forum.freeciv.org

hi guys, i m a new player, i like civilization and turn based strategy games and i decide to register me here, i like to play online with other players so yeah, hi guys again and sorry for my bad english, but is not my language

Xxpowermatrix98xX wrote:sorry for my bad english, but is not my language

No worries and have fun, you'll find lots of questionable English in the forum incl. my "DEnglish"

What comes to languages, de and en are very close relatives. I, on the other hand, have Finnish as native language... weird grammar ahead!

cazfi wrote:What comes to languages, de and en are very close relatives. I, on the other hand, have Finnish as native language... weird grammar ahead!

Don't be fooled by the "close relatives" thing though, there's a lot of what we call "False Friends" - words that sound alike but mean different things. Worst example is that we actually use the English word "handy" when talking about a mobile phone.
And according to some more or less trustworthy statistic, a higher percentage of Finnish people can maintain a conversation in English than us German people.

Bonjour,

French is a special case, because France invaded England in the Middle Age. Half of the English words actually come from French. The problem is, the meaning of many of them has changed in both languages since then, so we too have lots of false friends to deal with.

Is there anyone on this forum whose native language is English ?

Louis

Caedo wrote:a higher percentage of Finnish people can maintain a conversation in English than us German people.

Maybe, but then I would credit world's best education for that (we've falled in latest PISA results out from top-10 (still a notch above Germany), but that speaks of the currently studying pupils only - a lot of the total population belongs to the top-of-the-world class of their generation)

Oh, and I guess learning foreign language (almost always English as first foreign language - used to be German with older generations) is much higher priority for Finns than Germans. You can travel world quite a lot using your native language, while someone trying to get Hotel reserved in Finnish anywhere outside our borders is likely to fail.

Old English was very similar to Old German. Middle English mixed in a large amount of Old/Middle French. Then by/through Early Modern English, the English language went through a lot of standardizing, simplifications(such as the adoption of Natural Gender, rather than arbitrary gender for words in general practice, and the dropping of most declensions and conjugations), and semantic narrowing. Finally we added a ton of Latin words into Modern English. The 'false friends' are mostly because of the semantic narrowing (Before then those alternate definitions would've made sense in many cases; sometimes they still do with a little mental gymnastics). False Cognates, like Deutch and English mist, were probably still false cognates.

Natural Gender - Male things are masculine, female things are feminine, nonperson things are neuter. (A few exceptions made occasionally for sentimental reasons, such a calling a ship or other vehicle by feminine pronouns.) [More recently, many have been using plurals for 'indefinite gender', where neuter is not appropriate, but whether it is masculine or feminine is unknown.]

And yes, native English speaker.