Talk:English language/Archive 11

message: I have never in all my years seen coordinate spelled thus. At least not in BE. There is occasional debate about whether it should be hyphenated (c.f. co-operated), but even there the trend is towards spelling without the hyphen - cooperation, coincidence, etc. The only words I can think of where I have seen the diaresis quite regularly would be naïve, Chloë, Zoë and (more rarely) zoölogical. In my opinion, unless coördinate is a standard or commonplace spelling in a few of the major English dialects beyond BE, this needs to be changed.  Petecollier 14:45, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I’ve never seen it spelled that way either. If you have better examples of diereses, feel free to change the article. --teb728 19:42, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  *Coördinate??? 

message: The 309 million native speaker estimate is clearly outdated, dating to 1984. That number has grown by about 60 million since in the USA and UK alone. The second language speakers estimate dates of 199 million dates to 1999 and should have grown by 25 million just accounting for population growth. Ethnologue is a great resource for obscure language, but for English I do hope we can find something more up-to-date to establish a low estimate. I assume reasonable estimates for 2007 will be between 750 and 1,000 million, but hardly as low as 500. dab (𒁳) 15:31, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: number of speakers estimates

message: Can someone doublecheck the IPA transcription (infobox)with a couple of reliable sources? The double stop in the middle there doesn't seem right to me: it sounds ve-ry stil-ted. The first $ ends /ŋ/ and the second $ starts /l/, not /g/ - at least to my ears. Maybe I'm just completely mad. Petecollier 13:48, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: My Chambers dictionary has a /g/, as do I. I think Brits would almost always have a /g/, but  I imagine someone moving from an /ŋg/ in words such as long to the standard /ŋ/ might also drop the /g/ in English, but that would be hypercorrection Drmaik 14:07, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

text: (edit conflict) I've always heard it with a definite /g/. Leaving it out sounds like a typically German error to me (the same way Germans pronounce single as  and Pringles as . Yet Merriam-Webster provides both pronunciations (so you're not mad, or at least no more so than the editors of Merriam-Webster are) but puts the one with /g/ first; the AHD only gives the pronunciation with /g/. —Angr 14:08, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The Concise Oxford English Dictionary gives only the pronunciation with /g/. −Woodstone 14:15, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, it's a relief to know i'm not completely crazy... Perhaps I am not grapsing the intricacy of the IPA transcription but to me /ıŋglıS/ sounds like a word i would imagine was spelt <engglish>, with a syllable break between the two <g>s - although i accept it can be difficult to determine the precise allophones in your own language. Petecollier 14:23, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, what about single and Pringles? Can you hear a /g/ sound in them? The /ŋ/ sound is usually spelled n, not ng, when it occurs before the /g/ and /k/ sounds (think, not thingk; finger, not fingger). —Angr 14:57, 6 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I must be wrongly ascribing a plosive quality to /ŋ/? This phoneme seems to be universally described as a stop, whereas if it is a pure nasal like /n/ or /m/ then would that really be the case? The nasals are obviously somewhat occluded, but surely they are no more a *stop* than a fricative or laminal? Could I fit any more question marks in here if I tried? I think I'm drifting away from the purpose of this page.  Petecollier 10:31, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: The nasals /m n ŋ/ are all stops in the sense that the airflow through the oral cavity is obstructed. In oral stops (e.g. /p t k b d g/), the airflow is completely obstructed, while in nasal stops the airflow escapes through the nose. So yes, /ŋ/ is a stop, but no more or less so than /m/ and /n/ are. —Angr 10:35, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A fundamental misunderstanding on my part then. So what I now understand is that there is essentially no great difference to an English speaker's ear between [n] and [ŋ], save that the latter is pronounced further back (velar) in anticipation of a following /k/ or /g/. I need to go and hunt in the attic for my Linguistics 101 books.  Petecollier 11:30, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, not necessarily. In words like sing and singer, there is no /k/ or /g/ following the /ŋ/. And /ŋ/ is a separate phoneme from /n/ (at least in relatively surface-oriented analyses), as shown by the fact the words just mentioned form minimal pairs with sin and sinner. —Angr 12:33, 7 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This is definitely not the case in all English dialects, however. In Brummie, for example, the ing in finger and singer are exactly the same (like RP finger), as indeed is the ing in Birmingham. TharkunColl 12:40, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

text: I say [iŋglıS], note the first vowel... -iopq 07:57, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This variant was discussed in the archived section Talk:English language/Archive 8#Pronunciation of “English”. --teb728 09:07, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What was not discussed there, but should have been, is the fact that in California English and closely related accents, tense /i/ appears regularly before /ŋ/ rather than lax , so people who speak one of those accents will have /i/ in king and sing and finger as well. It's nothing specific to this word. AFAIK no accent of English contrasts /i/ and  before /ŋ/, so there's room for some variation there. In my own speech I'd say the vowel is phonetically about half way between [i] and , but I think of it as an allophone of  rather than /i/. —Angr 14:34, 20 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  /ıŋglıS/ or /ıŋlıS/? 

