61–70 of 319 posts
English, like any other language, can communicate ideas well. And that is all it needs to do.
One 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.
This would prevent some domain scams, which I would consider as an advantage.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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).
English is far from perfect and is not well suited to things where precision is required - laws, for example, probably should not be written in English - that is unless your aim is to provide lifetime employment to lawyers.
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…
So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the emotional one: I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.
The Dutch not liking English is probably just a little neighborhood rivalry. As I understand it, they don't like the Germans for some more recent transgressions.
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…
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).
Nevertheless, Chinese people already know pinyin but choose to use characters anyway. You could compare the urgency of completely switching Chinese to a phonetic system to standardizing English spelling or French verb conjugations, but that's ignoring the cultural factor.
Overall I'd be very skeptical and suspicious of the view that the Chinese writing system needs to change. Mao Zedong forced a switch to simplified characters on the mainland ostensibly to improve literacy, but the comparably more prosperous and educated Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau seem to be doing just fine with traditional characters. In my view, this switch was a needless violence against Chinese heritage by the CCP and I'd hate to see anything like that repeated without a very very good reason.
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…
This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.
You think you can do it with just a few years of learning, but talking in English to someone you share a language with is entirely different than talking to someone of a very distant origin. I remember trying to do it with my classmates in our very similar accents, with our common lexicon, as opposed to talking to Asian people during visits abroad (I am European).
Even with fellow Europeans from a different country it's not easy to get the message across, even between similar languages like Spanish and Italian, to the point that if you're from Spain and need to get something in an Italian shop, you're probably better off by speaking Spanish, statistically it will be understood much easier than English.
To sum up, English is not easy at all. It's just a bit easier and surely worth the effort given the great amount of resources already available in English, including the giant pool of speakers.
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.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bye
IPA: /baɪ/
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 c…
