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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#261

Post by alanwatts »

HelloMcFly wrote: post #12

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…

>I have no speculation on the long-term prospects of the written word.

Marshall McLuhan made such speculation in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#262

Post by widdershins »

Armisael16 wrote: post #260
wirrbel wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that point might have been a bit exuberant. Nevertheless, after 3-4 years I think you have covered most grammar topics, maybe excluding passe simple and subjonctive. In English you'll continue to learn new concepts such as "contact clauses" etc

I'm only doing this because of the topic of conversation, but you probably meant to say that your point was a bit exaggerated instead of exuberant (which means something along the lines of energetically happy). That's the only mistake I noticed reading through, so I have to congratulate you - I wouldn't've noticed you weren't a native speaker.

I think exuberant is quite a charming word to use in that context :)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#263

Post by lispm »

gjm11 wrote: post #243
Turing_Machine wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Genera was originally developed in ZetaLisp. Later Cmmon Lisp was added and many newer parts of the OS were developed in Common Lisp.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#264

Post by restalis »

wk_end wrote: post #209
mapt wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are communities that aspire to degender their terminology because of pseudonyms and sensitivity to problems of the transgender community. They revert to 'They' as singular agendered personal pronoun. As this is also the word we use for multiple people, conversations about Alice and Bob fork meanings at every usage; Are we talking about Alice, about Bob, or about Alice and Bob? Even a simple sentence often has m…

Singular "they" is incredibly widely adopted and would be and is easily understood by 1000 of 1000 native English speakers, and would be and has been understood by them for centuries: as the Wikipedia article (directly linked to by yours) says, "the singular they had emerged by the mid-14th century and is common in everyday spoken English". If we've been able to deal with this supposed combinatorial ambiguity for ~70…

"Suppose Adam is tall and Bob is short. Maybe English ought to have different pronouns for men of different heights (or hair colour, or...). It would help relieve this terrible ambiguity here. And yet we get by without this precision in our pronouns"

Hm... Let me hijack the current state of languages the other way around: why would we have distinctions at all? Why would we need to express distinctively about animate and inanimate, or about the existing number of colors (when the entire spectrum can be botched to fewer hue names), or to make a distinction between single and non-single (English "you" FYI), or a lot of other stupid differences that force us to think about when we're communicating? Why wouldn't we drop them and market this as a feature, emphasizing the fact that we can speak that way "just fine"? Actually, you know what? Why wouldn't we drop communication entirely?! That would be a wonderful final goal, wouldn't it? I may sound like trolling, but it's important to see the whole picture - the goal of the communicating act in its essence is to transmit perceived distinctions. Now, we can shape the language used for this communication by pushing it either in one direction - of evolution (by gaining the ability to make even more distinctions), which is an open end indeed and that may seem overwhelming, or in the other direction - involution, which (hey, good for us -) has only so much to be reduced to!

Science (including the part addressing languages) is a bitch, isn't it? We have one less linguistic aspect available for politics now!

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#265

Post by conceit »

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…

> I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine.

I'm not convinced just because it sounds odd to me.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#266

Post by mwcampbell »

vorg wrote: post #79
carlob wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that with global media we're much closer to having a generation where everybody at least understands English, than getting to the point where automatic translation is pleasant enough that you could read Anna Karenina translated by a machine and find it enjoyable. But then again robots can make cars, yet some people still buy hand-made supercars. So probably translators will have to stick around to translate a…

When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English , without nativisms like "stick around".

Maybe we native speakers should consider it an obligation to learn to speak and write in basic English without idioms, phrasal verbs, and other gratuitous features that make the language more difficult for non-native speakers.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#267

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mwcampbell wrote: post #266
vorg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English , without nativisms like "stick around".

Maybe we native speakers should consider it an obligation to learn to speak and write in basic English without idioms, phrasal verbs, and other gratuitous features that make the language more difficult for non-native speakers.

Like "consider it"

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#268

Post by NoGravitas »

curun1r wrote: post #59
dasil003 wrote: post #4

This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace. Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period…

> 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…

For Europeans, [Interlingua][0] would be ideal. The people that made it looked at a bunch of European languages, and look a least-common-denominator approach to lexicon, phonology, and syntax. The resulting language looks a lot like Spanish lexicon and phonology, with simplified English syntax.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#269

Post by paride5745 »

atemerev wrote: post #36

English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable. The best European language is, of course, Italian.

As an Italian native speaker, I do not fully agree.

Italian is great, but often is too much rhetorical and "slow" to convey a message, while English is quicker and allows you to "hack" the language in a unique way.

I do not love English, but I think that it is good enough and the quicker language to use out there (albeit one of the hardest to master properly).

Italian is excellent, especially compared to other (major) European languages (hello French and German). But it is not the quicker language to learn at an acceptable level IMHO.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#270

Post by [deleted] »

notahacker wrote: post #87
vorg wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> conjugation and gender are just as complicated Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?

Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality . Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's populat…

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