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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#291

Post by panglott »

vacri wrote: post #159
danieltillett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel. The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)

The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e'…

If you notice, the of people/peple is /i/, which is different from the of edible/edbl that is /e/.

The general rule of English taught in kindergartem is that the silent makes a vowel letter "say its name". That's the difference between "mat" and "mate" or "kit" and "kite" (or "nit" and "nite"). Similarly, doubled consonants make the preceding vowel "short", as in "holy" and "holly", where the former vowel says its name and the latter does not. Not to endorse Cutspel at all, but these are ordinary rules of English spelling that are taught to everyone at the beginning of elementary school. Cutspel looks very inconsistent, yes.

Another problem with English is that by college, educated people have so internalized its eccentricities that they have forgotten how difficult it is for kindergarteners to learn ;) The big advantage of spelling reform would be teaching children to read faster and more easily, so that more classroom instructional time could be spent on actual content rather than something as ridiculous as spelling. Spelling is now mostly a tool to reify social class. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the...

Spelling reform isn't going to be solved by a browser extension replacing words, because some of the benefits of spelling reform involve things like disambiguating words that are spelled the same, like the noun "moderate" and the verb "moderate". http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/09/luv-u-giv.html

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#292

Post by panglott »

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.

I sometimes see American TV stations subtitle American-dialect speakers. Mostly this is due to audio quality, but it happens frequently enough with urban speakers of African American Vernacular English.

Standard English on television probably certainly helps speakers of less-prestigious lects understand Standard English, but not necessarily inspires them to produce it.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#293

Post by lispm »

gjm11 wrote: post #285
lispm wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup. (Was that intended as a correction to something I wrote? If so, I wasn't clear enough and I apologize.) Regardless, it may be worth adding that ZetaLisp was one of the most important "source" dialects from which Common Lisp emerged, and that Symbolics people were heavily involved in the process. Genera wasn't so far from being "an OS of Common Lisp" even before there was a Common Lisp.

The main difference: ZetaLisp was developed specifically as a language and its implementation for a certain type of Lisp Machines as an OS language.

Common Lisp OTOH is a domain independent Lisp standard with only very few specific OS-related features.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#294

Post by [deleted] »

ApplaudPumice wrote: post #15
rvense wrote: post #3

This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents. And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whos…

In english words change meaning just by slightly changing accent. Ship, sheep buy, by sheet, shit see also http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/homophones-sam... Also english doesn't (compared to italian) is filled with exceptions.

[deleted]

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#295

Post by panglott »

garyclarke27 wrote: post #248

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…

Note that Geoffrey Pullum is a distinguished linguist, editor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and a frequent blogger at LanguageLog.

The tone of this article should be taken as more light than many here are; this sort of thing is a frequent hobbyhorse for linguists and mostly just evinces love for and humility about English.

But keep in mind that support for English is wide but shallow. There have been other international languages before and there will be again.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#296

Post by panglott »

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…

That English in particular is a bad language to be the international standard is no argument that any other language in particular would be a good international language.

It may just be that any particular language is bad to be the international language, for reasons that are peculiar to it. And these are the reasons that English is bad, from someone who loves it deeply.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#297

Post by panglott »

qb45 wrote: post #2

Reminds me of certain quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup. My personal pet peeve is when you concatenate two words to end up with something sounding completely different, say in finite infinite . Just doesn't make sense at all.

My favorite are words with that have opposite meanings, like "cleave" and "shaft".

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#298

Post by panglott »

jodrellblank wrote: post #23
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…

Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise. As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are writt…

Esperanto has certainly caught on. It just hasn't been more successful than English has been, which was always kind of a ridiculous goal anyway.

Many of the reasons people give for learning a language are highly ideological and often propaganda. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. There is more to a language than network effects; languages tie together families and communities. If you are the kind of person who likes Esperanto and the company of Esperantists (open-minded, internationalist, cosmopolitan) appeals to you, then that is reason enough to speak it.

Languages have carrots and sticks driving people to learn them. But then, languages that have sticks are usually using them to beat the snot out of minority groups in order to assimilate them to the national state. Esperanto has only carrots, such as a rich literature (some translated into English) and plenty of maps.

The primary function of the United Nations is to prevent large-scale interstate wars. Translation is a small price to pay for that, and certainly less costly than trying to force everyone in the world to use and understand a single language. It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#299

Post by conceit »

hibbelig wrote: post #271
wirrbel wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure there are a lot of French idioms, too. Is it less important to learn them than the English ones?

No of course not, GP just sucks at French, but doesn't notice this.
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