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From: tmb@tardis.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re:  Re: Easy languages
Message-ID: <10132@tardis.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 11-Jan-86 19:10:19 EST
Article-I.D.: tardis.10132
Posted: Sat Jan 11 19:10:19 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 14-Jan-86 04:19:50 EST
Organization: Harvard University
Lines: 32

||||Seriously. The English language, which is considered one of the easiest
||||languages in the world... [Thomas Breuel]
|
|||Says who???  Seriously, how can you quantify that?  By making studies of 
|||[Mike Maxell]
|
|Please! You mixed us up.  The *second* quote is mine (Maxwell), and (I
|
||I think there are many criteria by which a language can be judged `easy'
|
|You're proving what I'm saying!  Each language has its own peculiarities (and
|I fear I'm proving how peculiar English spelling is :-).  Some of those

I am tired of being quoted out of context. My argument was precicely
the same that Mike made, namely that every language has its own
peculiarities, and that therefore Japanese is, on the whole, not
any harder or easier to learn well than English or German.

Even in English, which unfortunately lacks a lot of the necessary
grammatical machinery, it should be clear from the quoted sentence
above, that the statement 'English is easy' is not a statement that
I made, but a statement that I have commonly heard. Probably I should
have said 'which is *often* considered...' to make this point
absolutely clear. I then went on to discuss why people might get the 
impression that English is easier than other languages and
discussed why that impression is probably unrealistic.

Now, if you want to discuss any more whether some languages are
easier to learn or speak than others, don't quote me as someone
who argues that English is easier than other languages.

						Thomas.