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

#451

Post by matz1 » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #446

chillacy wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 irregul…

'Why x is so damn hard' can be written for any other language. All language are equally complex. chinese writing might be hard but it makes up in other area.

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

#452

Post by jcranmer » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

tachyonbeam wrote: post #362

jcranmer wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Système de réseau de noyau Linux? Cache associatif de 8 sets? Those aren't severe linguistic contortions...

Your Google translation is no good. Sets is an English word, and it would be associative (feminine form). That being said, the reason I, as a French speaker working in tech/research, prefer to discuss tech in English, is because: 1. There is always new terminology being invented in conferences or bleeding edge R&D. There is no official translation for most of these terms. You could translate them, but most people wou…

I did not use Google translation. I went to the French Wikipedia articles, which used cache associatif.

But even if you want to quibble word choice, the fact remains that there's no severe linguistic contortion. Sure, French doesn't permit chaining nouns in the same way that English does. But the de chains are still permitted, and aren't much more wordy.

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

#453

Post by Zarel » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

matz1 wrote: post #451

Zarel wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 irregul…

'Why x is so damn hard' can be written for any other language. All language are equally complex. chinese writing might be hard but it makes up in other area.

You can't make such a strong claim as "all languages are equally complex" with zero evidence, especially if you're replying to a comment that gives plenty of evidence that Chinese is harder.

I will grant that Chinese is easy in some ways and hard in others. I'm saying that most differences in difficulty fade away, years into learning a language. The things that remain are disproportionately worse, for Chinese.

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

#454

Post by bunderbunder » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 2:55 PM UTC

pjscott wrote: post #340

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…

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 fluen…

Could it instead be that the language that people find pleasing changes over time, so that, as a modern reader, your tastes are naturally more attuned to modern writing?

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

#455

Post by jnurmine » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 2:57 PM 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.

Interesting with zwischenspeicher... In Finnish terminology "cache" is "välimuisti" which seems to be the same kind of word-construction.

I have wondered how people came up with translations to computer terminology. In retrospect, borrow from the German language, of course - as the saying goes, they have a word for everything!

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

#456

Post by bunderbunder » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 3:06 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #322

kaybe wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're citing information from two different studies that could very well have used different methods for counting lemmas. The text in between the two bits you quoted illustrates the extent to which this is the case: Alongside your study of 20-year-olds finding that they recognize ~42,000 lemmas, there's an earlier study of people about the same age finding that they recognize between 12,000 and 17,000.

The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.

Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.

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

#457

Post by owenversteeg » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 4:05 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #258

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 One language, of somewhat good literature.

Do you not think there is any English literature at all better than "somewhat good"?

What language do you think does?

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

#458

Post by _emacsomancer_ » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 4:34 PM UTC

Zarel wrote: post #442

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.]

That just means in modern English vowel length isn't distinctive, but it is in Japanese. English on the other hand has a distinction between /r/ and /l/ that Japanese doesn't ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_... ).

In other languages (like Tamil), voicing distinctions in stops aren't phonemic (so 'log' and 'lock' would be non-distinct). And so on.

If as a non-native English speaker you produced 'rog' when your intended meaning was "lock", people would stare at you in confusion too.

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

#459

Post by dang » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 4:48 PM UTC

vorg wrote: post #310

gabordemooij wrote: post #98

Citrine ( https://citrine-lang.org/ I am the author) tried to change this with respect to coding (it is a programming language that allows everyone to code in their own language and translate between parties). However, it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats). So it has failed and I realize that (I continue to finish it until 0.9 though, because I cant stop in the middle - I am a very neurotic pe…

> it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats) [...] Maybe I interefered with some globalist agenda This is the most likely reason, though they will disguise it by using people with other agendas against you as their useful idiot intermediaries.

Please don't post ideological battle comments to HN.

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

#460

Post by fooker » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 5:14 PM UTC

dorchadas wrote: post #447

fooker wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I never mentioned anything about 'good' or 'judge'.

My point was about breadth, which is factual to the best of my knowledge.