I just want to point out to all those who believe that "with minimal effort you can get your point across in English" that it simply isn't true. 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…
English to me is like Scheme(Lisp). They share very simple(not a synonym of easy) syntax, yet actually knowing(owning) either is very different from simply knowing their grammar.
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…
My main beef is that English is, for lack of better words, imprecise. This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.
English is one of the few languages you can read a million books, known every single grammar rule, and still sound like a complete idiot when speaking a word to somebody else (even if you're right)
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…
> 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. One reason is that many 20th-century totalitarian regimes had a problem with Esperanto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-ce... lists Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Soviet Union and Imperial Japan.
Ok. Why the downvotes?
Is this untrue? If true, though not a good enough reason by itself, it is very interesting
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.
I did not get from TFA that the Dutch don't like English. Also I don't think that's true at all (source: I'm Dutch). According to an older HN submission (can't find it right now) the netherlands is, with the exception of the UK, the country with the highest percentage of people speaking English (96%), and I don't know of anyone not liking it.
> 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…
Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.
> conjugation and gender are just as complicated
Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?
At least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...
But for a tiny, well connected island Britain has a remarkable diversity in pronunciation.
Even speakers of "RP", a supposedly region-neutral "educated" accent which is as close to "official" British English as we've ever had permits variations in pronunciation so marked that speakers of one variant can find speakers of other variants' pronunciation of a particular word comical.
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...
I think that with global media we're much closer to having a generation where everybody at least understands English, than getting to the point where automatic translation is pleasant enough that you could read Anna Karenina translated by a machine and find it enjoyable. But then again robots can make cars, yet some people still buy hand-made supercars. So probably translators will have to stick around to translate a…
When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English, without nativisms like "stick around".
But we don't actually know what having access to a babelfish does to language learning. It's easy to assume it would make learning a second language obsolete, but a counterproposal is that it makes the other language(s) more accessible to learn - for example, I've picked up enough Chinese characters to navigate a Chinese ecommerce site by using Google Translate until I started to recognize patterns myself
This is true, but given human nature it unlikely that people will both to go to the effort of learning a second or third language once there is an easier approach.
Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to translate something from an acquired language into your native language not because you don't understand what you're attempting to translate, but because none of the words in your native tongue feel right. But it eventually starts to happen a lot and you realize that there's so much that you weren't able to easily conceptualize because you were constrained by the limits of your native tongue.