This is non technical point but english is broken on other level. As Finnish person I find it ridiculous when people have long discussions about how to pronounce something. Shouldn't it be immediately clear for everyone how something is written or pronounced. Those thing should be 100% directly exchangeable. If I just make up a word and say it Finnish people can write or read the word without any problems. Also all kind of exceptions to generic simple rules should be dropped, just to simplify grammar.
Your language sucks
111–120 of 133 posts
Re: Your language sucks
#112> 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…
I speak Russian and Spanish, and was about to write the same thing. Russian is indeed not strictly phonetic, thought it has a phonemic orthography to a degree. Aside from 'v'/'g' sound, there are bigger problems with vowels reduction when non-stressed 'o' most of the time sounds as 'a', omitting 'ё' and so on. After struggling with English and Russian, Spanish is indeed a delight to read/write. Though obligatory accents make writing a bit cumbersome.
Re: Your language sucks
#113The 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.
Firstly, the problems he raises would be hard even if the native speakers of a given language were the first to develop computers. In fact I read a fascinating argument (from a link on HN?.. I forget) about Japanese computers developing into "appliances" (a gaming machine and a separate more expensive word processing machine for professionals) because early computers were too under-powered to support the Japanese cha…
In the context of some other language being the origin of computing, and since the OP mentions Russian as fairly easy to work with... What if this had been Russian everywhere instead of English? If all of the terminology, POSIX, C and other language keywords had all been Russian, with the rest of the world (including English speakers) instead learning Russian as lingua franca? (Yes, deviating substantially from history for this) Would the outcome be roughly the same? Would it avoid those pitfalls of Japanese? Would it be mildly more / less convenient?
Re: Your language sucks
#114The 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.
Interesting thought: It's possible that computers would inevitably be invented in the US/UK/Russia or some other country with a relative simple character set, because the doing something like Chinese, first would posse a hindrance. If you need 32bit to do Chinese, just to store the characters then your first step into computing is going to be harder, compared to the American that can do with 8bit.
8 bits is too much for what was used historically. Morse code had 1-5 "bits" (effectively having the compression built-in). Baudot code was 5 bits, invented by a French engineer in France in 1870, inspired by other non-English-speaking Europeans.
Re: Your language sucks
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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…
He's not arguing about language though, but writing systems specifically. If someone would say the English writing system sucks, and gave specific reasons why, I would probably agree with them. Spellings are absurd, we have unnecessary letters, case makes no sense, etc.
But I can't get being offended even if criticizing the language itself. English certainly has a lot of strange and arbitrary rules. What is with "be", "are", "am" for example? Why should languages be above criticism?
Re: Your language sucks
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is someone who is trying to apply a simple and consistent set of rules to non-perfect systems. The author of course gets 'angry' with the super-non-perfect systems. Those languages are very difficult to deal with, and he is expressing his frustration. That doesn't mean he's being condescending nor arrogant.
You should replace "non-perfect" with "non-English" in your comment. That would fit just as well.
I disagree.
It seems to me like english is "more perfect" if you are trying to build a straightforward model of a language like a software developer might.
The article suggests that there are some convoluted rules in other languages which make it much more difficult to model the language.
Re: Your language sucks
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
He says they suck to deal w/ in computing because they're hugely more complicated than English and Russian which have very small, simple alphabets that are very easy to process.
Computing was born in English speaking places (as far as I am aware), probably why it doesn't cater well for more complex languages.
Maybe it's just my ignorance showing, but it seems to me that the complexity is inherent in the languages themselves.
Re: Your language sucks
#118> 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…
I speak Russian and Spanish, and was about to write the same thing. Russian is indeed not strictly phonetic, thought it has a phonemic orthography to a degree. Aside from 'v'/'g' sound, there are bigger problems with vowels reduction when non-stressed 'o' most of the time sounds as 'a', omitting 'ё' and so on. After struggling with English and Russian, Spanish is indeed a delight to read/write. Though obligatory acce…
Glad there are other language nerds on HN.
The o/a thing is not totally intuitive to my foreign ears but I'm willing to forgive it as a phonetic feature of the language and less to do with spelling. (I'm reminded of how older people in my [American] family used to say words like "potato", or certain northeastern US pronunciations of words like "Florida" - I guess I have little trouble seeing how o/a can be a flexible concept for some.) Similarly I'm sometimes not sure when "e" becomes "je", but after listening to people speak I think I get something of an intuition...
Re: Your language sucks
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ligatures and letterforms like the "long S" (ſ) actually arose as a result of printing, interestingly. If you look at 13th century manuscripts created in Norman England, they're extremely legible and regularized. The very earliest printed texts ("incunabula") produced in England tried to mimic this medieval blackletter script, and are actually quite easy to read if you get used to them. By the Elizabethan era, many t…
This is a great post, I'm really enjoying reading it. I remember first seeing the long S as a child on a field trip to a local colonial village and being truly confused by it. It seemed so weird and unnecessary. It wasn't until many years later I even learned the rule for when it was used (middle of a word).
Somebody post that one as a story!
Re: Your language sucks
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
> As a Finnish speaker So how does Finnish compare up? Do you not have silent letters? In Dutch we have some useless things like combined letters: "c" and "h" are both used (like in "cake" or "hotel") but when combined to "ch" they sound like a "g". There are even duplicate ones: "au" and "ou" are both the same sound, and "ij" and "ei" too. You can't mix them though, "ijs" is ice and "eis" is a demand even though the…
Interesting to see Dutch mentioned. From what little I know about Dutch, its orthography does seem more similar to English than any other non-english-derived language I've seen. I seem to remember that some (clearly not all!) of the horrible mess of English orthography originates from Dutch in fact, since some of the first people to run printing presses in England (or to print books which were distributed in England)…
> its orthography does seem more similar to English than any other non-english-derived language I've seen.
Might have something to do with our western neighbours ;) (Yes, the ou in neighbours is on purpose.)