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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#101

Post by Pxtl »

empath75 wrote: post #91
teek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ditto conjugation. I actually like in Spanish how it's redundant if the pronoun is included, and alternately you can drop the pronoun for brevity.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#102

Post by wolfgke »

josinalvo wrote: post #73
wolfgke wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I also don't understand why at the beginning I was downvoted...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#103

Post by yongjik »

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

English about very basic knowledge exist then I say want word convey way exist word is?

Nah, I don't really believe it.

* The first sentence was more or less direct word-to-word mapping of a Korean sentence meaning "If I have a very basic knowledge of English, then I can convey what I want to say?"

I suspect that people say "it's very easy to speak [English] badly" because the worst they've ever encountered is a still half-decent attempt at English grammar (with years of training by the speaker), because anything below that is totally unintelligible and won't attract any attention.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#104

Post by mixmastamyk »

BuckRogers wrote: post #94

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…

Yes, though the gendered nouns and verb conjugations are a chore. No language is perfect.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#105

Post by tomcam »

For years the Western world dreamed about a universal tongue. It's here now, and it's English. Every complaint in the article is correct, but ask yourself this: if you had to choose between English and nothing, which would you choose?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#106

Post by chaoky »

The central axiom of linguistics is that no language is inherently more expressive than another. Yes, that means that conjugation and declension is no more complicated than strict word order. Grammatical gender provides redundancy, and conjugation allows for subject pro-drop. Orthography has nothing to do with the actual spoken language and things like "phonetic" pronunciation are not really an intrinsic feature of any language. Any language can be matched with a phonemic orthography; the only reason written English hasn't been is due to historical inertia.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#107

Post by vinay427 »

allemagne wrote: post #66
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).

Chinese characters aren't totally devoid of phonetic meaning. They are often structured so that their pronunciation is hinted towards. 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…

Honest question: Is encouraging non-native speakers (especially given China's increasing global role) to learn Chinese not a sufficient reason? I understand that you're suspicious, but I have no involvement other than an interest in learning the language in the future.

Perhaps today some/many Chinese look upon Mao's action unfavorably, but if it improves productivity for future generations was it worth it?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#108

Post by BuckRogers »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #104
BuckRogers wrote: post #94

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…

Yes, though the gendered nouns and verb conjugations are a chore. No language is perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of better.

English has verb conjugations too. Grab, grabbed, grabbing etc. While we do have a few gendered nouns such as blonde vs blond. I will grant you gendered nouns on the whole, but you're still only standing on one leg (gendered nouns) which is a relic but overshadowed by any number of facts in Spanish's favor.

Spanish is mostly phonetic, which for dyslexics makes them easier to learn. This has been proven. The benefits to Spanish over alternatives are long-reaching.

Such as that English is a linguistic island or that Spanish orthography is objectively the best on Earth for natural, world-languages. It was also better put together with the inclusion of the '¿' '¡' marks. It's a fantastic piece of orthography. As far as being a chore, if I didn't speak English or Spanish, I'd much rather be asked to learn Spanish between the two and would prefer to not waste my time with English or similar nonsensical language.

Mastery in any language is a lifelong effort but Spanish has the linguistic gold standard for its written form. While it's still another language and not 'easy', there are savings on effort and time overall to reach fluency. I speak both daily. In programming terms, it would be just "the best tool for the job".

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#109

Post by xxpor »

danieltillett wrote: post #28
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…

The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.

To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation.

The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#110

Post by stordoff »

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.

This also varies between English accents. Many American-English accents will pronounce "Mary", "merry", and "marry" the same, but in British-English they all sound different.
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