce German sounds clearer to me and I can thus understand more than just 20%...
I agree with you that Russian fonetics is closer to German fonetics, than to English fonetics. They are really very far from each other. Maybe, that's the reason, why I have the opposite expierence, than you, and it always have been more difficult for me to understand what native speakers say. I can hardly understand, what Paul Mccartney sings, but I can understand "Modern talking" rather well...
By the way, what's your opinion about creating of Non-native English corpus?
But the French phonetics are even further from English phonetics than German and probably Slavic languages...
Geography is actually irrelevant to phonetics. As a matter of fact, the language that sounds to me the most estranged from French is Dutch, although French speaking Europe is just next to the Dutch speaking one...unlike for German, it took me years to be able to make out the basic sounds, and even more to be able to reproduce them, although I live part time in bilingual Belgium...
The fact is that many sounds are not common to both languages and that Dutch, like English, features long and short vowels that French doesn't feature at all, the length of vowels being absolutely crucial to understanding Dutch, otherwise, one ends up saying and understanding very silly things...
In Esperanto, the length of vowels is irrelevant, which helps very much us French, but also many speakers of other languages where this length is irrelevant.
Reversely, the insistence of many Dutch and English speakers to apply long vowels in French makes it very difficult to hear them, because then, the words don't sound right to native French and we're often in doubt as to what word it was we heard...
Now for your question : I think it is a false good idea for an ideal world where youngsters with an inflated ego and consequently over-estimating their skills, challenge their skills in tricking the community to make us believe they're natives. It happens all the time, not only in English but also in French. That was actually my main incentive to write so many French sentences, because at the time I arrived here, French was one of the most damaged corpus, with nearly 60% of sentences having been written by non-natives, or even worse, by half-natives who are dead-convinced the things they write is correct...
I don't think, that English is ideal as an international Language (as well as French). I don't want to make any judgements about languages, that I'm not familiar with at all (like Esperanto or Dutch). I just want to say, that the judgement "It's easier for a non-native English speakers to understand native English speech, than speech of other non-natives" is not true generally, but in some cases.
Why "false good"? Creating of "International English" or "International French" corpuses should help to keep the main corpuses free from "bad" non-natives sentences.
I think you've misread me. At no point did I write that French was any better than English or any other language. I don't think it is. French is a confusing mix of Greek, Latin and German and features sounds that nobody else can utter and is therefore as ill-suited as English for international communication, even though it has far less different vowel sounds and its writing is more consistent.
As for your "purified corporae" proposal, again, who will judge who is native or not (this debate is endless here...) ? This impossibility makes the whole project a no-starter.
At least, the current native-"OK" tags on sentences are subject to comments but do not constitute an absolute barrier.
So I think the current system is the least bad.
I just mean, that nor English, nor French, nor Russian are not ideal for that purpose. That's the political issue, not linguistic.
Can you judge, if someone write in French well or not?
If someone always write correct and natural sounding sentences in the certain language, he/she could contribute to the main corpus. If not, to the International corpus. Advanced contributors should judge about quality.
I think, it's not right to say about "natives", but about "skilled users", because some non-natives might be more skilled in writing language, than average natives, and some people might even forget their mother tongue due to a lack of practice.
This is what "OK" tags by natives are supposed to achieve.
You wouldn't succeed in trying to universally define what a "simple sentence" is and in convincing everybody to classify their sentences according to that definition anyway...
I agree with this point, but maybe it could be "Non-native english", not simple.
Well, that's what "OK" tags tend to achieve.
You can always extract all English sentences that have been tagged "OK".
The only flaw is, that a few rogue non-natives tag them "OK" as well...
As I heard before, some people download all the sentences from English corpus, not paying attention to tags. And some native's sentences don't have this tag.
I often heard, that non-native's sentences is "bad", they "spoil" the corpus, etc. But it seems like kind of discrimination, and I suggest the solution, which may be good both in terms of ability to contribute in English for everyone, as in the term of keeping the main English corpus in a good conditions.