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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#181

Post by jodrellblank »

tokenadult wrote: post #30

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…

JB Rye has little to say about why Esperanto didn't catch on - indeed if the kind of inconsistency he writes about was a reason for languages not catching on, where would English be?

Take the clockwork morphology which Rye derides because, genuinely, "truanta" in Esperanto doesn't mean the same as truant" in English(??) That same clockwork nature was described by Claude Piron in these terms:

You never feel quite secure in a foreign language. I have more than 40,000 hours of study and practice of English, but when I improvised the inaugural speech last Friday, since, as you know, I had to replace the Secretary of the Club of Rome at the last minute, I mistakenly said costed instead of cost. I suddenly realized that I did not remember what the right form was. Irregularity of grammar always puts non-native speakers in an inferior position. [..] In Esperanto you feel natural and at ease because you feel secure. You know that you can follow your natural reflexes. This is never the case in another language. I once pronounced indict as rhyming with convict. Why? Because I knew the word only through reading and I generalized the pronunciation pattern I had assimilated from derelict, depict, afflict and similar words. This happened to me forty (18) years after I had started learning English, a language I have never ceased to practice ever since. It shows that really mastering English is out of my reach, as is confirmed by the fact that, in spite of so much more practice than the average European, I still cannot publish a text in English without having somebody correct my language. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm

These kind of claims are what makes it stand out as potentially useful as a second language, despite being imperfect, compared to learning other natural languages.

Rye is doing the kind of 'Unix haters handbook' of nitpicking.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#182

Post by tim333 »

moron4hire wrote: post #97
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…

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 tha…

Languages have always spread through invasion. English is spoken in the US, Australia, much of India etc because English troops arrived, latin America speaks Spanish because Spanish with guns went there.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#183

Post by Turing_Machine »

fennecfoxen wrote: post #175
muddyrivers wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages 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…

"Gang" (in that sense) isn't all that weird. It's just "going" with different vowels. "Uitgang" -> "out going" -> exit.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#184

Post by tim333 »

beat wrote: post #148
flatline wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even in my one year of Chinese, I learned a great appreciation for the ridiculous puns that can be made in Chinese. It's also remarkably concise. I think most computer programmers, if exposed to Chinese, would really admire its clarity and simplicity. It's like the Lisp of natural languages.

I wonder if English would be the c++. Large complicated mess, popular.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#185

Post by Turing_Machine »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #154
beat wrote: post #145

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.

Genera is the Lisp of operating systems. :-)

I'm not sure what the Haskell of operating systems would be like.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#186

Post by gizmo686 »

m_mueller wrote: post #158
bitL wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

>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.

First, the obligatory, any claim that a particular cultural element causes a particular language feature needs tremendous evidence; languages evolve on their own.

Second, Japanese has very explicit subjects, they are what comes before the は or が particle. By convention, stating the subject in a sentence is optional and generally omitted if it could be understood from context. You could argue that this is an imprecision, but if you need the precision for something, then just state the subject. There is only a 1 syllable overhead for doing so (beyond the syllables in the subject itself). From a technical (read linguistic) standpoint you could argue that what is marked by は and が is not really "subjects", but something else ("topics"), which is technically correct[0]. One could also argue that Japanese does not have adjectives, which is also technically correct, but both of these say more about how the field of linguistics chooses to model and define terms than about Japanese itself.

Third, Japanese has a very well defined grammar. Unlike English, it is largely not based on word order, but by particles that follow phrases to indicate what part of speech said phrase is (and yes, in my experience, this is very useful for poetry). Admittedly, colloquial Japanese sometimes omits these particles, but when they do so the sentences are arranged in very standard forms turning it into a word order based grammer.

[0] Mostly. Sometimes は and が really do mark the subject.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#187

Post by beat »

tim333 wrote: post #184
beat wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in my one year of Chinese, I learned a great appreciation for the ridiculous puns that can be made in Chinese. It's also remarkably concise. I think most computer programmers, if exposed to Chinese, would really admire its clarity and simplicity. It's like the Lisp of natural languages.

I wonder if English would be the c++. Large complicated mess, popular.

Egad, no! English is like Perl. It looks strange, but it's actually pretty simple and flexible, despite the ideas held in place with duct tape. Right->{}?

C++ is absurdly obtuse and complicated, for no good reason. It's not simple or flexible at all. If it were a natural language, it would be dead already. Native speakers would have been conquered by another people who could actually understand each other relatively unambiguously. Like English speakers.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#188

Post by fennecfoxen »

tosseraccount wrote: post #64
purpled_haze wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most similar language to English, except for Frisian, is Dutch. Here's an admittedly imperfect graph showing this : https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lex... . French, Spanish, Italian , Portugese and Romanians can often understand each other to a limited degree as all are modern mutations from Latin. English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand…

> English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a little Dutch.

Allow me to suggest some simple, easy-to-digest sample audio. Try listening to one of these five times. :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRvPFK5Ss4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPiGqzZRGA

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#189

Post by schoen »

netheril96 wrote: post #179
gbog wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You are conflating language constructs with words. More words may be fine, but more "features" are not. Frankly, those "features" are more like bugs. What on earth is the usage of masculine or feminine nouns, or irregular past tense/participle, or to/ing difference?

There's a theory that languages have sometimes evolved extra redundancy to help with understanding in noisy environments (in every sense of noisy, but especially if it's physically difficult to hear someone). This could be viewed as akin to a parity bit in telecommunications, where it's deliberately redundant to increase the chance of detecting errors on a noisy channel, or with other ECC methods of correcting them.

Noun gender might conceivably work that way some of the time, for example if there are nouns that otherwise sound fairly similar but are distinguished by their genders; if you heard an article or an adjective that agreed with the noun, you could get an extra clue about what it was.

An example that I thought of in Portuguese is ato/ata, two closely etymologically-related words with different grammatical genders. The former means 'act, deed', while the latter means 'record, minutes (of a meeting)'. If there were a context in which these could be confused when spoken, surrounding words would likely reveal which one had been said.

I'm not sure whether this is commonly understood to be a likely reason that languages actually have systems of agreement.

Edit: another example of an agreement mechanism that people have to spend time studying is agreement of verbs with their subjects (in various ways depending on the language -- for example Hebrew and Arabic verbs agree with their subject in gender!). This is more complex and more effort to learn than in languages that don't do this or do it less, like Chinese and Swedish (which don't even mark person or number in the verb). You can imagine that this redundancy is sometimes helpful when you mishear either the subject pronoun or the verb itself, like the different between "we want" and "she wants" or "we know" and "she knows" -- if you didn't hear for sure whether the subject pronoun was "we" or "she", having it be fully or partially marked in the verb conjugation would help you figure out which it could have been.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#190

Post by beat »

username223 wrote: post #169
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> As for Unix - it's the Java of operating systems. What do you mean by this? IMHO Java's goal was ubiquitous mediocrity: a cross-platform VM for a language suitable for large teams of interchangeable workers. We had Lisp operating systems (and hardware) back in the day, and it didn't catch on.

I don't think Java actually started that way. It was a lab experiment gone rogue, starting as a way of shoehorning complex application code into the very primitive web browsers of the mid-late 1990s. That never really caught on, but it was fashionable enough for Sun to invest in developing JEE as a way to build sophisticated server-side apps. Back then, we were hacking apps together with CGI and server-side includes - so primitive, so insecure. IBM took to the field with Sun and started selling Websphere so management could feel better spending millions on licenses rather than using that crazy open source stuff, and it all rolled from there.
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