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

151–160 of 319 posts

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#151

Post by newman314 »

flatline wrote: post #133
newman314 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know. Try saying that in Japanese or Chinese. Not the same effect.

Chinese is more full of double (or more) meanings than any other language I've studied. Chinese literature and poetry are famous for playing on multiple meanings of a single character or sound.

To be clear, I was referring to everyday conversational Chinese.

The play of words with any sort of literature or poetry isn't the normal usage.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#152

Post by tomphoolery »

beat wrote: post #145
sdegutis wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English suffers from the same problem as UNIX: they're both good enough .

English and Unix are both strong arguments that "good enough" is the best way to communicate, that being more rigid and formal and, well, consistent, is actually counterproductive.

Right, like there's a certain "peak" at which the value of consistency does not justify the learning curve required to maintain that consistency.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#153

Post by gbog »

crazygringo wrote: post #136

Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce. On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances. And hon…

> no subjunctive tenses > no tones etc.

According to this view a perfect language would have... what? So are we in the same game as in computer language, with this discussion about how many features should we allow?

My view on this may be uncommon: Less features for computer language migth be better in some cases, but more features in human languages is always better, because the human brain will make the best out of it.

Taking a simple case: two idioms with the same meaning is bad in python, should be removed if possible. Two words with the same meaning in English (e.g. to use/to utilise, tired/fatigued) is good, because both words will fork away and each carry subtle differences that will be powerful.

English is highly unsuitable, but not for this reason.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#154

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

beat wrote: post #145
sdegutis wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English suffers from the same problem as UNIX: they're both good enough .

English and Unix are both strong arguments that "good enough" is the best way to communicate, that being more rigid and formal and, well, consistent, is actually counterproductive.

English isn't elegant, but it is very expressive, with plenty of scope for nuance.

But relatively rigid ("strongly typed"?) languages like Latin and ancient Greek were also very expressive, so I'm not sure that's a convincing argument.

As for Unix - it's the Java of operating systems.

I'd love to see the Haskell or the Lisp of operating systems, but we seem stuck around 1975 as far as OS research goes.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#155

Post by stan_rogers »

beloch wrote: post #85

Perhaps the time has come to start using phonetic spellings (e.g. An English specific subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet) in at least some contexts, such as signage. Wales would be a good place to start. If someone here has the patience to translate, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" into IPA phonetic English I'd sure appreciate it. On second thought, maybe we should leave the We…

But then whose phonology would we use? There isn't really an English, even if you restrict yourself to England itself. It's not just a matter of minor and systematic variations in vowels, either; laboratory (to pick an arbitrary example) has a different number of syllables and completely different vowels depending on who is saying it where.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#156

Post by HelloMcFly »

meric wrote: post #143
HelloMcFly wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry, was replying to parent comment with a bit of humour rather than directing at you.

Fair enough, no worries even if you were!

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#158

Post by m_mueller »

bitL wrote: post #121
newman314 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I speak 8 languages and can tell you it's the same in every single one of them...

I don't speak as many languages as you (chapeau btw.) but I do think there are differences in precision between languages. By far the most imprecise language I know, and I suspect this is by design (politeness), is Japanese. It basically has no subject and most of what we'd call grammar is derived from context. I suspect this language must be amazing for poetry, but I'm not good enough to be able to tell.

The most precise language I know is German, although this is also my native tongue, so I could be biased here. German has most of the grammar of Latin (4 out of 5 cases) and together with always distinct subjects (no you singular/you plural confusion) and compound words (need a new word? go wild!) it allows for very succinct communication. Great for technical specs, essays etc. Describing feelings can get tough, on the other hand - anything that you can't define exactly tends to sound lazy. That's where the Romance languages with their Subjunctive have the upper hand...

So my point is, IMO there are some profound differences in what languages are good at. All of them are able to communicate any piece of information, but how natural it will sound, depends on the language. Just like programming languages are usually Turing complete, yet (so far) have their strenghts and weaknesses depending on the field of application.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#159

Post by vacri »

danieltillett wrote: post #38
maemilius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself. For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while st…

You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel. The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)

The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e' is lost?

On a first reading, this new regime sounds like it's just as full of "you-just-have-to-knows" as the thing it's trying to solve - and it makes the context of the word even more important to figuring out what it means. For example, "eye" by itself is totally unambiguous. "y", suggested on the site, is the name of a letter (and the pronunciation of that is "why", not "aye"), and "ey" is yet another word with yet another pronunciation (contraction of "hey"). Nothing is gained from shortening "eye", and something is lost. I just don't see Cutspel actually solving more problems than it creates.

Finally, why is it "cutspel" instead of "cutspl"? The stress is on 'cut', so 'spell' doesn't need that unstressed E before the L, according to rule 2...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#160

Post by kuschku »

tomcam wrote: post #105

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?

Nothing.

Rather no universal language and having to translate than forcing every child to learn this abomination of a language.

Maybe I’m biased as someone who had to learn english as second language, and had to memorize every word multiple times - just for the different ways of spellings, or composita (helpful vs. help and full, wtf?)...

People always complain about having to learn gender for the German words – but that’s 2 bits of data plus the pronunciation – which is the same as the spelling.

In English, you have the spelling, the spelling of various combinations, and different variations of pronunciations.

It’s hard to speak properly, impossible to learn, and its only benefit is that everyone speaks it.

It’s the PHP of languages.

Post reply on HN