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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#31

Post by pcrh »

rvense wrote: post #3

This 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…

It might be worth noting that the author is English. The English have a very peculiar relationship with accent, in that one's accent is one of the prime indicators of social class in their country.

As such the author may be unknowingly over-emphasizing the role of distinct vowel pronunciations, assigning their importance to intelligibility or understanding rather than merely to accent.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#32

Post by maemilius »

danieltillett wrote: post #5

The 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]. 1. http://www.cutspel.com

After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself.

For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me.

I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey...

All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#33

Post by DrScump »

danieltillett wrote: post #7
dasil003 wrote: post #4

This 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...

[1] should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...

(general note: please use desktop rather than mobile-specific URLs wherever possible. In this case, the mobile fragment identifier gets mishandled on desktop browsers, going to the "Shaltanacs" section instead. The desktop URL with fragment identifier works on mobile and desktop alike.)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#34

Post by curiousGambler »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #12

Language is a tool to facilitate information exchange. It doesn't matter how "superior" one language is to another for any given reason, if a language provides limited opportunity to exchange information then it is not valuable. The incentives to learn English exist because the value of exchanging information in English is strong in the present-day sociopolitical context, and the malleability of the language played a…

"I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time"

On the topic of languages, I wonder if the Germans have a word for this yet... If so, English speakers should totally import it as they did Shadenfreude.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#35

Post by ktRolster »

jes5199 wrote: post #17
vinay427 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

yeah, Chinese is heavy on sounds and glyphs unfamiliar to Westerners, but is really light on syntax and grammer. So: high barrier to entry, but not that steep of a learning curve?

Chinese speaking: easy. The accent is not particularly harder than any other language. The grammar is mostly simple.

Chinese writing: doubles the difficulty of the language.

If you think of it, the hardest part of any language is the vocabulary. That is going to take the most time, because there are so many things you need to know. I am still learning vocabulary in my native language.

Chinese essentially takes the most difficult (time-consuming) part of the language and doubles it. It's also a very fun part of the language

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#36

Post by atemerev »

English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable.

The best European language is, of course, Italian.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#37

Post by pera »

rvense wrote: post #3

This 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…

I know a few people who started learning Spanish as an adult (20+) and developed a perfect accent after a couple of years of speaking Spanish only. It's not common, but it is possible. What I find funny about English is that even native speakers don't know (or agree) how to pronounce some words :)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#38

Post by danieltillett »

maemilius wrote: post #32
danieltillett wrote: post #5

The 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]. 1. http://www.cutspel.com

After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself. For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while st…

You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel.

The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#39

Post by ktRolster »

rvense wrote: post #3

This 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.
Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language).

Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#40

Post by wolfgke »

thinkpad20 wrote: post #20
danieltillett wrote: post #5

The 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]. 1. http://www.cutspel.com

I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). Eng…

> I wonder if that's unique to English though.

At least in the German language I'm not aware of a similar phenomenon (at least in this manifestation). The German grammar is rather complicated (which restrains, in my opinion unjustifiably, many people from learning German). This has in my opinion the "advantage" that it is "rather complicated" to speak or write something in German completely incorrect without at least being very unsure whether it is really correct. In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.

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