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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

#301

Post by tomcam »

eftychis wrote: post #285
geff82 wrote: post #99

I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me…

Curious. How do you quantify expressiveness? English does not seem that expressive to me. English, German and Esperanto are way too related also to be making a comparison (which was kind of the criticism against Esperanto). Could you give a couple of examples? Also, I have to disagree with the statement that it is the language of great literature. I counter argue those would be French, German, Greek, Latin, Literary…

> Could you give a couple of examples?

Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Whitman

I believe that English has many problems, from crazy grammar rules to horrendously inconsistent spelling. But to say it is not expressive is absurd, and suggests that you haven’t read any great English literature. This is not to say that the cultures you mentioned and many other have not produce their own great literature, of course.

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

#302

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

zerb wrote: post #291
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what that means.

The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example. I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an i…

I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is.

All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.

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

#303

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

toufka wrote: post #295
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what that means.

In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are clo…

I find that a somewhat odd evaluation. English is comparatively intolerant of changes in word order compared to a lot of languages.

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

#304

Post by dorchadas »

xxpor wrote: post #263
dorchadas wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. Not even all Indo-European ones. It's absolutely awful at trying to translate to and from Irish, for instance.

Probably because it doesn't have full official status at the EU. Google has a ton of data for EU languages because documents have to be translated between them all.

It's an official language, but not a full _working_ language, something which seems to be slated to change within the next few years.

In my personal opinion, however, knowing the quality of "Irish" [1] that the translators will have, is that it still won't really help translation all that much if you wish to actually communicate with native speakers.

[1] There's a huge rift forming in Irish between the "Gaelscoilis" or "Urban Irish" that is learnt and passed on by non-native speakers and that which is passed on in the traditional areas. Unfortunately, there's also a lack of communication between the two areas, partly because they struggle to understand each other; natives from the traditional area often have to translate the non-traditional speakers' Irish to English in order to understand the meaning, for instance.

There's also the fact that the people creating the legal terms for the language often don't really have a firm grasp on the history or nuances of various words or the language, and are often themselves not native speakers. This led to a funny incident where they translated "dental hygienist" as "toothed hygienist" in the official dictionary of new terms. It's also likely to lead to a "Neo-Irish" that is completely divorced from the language as used in the Gaeltachtaí (traditional speaking areas); one linguist has even gone so far as to say it'll be "Irish in English drag", which looks truer and truer when you look at the errors they make and pass on.

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

#305

Post by anotherevan »

My favourite quote about the English language:

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

— James Nicoll

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

#306

Post by eftychis »

tomcam wrote: post #301
eftychis wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious. How do you quantify expressiveness? English does not seem that expressive to me. English, German and Esperanto are way too related also to be making a comparison (which was kind of the criticism against Esperanto). Could you give a couple of examples? Also, I have to disagree with the statement that it is the language of great literature. I counter argue those would be French, German, Greek, Latin, Literary…

> Could you give a couple of examples? Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Whitman I believe that English has many problems, from crazy grammar rules to horrendously inconsistent spelling. But to say it is not expressive is absurd, and suggests that you haven’t read any great English literature. This is not to say that the cultures you mentioned and many other have not produce their own great literature, of course.

I meant examples of expressiveness over German. Edit: You were comparing English with other languages and implied it is more or as expressive as the majority of languages (or at least the ones you are familiar with). Thus my question.

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

#307

Post by dorchadas »

jopsen wrote: post #266
dorchadas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I don't know about French, but when I learned Danish in school we were definitely impacted by the standards body on the Danish language. Sure, it doesn't change things overnight, but generation by generation these standard bodies can slowly but steadily push how grammar is taught in school and what language the is used in the media.

Yes, it impacts the standard that you will be taught in schools and hear on the media, as well as what you should use in formal situations. But, outside of the higher registers, it really doesn't impact it at all.

People rarely speak the standard as a native language, and we're much more likely to pick up our language from our peer group and parents. This does, of course, change with higher educated people, who are more used to using a higher register [1] of language that more closely follows the standard.

Also, not everyone speaks like they write; writing really should be divorced from language when talking about language change and such, as it's generally not indicative of how people talk since they're following set standards that are explicitly learnt, unlike language which is acquired naturally.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register_(sociolinguistics)

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

#308

Post by fifnir »

anotherevan wrote: post #305

My favourite quote about the English language: “The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.” — James Nicoll

But at least english pays proper tribute to the languages it took from (at with greek that I'm personally familiar) by adopting specific spellings.

Words spelled with "ph" for the f sound are spelled like that because they are derived by greek words. In latin languages elephant is spelled like elefant, making tracing the history of the word much harder

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

#309

Post by foobarian »

geff82 wrote: post #99

I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me…

It really doesn't matter which language it is, as long as it's not super hard to learn. The hard reality is, if you have N languages and speakers, to communicate without coordination either they have to each learn N-1 other languages or just 1 with O(1) coordination. The rest just happens naturally via network effects.

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

#310

Post by vorg »

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…

> it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats) [...] Maybe I interefered with some globalist agenda

This is the most likely reason, though they will disguise it by using people with other agendas against you as their useful idiot intermediaries.

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