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

The Unsuitability of English (2015)

chronicle.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 319 posts

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#201

Post by Turing_Machine »

moomin wrote: post #18
Mithaldu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Probably true, but not because of the vowels, but because of rhythms and consonants for languages other than english. Particularly vowels are divisive, and to take spanish as an example, consider this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ Watch it with your mouse cursor off, and read the spanish bits, then sound them out, then check whe…

Well, strictly speaking everyone has an accent, including native speakers. But being able to pass for a native is perfectly possible; in fact my brother can do it in France, a country that is famous for spotting foreigners a mile off. How did he do it? He spent several years there and really worked at it (he can also do a convincing range of British accents). His one regret is that he nailed it in a somewhat bucolic…

I used to know a woman who learned French in Belgium (her husband was career military, and they were there for quite a long time). When she visited France, they all assumed she was Belgian.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#202

Post by ktRolster »

jeena wrote: post #115
ktRolster wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language). Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.

I find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite. I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.

The first tip is to learn to listen to yourself. If someone ever corrects you, that is gold.

1) Focus on the vowels. They will help you get the resonance right (the resonance is how you hold the muscles in your mouth, so the sound seems to come from the back of your throat like in Russian or the front of your mouth like in Korean)

2) Focus on the rhythm of the language. I'm sure you know what I mean here.

3) Focus on the intonation: what pitches do they have? Scottish has kind of a lilt, for example.

4) Try to notice "phonemes", and I put it in quotes to expand the idea to mean "what native speakers consider important". For example, Mandarin speakers can't hear a vowel change to save their life, but if you get the intonation slightly wrong they glare at you.

5) Focus on details, listen to how letters change when they are between other letters, etc. (Watching to how people respond to your speech can be helpful, especially if they don't understand. Small words especially. For example, a listener might get confused and not understand the world "Lip", even though they would understand "Literally", if your "L" is slightly off)

6) Don't underestimate the value of correct grammar in improving your accent.

Incidentally, I learned of the existence of this as formal theory from David Stern (although his focus is on stage accents which is a little different)

Also, if you have any tips I'd love to hear them too :)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#203

Post by danieltillett »

vacri wrote: post #159
danieltillett wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel. The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)

The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e'…

I can't answer for the rules of cut spelling as I did not develop it, but the nice thing about it that made me choose it was that it does not need to be implemented all at once. You can basically add each cut word one at at time to normal spelling.

I can answer why I chose cutspel rather than cutspl and that is it is easier to remember. It is the name of the chrome extension not the system of spelling reform which is called Cut Spelling.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#204

Post by Turing_Machine »

WalterBright wrote: post #132

I'm not too impressed with the article. Any language that achieves worldwide domination is going to expropriate whatever words are convenient from other languages, and they'll never fit in properly with the rest of the language. English is one giant polyglot of other languages, including a hilarious mixture of old English with French (from when the French conquered Britain). English also has many dialects and accents…

"including a hilarious mixture of old English with French"

Also Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, Hindi/Urdu (more common in the U.K.), Spanish and Native American words (more common in the U.S.), German and Latin (more common in scientific and technical fields)...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#205

Post by ktRolster »

disordinary wrote: post #112
ktRolster wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is easier than many languages: it doesn't have gendered nouns or adjectives almost at all (thank goodness), it doesn't have noun declensions, it doesn't have many verb conjugations (hello Russian!). It's biggest pain is tricky spelling and a list of irregular verbs.

The problem with English is you have to memorise the vocabulary multiple times, you have to memorise the word, often how it declines, and also do the above for written because they way it's spelled and spoken is usually not consistant. Not to mention the fact that there are tons of words which sound almost identical but have different meanings. You're deriding Russian for having issues, and yes it's complicated, but…

Russian.....thy gender confoundeth beyond all declensions.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#206

Post by Turing_Machine »

beloch wrote: post #85

Perhaps the time has come to start using phonetic spellings (e.g. An English specific subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet) in at least some contexts, such as signage. Wales would be a good place to start. If someone here has the patience to translate, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" into IPA phonetic English I'd sure appreciate it. On second thought, maybe we should leave the We…

Not an IPA text version, but I've heard that this is a reasonably good attempt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#207

Post by comex »

mapt wrote: post #199
schoen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a theory that languages have sometimes evolved extra redundancy to help with understanding in noisy environments (in every sense of noisy, but especially if it's physically difficult to hear someone). This could be viewed as akin to a parity bit in telecommunications, where it's deliberately redundant to increase the chance of detecting errors on a noisy channel, or with other ECC methods of correcting them.…

There are communities that aspire to degender their terminology because of pseudonyms and sensitivity to problems of the transgender community. They revert to 'They' as singular agendered personal pronoun. As this is also the word we use for multiple people, conversations about Alice and Bob fork meanings at every usage; Are we talking about Alice, about Bob, or about Alice and Bob? Even a simple sentence often has m…

At least it's 'only' a few pronouns - it may sound awkward now, but not so awkward that it couldn't become acceptable in a timespan of decades or less. Compare to the many languages that assign a gender to every noun, where you'd have to make up a whole new set of endings or something. (Of course, there are also plenty of languages with no grammatical role for gender whatsoever.)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#208

Post by gbog »

schoen wrote: post #189
netheril96 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are conflating language constructs with words. More words may be fine, but more "features" are not. Frankly, those "features" are more like bugs. What on earth is the usage of masculine or feminine nouns, or irregular past tense/participle, or to/ing difference?

