What constitutes a tonal language
[QUOTE=Dinghy]Uh... KHMER IS INDEED TONAL ACCORDING TO THE FOLKS I KNOW!! I know several Khmer in the US and they INSIST it's tonal. My Thai teacher speaks some khmer and he says it's tonal as well (just not as extensive as Thai). I'll talk to one of my Khmer friends in depth and ask him.
Speaking of languages - Lao is to Thai like Portugese is to Spanish - similar but not exactly the same. Some of the words don't mean the same and several letters have different "names". Isaan is a strange combination of thai/lao/khmer languages[/QUOTE]Khmer is certainly NOT a tonal language. A tonal language means that the very tone of a word directly affects the meaning. For example, in Thai, glai and glâi are only differentiated by the tone. The former means far while the latter means close. In Chinese, mai (third tone) means buy while mai (fourth tone) means sell. This is NOT the case in Khmer. Tones only add nuance, not lexical meaning.
For example, in English, The GIRLS go to school and "The girls GO to school" and "The girls go to SCHOOL" are differentiated by emphasizing what is important. However, no one would say that English is a tonal language.
Ask any linguist whether Khmer is a tonal language. Ordinary Khmers probably know no more about their language than English-speakers know about theirs (how many English-speakers know what a phrasal verb is or what a cleft sentence is?).
Brits knowing their own language!!
[QUOTE=Cunning Linguist]...........Ask any linguist whether Khmer is a tonal language. Ordinary Khmers probably know no more about their language than English-speakers know about theirs (how many English-speakers know what a phrasal verb is or what a cleft sentence is?).......[/QUOTE]How true your statements are.
I recently considered doing a TEFL course in my home town and when I made contact with them was surprised to be sent a pre-interview exam. It was all about the 'finer points' of the language I have spoken natively for nearly 50 years and I did not even understand some of the questions, let alone be able to answer them.
I took the questions into work and asked some of my respected colleagues(there are some who struggle to spell their own name so I excluded them) if they could answer them; no one was able to approach them confidently but the best response came from someone who has been studying German in recent times. It seems as if the nuances of language speaking are taught when learning a foreign language and not when learning your own (and we know how bad the Brits are, in general, at speaking foreign languages.)
When I last returned from Cambodia I shared a row of seats with a Malysian girl and we had a nice flight and have stayed in contact. She is 23yo and studying to be an English language teacher. Her grasp of the English language is excellent and so I sent the same questions to her. A few days later she replied with all of the questions answered saying how it was useful revision for her but that it did force her to remember things that she had forgotten. I am embarrassed to say that her command of the English language is better than mine (and 99.999% of the British population).
As I have recently been studying Khmer I got to thinking what a Vowel is! I have always thought of a vowel as being A, E, I, O and U but the Khmer language has its own Vowels, so what are they? They are sounds made with an open aspect but how many Brits even know this? I reckon maybe only 1% and this is really sad but probably explains why we are so bad at learning foreign languages as we do not understand our own.
If you really want to get blown away by the finer points of a spoken language do a search on wikipedia for Vowel. I think that if you can understand all of these points then you would find find learning other languages much easier (as long as you can understand how those rules apply to the language you are learning!!).
I would be interested to know if the points above apply just to Brits or whether they apply to other English speaking nations such as America and Australia. Anyone care to comment?
Sorry to ramble on,
Hawk
R-etard...bodyguards???!!!! WTF
Is it just me or is this whole statement weird? I've been a frequent visitor to SEA since the late 80's, Kam since 95 and not once have I felt threatened or put myself in harms way, I will in fact say that PP is one of the safer cities I've had the fortune to spend time in.
So ETARD minus the are heres some friendly advice meant in the nicest of ways. Stay the fuck it is wherever you come from, you obviously are just another farangenstein with zero common sense.