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I see. In the future, if you do not intend to support a particular idea but rather just repeat it, then you should not state it as fact like this:


Instead, you should state it as someone else's conclusion, like this:


And you should certainly provide an explicit citation of the person whose idea you are repeating.

(Incidentally, even if you had done this, I still would have objected and provided the above counter-evidence, because that is how discussions work.)

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

You're right. :| It's when you said "sources" that went like, "oh god, right". And I was kind of disappointed, because we asked me sources while others are freely speaking without being judged.

Nonetheless, I like the critical period theory because it gives an answer to many thing, but I can't verify it myself.

I'd consider people my age in Québec have a native language (French) and a half (English, when our parents are not anglophone) since we were so much surrounded by English content and culture.

I made up that last assumption, I can be judged upon.

This is very interesting: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... guage.html

It's always seemed to me that the slur in question might have begun as a descriptive term for a person from Pakistan then expanded to mean 'foreigner of a middle-eastern flavour' due to a combination of laziness (why learn the difference between an Indian, a Pakistani, a Bangladeshi, an Arab, a Persian etc. when you can just lump them all together under the same heading and drink some cheap cider instead) and ignorance (because, after all, there's only really us and them, anyway). Hell, my uncle's bloody Iranian and he gets the aforementioned slur thrown at him, and there's not much to confuse between the two, culturally, linguistically, or appearance-wise.

According to the guy who was asked if he spoke '[ethnic slur]' (whom I hasten to point out was not Pakistani but Indian, and, by his own admission, not the most reliable of sources), 'pak' means 'peace' (I forget in which language, he spoke many), and 'pak + i' (as in Arabi, Punjabi, Bangladeshi, etc.) was originally intended as the demonym for the people we now know instead as Pakistanis.

Mind you, he also taught a girl to write 'Fanny' instead of 'Danni' in the Devanagari script, (which lead to an hilarious mix-up with a tattoo) so maybe take that one with a grain of salt.

Edit: 00.59 - Spelling.

Dan

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Valar morghulis.

Zidhgebzhail Orthography

This thread is for erroneous "facts" about linguistics and natural languages that have been quoted so often some people think they're true.

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I am not responsible for the accuracy of my sources; they're responsible for their own mistakes, if any, and also responsible for defending their own statements if you disagree with them.

"French is polysynthetic." :3

Well i have read that the Riau dialect of indonesian doesn't even distinguish subject from object, has no form of noun declension and has no temporal distinctions. Through i dont much about that language, i believe that would be pretty close to "no grammar".

French myth about English: "French is more complex, put more precise; English is simpler because it's concise."

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"English comes from Latin." (People not studying linguistics will say this. :3)

"English is the easiest language to learn." (People already having some grasp of it will claim this.)

"German is a harsh language." (Mostly because of Hitler's accent and speeches.)

"Chinese is very hard to learn." (Because of the writing system, people suppose even speech is random.)

"Genders have no real use." (Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...)

"Basque is impossible to learn." (I really heard this from people who knew the region, lol.)

"Latin is a dead language because it can't be spoken anymore." (From who've heard the expression "dead language", then thinking it's impossible to speak it.)

:D I'm sure I got more, but can't remember. I like demystifying those things with my noob friends.

From this weekend:

Me talking to a friend: "blah blah blah Proto-Indo-European blah blah"

Some guy: "What's that?"

Me: "The proto-language that all Indo-European languages are believed to be derived from."

Guy: "Huh?"

Me: "Ancient language that modern European languages come from."

Guy: "Oh. You mean Latin."

Followed by about fifteen minutes of trying to explain that no, I did not mean Latin, and what exactly PIE was. I decided against trying to explain that not all languages in Europe are PIE, but then ended up having to explain that many languages spoken in India are also PIE, hence the term "Indo-", and that India is really not all that different, nor is it mystically "Eastern".

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♀♥♀
Dotjen
Kotanese

I have been told by many people that Chinese is impossible to learn. All of whom cannot point to China on a map...

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Dotjen
Kotanese

I don't understand your grammar. If only you had used more inflections!

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Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high

Derp. Are you texan, by any chance?

The ignorance is strong with this one.

Sure, you may have read that statement somewhere. No, it's not "no grammar". Go and learn, please.

Thing is, it's probably understudied, so its grammar might not be well understood.

Off course people go berserk because i forgot to insert the word "distinguish".

So, care to respond to my post which does not go berserk at that?

Inserting distinguish between dosn't [sic] and even wouldn't have improved the content of your message.

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Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high

According to this paper http://wwwstaff.eva.mpg.de/~cschmidt/SW ... ts/Gil.pdf words are unmarked for their role in a sentence but can be put anywhere in a sentence. Besides a didn't say "no grammar" i said pretty close to "no grammar". Off course a language cannot function with no grammmar at all.

Why?

While fixing a grammatical error, it doesn't change the message conveyed.

Also,

Try reading what it says again. If I can have a page number, I can correct what you are almost certainly misreading.

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Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high

What did you read it as?

By it, I mean the entire pdf again, as I found nothing that said words could be slapped together willynilly, hence why I asked for a page number.

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Up in blue sky silly blimp goes by
Where it come from where it go
Ziggy-Zaggy it fly high