Thursday, June 18, 2009

Enough Already!

Okay, I have to admit ('tis no secret, anyway), that I find Euro-English highly amusing. Although I can't stand it when native speakers produce muddled sentences as a result of not paying attention (you can tell, trust me), I love reading the kinds of crazy constructions Europeans come up with when they try to translate their own stuff. I don't read as many Asian websites, but I'm sure they are equally amusing.

I'm also quite taken with the vocabulary they often use in their translations - they have a tendency to use a wider and more interesting set of words than we usually encounter. It's like they play with our language more adventurously than we do.

However, something must be said about Estonian English. The word "already"... it shouldn't be used quite so much.

The, shall we say, ebullient use of the word "already" is clearly an insite into the normal Estonian sentence structure, but it is used a tad more sparingly in English. Most of the time it is implied or understood within the context of the other words in the sentence.

While I was in Estonia, I started to feel a little pestered by the word. It was completely superfluous about 80% of the time, and quite often it was in a slightly odd place.

Estonians, look carefully at English language texts written by native English speakers. How often do they use the word "already"? That's a good indication of how often you should use it.

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