Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Unsuitability of English (2015)

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 319 posts

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#51

Post by meric »

curiousGambler wrote: post #34
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 .

There's a word for it in English starting with a B and is an analogy to an output of an animal, which I'm disinclined to repeat here.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#52

Post by DanBC »

curiousGambler wrote: post #34
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 .

Not a word but Stewart Lee's "Loch Ness" bit is my favourite take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlcuV_Dojwg

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#53

Post by awaworht »

>Japanese uses two different syllabaries (one symbol per syllable) plus a selection of about a thousand Chinese characters sprinkled in amongst them

A bit of a nitpick, but this isn't really accurate. The Jouyou kanji[1] contain 2,136 Chinese characters that all Japanese people must learn in school. In addition, the Jinmeiyou kanji[2] (used for names) contains an additional 843 Chinese characters. And it's not uncommon for speakers of Japanese to know many more. There are more than 50,000 Chinese characters listed in the daikanwajiten[3] with Japanese pronunciation (most are not used in either Chinese or Japanese). In fact, the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese has increased with the use of computer input[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-Wa_Jiten [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_way...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#54

Post by danieltillett »

Spooky23 wrote: post #47
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 was on a conference call the other day with A gaggle people trying to fix a technical problem. We had a Brit, 4-5 accents/language competencies from India, a Chinese person, a heavily accented Vietnamese person, heavy Boston speaker, various NYC and "lunged idland" dialects and a Texan. It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.

Yep. Often it is the native speakers that are the worst problem in cases like this. We tend to fall into “higher” English and use uncommon words or idioms. I have been in many situations where the non-native speakers talk to each other with no problem, but they get lost with my contribution.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#55

Post by DanBC »

ApplaudPumice wrote: post #15
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…

In english words change meaning just by slightly changing accent. Ship, sheep buy, by sheet, shit see also http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/homophones-sam... Also english doesn't (compared to italian) is filled with exceptions.

Many people are going to pronounce "buy", "by", and "bye" exactly the same way. The only way to tell the difference would be from how the word is used in a sentence.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#56

Post by danieltillett »

wolfgke wrote: post #40
thinkpad20 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

This is the big strength of English. Even when you completely mess it up the person on the other side can usually understand what you are saying. Also native English speakers are quite tolerant of non-native speakers making a mess of the language - while we expect everyone to speak English, we don’t expect you will speak it without mistakes.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#57

Post by danieltillett »

pera wrote: post #37
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 :)

That is because there is no official English.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#58

Post by wolfgke »

danieltillett wrote: post #56
wolfgke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>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. This is the big strength of English. Even when you completely mess it up the person on the other side can usually understand what you are saying. Also native English speakers are quite tolerant of non-native speakers making a mess of the langu…

I have a different opinion on this topic, but this is the same discussion as strongly vs. weakly typed programming languages (I'm obviously on the side of strongly typed ones).

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#59

Post by curun1r »

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…

> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time.

Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too).

Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#60

Post by wolfgke »

danieltillett wrote: post #57
pera wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

That is because there is no official English.

At least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...

Post reply on HN