On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 20:06 +0530, Srini Ramakrishnan wrote: > > a native english speaker may find this incomprehensible. but any > > continental european would understand what it means. native speakers are > > Actually, I disagree. I have difficulty parsing that sentence, and I > speak more than half a dozen languages.
yes, but as an indian on silk, you probably count as a native english speaker. my point was not that only monoglots have trouble with euroglish, but that people who speak english particularly well as a first (more-or-less) language do. > It's really the cultural > context that may make it more understandable to other Europeans. I > think there are similar Indian constructions in English that make > sense to other Indians, but rarely make sense to non-Indians. yes, that's another valid point of course. the specific example i gave was euroglish, as i said it would be understandable to any continental european, since all the latin languages have something similar to the french verb "offrir" meaning ... literally, to offer, but also used as to gift. in fact, that's the root in english too; in non-latin languages like dutch, offer is a sacrifice. so the default notion of tagging on "for free" to that sentence as suresh read can be quite natural, unless you've learnt from early on _not_ to do that. loads of other examples. i find living in benelux that my english is getting littered with odd turns of phrase, and that my tolerance for imperfections in the english of the loads of reports and papers we publish, written by non-native-english speakers, is increasing dramatically as i realise that improving the english beyond a point wouldn't improve the comprehension of the writing for (frequently non-native-english) readers. -rishab
