Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 576 posts

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#111

Post by mariodiana »

pta2002 wrote: post #73
mariodiana wrote: post #48

I can't fault Indians for "prepone" when so many of my fellow programmers say "performant."

What's wrong with performant? (Non-native speaker here)

It's a neologism. Some people love it. (Actually, it seems like a lot of people do.) To others however, it strikes the ear as awkward sounding. I wouldn't say there's anything "wrong" about it. It's a matter of taste. It's a bit of a pet peeve for some of us.

I bought a book a couple of years ago: iOS and macOS Performance Tuning. I took note that the author had not used the word "performant" even once in the book's 400 pages. Maybe I'm a snob, but it made the author seem the more credible to me.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#112

Post by anotherhue »

chris_j wrote: post #72
pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

I (native English speaker) have noticed this a lot. The example that I remember most vividly is receiving advice while trying to cook food on a barbecue: A Portuguese speaking friend suggested that I "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue". It make perfect sense but sounded incredibly fancy to me. A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.

An Italian friend of mine, when struggling to find the word for a Satellite Dish, called it a parabola. I was very impressed.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#113

Post by awillen »

biztos wrote: post #29

I'm a native English speaker who's lived in other countries a lot and speaks three languages, now trying to learn a fourth. The weirdness of "English" is something I think about often. For starters, you have to live in it before you can really speak it. And our spelling is the least rational, least consistent thing I've ever seen. In addition to the weird way we spell a lot of things, many of the sounds are not prono…

What languages do you speak? I speak Spanish and have been learning Polish for a few years because my wife's family immigrated from there, and many are still in Poland, with some only speaking Polish... can't have the in-laws talking trash without me knowing :)

Spanish is generally straightforward and consistent, though the huge number of dialects can be a challenge for practical communication.

Polish is a goddamn nightmare. I thought English was bad, but hoo-boy, Polish haunts my dreams. To say it is needlessly complex is an understatement. You have to change the endings of adjectives/nouns to match the context, so you end up with a ridiculous number of forms of each word.

"Dog" is pies (pronounced pee-yes, sorta). Unless you use it in the sentence "I have a dog," in which case it is psa (puh-sah, again, sorta... I don't even know how to type out some of the sounds phonetically). If you say "Cooper is my dog" then it's psem.

Depending on who you ask, there's somewhere between twelve and twenty ways to say the word two in Polish (and just to be clear, most of these counts don't include things like both, pair, etc. - just literally the word two).

Then there's the specificity of the verbs of movement. Oh my dear lord - the verbs of movement.

You see, you can never say that you went somewhere or that you're going somewhere. You must specify how. Always. You cannot go to Poland, you must fly to Poland. And every verb of movement has at least two, usually three forms. To fly is latac or leciec or poleciec, depending on whether you flew once, you flew regularly, or you were flying when something happened. The last one is a situation in English that we'd just handle with a form of "to be" and a gerund - "I was flying when..." In Polish, you have to memorize a specific version of each verb for that form.

Add to that the fact that my Polish teacher's explanation for many things is "there's no rule, you just have to learn what sounds right." In one case, if you have a masculine noun you must either add an a or a u on the end. There is no rule for which.

It's like they designed the whole thing just to be a nightmare for any non-native speaker trying to learn it.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#114

Post by meepmorp »

biztos wrote: post #104
mbg721 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the benefit of confused Americans like myself: English as it is spoken in Scotland, Scots, and Scots Gaelic are three different things.

Interesting, I think Wikipedia is saying it's a distinct language that shares a lot of words etc with English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.

> And I admit I have no idea where the line is between a dialect, and that.

It's usually based around a combination of factor - mutual intelligibility, orthographic conventions, etc. Also, of course, "a language is a dialect with an army and navy."

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

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#115

Post by BlameKaneda »

Y_Y wrote: post #15

Can I gripe about the spelling "nonnative" rather than "non-native"? It the former spelling it looks like it's said all at once, like the word "normative". Probably it's in common use and there are other similar cases we've assimilated, but I don't have to like it.

When I saw the title I pronounced it as "NON-nah-tiv" (like "normative"), and didn't realize it was non-native until your comment.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#116

Post by hob_code »

pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

Richard Feynman noted something similar in his story about traveling to Brazil and learning Portuguese[1]. People would compliment him for using larger elegant sounding words, when really he just couldn't remember simpler words.

1. https://southerncrossreview.org/81/feynman-brazil.html

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#117

Post by mondoshawan »

chris_j wrote: post #72
pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

I (native English speaker) have noticed this a lot. The example that I remember most vividly is receiving advice while trying to cook food on a barbecue: A Portuguese speaking friend suggested that I "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue". It make perfect sense but sounded incredibly fancy to me. A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.

I'm a native English speaker, and that sounds like something I've said before, and all I've had is public schooling, with no college. :)

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#118

Post by alickz »

JackFr wrote: post #87
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have met Americans who believe the UK spelling of words with -our instead of -or actually represents a difference in pronunciation. That is, they have the mistaken impression that Brits say /kəlur/ instead of /kələr/.

'gaol' always throws me for a loop when I'm reading something British. I need to remind myself it's pronounced 'jail'. (A quick google tells me that all the major British newspapers switched over to 'jail' by the 1990's - score one for the good guys!) I remember reading 'Mutiny on the Bounty' as a child and talking about it with my father and I said something about the 'boatswain', and he (a former naval officer) loo…

I've known the word boatswain for decades at this point and never knew it was pronounced like that!

Speaking of military terms, lieutenant as "leftenant" always threw me. I had just assumed they were different words.

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#119

Post by mwcampbell »

chris_j wrote: post #72
pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

I (native English speaker) have noticed this a lot. The example that I remember most vividly is receiving advice while trying to cook food on a barbecue: A Portuguese speaking friend suggested that I "move the burgers to the periphery of the barbecue". It make perfect sense but sounded incredibly fancy to me. A native English speaker would never have said that... unless they had received a really expensive education.

I don't know if this is quite the same phenomenon, but when I attended the 2008 Lua workshop (in Washington, DC), my roommate was Brazilian, and when he needed to refer to the blanket on my bed, the word he found was "mantle".

Re: Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

#120

Post by amirkdv »

pdpi wrote: post #26

As a non-native speaker, one fascinating phenomenon for me is the flip side to Uncleftish Beholding[1]. Many latinate words are considered more sophisticated, or fancier in general, than germanic words. Because I'm a native speaker of a Romance language, those are precisely the words that I reach for naturally, because they're familiar. What follows is that, past a certain threshold where your English is good enough,…

The dual origin story of the English language is quite fascinating!

There's a Wikipedia page dedicated to a list of just what you described, synonymous words with Romance vs Germanic origins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_d...

Post reply on HN