321–330 of 478 posts
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... 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 e…
According to which method of counting?
Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."
In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Vocabulary_size
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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.
It's a general property of natural language that speakers can produce ungrammatical sentences and yet be understood by other (perhaps more fluent) speakers. English isn't special that way.
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…
On the topic of English and speaking it better each day: the funny „upside down quotes” are an instant giveaway that you are German. It’s not really a correct typographic treatment of quotes in English (or almost any language except German, afaik).
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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 e…
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. According to which method of counting? Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lem…
Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.
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In Chinese, "Linux内核网络系统", literally "Linux Kernel Network System". Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language generally uses full meaning-to-meaning translations of technical terms as much as possible, and only occasionally uses phonetic nouns (e.g. 安卓 "Anzhuo" for Android) or English words (e.g. "Linux"). Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to s…
Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not -…
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.
There are many other words much harder to translate than these ones, like "backslash", "hash map", "pipeline", "placeholder", ...
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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 wide…
Hrmmmm.....
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Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. One of the most enjoyable things I used to find about travel was experiencing and dipping into other cultures and trying out a little local language picked up from phrase books etc. These days people seem to prefer practising their English on me as I'm a native English spea…
Google translate is really bad. Greek to English is terrible plainly. German to English the same -- was trying to prove a point about the meaning of a phrase and speed typed skipping umlaut. To this day I am not sure what the inference is to result in such a distant translation if you forget a single Umlaut. Every time I have to correct a friend's/family's work that used Google translate I facepalm. I suggest people…
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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?
The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words.
As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد" after all.