English has been my pain for 15 years • Hacker News Board

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#111

Post by vacri » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:51 PM UTC

enimodas wrote: post #94

tragomaskhalos wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several major problems with theoretical English spelling reform: 1. A purely phonetic approach means that, even within the UK, I would spell everything differently from my colleagues from Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow etc etc. Not good. 2. English spelling tends to represent the "deep" structure of words rather than the ("shallow") representation - your "thesis - antithesis" is an excellent exa…

1. Every other language with such a system bases it on the "standard" pronunciation, for English this could be for example BBC English. As a result you'll sometimes have youths who will write the local dialect phonetically in IM chat, but they also know how to write (and speak) the standard way. 2. You're saying people should threat written English words like Chinese glyphs, masquerading as a non-glyph language, and…

3. It's not a gimmick. Shakespeare is but one example of culture; he's not the start and finish of it.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#112

Post by gbog » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:52 PM UTC

beloch wrote: post #36

English isn't just the language of IT, it's become the lingua franca of science and commerce. Very little research worth reading is published in a language other than English these days. I wouldn't be surprised if there are obscure, third-rate English-language scientific journals in China that have never been seen, let alone had articles submitted to by native English speakers! Over the years, I've worked with a lot…

No research in other languages than English? You crazy? Most research on Chinese art, history, literature is in Chinese. Same for French. I'd agree that some topics that are more detached from a given culture, like mathematics, are mostly English zone, but this is not the biggest part.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#113

Post by devgutt » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:53 PM UTC

besides, I feel that I'm wasting too much time. I know that is important, but still, it is just a tool. Not even a challenging one. It's just a boring tool to learn.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#114

Post by DanBC » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:56 PM UTC

sergiosgc wrote: post #100

kome wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instead of facing the problem The "problem" is to talk another language? Well, that's pretty imperialistic.

No, not really. I have the same opinion and I'm not a native English speaker. English has some good properties for a common language: - It has a simple grammar - It is spoken by the entertaining media - It already has a head start Now, if they could actually fix the major flaws: - Spelling is absurd. It's not just bad, it is absurd. - For foreigners, the UK accents are terrible. It took me a couple of days in London…

bend, send, spend, friend.

Rough - 'ruff'

Cough - 'coff'

Bough - 'bow'

Though - 'tho'

Through - 'throo'

hiccough - 'hiccup'

Bought - 'bawt'

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#115

Post by vacri » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:56 PM UTC

dsego wrote: post #16

nasmorn wrote: post #5

English is so horrible because it has no discernable orthography. My favorite example is anti thesis -> antithesis. I mean what the fuck, my mothertongue german is the king of combined nouns but this change of pronounciation on concatenation doesnt happen ever. Or phonetical difference based on grammtic use as in the verb read. Horrible. I think it should be handled like the Finns and Koreans did. Throw all the irreg…

Kompjuter (or kompjutor) is computer in Croatian :)

English doesn't really do the 'y' sound for j's except in clearly borrowed words. For 'native' words, it's generally 'dz', and only becomes 'h' or 'y' when adopting foreign words like jalapeno or fjord.

If you really want to standardise English spelling, then 'kompyuter', 'halapenyo', an 'fyored' would be the targets. The only problem is that when you start doing phonetic spelling (against a standard accent), you start to lose the semantic link between words - it's no longer clear which words share roots.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#116

Post by phrasemix » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:57 PM UTC

malandrew wrote: post #101

The number one rule I have taught to people who speak English as a second language is to always always always learn polysyllabic words, especially those with 3+ syllables, to learn them back to front and never from front to back, which is the natural way to approach learning long words. Instead of learning a word like onomatopeia like this: on... ono... onomat... onomato... onomatopei... onomatopeia Try saying it out…

This is a fantastic idea! Do you mind if I share that with my English students?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#117

Post by EdiX » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 2:59 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #81

Most of English's "problems" come from a sort of natural drift that all languages experience all the time. There's no way to freeze a language in its "most useful" form, because a billion different speakers are simultaneously pulling it in different directions. It either ends up as a sort of democratic consensus, or eventually fractures into mutually unintelligible dialects. 1. Shakespearean pronunciation: http://www…

Most of English's problems come from this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#118

Post by rsheridan6 » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 3:01 PM UTC

cliveowen wrote: post #35

Last time I expressed my thoughts[1] here about the same thing I was brutally word-raped by the angriest people on earth, now everyone is saying what I was saying all along and it's all well and good. You need to know English: put in the effort, watch a shitload of movies and read even more books. That's it, you can't just ignore it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6239371

You should have tried expressing your thoughts while being Paul Graham.

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#119

Post by sillysaurus2 » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 3:02 PM UTC

doomlaser wrote: post #30

The recent frenzy of accent related Hacker News posts seems to reinforce the opinion I saw in a thread discussing the pg controversy: "Dear Paul, It's not what you are, it's what you did. At least, I hope. I suspect this is all coming out of a desire to emphasize that communication is important when you're starting a company. It's never just about solving technical problems. Well, sure, that's true. But as Nitasha ha…

He's operating off of hard data. And the data shows that the top 100 startups don't have thick foreign accents. He gave them the chance to prove themselves, and they demonstrated it's important not to have a thick foreign accent. Isn't that the opposite of biased? Should he ignore the data? Keep it quiet and not give founders the opportunity to improve themselves?

Re: English has been my pain for 15 years

#120

Post by phrasemix » Mon, Sep 02, 2013, 3:03 PM UTC

decode wrote: post #51

hey guys, you are not understanding us, we are not understanding what you say as well, and it is hard to find people that, once your understanding limits are obvious, will try to slow down the peace of the conversation. Often even if I say I did not understood, I'll get the same sentence repeated the same at speed of light. This is an important point. There are a number of things that native speakers of English can d…

I go back and forth on this. As someone who's taught English as a second language for many years, I can't help but alter the way that I speak. It does help a lot with people whose listening skills are weak.

But I sometimes think it does a disservice to students or people that I spend a lot of time with (like my wife, who's not a native English speaker). Yes, they understand me. But am I then making it harder to understand "real" English speakers who aren't as careful with their pronunciation?