171–180 of 319 posts
This article from 23 November 2015 was followed up by a 3 December 2015 article by the same author (professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum) titled "English and Its Undeserved Good Luck," previously discussed on Hacker News.[1] The author is a renowned and very influential scholar of the English language, co-editor of the most authoritative grammar of the English language, the The Cambridge Grammar of the English La…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I admit that languages evolve, and if there is ever an actual contender to make writing in Chinese significantly easier to use and learn, then a separate conversation should be had (I think this is true of all languages and scripts). However, there are a few reasons this probably won't ever happen.
Firstly, any phonetic system currently used for Chinese immediately loses the semantic complexity behind characters that not only allows the reader to guess its meaning based on the context and the components within the character, but the potential for deeper poetic meaning behind the use of certain characters and the way they look.
Secondly, all Chinese dialects can share a writing system specifically because of its non-phonetic nature. Were pinyin to suddenly displace characters, it would be useless for millions of people who don't know Mandarin.
Finally, the forced implementation of simplified characters has fractured the Chinese speaking world. Simplified versus traditional characters are not just a statement on what's more useful in a pragmatic sense but a political and cultural statement on what it means to be Chinese.
If that debate is so heated when all that has changed is the way characters look, imagine the implications of abandoning the 5000 year old system completely. Combine that with recent Chinese history -- the Opium War, embarrassment by the hands of foreigners, European and American hegemonism -- and the notion of changing a fundamental part of Chinese identity in order to cater to foreigners seems absurd.
On a side note, I've always had this question (Excuse me for the ignorance, English is my third language). I think most here would agree that there's just no rule in English on how a particular word would be pronounced (yes, there's a general layout, but the number of exceptions greatly outweigh them). So when a new word is added to the language, who decides how would it be pronounced, what its singular/plural form w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Also in my opinion, word order is easier to deal with instead of tons of endings for parts of speech.
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…
As a non-native speaker who started to regularly use English in my 20's, I find pronunciation is the hardest part. As mentioned in the article, "The fine distinctions of English vocalism are beyond many adult learners’ phonetic abilities, which is why some foreigners pronounce modal and model the same, or bird and bed the same, or seat and sit the same, and so on." Pronunciations in Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc. a…
It's fun like that; I've studied a trivial amount of Dutch and German and kept running into words where the root was present in English in some really weird way. For instance, one of the first signs I saw at AMS was 'uitgang' (exit) which is clearly the same root as 'gangplank' and 'gangway' and which shows up in some really old folk songs (Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, and why sae sad gang ye, O?). Or "rustig", which is just "quiet", but has a certain specific rough-hewn country-living feel to it when you use it as the English word "rustic".
They also seem to use the old-fashioned form of the helper-verb "will" ("wil") to mean want/desire (as contrasted with "shall", which has been replaced in modern English, at least in America.)
And, of course, the word for boy-child is "jongen" - pronounced "young'n", like you're from Appalachia or something. (Actually, I think there are a lot of things like that. Don't put down the people with the 'uneducated' accents, they have a perfectly legitimate linguistic history.)
(Estas ia honto Esperanton ne despegar.)
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.
You're calling out Dutch as a bastard? Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans. If anyone bastardized the Germanic language group, it was English.
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
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…
But I can see how these things are just annoyances to people who are just trying to learn English to communicate. In any case, we are stuck with English, that's network effects for you.
[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_...