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

#461

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

zerb wrote: post #445

dredmorbius wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Strictly on a UI/UX basis, it beats most other online dictionaries for not being annoying A.F.

I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.

I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.

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

#462

Post by gcb0 » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 6:20 PM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #367

gcb0 wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that too. until I had to talk in english full time and realized how much was transliterated informally in conversations and how those terms were corrupted into the national language. what you call lingual contortion only seem odd (to me and you since you also mentioned a romance language) because romance languages were the trend setters at some point and now have very refined processes to change the languag…

"roman dominion over the channel" Do you mean how the Normans conquered and ruled England after the invasion of 1066? Lots of foreign words come into a language when your rulers speak another language. Often the conquered populations are completely converted to the ruling people language.

yep. thats what I mean.

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

#463

Post by chillacy » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:27 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…

A good case but I'm looking for something more objective, like actual studies counting the hours. Moser is a famous text that gets posted on HN a lot but this is basically the most critical text there is, and it gets to the point where he's unfair and contrived, since it's written to be comical as opposed to accurate.

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

#464

Post by lcall » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:34 PM UTC

I'm a native English speaker who learned Spanish, and some Russian & Esperanto.

I'm thinking about Esperanto. Perhaps most relevant to this discussion is its benefit of being by far the cheapest workable global route to everyone being able to talk to and understand each other, even if haltingly. For some people, learning English is simply too hard. For the rest, it's still a very big effort, and Esperanto is extremely easy by comparison. In terms of global cost/benefit, Esperanto seems like a big win. (And it's fun.)

Further, I have started thinking that Esperanto should be everyone's 2nd language, simply because it's so easy to learn yet seems ~"complete", and more importantly, has been shown to make learning other languages easier to the point that overall you learn, say, more French (or probably English) if you learn Esperanto first, than if one spent the entire time studying French. So learn whatever you would have learned as a 2nd language, for the 3rd, and you saved time and got farther, overall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acqui... [wikipedia.org]). And it seems to me the easiest way for someone to better understand the grammar of their own native language, by seeing a simple & clean example. (Some in one forum I saw dismissed the studies, but when I read the dismissals it seemed a case of believing what you want, with the studies being more persuasive to me as they put much more work into it, but I would be interested in more info.)

(I don't think most users see it as a replacement for a first (or native) language, though that has been done intentionally by some (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Esperanto_speakers [wikipedia.org], or search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto for "native").

(There are other interesting constructed languages each with their pros & cons, but none with nearly the same amount of traction or interest as Esperanto. It's interesting to consider, given all that has been learned in the field so far, how to "optimize" a constructed human language, considering various factors like ease, familiarity, beauty, efficiency, computability, or whatever one sees as most important. ... )

Claude Piron made an interesting/enjoyable video, I think in different languages, showing some benefits of Esperanto. Here is the one in English:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU

(edit/ps: I hope to use Esperanto when my personal organizer gets the ability to use multiple languages for the same "knowledge". AGPL: http://onemodel.org .) (pps: had i noticed the "more" button I would have realized others in the discussion already wrote about this.)

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

#465

Post by NihilumExNil » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 7:51 PM UTC

bhelkey wrote: post #129

NihilumExNil wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not only that but it comes with access to learning material built in. Still though, English is probably not the majority spoken language, much less absolute majority, even on the net, especially if proficiency is a factor.

English is used by 52.9% of the top 10 million websites [1]. This doesn't factor in proficiency but I don't see why that should be included. [1] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/a...

The linked page notes that the Alexa provided stats might be considered inaccurate.

Either way, it has youtube.com on place 2. If that is counted as English, which I simply suppose were the case, "English is used by ..." is highly misleading in this context. Surely they don't analyze the video contents, maybe comments as proxy, never the less for music and the like the language doesn't even matter. Proficiency is a factor because a play button is neither English nor Japanese.

Please see https://w3techs.com/technologies/cross/content_language/char...

They compare UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (that's Latin-1) and a Cyrillic encoding. That's it. They simply don't analyze the Chinese market. Which is not surprising because Alexa is after all into advertising and focused on a target group. They include baidu, but probably only for comparison. I can't explain the mismatch any other way, that is the mismatch of English 50% compared to .de, .cz, .jp, .ru etc. each only ca. 2%. .de on second place ... wut?

English speakers are highly biased to rest on the assumption, because it's comforting. I can't even blame anyone for that. It's a shit language, but the comfort is the language has the grammar that is an easy learning.

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

#466

Post by ivm » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

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…

> expressive

It always feels constraining for me when I want to convey an emotion. For example, in English one would say "soft kitty" but in Russian you have at least 10 options: мягкая (simple "soft"), мягонькая (diminutive "soft") + кошечка, киса, кисонька, кисуля, кисулечка. Depending on the choice, you can sound tender or childish or like an old lady.

It's definitely not an exhaustive list of how you can call a cat, there are also funny augmentative options for male cats: кошак, котище, котяра, котофей. Spanish also feels amazing because of its extensive use of diminutives and augmentatives. But yes, English is the best language for technical or business purposes because it's so concise.

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

#467

Post by andriesm » Sat, Jul 28, 2018, 10:48 PM UTC

greenhatman wrote: post #246

lgessler wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangential: it's worth noting that this is a historical circumstance rather than something that has to do with French in itself. When a new domain arises that a language didn't previously have words for, like computing, "home-grown" (as opposed to borrowed) words can be more or less successful. Take the French Academy for example, whose attempts at purging French of English loanwords[1] has had mixed success. (And se…

We learned a lot of Afrikaans tech words in computer science in high school in South Africa. It's pretty useless for me. I've never used any of it since, and have forgotten most of it.

Fellow Afrikaansie here. There were some very novel Afrikaans words for computer terminology in that school computer science handbook... However none of it seems to be that useful or much used at all, and English accesses the latest tech and many major western tech hubs.

I suspect this is the case for my languages, especially those spoken in very few countries or by smallish population groups, especially when the language speaking group is not Geographically close to other populations of a grammatically closely related language.

I am busy studying Georgian because I am relocating to the eastern European country. However I remain doubtful that Georgian will be that useful for technical computer stuff, because it has only around 4 million speakers and is linguistically close to almost no other widely spoken language.

I will find out soon, as my language skills and experience with the place collide.

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

#468

Post by remram » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 1:57 AM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #452

tachyonbeam wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"sets" is the English word you used

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

#469

Post by wallflower » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 3:18 AM UTC

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #297

enriquto wrote: post #284

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 Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese? On the other hand, I have known lots of Spanish and Chinese people who are utterly incapable of saying just a single E…

>Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese? I think they are referring to the Chinese writing system being very loosely coupled to the pronunciation (in contrast to languages like Spanish or Korean).

Yes, I was referring to the writing system. It appears that the correct term to be used is "logosyllabic", not "symbolic".

> Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

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

#470

Post by LetUnityBlossom » Sun, Jul 29, 2018, 7:58 AM UTC

kzrdude wrote: post #166

colanderman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the idea behind Esperanto, the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second, to avoid privileging native speakers and promulgating hegemony. (Granted, Esperanto vocabulary and orthography is quite Euro-centric.) Learning a second language is difficult, especially one very unlike your native tongue. Native speakers of the de facto lingua franca always have…

English is actually fulfilling the original goal of Esperanto: > Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding. We should be amazed at the global convergence on a language, even if it's not Esperanto, and it can accomplish all the same things.

Yes, English becomes Esperanto.