Your language sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Your language sucks

#101

Post by ddod » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

ethanpoole wrote: post #57

ddod wrote: post #37

This article is interesting in that, while it's not the intention of the writer, it seems to point out some technical underpinnings for how language might impact culture. If a computer's handling of a language can vary so drastically, imagine how the human brain must deal with expressing or receiving complex thoughts through these. I recall reading some discussion of this concept in the field of International Relatio…

> If a computer's handling of a language can vary so drastically, imagine how the human brain must deal with expressing or receiving complex thoughts through these. Orthography and language are not the same thing. Having a complex orthography has no bearing on processing complexity. If a language has a complex orthography, it may be hard to read and write, which are learned skills, but it won't be hard to speak and l…

That assumes that each of these properties exist in a vacuum, which is surely not the case. There's an obvious interaction between written and spoken language, and even without that, hundreds or thousands of years of differences in the written interactions and data transferred through reading within a culture could have immense impact on collective experiences and ways of thinking.

Re: Your language sucks

#102

Post by asveikau » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:30 PM UTC

> Russian has a very simple alphabet, strictly phonetic.

I don't speak Russian but I know enough to say it's not "strictly" phonetic in that there is not always a 1 to 1 mapping of letters to phonemes. For example as an outsider looking at the language I get confused at things like the "г" in "его" being pronounced as a "v" and not "g".

In terms of phonetic writing, I personally really like Spanish. Its writing seems the most phonetic amongst languages I have exposure to. (Admittedly limited). With the accent marks you can know the stress of every word even if it's one you haven't seen. You can adjust for regional accents based on spelling ("s" and "z", "ll" and "y" kept distinct even if a lot of speakers say them identically.) There are quirky rules about how a consonant sounds if some vowels come after it but at least it's consistent.

Re: Your language sucks

#103

Post by Argorak » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:32 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #54

packetized wrote: post #4

The points made may be salient, but the tone is so condescending as to be nearly unreadable without getting angry. A large number of his points around languages that are radically different from English could be summed up as: "Your language sucks to deal with in computing because your native country didn't develop computing machinery first." This fairly reeks of tone-deafness.

Who cares about tone? Why be sensitive in this context? It's a language. Why would anyone get offended when someone says "Your language sucks"? It's not like they're saying your hair sucks or your tongue is incapable of tasting sweets or your ear is shaped like a tulip. It's a language . No one can help what language they learned when they were a child. It wasn't up to them. Of course some of them are going to suck o…

> Who cares about tone?

Leaving aside the idea that you are the one to decide what others should be sensitive on: Because it makes the signal-to-noise ratio of this blog post _crap_. I'm not sure if particular things are a serious grief or just a bewildered look at new things. I'm not sure of the intention. Should it educate or just rant? It's unclear and wastes a lot of time on things that don't add anything.

Re: Your language sucks

#104

Post by clairity » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:40 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #77

clairity wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the blocks-as-syllables concept in hangul makes lots of sense. that, and the straightforward mapping of letters to the english alphabet, made it fairly easy to learn how to read korean. understanding what you're reading is a completely different matter however.

The funky part being that the blocks aren't just syllables, the boundaries between blocks often correspond to the boundaries between morphemes, because of how the phonotactics of the language have evolved and Hangul was designed to fit them. To use English as an example, the word "cats" contains two morphemes, the stem "cat" and the plural suffix "s". In Korean+Hangul, this sort of combination tends to split neatly i…

interesting. i knew about the letters shapes resembling tongue/mouth positions but not that blocks represented morphemes, not just syllables.

Re: Your language sucks

#105

Post by sho_hn » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:41 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #74

eric_bullington wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first I thought you were being sarcastic, but then I realized you are actually arguing that only overly-sensitive people are offended when their language is insulted. Since language is a core component of human culture, many people become offended when their language is insulted or threatened. Countries have gone to war over language. Provinces succeed over language. Language is a very, very sensitive topic in man…

That's very interesting. Thank you. Which cultures have gone to war over language? I'd like to educate myself on their history, and try to understand how something like language was one of the primary reasons for something as serious as a war.

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is a journey through human history as seen through a lense of expanding, contracting and competing languages spheres. Well worth a read.

Re: Your language sucks

#106

Post by kevin_thibedeau » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:43 PM UTC

efesak wrote: post #100

lomnakkus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't want a writing system which is too tied to pronunciation. If you go too far in that direction you'll end up with people with different dialects of the same language not being able to communicate clearly, even in writing! That would be a very undesirable state of affairs. Yet you still want some correlation between spelling and pronunciation, otherwise the writing system essentially becomes completely…

I am from country with strongly phonetical language and you are just plainly wrong. There are minor dialects but it is considered rather as slang in compare to language taught in schools or comunicate with officials or even broader audience. (On the other side, it is much more difficult for us to learn English and get used to that disconection between alphabet and said words. And we don't have spelling competitions :…

The GP isn't wrong. Consider all of the mutually unintelligible Chinese dialects that use the exact same script.

Re: Your language sucks

#107

Post by sillysaurus3 » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:53 PM UTC

sho_hn wrote: post #105

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very interesting. Thank you. Which cultures have gone to war over language? I'd like to educate myself on their history, and try to understand how something like language was one of the primary reasons for something as serious as a war.

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World is a journey through human history as seen through a lense of expanding, contracting and competing languages spheres. Well worth a read.

Thanks so much!

Re: Your language sucks

#108

Post by sho_hn » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:55 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #104

sho_hn wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funky part being that the blocks aren't just syllables, the boundaries between blocks often correspond to the boundaries between morphemes, because of how the phonotactics of the language have evolved and Hangul was designed to fit them. To use English as an example, the word "cats" contains two morphemes, the stem "cat" and the plural suffix "s". In Korean+Hangul, this sort of combination tends to split neatly i…

interesting. i knew about the letters shapes resembling tongue/mouth positions but not that blocks represented morphemes, not just syllables.

This is partly because while Korean and Chinese are distinct languages, a large part of the Korean vocabulary consists of imported Chinese stems, and Chinese is heavily monosyllabic. As such, a lot of Hangul blocks are close homophones to the sound values of Han characters.

Re: Your language sucks

#109

Post by fractalb » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 4:58 PM UTC

so, if someone has to develop a text(English)-->voice, or voice-->text(English) application, how many special cases would the developer have to handle?

Re: Your language sucks

#110

Post by lomnakkus » Sat, Oct 18, 2014, 5:09 PM UTC

efesak wrote: post #100

lomnakkus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really don't want a writing system which is too tied to pronunciation. If you go too far in that direction you'll end up with people with different dialects of the same language not being able to communicate clearly, even in writing! That would be a very undesirable state of affairs. Yet you still want some correlation between spelling and pronunciation, otherwise the writing system essentially becomes completely…

I am from country with strongly phonetical language and you are just plainly wrong. There are minor dialects but it is considered rather as slang in compare to language taught in schools or comunicate with officials or even broader audience. (On the other side, it is much more difficult for us to learn English and get used to that disconection between alphabet and said words. And we don't have spelling competitions :…

I am not wrong. My native country did this experiment about 200-300 years ago -- it failed badly, and that was with a very small population which was (geographically) widely distributed.

Trying to read (as schoolchildren) a few samples of text written in different dialects during that time dispelled any notion that it was a good idea.

Also: China (as another poster pointed out).

EDIT: Btw, if you have a good grasp of English accents, it's pretty easy to see what kind of chaos would occur in a country as small as England. (Thinking of the "north south divide" thing.)