English: More forgiving of mistakes?

[Grant Barrett]

I agree (under the weight of people who know better than I) that
English is difficult to learn as a second language, perhaps
moreso than other languages.

But one of my other, perhaps poorly articulated, speculations
that English is more forgiving of errors than other languages has
gone pretty much undiscussed. I refer largely to spoken English.

Although there's certainly something to be said for a trained
ear (when, for example, only close family members can understand an
infant's speech, or when a Chinese teaching assistant finds him-
or herself more understood by students as the semester
progresses), I seem to find that in oral English, just about any accent
and mangling will do, whereas I find that my French often returns
honestly blank faces in my French listeners [1. My accent's not
*that* bad; 2. They're not being rude; 3. It happens to others from
 around the world, too.].

I am told by a Chinese friend that what with tones and the like,
Mandarin as a Second Language (MSL) students often get those
same, blank looks. A Peruvian friend who fluently speaks Spanish,
French and English reported the same thing when she tried her new
Chinese in Beijing. The Peruvian's fellow MSL students understood
her just fine: they had trained ears, trained for the
peculiarities of her accent, or even of a general beginning Chinese
speaker's accent.

So the question is, then, does English have a communication
advantage because of its flexibility? Is English pronunciation
variable enough to accommodate errors so that when speaking English the
message received is more likely to equal the message intended?
Is it more so than other languages? Does the huge word-base
(particularly synonyms) of English allow, at least on a new English
speaker's end, for greater flexibility in word choice, resulting in
easier composition? Does more word choice mean less likelihood of
being locked into a single expression, greater chance of finding
a cognate (real or imagined, and particularly in Romance and
Germanic languages)?

If there is a special English flexibility, do the two underlying
roots of English play in role in English's success?




--

Grant Barrett
gbarrett at monickels.com
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