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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

#311

Post by toufka »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #303
toufka wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken.

"I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.

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

#312

Post by geomark »

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…

In my mind, global English style = how they speak English on the nightly news.

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

#313

Post by zerb »

toufka wrote: post #311
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken. "I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.

But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.

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

#314

Post by andrepd »

geff82 wrote: post #268
Pissompons wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is the language of great literature The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.

I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.

I don't mean to be rude, but how many other languages do you speak? There's an almost ineffable depth to nearly every language on this earth, and there are hundreds of them with very large literature corpuses. Naturally, maybe speaking two languages, you are familiar only with literature in those languages. Also, remember that English, being spoken by so many people, its literature is naturally more divulged and widely known. Nonetheless there are truly unique characteristics to almost any language, so much that you could fill a lifetime of study in any one of them.

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

#315

Post by matt-snider »

zerb wrote: post #270
blattimwind wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netzwerksubsystem des Linux-Systemkerns achtfach assoziativer Zwischenspeicher This is of course cheating since these two languages are fairly close to each other (although Technical German tends to be more descriptive and somewhat more accurate than Technical English on average, at least that's my overall impression across a bunch of fields). Both also happen to have a full complement of technical and engineering te…

"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding. As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.

German just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like:

- Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization - Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending - Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten" - Neugier = curiousity: "new" + "greed"

I do wonder if this "composibility" is actually the norm for languages and English is just the odd one out. Having a large vocabulary from other languages (e.g. Latin) obscures the meaning of some word roots (e.g. particula - pars + diminutive, just like in German) so you have to just memorize it as one chunk. So perhaps the benefit of other languages like German is just their purity/consistency.

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

#316

Post by andrepd »

tbrock wrote: post #116
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’s also the lingua franca of tech. There isn’t any way to say “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” or “8-Way associative cache” in French or any other language without severe lingual contortions.

"Subsistema de rede do kernel do Linux"

"Cache associativa (8-way)" or "Cache associativa por 8 vias"

See, not so difficult. :^) It's just that, for standardization's sake, it's best to just communicate in English.

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

#317

Post by kaybe »

wozniacki wrote: post #294
geff82 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.

... written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader. Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner? How about other non-English language authors? Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various language…

I have the impression that basic German is quite technical. You can be poetic, even very poetic, but it is not easy. You can, however, easily describe the relation of one thing to another in detail.

English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..

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

#318

Post by andrepd »

felipemnoa wrote: post #283
enriquto wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use "fin de semaine" and people understands it perfectly.

Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages. P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation…

For Portuguese at least it's most likely translating word-for-word. The term is "fim-de-semana" ("fim" rather than "final", and hyphens signifying a compound word)

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

#319

Post by zerb »

matt-snider wrote: post #315
zerb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding. As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.

German just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like: - Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization - Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending - Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten"…

I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious.

Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".

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

#320

Post by zerb »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #302
zerb wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.
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