On Thu, 10 Sep 2020 17:48:39 +0000 (UTC), "Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at
yahoo.com (via tml list)" <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote to Freelance
Traveller:

> 1) tried to talk on the phone with tech-support in India & just could NOT understand his english so we went into chat mode on our pc's & it turned out that his grammar was impeccable! No problems after that.

Accent and intonation varies _widely_. The example that comes to mind
immediately is that your Indian TS guy might well "develop" programs or
scripts in text chat, but you'll hear him pronounce it "devil up" on the
phone.

At one point, my father (a New Yorker) was working for a company that had
customers in Australia, where he was sent to give a workshop on the
company's products.  He came back and said that he wasn't sure what they
were speaking, but it wasn't English.

Loren Wiseman once told a story about being with a tour group in Sweden,
along with a Norwegian and a Finn.  The language of the group was English,
and everyone spoke it - but Loren ended up "translating" between the
Norwegian (who was speaking English) and the Finn (who was speaking
English), as he could understand both (speaking English), and both could
understand him (speaking English), but neither could understand the other.

Americans are _not_ at a disadvantage when _speaking_ to others for whom
English is a known language; American entertainment has gone world-wide,
and most English speakers will have been exposed to, at the very least,
"Midwestern newscaster" English, and probably a couple of others, like "New
York", "Texan", or "Southern", as well. We are, however, at a disadvantage
when _listening_ to others speak, because for the most part, we don't get
to hear other forms of the language in entertainment; the most we're likely
to hear is the Received Standard of the UK.

>2) when I first started school the majority faction in the ed establishment was, IMO, very into trying to 'regularize' the english lang (NO SPLIT INFINITIVES!) but as the years went by and 'baby-boomers' appeared as teachers in classrooms, thing began to change & by the time college came around, things had changed A LOT!

Not so much "regularizing" the language, as trying to (inappropriately)
apply the rules for Latin to English. For many years - decades - Latin was
seen as the sine qua non of languages, and it wasn't until almost the 1970s
that that attitude was finally abandoned, and English taught on its own
terms.

Like James Nicolls said, English doesn't borrow words; it follows other
languages into dark alleys, hits them over the head, and rifles their
pockets for loose vocabulary (and grammar).

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