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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#91

Post by empath75 »

teek wrote: post #70
curun1r wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Gender is actually a useful layer of redundancy when listening to someone speak. If you miss a syllable or two you can fill in the blanks sometime if you caught the article.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#92

Post by HelloMcFly »

meric wrote: post #51
curiousGambler wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Bullshitters don't tend to proactively preface their statements with caveats on their own credibility, but I take your point. I'm essentially parroting information obtained from others in my own words, likely imperfectly. I'm not spinning yarns on my own personal theories and opinion while presenting them as The Truth.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#93

Post by armenarmen »

curun1r wrote: post #59
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 c…

Robert Heinlein apparently felt the same way, "Galactica" the language of spacefaring humans was based largely on Spanish in his books

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#94

Post by BuckRogers »

This article is around the lines of why I think Spanish is the best language to rally around as the global language. It's phonetic, if you can speak it you can (for the most part, especially compared to other languages) read or write it by just knowing the basic rules of the written form. It's already in widespread use. It's modern and not behind the times so there are terms for everything, and it's Latin based so it has every root word that English does to grow from. It just makes more sense than an artificial language that doesn't have a 400+ million person headstart. For myself, I like the way it sounds too. I particularly dislike the Scandinavian languages and only slightly like German a bit more than those, and English a bit more than German. But to my ear (having lived in Europe), the Latin varieties are just as powerful sounding but also elegant (subjective of course). Latin languages like Spanish also have the advantage of interlingual comprehension. A well-educated native Spanish speaker (meaning college educated or similar), can understand the Pope when he speaks in Italian. Or know much of what a Portuguese speaker is saying much of the time. This doesn't apply as much to folks who barely know their own language, which is where most people pull their perceptions of groups like Spanish speakers from (desperate immigrants with little to no education). It's spoken across all 5 continents.

Due to these reasons and more (encouraging friendship with neighbors both here and on a national scale), I've fully embraced Spanish as a 2nd language as an American. It's a good thing.

There's a reason there's no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#95

Post by wodenokoto »

newman314 wrote: post #67
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…

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.

no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#96

Post by pessimizer »

Scarblac wrote: post #13
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

"There exists today a universal language that is spoken and understood almost everywhere: it is Broken English." https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#97

Post by moron4hire »

curun1r wrote: post #59
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 c…

I would not be surprised if a very large component of the dominance of English is due to a dominant British Empire flowing directly into a dominant American empire, with a sidetrip into the near complete destruction of European economic output during WWII. Because the British and the Americans in the aftermath did not horde their academic research away from Europe (unlike Russia), it created the massive incentive that we continue to perpetuate today to publish everything in English.

In other words, Spanish is not more popular because Spaniards didn't invent the modern economy.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#99

Post by foldr »

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.

The difference between 'ship' and 'sheep' and 'sheet' and 'shit' is the difference between a tense and a lax vowel. Italian doesn't make use of this distinction, so it's hard for Italians to hear the difference, but it's a perfectly ordinary distinction in vowel quality used in many languages.

There is no difference at all in the pronunciation of 'buy' and 'by'.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#100

Post by Pxtl »

teek wrote: post #70
curun1r wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What? Spanish conjugation doesn't seem so bad. Simpler than French, at least. Bigger challenge with Spanish is that conjugation of second person stuff varies by dialect - Argentines, Mexicans, and Spaniards do it differently.
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