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Your language sucks

garrett.damore.org

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Re: Your language sucks

#121

Post by maga »

asveikau wrote: post #118
maga wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The problem with o/a is that in some dialects they indeed pronounce 'o' instead of 'a'. Pronouncing 'a', or 'akanye', as it's done in Moscow, became the right way and was imposed through the education system throughout the Soviet Union. Hence, not doing so may be perceived as a sign of a low education level/social status.

Re: Your language sucks

#122

Post by oranguntan »

That guy will have a bad surprise about how English 'has simple sorting rules' when someone expects names such as 'Saint Thomas' to sort in the same order as 'St. Thomas' and that somehow 'St.' may also stand for 'street' depending on the order, so that "Thomas St.' should compare equal to 'Thomas Street', and 'Thomas, St.' is probably referring to 'Saint Thomas'...

Re: Your language sucks

#123

Post by oranguntan »

oh_sigh wrote: post #12
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.

How would those issues with the languages be dealt with if, say, one of the worst offending Asian languages(according to the author) had developed computing machinery first? English+ASCII is simple because the rules are simple, not because the US invented the standard first.

Up until IIRC the 1950s Japan actually officially planned to cease use of Chinese characters and switch to kana entirely. This was not done for reasons of tradition, but it's what the Koreans did.

Re: Your language sucks

#124

Post by oranguntan »

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…

Is living with autism difficult?

Re: Your language sucks

#125

Post by bane »

dang wrote: post #119
bane wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

My field trip or his much more excellent post? I submitted his post just in case that's what you meant.

My field trip was a pretty boring normal school affair. If you grow up in one of the original 13 U.S. colonies you'll probably visit some former colonial stuff sometime during school. IIR I first noticed the long 's' at Colonial Williamsburg, probably in some reproduction early newspaper or something.

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

Re: Your language sucks

#126

Post by oranguntan »

Argorak wrote: post #5

All I hear is: "I wanted to model the real world and it didn't fit my mental model." Sadly, there is some information in all that cruft that is interesting to people coming from an english context when dealing with international character handling, but well, nothing you couldn't get somewhere else.

Turns out nerds are actually not necessarily as godly intelligent as they base their identities around being, and are actually pretty bigoted a lot of the time

Re: Your language sucks

#127

Post by oranguntan »

kazinator wrote: post #76
TillE wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, because you're distinguishing between Masse and Maß (Mass). They're not precisely equivalent if you're attempting to determine meaning, but for many purposes they are. For example, searching for "ss" in Chrome will hit ß. That's good behavior.

Doesn't it depend on region? ISTR they don't use ß in Switzerland, so there is no Massen versus Maßen.

yup

Re: Your language sucks

#128

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

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.

For an example of a "sensitive" language situation see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

>In the 20th century, Serbo-Croatian served as the official language of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (when it was called "Serbo-Croato-Slovenian"),[9] and later as one of the official languages of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The dissolution of Yugoslavia affected language attitudes, so that social conceptions of the language separated on ethnic and political lines. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Bosnian has likewise been established as an official standard in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and there is an ongoing movement to codify a separate Montenegrin standard. Serbo-Croatian thus generally goes by the ethnic names Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and sometimes Montenegrin.[10]

This is also a great article on the topic

http://www.rferl.mobi/a/Serbian_Croatian_Bosnian_or_Monteneg...

Re: Your language sucks

#129

Post by UrMomReadsHN »

>But the winner (loser?) here is Serbian, which in some places uses both Latin and Cyrillic characters interchangeably!

When I was in Sarajevo once it a while you'd see writing with Latin characters, once in a while with Cyrillic characters and I also saw writing in Arabic. All on the same street. Also Bosnian used to have a third alphabet - Arebica, a variant of the the Perso-Arabic script.

Also the license plates in Bosnia and Herzegovina only contain the letters that are in both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet - A, E, O, J, K, M, T.

Re: Your language sucks

#130

Post by oftenwrong »

vesinisa wrote: post #30

As a Finnish speaker, I must disappoint you that both Russian and English do have broken alphabets (although this might not affect their character coding). English makes extensive use of silent letters and letters whose pronunciation is dependent on the context (word) they appear in (take e in "context" and "appear" as an out of hat example). I haven't studied much Russian, but I know that the letter ъ in their alpha…

Relevant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ucCJ_Vn58w
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