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

331–340 of 478 posts

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

#331

Post by spraak »

saget wrote: post #157
Koshkin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many languages have these sub-languages "baked in"?

I don't know about all languages but Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin all have many formal and informal conjugations of words

Tibetan is very interesting in this way. Standard/Lhasa Tibetan has itself many registers, and then there is Classic Tibetan, Literary Tibetan, and I forget the proper term but there are also secret/esoteric forms specific to e.g. certain Buddhist and Bön teachings

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

#332

Post by brendyn »

Pissompons wrote: post #242
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 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.

There are some 7000 languages i the world, and maybe half of those even have a writing system at all, let alone libraries full of literature.

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

#333

Post by 628C6l0 »

khuey wrote: post #326
628C6l0 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

The vast majority of country names in Chinese do not contain 国 but are rather purely phonetic transcriptions. Only a handful of countries have 国 in the common name.

That's true, but I think the full name usually has, just as the full names of Beijing Shanghai Tianjin etc contain 市 even though the short names doesn't.

And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.

Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …

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

#334

Post by pjscott »

brendyn wrote: post #332
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.

There are some 7000 languages i the world, and maybe half of those even have a writing system at all, let alone libraries full of literature.

There are a few heavy-hitters, though. I'd expect China, for example, to have written some great literature over the years.

(Epistemic status: I don't actually know anything about Chinese literature, and I welcome correction on this point.)

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

#335

Post by eftychis »

yorwba wrote: post #329
eftychis wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Native German speakers do not usually forget umlauts (since they are separate keys) and so Google translate won't have the necessary training data to robustly handle German without umlauts. The output appears as gibberish because the language model can't distinguish the input from gibberish. That becomes more obvious if you intentionally input nonsense: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120

True. However, I claim Google translate is a lot of times used by non-conversant level German speakers, who don't have the right layout. I would expect Google translate to be trained somewhat adversarially. Example:

"Ich werde Bücher lesen" translates just fine. If we skip the Umlaut Google translate "forgets" the meaning of books. If we change the tense to present everything translates just fine.

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

#336

Post by School-Cotton »

Pissompons wrote: post #250
bunderbunder wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> What distinguishes the global English style? I'd say that it's basically just the lowest common denominator of English. Imagine an English where any accent is acceptable as long as you're consistent and any regional vocabulary is okay so long as it's well known (e.g. either "torch" or "flashlight" is okay, "soda" is okay but "pop" is not). You then have "global" English.

I’m American and I certainly don’t think “torch” to mean flashlight is well-known. The overwhelming majority of people in the US would not understand it.

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

#337

Post by School-Cotton »

sjwright wrote: post #299
l9k wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there is such thing as Euro-English, but a French-English, Spanish-English, Dutch-English, because every non-native speaker will make grammar/vocab/pronunciation mistakes depending on his/her primary language.

But the brilliant thing of the English is she has excellent at withstand error. Close enough is often good enough.

What makes you think this property is specific to English?

You can speak broken French too and a person from France will still understand you.

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

#338

Post by lunaru »

pjscott wrote: post #334
brendyn wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some 7000 languages i the world, and maybe half of those even have a writing system at all, let alone libraries full of literature.

There are a few heavy-hitters, though. I'd expect China, for example, to have written some great literature over the years. (Epistemic status: I don't actually know anything about Chinese literature, and I welcome correction on this point.)

Most discussions regarding Chinese literature would start with the big four (novels): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels

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

#339

Post by School-Cotton »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #25
opportune wrote: post #17

The best point that the article touches on is that English is a good "neutral" language for countries like Sudan and entities like the EU with many different languages spoken. There is a bit of a snowball effect where any language having the advantage of being spoken as a cross-cultural communication language further incentivizes learning that language for people wishing to communicate in that manner. I think such a…

Computers will translate in real time. Binary is the universal language of classic computers based on electromagnetic physics. Assuming quantum computing or some other unforeseen technology doesn’t replace other forms of computing then we will likely all be relying on binary in one way or another.

“Binary” isn’t a language. It’s not clear at all what you mean.

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

#340

Post by pjscott »

andrepd wrote: post #314
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.

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…

The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-)

I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?

(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)

Post reply on HN