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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

#441

Post by blattimwind »

zerb wrote: post #440
olavk wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is just a question of orthography. In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word. In English, they are usually (but not always) written with space. So "Christmas tree" is "Weinachtsbaum". This is sometimes made out to be much more mysterious than it is, as if German is more "composable" or something, but the only difference is the typographical space. English is just more difficult to spell…

It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between. There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly mean…

> "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night)

Weihnachten comes from weih/geweiht meaning hol{y,ied} night.

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

#442

Post by Zarel »

_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.

I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English.

Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.

Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents.

Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down).

It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.

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

#443

Post by PoachedSausage »

lawlorino wrote: post #426
gabordemooij wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm Dutch. Our language has been affected deeply by English. People even make a lot of spelling mistakes because of English. For instance, our government building has a spelling mistake in the sign of their main building, it reads: 'Hoofd Gebouw' but this is wrong in Dutch, because it must be 'Hoofdgebouw' (without the space, but in English you write it as 2 words instead of one). People don't know a lot of Dutch…

> A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language). As a native English speaker living in NL I'm really curious about this, could you describe a situation? The few Dutch people I work with have out…

Another native English person here, so usual disclaimers. I have visited and traveled extensively from an early age around the southern Netherlands (Noord-Brabant) due to my parents meeting and befriending a Dutch couple whilst traveling there before I was born.

I have found levels of English there to also be excellent, one possible reason could be that English language television and radio broadcasts (BBC etc) have been available to the Dutch for decades, and in a lot of cases actively consumed. That was certainly the case when I was there as a child.

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

#444

Post by zerb »

blattimwind wrote: post #441
zerb wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between. There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly mean…

> "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) Weihnachten comes from weih/geweiht meaning hol{y,ied} night.

Ah, thanks.

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

#445

Post by zerb »

dredmorbius wrote: post #417
matt-snider wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really interesting reading up on etymologies like that - thanks for the link! This is what I meant about the meaning being obscured too much, so it has to be simply memorized as one chunk.

I ... can spend a lot of time at Etym Online. Some fun finds: vodka, pollution, pen, fiction, dough.

What do you think of Wiktionary? That's been my go-to for a long time.

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

#446

Post by Zarel »

chillacy wrote: post #376
matz1 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.effectiv…

The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, because of how kanji/hanzi work.

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160...

(English is, in turn, harder than languages such as Spanish because of its spelling weirdnesses.)

The early weirdnesses stop mattering pretty quickly. Stuff like irregular verbs, you just get used to. The things that make languages hard are things that still trip you up years into learning the language.

In English, that'd be spelling. We have spelling bees! For a lot of languages, the idea of a spelling bee is unthinkable, because spelling is just not a problem. But in English, we have spellcheck on computers, we have native speakers constantly correcting each others' spelling.

In Chinese, that'd be reading/writing characters. At least in English, if you forget how to spell a word, you can just spell it out phonetically. In Chinese, there are thousands of characters, and if you forget how to write one, you're screwed. In a famous essay, someone forgot how to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and asked his friends at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, and none of his friends could remember, either (we're talking native Chinese speakers in the PhD program for Chinese).

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

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

#447

Post by dorchadas »

fooker wrote: post #402
grey-area wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Please name 10 popular high fantasy novels spanning multi thousand pages in French and Russian.

So, basically, if they don't have the breadth of literary genres that English does, they're not as good. That's a horrible metric to judge literature and literary value by.

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

#448

Post by krylon »

geff82 wrote: post #410
krylon wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot think of a a good example right now, but as a native German speaker, I do sometimes find myself wondering how to express a certain thought in German. English grammar feels more flexible to me than German, and English seems to be more suited for colorful idioms.

Fellow German here. From a grammatical standpoint German is a really flexible language while English isn‘t. I only recently found out about it during my Latin studies (selftaught) and comparing Latin to German and English. The problem with expressing a thought in German might be a side effect of the ubiquity of English in so many fields: we are just used to think in English terms that it becomes a second nature.

English has so many idioms that are nearly impossible to translate elegantly. "go to town on somebody", for example; a good part of learning English is not just learning grammar and vocabulary (although those are necessary), but learning all these idioms (which is kind of an open-ended process).

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

#449

Post by sjwright »

School-Cotton wrote: post #337
sjwright wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn’t say it was specific to English.

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

#450

Post by dorchadas »

zerb wrote: post #289
MereInterest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the most part, yes. Though, if you flip the word order, it immediately sounds off. "Were I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds reasonable. "Was I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds rather jarring.

It seems there's a general trend in the development of English to remove tenses and moods in favor of instead more-strictly prescribing word order. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

Yep, and in a lot of other Indo-European languages as well. However, it's not a constant trend across languages as Finnish and Estonian both have more cases than their ancestor language did. It's likely that English will circle back around and start becoming less analytic as time goes on due to various things such as grammaticalization.
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