The Unsuitability of English (2015)
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The Unsuitability of English (2015)
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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#2Reminds me of certain quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup.
My personal pet peeve is when you concatenate two words to end up with something sounding completely different, say in finite infinite. Just doesn't make sense at all.
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#3This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents.
And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whose native language is being replaced by it, I know that English is a perfect example of this.
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#4This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace.
Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#5The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say.
I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1].
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#6One of the major reasons english has succeeded is because it adapts (ie it doesnt have fixed rules). This means it is inclusive and future-proof. Imagine if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks like it is spelled incorrectly.
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#7This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace. Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period…
We are going to have the technological equivalent of a Babel fish [1] soon, so we should expect that basically everyone will just learn their native language unless they like learning languages as a hobby.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#8As a native English speaker who has never learned another language beyond high school Spanish, I often feel sympathy for the plight of those who are forced to learn English later in life. I see many native English speakers with a tenuous grasp on the language, and from that and anecdotal evidence I know that it's a hard language. I remember how difficult Spanish, ostensibly an 'easy' language, was for me to learn. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I need to learn English late in life, and I'm sorry for what we've done to you, world :).
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#9This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents. And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whos…
> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent.
Probably true, but not because of the vowels, but because of rhythms and consonants for languages other than english. Particularly vowels are divisive, and to take spanish as an example, consider this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ
Watch it with your mouse cursor off, and read the spanish bits, then sound them out, then check whether you got it right. (If you know spanish, find someone who doesn't.)
As an english person, you'll get a lot of them wrong. However most people from the european mainland will get most of them right, especially germans like me. Barring the ll sound, and the rhythms, spanish sounds very close to how a german would read it.
Yes, there will be accents, but nothing as strong as you get with a european mainlander speaking english.
And that is entirely because english vowels are a mess that can only be conquered by memorization.
Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)
#10This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace. Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period…
From what I understand, spoken Chinese is not terribly difficult compared to something like English with its immense number of ambiguous and arcane grammatical structures. The most unique aspect is the use of tones, which at least often results in shorter words. Orthography is a different story, and could be aided by a phonetic script (see Finnish, Korean, or Cyrillic for instance).