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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#241

Post by somehnreader »

muddyrivers wrote: post #163
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…

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…

I came to England in my 20s and am now often complimented on my pronunciation:

Try to over exaggerate the way natives speak your target language, almost as if you were mocking them (Do it by yourself first, not in a conversation as that might make them punch you).

Watch QI and try to speak like Stephen Fry does, or if you want a US accent do the same with American shows. After a while you get the hang of it and you speak more natural.

I am in no way able to trick English people into thinking that I am one of them, but other foreigners always assume I am English, to Americans I just sound British.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#242

Post by langarto »

Pxtl wrote: post #100
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.

What? Spanish conjugation doesn't seem so bad. Simpler than French, at least. Bigger challenge with Spanish is that conjugation of second person stuff varies by dialect - Argentines, Mexicans, and Spaniards do it differently.

What you say about the second person is true, but all the forms are understandable by all Spanish speakers and all of them are «correct». It is mostly a matter of style.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#243

Post by gjm11 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #185
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.

Genera is the Lisp of operating systems. :-) I'm not sure what the Haskell of operating systems would be like.

Genera might be the Common Lisp of operating systems (as well as the, or at least an, operating system of Common Lisp). Is there a Scheme of operating systems?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#244

Post by gjm11 »

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…

I am a native anglophone and know a bit of German, but have never learned any Dutch. I find Dutch very strange because looking at it or listening to it it feels as if I ought to understand it, but in fact (usually) I mostly don't.

I guess what triggers the ought-to-understand feeling is that things like letter/n-gram frequencies, word lengths, etc., match English fairly well. A bit like looking at the output of a Markov chain text generator or an RNN trained on English.

(Spanish is, for me, more or less the opposite. Given a page of Spanish text I can generally decode it pretty well, albeit slowly, on the basis of other languages I know -- English native, French fairly well, schoolboy Latin -- but it doesn't trigger that feeling of recognition in the way Dutch does.)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#245

Post by gjm11 »

joolze wrote: post #84

This is absurd. First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you basically brute force your way through the family to find your word. Now he complains about the pronun…

> First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet.

No, he doesn't. What he says is: "it has probably the worst alphabetical writing system in the world", and "What an alphabet does is spell out the sounds of words at the level of consonants and vowels. And I don’t think you can find a language that does it worse or more perversely than English does."

I think you've misunderstood the structure of the paragraph in which he says those things. He mentions Chinese and Cambodian not to say "these would be better" but to say "you might want to respond to my complaint about English orthography by saying these languages are worse, but that would miss the point because they're the way they are because they're non-alphabetic, and what I'm claiming is that among alphabetic systems English has a particularly bad one".

> The large vocabulary [...] is what makes English so attractive for scientific application.

What Pullum says is: "You may think of this as a rich lexical treasure-house that we should prize; some might call it a needless and memory-burdening overstock of alternatives, reminiscent of the cereal aisle of a modern supermarket. The English lexicon could have been far less profligate, given a little forethought." In other words: yeah, it's good to have a wide variety of ideas represented in your vocabulary, but the English lexicon is redundant and could have been markedly smaller without substantial loss of expressivity and flexibility.

(I am not sure whether I agree with him, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with you if you're suggesting that science benefits particularly from the rich vocabulary of English. Technical terms can be, and are, imported into any language; that's not where English is unusual; and science doesn't make particular use of e.g. the ability to distinguish between {cow,beef,veal} or {sheep,lamb,mutton} or {sleepy,tired,fatigued,knackered,exhausted,weary,...}.)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#246

Post by logicrook »

wirrbel wrote: post #240
logicrook wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How and where do you learn this dialect? How does it differ from 'generic French'?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology

'Parisian dialect' just sends to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_French.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#247

Post by majewsky »

kuschku wrote: post #160
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…

> but that's 2 bits of data

As if brains store bits.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#248

Post by garyclarke27 »

What a silly article, he should read some Wittgenstein, the purpose of a language is to communicate - English has won the darwinian race to become the global standard for this - stop moaning, accept it and get over it, there is nothing you or anyone can do now. Many dimwits believe Mandarin will take on this role - zero chance (unless by force) it's too late, Mandarin does not have the geographic reach and is fatally handicapped by it's crazily difficult to master, pictorial text representation system, which even natives struggle with. All Human languages have faults and are difficult. The effort and time to master a foreign language is huge for most of us, therefore the benefit must be equally huge. English is the only langauge that provides enough benefit and thus incentive to learn, for the vast majority. English also has by far the largest vocabulary - therefore must be the best system we have,to describe abstract ideas or to represent reality. The only factor I can think of that might stop English being understood by nearly every human within a couple of generations or so is real time translation, which would actually be a shame I think.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#249

Post by majewsky »

kuschku wrote: post #165
joolze wrote: post #84

This is absurd. First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you basically brute force your way through the family to find your word. Now he complains about the pronun…

> Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language. That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several tim…

> "backyard-filled-with-children" (kindergarten)

A kindergarten is most definitely a backyard filled with children. You would call that a "playground", most likely. Or just a backyard filled with children. A kindergarten is a daycare center for children aged 2-6.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#250

Post by timwaagh »

the only reason an organisation located here would push against the use of English internationally, is the fact that the Netherlands is internationalizing at such a pace it's being increasingly used locally over here. In Amsterdam it's becoming less and less possible to order a coffee in Dutch. That's just fine though.
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