message: Why isn't Madagascar coloured in? English is one of the official language so it should be.
It is coloured now. Aaker 10:50, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: What happened to the map? Madagascar adopted English in 2007

message: Do you think it would be a good idea to add the total number of people that live in a country that has English as an official languages regardless of whether the entire population speaks it to the infobox. The French language and Spanish language pages just add up the total population of the countries where their language is spoken. English on the other hand seems to try and count as few people as possibile. We could include both numbers. What do you think?
:I think it would be better if French language and Spanish language didn't do that than if English language did. It's misleading. Sometimes I'm tempted to say we shouldn't even give numbers of speakers for languages, because of the headaches involved in trying to define who counts as a speaker and how to find reliable sources for figures. —Angr 12:04, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Infobox

message: At Talk:Spanish language the idea has been raised that countries where a language is offical, but not predominant, should be colored differently on the map.  For instance, currently on the English language map Puerto Rico and South Africa are colored dark blue, and this would have to changed.  Similarly, Equatorially Guinea and Paraguay would be shaded lighter for the Spanish map.
I personally do not care which standard is used.  That de facto/de jure official countries being darkly colored regardless of predominance is fine with me.  So is changing it.  I expect that only three maps will be affected by this -- English, Spanish, and French.  However, the Spanish language map has recently undergone a huge change, and I want to make sure that no further changes occur unless the standard is applied to all the language maps.  I was hoping to get feedback from some of the English language editors.  SpiderMMB 23:43, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed Map Standard

message: Why is it that many English speaking regions only appear as tiny dots that are only visible when you enlarge the map and know where to look. Can't we change the map to make it more like the French map. I.e. put large circles around small areas so that people will know where to look. Take a look at the French language map and let me know what you think. Thanks.
:I think it's a good idea and I all also think it would be a good idea to find a standard for these linguistic maps, otherwise we will never reach consensus. Aaker 14:22, 15 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: English map versus French map

message: The article indicates that there are APPROXIMATELY 990,000 words in the language, but then goes on to say that 25,000 are added each year. This surely indicates that either some get dropped each year (how?) or else this growth is only a recent feature of the language --- otherwise by my calculations we'd have had no words at all some 40 years ago, which I don't think is true! :)
I realise that word counts will only ever be estimates, but the 25,000 point does jar...
85.140.0.183 09:21, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: While there is phenomenal growth in the English vocabulary, I think I've heard the much more sober statistic of four to six thousand new words a year, though I can't link it ("to link" being an example).  And yes, of course, this growth is accelerating; I'm not sure, but I've got the impression that people are more tolerant to word inventions, neologisms, and portemanteaus then they were back in, say, Victorian times.  Words are dropped as well, simply by falling into disuse, though some dictionnaries still cite them.  However, I still think the net result is an increase in vocabulary, since we are also dealing with new technologies, diseases, social phenomenon, etc.  Take the word "hippie"; it didn't replace an old word because it was a label for a new phenomenon, so that's a net gain.
PheonixSong 13:20, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of Words in Language 

message: http://esl.about.com/od/englishlearningresources/f/f_eslmarket.htm
:This is the last sentence in the 2nd opening paragraph, but is then repeated (in more detail) in the next paragraph. Seems redundant to me 210.5.36.1 05:41, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: One Billion people are in the process of learning English at the moment

message: The US has a population of 301 million alone so this figure has got to be wrong. I am aware that many people that live in the US are not first language speakers but many people are bilingual there.
If you then add Canada (30 million), Australia (20 million), New Zealand (four million), Great Britain (60 million), Ireland, South Africa... you've got to get way more first language speakers. Other languages that have wikipedia articles just seem to add the populations of the countries where their language is spoken. There must be around 350 million first language English speaker at least. What do you think?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.49.197.7 (talk) 13:20, 9 September 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There are various definitions of a "native speaker", and I agree there's probably a good case for counting at least some bilingual people. But if we want to quote reliable figures, then we are generally limited to the definitions used by statistical offices, such as "people aged 5 or more who speak English only at home" from the US Census Bureau. Do you know of any good figures that use a less restrictive definition? -- Avenue 02:08, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: 309 million first language speakers is too low