Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by ggreer » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 5:59 AM UTC

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

In the paper you link to, the information rate of English is about 10% higher than Spanish. That may not seem like much, but it's probably enough to matter.

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

#372

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

lgessler wrote: post #351

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.

Does a work need to be written to have literary merit?

Writing lends persistence and faithfulness to the original.

Oral traditions tend to be divergent and mutable.

Even such changes as the introduction of the printing press, and cheap paper, had profound impacts:

• Copies were now letter-for-letter identical.

• Reproduction costs fell by 2-6 orders of magnitude.

• Translation to the vernacular became viable. It was cheaper to bring the book to the reader (translation) than the reader to the book (learning Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, etc.).

• Literacy grew -- from 5-10% in 1500 or so to 95%+ by 1900.

Of course, the number of published works grew, as did the literary canon, to the point it's a largely meaningless term (or has been subsumed by pop culture).

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

#373

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:08 AM UTC

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"…

The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:

c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/syntax

(One of my favourite wwebsites.)

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

#374

Post by grey-area » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:08 AM UTC

fooker wrote: post #345

andrepd wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I speak 4 languages and have read literature for 3. The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, thrillers).

Russian and French 19c literature are the two obvious counter-examples. I admire the attempt to reframe the question in terms that allow you to claim English is pre-eminent though.

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

#375

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:13 AM UTC

dzhshnacct wrote: post #365

tbrock wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

actually even the english way is quite cumbersome languages like sanskrit and chinese which have built in word generators and preserved root meanings are much better and able to stand independently not surprisingly indians and chinese have been better able to resist westernization imo chinese is a very tech friendly language and has a good shot at becoming the lingua franca of tech in the near future currently the ch…

The handicap for Chinese and Asian languages is charactersets and input. A finite phonetic alphabet is a tremendous technical advantage when keyboarding, and alternatives really haven't proved superior.

(I'm entering this via soft-keyboard and stylus, painfully, with many typos. The fact that the interface could be trivially modified, but hasn't and isn't, and yet remains so deficient, doesn't speak well to prospects here.)

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

#376

Post by chillacy » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:24 AM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #249

wallflower wrote: post #63

In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1]. China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2]. It can be a…

>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2]. Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn. Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is m…

> I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.

I've always wanted to know if this is true or not, but I've never found a good answer. I know the FSI rates Chinese at roughly 2000 hours of instruction to their definition of fluency (compared to 500 for other european languages like french or german), but I haven't found a similar comparison for chinese speakers.

Link: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...

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

#377

Post by dzhshnacct » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:27 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #375

dzhshnacct wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actually even the english way is quite cumbersome languages like sanskrit and chinese which have built in word generators and preserved root meanings are much better and able to stand independently not surprisingly indians and chinese have been better able to resist westernization imo chinese is a very tech friendly language and has a good shot at becoming the lingua franca of tech in the near future currently the ch…

The handicap for Chinese and Asian languages is charactersets and input. A finite phonetic alphabet is a tremendous technical advantage when keyboarding, and alternatives really haven't proved superior. (I'm entering this via soft-keyboard and stylus, painfully, with many typos. The fact that the interface could be trivially modified, but hasn't and isn't, and yet remains so deficient, doesn't speak well to prospects…

hey thats one of the things i've worked on

see my first submission a few days ago on zh android ime with devanagari

with zhuyin and alternatives chinese input is not a problem and this is going to even be less of a problem with voice input in future

in fact the input problem only tightened the link chinese have to tech via their phones

but pinyin needs to go away or chinese will lose their culture in the long term latinization is going to lead to christianization

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

#378

Post by perfunctory » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:38 AM UTC

> An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better

Sigh

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

#379

Post by emmelaich » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:45 AM UTC

nneonneo wrote: post #179

acchow wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

I recently learnt the Chinese name for San Francisco: Old Gold Mountain. From the gold rush days.

Similarly, New Gold Mountain is Melbourne Australia near where the Australian gold rush started soon after.

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

#380

Post by blattimwind » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:49 AM UTC

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.

> I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.

Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficult (for humans, not so much).