There's a theory that languages have sometimes evolved extra redundancy to help with understanding in noisy environments (in every sense of noisy, but especially if it's physically difficult to hear someone). This could be viewed as akin to a parity bit in telecommunications, where it's deliberately redundant to increase the chance of detecting errors on a noisy channel, or with other ECC methods of correcting them.…

Yes, redundancy helps in noisy environment. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, and the mistake here is to think human languages are "communication tools". If they were, they could be easily simplified, replaced by better tools, etc. But languages are much more than "communication tools". For example, inside us, ideas have to mold themselves in a given human language framework. So do dreams, many parts of memories, etc. There is no "communication" here, if communication is transmission of information bewteen two or more agents.

So, to take an extreme, if a language was much harder to learn but much more feature rich for non-communication purpose (e.g. a better language to dream in), it could very well be much better to choose the complex language over the simpler one, even if the learning part is harder.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#209

Post by wk_end »

mapt wrote: post #199
schoen wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a theory that languages have sometimes evolved extra redundancy to help with understanding in noisy environments (in every sense of noisy, but especially if it's physically difficult to hear someone). This could be viewed as akin to a parity bit in telecommunications, where it's deliberately redundant to increase the chance of detecting errors on a noisy channel, or with other ECC methods of correcting them.…

There are communities that aspire to degender their terminology because of pseudonyms and sensitivity to problems of the transgender community. They revert to 'They' as singular agendered personal pronoun. As this is also the word we use for multiple people, conversations about Alice and Bob fork meanings at every usage; Are we talking about Alice, about Bob, or about Alice and Bob? Even a simple sentence often has m…

Singular "they" is incredibly widely adopted and would be and is easily understood by 1000 of 1000 native English speakers, and would be and has been understood by them for centuries: as the Wikipedia article (directly linked to by yours) says, "the singular they had emerged by the mid-14th century and is common in everyday spoken English". If we've been able to deal with this supposed combinatorial ambiguity for ~700 years, how bad could it be? If we can deal with singular and plural "you", why not singular and plural "they"?

It's certainly not common, even amongst "PC" types or whatever, to want to eliminate gendered pronouns entirely; just that everyone gets to be called the pronoun of their choice (regardless of whatever genitals they were born with), and when the antecedent is of indeterminate gender, a pronoun of indeterminate or at least not a male-default gender is chosen. So Alice and Bob can still be "she" and "he" respectively if they so choose, and there's no confusion there; "they" still refers to both of them. But when a person wants to tell the story of Alice and Bob, that person is "they" or maybe "she" or sometimes "he" - just not "he" by default.

Anyway, slicing up our pronoun space into male/female is entirely arbitrary. Perhaps Alice and Bob are the people chosen for these kinds of stories because our pronouns are gendered; if our language categorized people in different ways than gender, we would chose people as examples along those lines instead. And what do we do when we have a story about Adam and Bob? They're both "he"! How ever do we deal with the combinatorial explosion of ambiguity? And yet people somehow have managed to tell stories with multiple men in them for millennia...

Suppose Adam is tall and Bob is short. Maybe English ought to have different pronouns for men of different heights (or hair colour, or...). It would help relieve this terrible ambiguity here. And yet we get by without this precision in our pronouns.

Perhaps Adam is black and Bob white. Should they have different pronouns to distinguish them? If you say no to that and feel like that maybe might even kind of be a bad idea because of the rigid line it draws between two people created equal, well, now you know why people might be opposed to gendered pronouns.

Some languages have the notion of politeness encoded in, which can often help distinguish pronouns in stories between children and adults, or royalty and their subjects. English doesn't really have this (at least not at a grammatical level), and yet somehow I don't feel my language to be particularly enfeebled without them - I can tell stories about little girls talking to their mothers, or male peasants talking to kings, just fine.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#210

Post by _delirium »

danieltillett wrote: post #54
Spooky23 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was on a conference call the other day with A gaggle people trying to fix a technical problem. We had a Brit, 4-5 accents/language competencies from India, a Chinese person, a heavily accented Vietnamese person, heavy Boston speaker, various NYC and "lunged idland" dialects and a Texan. It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.

Yep. Often it is the native speakers that are the worst problem in cases like this. We tend to fall into “higher” English and use uncommon words or idioms. I have been in many situations where the non-native speakers talk to each other with no problem, but they get lost with my contribution.

There's also the flipside of that: rather than "higher" English, native speakers are also more likely to use fairly "sloppy" English, especially with pronunciation. When not thinking about it and speaking quickly, native English speakers, or at least American English speakers, tend to elide or merge syllables, which second-language speakers often find challenging to understand.

I've more than once found that the reason someone didn't understand something I said in English was just because, speaking quickly, I was leaving out 20-30% of the syllables, if you were to really try to pick out distinct ones. Americans hearing me speak would fill these in subconsciously, but second-language speakers can be thrown off. For example, if you listen to how I say a phrase like "no, morning won't work, because of the meeting" (11 syllables) when I'm speaking very quickly, you can only really make out 7-8 distinct syllables, roughly "nah, morn' won' work 'cause the meet'n".

Post reply on HN