Re: hi-speed talkers
Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Thu, 18 Apr 96 12:32:08 EDT
Just a point of view from a native Englisher about conference
English. I find most of my fellow native speakers have a terrible
time with any divergence of dialect or second-language speaker
variety of English. It is only because of my diverse and mostly
superficial (but it's enough) experience of other languages'
sound patterns and grammatical tendencies that I think I am
better at this than others. So I sort of doubt that being a
native English speaker confers an advantage in understanding
other varieties of English. In fact I sometime find that
non-native speakers understand each other better than native
speakers understand their special forms of English.
There is also, of course, an art to speaking English for maximum
comprehensibility by non-native speakers. When I return from being
away and using this special variety, I sometimes get odd looks
from my fellow native speakers because I tend to go on using
it when it's not needed.
I suppose I could try writing more in this way here on xmca,
but I have not yet learned how to be subtle or poetic as well
as easily comprehensible. I apologize for troubling people to
ruminate (as Joao put it) for too long to make some sense of
what I sometimes write. JAY.
JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU