Star Bringing Down the Language Barrier - Automatically
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
In the News One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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sbergman27
Member since:
2005-07-24

English is not all that hard to learn as long as you use a proper method. You don't want to memorize every single word. It is mostly phonetic but more complicated because it combines anglo saxon words such as "house" and "ball" with greek/latin roots. You have to know a few rules for example: ch in a greek word like chorus is pronounced 'k' but 'ch' in an a french word like 'chef' and 'chevrolet' is 'sh and 'ch' in an anglo word like 'chicken' is the regular pronunciation.

So you are saying that you don't have to memorize every single word, because you can just memorize the etymology of every single word, along with the applicable rules used by the (often dead) language from which the word derives. Of course, that doesn't really work, because there are plenty of exceptions which are not consistent with that method, since English cannot even follow its own confusing and needlessly complicated hodge-podge of rules.

In English, if you haven't looked up and memorized what is considered "standard" for each form of each word, you are making a guess, pure and simple.

Edited 2008-05-04 15:30 UTC

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