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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#211

Post by lstamour »

beat wrote: post #126
danjayh wrote: post #8

As a native English speaker who has never learned another language beyond high school Spanish, I often feel sympathy for the plight of those who are forced to learn English later in life. I see many native English speakers with a tenuous grasp on the language, and from that and anecdotal evidence I know that it's a hard language. I remember how difficult Spanish, ostensibly an 'easy' language, was for me to learn. I'…

The one that baffles me is how Chinese speakers (and other tone-language speakers) ever learn to speak and understand spoken English effectively. In English, tones (changes in pitch) are used to imply emotional shadings like sarcasm and surprise. In Chinese, tones are actually different words. It's hard for an English speaker to learn to pronounce tonal langauges (I did one year of Chinese, and my wife has a master's…

If the anime I've been watching for almost a decade has taught me anything, it's that for Japanese at least, the clues behind sarcasm there and in English aren't quite that dissimilar. Tone of voice can still be used, you just have to be a bit more careful about it. Sometimes it just comes down to accent or word choice. After Googling, the consensus seems to be that sarcasm really comes down to the shared context in the conversation. If it's obvious and you both get the joke, the sarcasm worked. It's just as easy to miss sarcastic comments in English -- as not everyone says it with the same verbal emphasis. And of course, we can always understand sarcasm online. (Okay, that was a poor joke... moving on...)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#212

Post by lr4444lr »

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.

I agree, and I suspect a lot of the suggestions given in these comments is post-facto reasoning. At one time as I'm sure you know, while Middle English was quite well established, Latin was the "Lingua Franca" of the "civilized" world due to the institutional networks of the Church and the university. Plenty of flat and embarrassing Latin, which we still have, was written at this time (with a number of its classical features modified), that could provide much fodder for a similar article some 900 years ago. Were it to have gone on, and had English died out, leaving us with few examples other than Beowulf, the memoirs of elite regents, letters between statesmen and the like, we might have another impression altogether.

Instead, Imperial England left on the world a linguistic legacy to which we adhere out of convenience of circumstance, and probably will for the long foreseeable future: "learn once, enjoy commerce and education everywhere!"

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#214

Post by ommunist »

English is perfectly suitable, since most of the technical literature, describing how to build and maintain everything around you is in English. German and Spanish are also fine. There are fields, where German prevails (funny enough, one of them is oriental linguistics). English is lingua franca of science and technology and there is no alternative to that. This is cultural domination consequence everyone is facing.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#215

Post by wirrbel »

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…

At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages).

To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily because words were often alike (sometimes the same words have different meanings, "false friends"). But of course in contrast to french, one does not have to learn conjugations, gender of words, etc.

But after having reached an intermediate level of both english and french, things started to change. Perfecting your English skills progressively gets harder, whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language.

As it turnes out, English is huge. The english dictionary is huge. It is basically the size of the german dictionary and the french dictionary combined, as it draws words from 3 main sources French, Old Saxon and Scandinavic, and then was happy to incorporate words from all over the place. So you have the word "hunger" (germanic root, compare german "Hunger") and "famine" (romance root, compare french "faim" meaning hunger and "famine" meaning famine). To this day, using english on a daily basis and reading many english books, I see a lot of words I have not yet learned.

The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.

At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#216

Post by rvense »

trophycase wrote: post #213

I seem to remember reading something about how English has one of the highest, if not the highest information to syllable ratio. I think that might give clues as to its ubiquity.

You may have read that, but it's wrong. Actually, I think it qualifies as both wrong and not even wrong:

1. No two linguists would be able to agree on a definition of 'the amount' of information in a sentence. 2. Even for some arbitrary measure of information, it would depend on what was being said. Are we talking about banter between two friends meeting in the street, or a university lecture? 3. The idea that English is special for linguistic reasons is just wrong. It's a language like any other. They all have their quirks.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#217

Post by prewett »

stordoff wrote: post #116
danieltillett wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Often it is the native speakers that are the worst problem in cases like this. We tend to fall into “higher” English and use uncommon words or idioms. I have been in many situations where the non-native speakers talk to each other with no problem, but they get lost with my contribution.

I wonder if taught English is more standardised than native English. I can certainly think of things I hear regularly that might surprise even a native speaker. Couple of examples: - The informal form of 'you' persists to some extent in parts of Yorkshire - "Where are you going?" often becomes "Where's tha goin'?" - There is slang that I rarely hear outside of my immediate family (though I suspect it's more common th…

I think it is because non-native speakers all learn the same basic 1000 words (initially) and same most-frequently-used grammatical patterns. Native speakers know thousands more words and all the colloquial phrases.

I can understand foreigners (Americans, anyway) speaking Chinese pretty easily, because we all know the same (limited) vocabulary and grammar. I have real trouble with native speakers because they use all the short forms of the words and the grammar patterns that you don't learn initially.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#218

Post by rvense »

wirrbel wrote: post #215
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…

At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages). To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily b…

> The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.

> At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.

Are you seriously suggesting that French does not have idioms?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#219

Post by prewett »

vinay427 wrote: post #107
allemagne wrote: post #66

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?

Written Chinese is not possible to phoneticize, because the mapping of characters to sounds (including the tone) is many-to-one. The poem of shi was written to demonstrate this point [1].

The oral language could obviously be phoneticized, since you can't see the characters when someone talks. But I think native speakers think in terms of characters, not syllables. So you get puns based off of sound and meaning, and written Chinese takes advantage of the fact that characters uniquely describe a meaning, most notably in names. When native speakers discuss names (people, places, etc.) they often ask which character it is. In fact, it is apparently such a common question that foreigners learn the phrase pretty early on.

Language isn't just about productivity. The characters have a lot of character. In fact, you can communicate a lot simply with the choice of character, since there is a long history and connotation.

[1] http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#220

Post by Scarblac »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #194
vacri wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

British spelling is not the British accent. One estimate had the English accent changing about every 25 miles as you travel through Britain. Have you seen Hot Fuzz ? In it, the police visit a farmer with a strong West Country accent, and take an interpreter with them. All parties are speaking English in the scene, but the farmer's words are so strongly accented, the interpreter has to translate. That scene was based…

I would expect that to have gone away to some degree with the rise of movies, radio, and television. Certainly it did in the United States. We still do have regional accents, of course, but I remember seeing a farmer from Appalachia on television getting subtitles when I was a kid. I doubt that ever happens today.

Still happens in the Netherlands, which is of course far smaller still. People switch from their local dialect to standard Dutch on TV, but still have accents that confuse city people or those living on the other side of the country.
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