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Those are hilarious. Brought me to tears.

I would most definately end up deported/ arrested if I caught these on a trip:

*In a Japanese hotel: You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
*Detour sign in Kyushi, Japan: Stop: Drive Sideways.
*In a Bangkok temple: It is forbidden to enter a woman even a foreigner if dressed as a man.
*In an Acapulco hotel: The manager has personally passed all the water served here.

It's when you realise that "Ghoti" says "Fish" that you get worried

[QUOTE=fable]I suspect if English wasn't so simple to learn on the surface, luring you into a quagmire of problems, its reputation wouldn't be so poor. All the more reason to respect people who take the time to learn it well, and to learn their languages, in turn, so you can eavesdrop when they complain to one another about how awful English is. [/QUOTE]

Agree, and also because it's easy to form a sentence that means something even when you are a beginner, English among non-native English speakers, can result in the type of funny errors that IK posted examples of. Forming a sentence that is not complete nonsense is much more difficult in grammatically complicated languages like Finnish, German or Russian, thus, no "funny" errors are made but instead meaningsless nonsense.

ROFL @Ik

CE, you have poblems when you cannot use the word 'funny' without shock quotes

LMAO!!! Good stuff indeed.

[QUOTE=C Elegans]Agree, and also because it's easy to form a sentence that means something even when you are a beginner, English among non-native English speakers, can result in the type of funny errors that IK posted examples of. Forming a sentence that is not complete nonsense is much more difficult in grammatically complicated languages like Finnish, German or Russian, thus, no "funny" errors are made but instead meaningsless nonsense.[/QUOTE]

I've sometimes wondered why some languages are so grammatically intricate; why German, for example, is so much more difficult to correctly use with any sophistication than Spanish. The obvious answer is that many languages start out with a great many complexities, but that these are worn away with use, over time. English is noticeably less complex than it was 250 years ago, when it still possessed formal and informal pronouns for "You" singular and plural. Five hundred years agos, it was a sophisticated bear to write, and read; and transcribed speeches indicate only a mild degree of simplification. An individual written sentence could last half a page.

Yet the language has simplified, and German hasn't. English has done it without conventions, as well; the German language was last actually changed in a convention-style meeting back in the mid-19th century, as I recall. Perhaps it is this attempt to consciously manipulate the language that has frozen it; or maybe it's pride in the huge number of verb conjugations, the gender agreements, etc. Regardless, German remains an easy language to understand but a difficult one to speak, while Spanish, Italian, French, etc, are much simpler while losing nothing for being relatively laidback.

[QUOTE=fable]The obvious answer is that many languages start out with a great many complexities, but that these are worn away with use, over time.
<snip>
Yet the language has simplified, and German hasn't.[/QUOTE]

As far as I know (and I know very little about lingustics), there is much evidence that all or almost all languages were analyticical from the beginning, but some have later developed into a more synthetical form. English and Chinese are examples of current analytical languages, ie they use separate words to describe the relationship between words, and the meaning of words is context dependent. Analytical languages, like German, Latin and most slavic languages use suffix and prefex attached to the "main" words in order to denote how the words relate to each other.

According to one hypothesis, the reasons why different languages have developed different "stages" at the analytical-synthetic continuum, are related to how old the language is, how much contact the language has had with other languages, and the trade-off between analytic structure being easier to learn but synthetic structure being easier to speak. According to this view, if I understand it correctly, English would have been hampered from developing highly synthetical traits due to it's wide distribution and high degree of contact with other languages, whereas Chinese would have kept its' original analytical features due to lack of further distribution and lack of contact with other languages (ie no need for the 1st stage of simplification - synthetisation). This view would predict that the languages who have had "medium" contact with other languages and moderate spreading, would be the most synthetic and thus the most difficult to learn (although efficient and fast to speak).

Discrepant to this view would be for instance Inuit languages, that are all highly synthetic. Inuit languages have spread somewhat geographically, but not culturally and they have been very isolated from other languages.