Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 478 posts

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

#201

Post by jcranmer »

toasterlovin wrote: post #139
knuththetruth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While Hollywood definitely takes into consideration foreign markets when making films, the idea that their agenda is to propagandize the rest of the world is laughable. They make what sells, because all they care about is making money.

Hollywood has in the past made films that were pretty explicitly propaganda. Look at all of the propaganda films of World War II, and those weren't forced production by the US government. Granted, at that point, the propaganda was for domestic consumption, not foreign consumption.

Furthermore, other countries definitely use films and film exports for propaganda--China really comes to mind here.

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

#202

Post by l9k »

gabordemooij wrote: post #98

Citrine ( https://citrine-lang.org/ I am the author) tried to change this with respect to coding (it is a programming language that allows everyone to code in their own language and translate between parties). However, it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats). So it has failed and I realize that (I continue to finish it until 0.9 though, because I cant stop in the middle - I am a very neurotic pe…

Not exactly programming, but Excel functions are translated in the local language

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

#203

Post by devmunchies »

dorchadas wrote: post #153
raverbashing wrote: post #90

English is the PHP of languages. Good enough to solve your problem, and easy to understand, but not really elegant (and not without its quirks). And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve. And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the ti…

> And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve. To be fair, they really don't have any effect on language as it's actually used. French people still say 'le week-end', despite how much the Académie raves about it. They still often drop the 'ne' in negative sentences as well, despite it being stand…

> To be fair

Since we're discussing language, I see this prefixed on several comments these days when the comment has nothing to do with "being fair". Its just added to a statement when making a counter point to not come across as hostile.

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

#204

Post by dorchadas »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #147
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names. > Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and be…

> There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England Actually, there's a plenty. "Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s…

Except it's not a creole, nor nowhere near it. For instance, a lot of the changes that we see in Middle English were already underway and documented even in our Old English texts. It's definitely outside academic consensus to consider the language a creole.

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

#205

Post by dorchadas »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #167
nerfhammer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also (unusually?) English retains some semblance of the original spelling of words borrowed from numerous other languages and dialects

Not just that -- in some cases spelling of original English words was changed to align with certain political requirements. My favourite example is "queen": it was originally a perfectly norman Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Old English) word, "cwene" (pronounced more or less kweh-neh). When the French-speaking Normans conquered England, they accepted the local word for political reasons, but their scribes used the French way of…

A few fun examples of mine on this:

debt [1]: Originally spelled 'dette' in Middle English; the was added to make it more Latin-like.

isle [2]: Originally spelled 'ile, yle', the was added to make it more Latin-like. Funnily enough, in this case, the was also added to the native English word 'iland', under influence from the new . [3]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/debt

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/isle#Etymology

[3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/island#English

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

#206

Post by devmunchies »

raverbashing wrote: post #90

English is the PHP of languages. Good enough to solve your problem, and easy to understand, but not really elegant (and not without its quirks). And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve. And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the ti…

I'd say JavaScript. PHP is a language that is used privately but JavaScript is the common language used publicly that everybody has to know regardless of your backend (native) language.

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

#207

Post by bunderbunder »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #103
physicsguy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a native (British) English speaker, and I actually can find it quite hard to communicate with non-native speakers, because they don't understand my accent. It's not particularly strong as British accents go (nothing like Glaswegian or Geordie for example), but it really caused problems when I moved to a research group which was made up of primarily English-as-a-second-language speakers. The other thing I found wa…

I’m a British native that works almost entirely with people with English as their second language, mostly remotely. To be effective you need to adapt your language and accent to fit the global English style, and adapt to individual dialects on a country by country basis. It seems a little counter intuitive, but English is genuinely a global language and not owned by the English anymore, so it’s important to adapt to…

> the global English style

What distinguishes the global English style?

US native here, so perhaps I'm just failing to see past the absence of leftovers from Noah Webster's efforts to violently excise any evidence of French influence from the language, but, to me, Southern English English seems about right for that description.

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

#208

Post by dorchadas »

toasterlovin wrote: post #152
nerfhammer wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also (unusually?) English retains some semblance of the original spelling of words borrowed from numerous other languages and dialects

The crazy thing about English is that some of the various crazy spellings were decided on a long time ago as a way to distinguish the linguistic origin of words (Greek vs. Latin vs. French, basically) for a reading audience that was highly educated, and in the 800 years since then nobody ever engaged in a systematic campaign of spelling reform . In some ways, I think this reveals a lot about Anglosphere culture.

To be fair, several people actually have tried to reform English spelling [1]. Perhaps the most famous of these, at least in America, was Noah Webster (of Webster's Dictionary fame) in the 1800s. He's actually the reason Americans use 'color' over 'colour' and 'center' over 'centre'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

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

#209

Post by snowpanda »

reustle wrote: post #162
acchow wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?

Something like リニキス カーネル ネットワークイング サブシステム It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.

What is katakana?

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

#210

Post by ythn »

dorchadas wrote: post #186
ythn wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but the rate at which languages convey information is roughly the same [1]. So Spanish speakers just speak faster. [1] http://ohll.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/Pellegrino_... The PDF linked is a draft of the paper, freely available; it's been removed from Academia, so here's the JSTOR link of the final release: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23011654

For speaking, sure, but if you are writing then Spanish will take longer because you have to physically type out more characters.
Post reply on HN