41–50 of 57 posts
The thing is, there are no perfect language, just like programming languages. You will always find advantages and disadvantages of them at some point. Yes, I agree with the author on the points that he is making, but comparing to other languages, I think that English is one of the easiest languages that can be learned and understood easily. "Ease" is an important aspect in the context of languages, since people all a…
The thing is, there are no perfect language, just like programming languages. You will always find advantages and disadvantages of them at some point. Yes, I agree with the author on the points that he is making, but comparing to other languages, I think that English is one of the easiest languages that can be learned and understood easily. "Ease" is an important aspect in the context of languages, since people all a…
Are you sure that English didn't just take off because of the British empire?
"I am not trying to argue that we should now give up English for international or scientific communication, or try to replace it with this or that other language (except possibly in a limited way, e.g., see below on Basic English). I am not proposing to use Interlingua, Esperanto, Latin, Italian, Chinese, Russian, or anything else: I am maybe saying that we should have used Interlingua, Esperanto, Latin, Italian, Chi…
Regarding scientific communication in particular, the most obscure Chinese characters are for words unique to scientific fields, so while the average English speaker might not be able to understand an English physics paper, the average Chinese speaker can't even read a Chinese physics paper. In other words, you must possess above average Chinese skills to communicate about science.
For me it seems a global language strength lies, in fact, in this ambiguity, loose standards and acceptance of errors (in pronunciation, for example) - I'm thinking like HTML - it really can be buggy and still render text fine. French, German or Polish, on the other hand, are like XML - sure, it's strict and there are all these rules - but boy, try to make a mistake and it will blow in your face ;)
The spelling leaves lots to be desired though. Luckily it is among the easiest things to change in a language.
A good candidate would have to be specially created with unambiguity in mind, like with formal languages, but as importantly, it would have to be aggressively controlled to avoid any misuse or divergence of usage. The later is most probably impossible in practice: enforcement would not scale. A simple question: how would a user of that language deal with a concept for which no word exists? The only possibility is to formulate that concept in lengthy sentences (Ents do speak like that), until a word is officially adopted by the language conformance body. Of course, people wouldn't be able to wait for that adoption each time they stumble on the issue, and it's bound to happen all the time. From then, one or more unofficial words would pop up for ideas yet inexistant in the language lexicon, and of course subtle semantic differences would crop up among these variants. Or maybe the author is implying that agglutinative languages don't suffer from that problem?
I am only talking about vocabulary, because this issue alone is enough to demonstrate the problem. For grammar, Lojban and a few other artificial languages have been created with syntactical unambiguity as a goal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A few times in conversations I've found myself trying to force "friendlily" (friendly as an adverb) out of my mouth. Aside from me tripping on my tongue trying to pronounce it, the people around me understood what I was saying just fine.
Adverbs for adjectives ending in -ly end in -like instead, e.g. "costly-like", "friendly-like".
My, what a collection of old chestnuts. * All his bugs are features: malleability and adaptability are English's strengths. * Most languages proliferate their vocabulary to express all the needed shades of meaning, English uses Norman/German vocab to distinguish formality just as Japanese uses wago/kanji compounds. * Basic English's claim to a limited vocabulary only makes sense if you ignore the many implicit phrasa…
To make a dot-point list, preface each line with four spaces. HN interprets that as 'code snippet' and keeps your formatting. On-topic, one thing I see missing when I read articles detracting from English is the benefits of English. Like not having genders for non-gendered things. This article talks of ambiguity in English, but in turn an English student doesn't have to figure out whether a pair of scissors is male o…
If you do this, remember to add line breaks
every 50 characters or so for mobile screens.
* so each point is in its own paragraph.
No one got up one morning and said, "You know what? We really should be conducting all of our business in English." It was the result of many years, and many different accidents of history that led to English having its current position in the world. World War II, the growth of American industry, the dominant position that the US has played in research and business, and the growth of the computer industry in the US a…
My, what a collection of old chestnuts. * All his bugs are features: malleability and adaptability are English's strengths. * Most languages proliferate their vocabulary to express all the needed shades of meaning, English uses Norman/German vocab to distinguish formality just as Japanese uses wago/kanji compounds. * Basic English's claim to a limited vocabulary only makes sense if you ignore the many implicit phrasa…
The argument is not 'how' English got where it is, but if it is the best language for the job.
Because it is the voice of global resistance? I don't even know what that means. It's akin to waving a flag and playing an anthem to make your point.