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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

#471

Post by LetUnityBlossom »

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.

English becomes Esperanto https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2016/04/23/english-...

What Belgium’s World Cup team says about the spread of English across Europe https://qz.com/1319430/belgium-world-cup-2018-what-belgiums-...

As Britain leaves, English on rise in EU — to French horror https://www.politico.eu/article/french-english-language-brex...

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

#472

Post by blattimwind »

jnurmine wrote: post #455
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.

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!

It just occurred to me that there are two very different kinds of caches which aren't really distinguished by terms:

- Cache, as in processor cache: total access mediation, i.e. all operations go through the cache. Cache bypass might be possible but rare in practice.

- Cache, as in application cache (e.g. redis/memcached/@lru_cache): thing were you put some result to recall later conditionally. Exactly the opposite of total access mediation: application needs to explicitly use cache.

The first one I'd call Zwischenspeicher. The second I'd call Ergebnisabrufspeicher.

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

#473

Post by fooker »

simias wrote: post #416
fooker wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

The genres you list are very popular in the English world. It's fine of course but to use that to argue for a supremacy of English language literature doesn't strike me as a very solid argument. It would be like saying that Comics are superior to Bandes Dessinees because you enjoy super heroes a lot. Or that American cuisine is the best because you love hamburgers, tex mex and slow cooked meat. Nothing wrong with tha…

I am not arguing for the supremacy of English literature, just the volume and breadth of those genres, which you apparently agree with.

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

#474

Post by grey-area »

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.

QED

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

#475

Post by alach11 »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #323
toufka wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken. "I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.

The first three are grammatical, not so much the last three. I agree most speakers of English (native or otherwise) could figure out what someone saying the last three intends. But you're saying that this is a special fact about English. That if I attempt to speak in 'broken Spanish' or 'broken Japanese' and produce the equivalent of 'me want food' in Spanish or Japanese, that Spanish and Japanese speaker would just…

I can't comment on Japanese, but broken Spanish can be confusing (to me) due to verb conjugations. Conjugations are also a major sticking point for new learners of the language since they have a big impact on meaning but can be hard to remember.

For example, changing a single letter in "quiero" ("I want") can have a big impact on its meaning by becoming "quiere" ("He/she wants") and "quieres" ("you want").

See this page for the 142 possible conjugations of the verb querer: http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/querer

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

#476

Post by School-Cotton »

lloda wrote: post #92
RightMillennial wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English does have double negatives, and they're grammatically correct when used properly. They simply cancel each other out which differs from Spanish where they add emphasis.

Spanish double negatives aren't emphatic, they're 'grammatical'. If you need one ('Nadie lo sabe') you cannot add another one for emphasis, and if you need two ('No lo sabe nadie') you cannot remove one for less emphasis.

Out of curiosity, can you explain the difference in meaning between those two sentences?

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

#477

Post by gabordemooij »

dang wrote: post #459
vorg wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Unless they are left of course. /cynismoff

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

#478

Post by JdeBP »

remram wrote: post #468
jcranmer wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sets#French

As others hinted.

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