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Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

theguardian.com

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Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#51

Post by opportune »

TravelAndFood wrote: post #44
opportune wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the…

As a native English speaker who has passable Spanish, I think the main hurdle, which I guess wouldn't be called a "complexity", of learning Spanish to a high level is understanding native speakers in natural conversation given how fast they talk.

Me too. My Spanish reading is probably at around a 12th grade level and writing somewhere around 9th grade, but my listening comprehension of native speakers is atrocious. I think it's just a matter of practice/exposure though

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#52

Post by trophycase »

opportune wrote: post #10
barking wrote: post #6

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the…

Spanish may be simpler, but it also conveys less information per syllable iirc.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#53

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

opportune wrote: post #48
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'English grammar'? (Hopefully you don't mean spelling.) And what are examples of such exceptions? (English doesn't strike me as having any more exceptions in morphology or syntax than any other language, and has a simpler morphology than many languages.)

A lot of English's exceptions are things we hardly notice as native speakers. For example, we have a lot of irregular verbs. Of course other languages also have these, but oftentimes they fit into more neat patterns or small verb classes as in Spanish. Using verbs together is more complex than in other language (when do you add the word to?). We have a lot of nouns that you treat specially, like glasses/pants/deer. E…

In terms of things that are difficult for non-native speakers, English doesn't have grammatical gender, which takes an immense amount of time to acquire.

English's irregular verbs also fall into classes. There are only a couple of (very common) verbs like "be", "go" which are truly idiosyncratic. And English has the advantage of actually having very few verbal forms overall. Other than forms of "be", the present tense only has 2 forms (3rd person singular and everything else (e.g. "I go, you (sg.) go, he/she/it goes, we go, you (pl.) go, they go") and the past tense only one form (e.g. "I went, you (sg.) went, he/she/it went, we went, you (pl.) went, they went").

> Certain ambiguous sentences are only able to be deciphered through sheer exposure to the language + context, which is not necessarily easily transferable across languages ("I can't find my shoes" means that you so far haven't been able to find your shoes, whereas "I can't eat pork" means that you prefer not to eat pork for one reason or another, whereas "I can't see infrared" means that it is impossible for you to see in infrared).

These all have to do with modality and work the same way in every language I know.

> English also has a weird way of asking question compared to other languages, i.e. in many other languages (most?) you normally say something like "You want to buy a hotdog" or "What you want?" whereas in English we require a varying assortment of nouns and helper verbs.

This is true, and is fairly unusual (though French has some weirdness of this sort).

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#54

Post by gaius »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #41
gaius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.

One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.

Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#55

Post by frockington »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #41
gaius wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.

One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.

What is the proper use of curly versuss straight quotation marks? Do they serve a purpose other than style?

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#56

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

gaius wrote: post #54
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.

Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX

> Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX

So it isn’t enough that we have to be limited to ASCII, we have to be limited to only one of several typesetting engines as well? Your claim above that ASCII ought to be enough was already odd, but to defend it now you are going into even more absurd territory.

Furthermore, TeX’s feature set does indeed include a few basics, but it still lacks some typesetting features later made available in Unicode. This is one reason why modern TeXnicians appreciate being able to typeset TeX-formatted documents with Unicode characters included thanks to xetex.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#57

Post by nutjob2 »

English is such a horrible language to learn, I pity non-native speakers. On that basis, the rule is: you're not allowed to criticize another person's English, unless it's their native one.

They didn't ask for this language, it was forced upon them.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#58

Post by knuththetruth »

weberc2 wrote: post #20
blt wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, that might be one factor, but the global imperialism of the British and United States is another huge factor.

Or even just the cultural exports due to British and US media (BBC, Hollywood, etc) or the desire to do business in wealthier markets.

Many of the “cultural exports” are, however, essentially propaganda to glorify the power and righteousness of the American empire.

History has proven that this “soft power” approach to be incredibly effective. After all, we still study and celebrate similar texts from the Greek and Roman empires, even though they’re 1000s of years dead. Much less so those who they conquered, exploited, and enslaved.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#59

Post by ythn »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #24
barking wrote: post #6

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

English pronunciation is extremely hard. There are virtually no rules, you have to memorize pronunciation of each word individually. It is neither simple nor logical.

Every language has tradeoffs. Sure, Spanish might be easier to pronounce since the rules are more rigid, but on the other hand the information density is way lower. It takes 2-3 syllables of Spanish to communicate the same information as 1 syllable of English.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#60

Post by jessaustin »

YaxelPerez wrote: post #32
saget wrote: post #21

English is also nice in that there is no "baked in" formal or informal use of the language. I think it breaks down barriers in conversations with a superior or a random stranger. I wonder if this has any larger scale effects...

There used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V_distinction#Englis...

It's funny that "thou" seems so formal now.
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