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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

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Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#221

Post by mehmetemre »

gbog wrote: post #198
zanny wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…

> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisati…

Chinese is an isolating language, so it doesn't have affixes, conjugation etc. so they can use that kind of writing system.

In the other hand, English and lots of other languages (including my native language Turkish) are synthetic languages, so they have affixes, and they do not adapt well to logographic writing systems (class of Chinese characters) in my opinion (I am not an expert on linguistics). My reasoning is not the cognitive overhead that's caused by memorizing tons of characters, but overhead of encoding/decoding the affixes into that type of writing system.

Japanese is an interesting example in this case, it is a synthetic language and has conjugation etc. so Japanese people use Kanji (Chinese characters as used by Japanese) to write word root and Hiragana to write conjugation, function words, spelling etc.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#222

Post by ithkuil »

lunchbox wrote: post #203
gbog wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisati…

> Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. But I would think (and remember reading somewhere) that phonetics shift more quickly where there is no written record of the pronunciation. Chinese has dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects (Mandarin, Wu, Cantonese, Hakka, etc.). Maybe…

> If you go back far enough (e.g. to the time of Chaucer in the 1300s), it becomes hard to understand what is being said

That's because at that time they still wrote phonetically. Today the spelling of some languages, like English especially, is fixed and immutable yet the pronunciation diverges.

Think about equATION and pronunciATION (or any other word ending in -ation that has "ʒ" instead of "ʃ").

There is also the reverse effect. Spelling influences pronunciation. Especially the sounds of single vowels (a,e,i,o,u), their sound being used frequently when spelling, becomes a guide to pronounce unfamiliar words, making words like "fungae" sounds nothing like what the latin word used to be (and how it was probably pronounced by english speaking educated people in the middle ages).

That said, even a crippled phonetic alphabet is certainly easier to learn than ideograms. However English is at the worst end of the spectrum. Japanese syllabic writing systems (hiragana and katakana) are much easier to write even if they have a few more glyphs. Unfortunately, even if you master -kana scripts, and thus able to write everything you want in Japanese, you'd be cut off from mainstream culture, including newspapers street signs etc

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#223

Post by ithkuil »

icelancer wrote: post #99
soneca wrote: post #73

"It’s almost impossible to feel like part of a community if you’re not highly proficient in the language. Even non-native speakers who are fluent enough to read posts in their second or third languages often aren’t comfortable enough to write in them." Wow, this is true! I am brazilian and you have no idea how much effort I put in writing every single comment here on HN. And the longer de comment is, the more stupid…

Your written English is better than the vast majority of our current undergraduate college students in America, so I really wouldn't worry about it.

I found this to be a real issue. Native speakers value stuff that I get right with no effort, like getting "its" and "it's" right or usage and spelling of "complicated words" (most of latin and greek origin). Furthermore, most native speakers (e.g. "current undergraduate college students") have the tendency to write the way the speak (or using complicated words that makes is look like I have control over this language while I obviously don't: excessive colloquialism).

I struggle putting the words in the right place, getting articles right, controlling the subtle nuances of tone the make the difference.

I have troubles writing less and yet be understood.

Please don't say that today your kids don't know their mother tongue, that's not true. They just struggle with adapting to formal language.

EDIT: in case you find that in this particular text there are no significant issues, keep in mind that this is after many years of using the language professionally and after one year of living in Ireland.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#224

Post by unwind »

eknkc wrote: post #81

They are spreading thin. It used to be StackOverflow, I'd go search for something and ask if the search would yield nothing. Now they have a thousand sites and I don't know which one to look at, or ask questions on.

I believe the solution to that is to not aim for a specific site and use its search; use a regular web search instead and trust that SO and gang make their sites indexable. That certainly seems to be the case. I have a particular SO question I often reference in order to link to it in answers and comments; I always just google two words to find it.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#225

Post by justincormack »

guelo wrote: post #86
rdtsc wrote: post #45

Programming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and whe…

I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc. I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-english speaking programmers. But what does it look inside priv…

There is a book http://www.coding places.net/ about among other things language and software in Brazil. It depends on the audience with open source being more English. But it does vary by country, China seems much less English in usage.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#226

Post by jaimebuelta »

Aldo_MX wrote: post #150
icelancer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your written English is better than the vast majority of our current undergraduate college students in America, so I really wouldn't worry about it.

Although native-English speakers are always nice enough to tell me that my English is "good enough" to be understood, there are times that I feel uneasy with myself, because I just lack the practice to be able to communicate fluently in English.

Similar feelings here. I am Spanish, and work in Ireland since 4 years ago, so I have to communicate in English.

Even if people had told me quite a lot of times that my English is very good, that they've never have problems understanding me, I still can feel all the extra effort that I have to put into it, as well as being aware of most of the grammar or pronunciation mistakes I do.

Of course, practice is everything. I am clearly way more relaxed now than I used to be. But I still have to take some seconds from time to time to phrase correctly. On the other hand, I do that as well on Spanish. Communicating is hard!

I guess that some Dunning-Krueger effects works here. You are aware of your limitations, even if they are not that big, and that stings.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#227

Post by jaimebuelta »

guelo wrote: post #86
rdtsc wrote: post #45

Programming specific I think is easier in English. I speak 3 languages and understand 4. Talking about programming, computer science and technology in non-Engish is awkward. It either is necessary to just use English terms anyway for every other noun or struggle with awkward translation of them. Things like kernel, doubly linked list, hash table, binary tree, greedy algorithm, they are all invented in English and whe…

I wonder how corporate programmers in non-english speaking countries communicate about programming. I would imagine that they use their local language for docs, commit descriptions, email lists, etc. I think most of the source code people can look at is for open source projects and they always go with english as the default even when there are mostly non-english speaking programmers. But what does it look inside priv…

You have a weird jargon of mixed languages... Basically you end up bolting together english words with other grammar to create monsters...

I try to limit the amount of this weird jargon, but is extremely easy to fall into that.

PD: This is in Spanish

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#228

Post by sampo »

emiliobumachar wrote: post #215
gbog wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better. Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisati…

I do not speak any language with that writing paradigm, but I can think of one big disadvantage: it's different memory efforts to learn a word's written and spoken forms. In languages where letters are mapped to sounds, even after phonetics changed a bunch, the written and spoken forms are huge cues to each other. (There are exceptions). If a new word came to be in English and it was written, for example, "scaramara"…

> it's different memory efforts to learn a word's written and spoken forms

I've always felt that I need to memorize both the written and spoken forms, when I study English.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#229

Post by vukmir »

WildUtah wrote: post #179
zanny wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…

"thinking of a way to create an "optimal" language" The Korean tried inventing an optimal alphabet a few centuries ago and it caught on. [0] Traditional Korean writing (in Chinese characters) has been almost abandoned. The Korean Hangul alphabet doesn't include all possible sounds but I don't think that's really what you want. All those guttural consonants, tonal vowels, and clicks and snaps and buzzes that are possi…

Serbs did it too at the beginning of the 19th century and since then (in Serbian) every word is written exactly as it is pronounced.

The rule is: "Write as you speak and read as it is written."[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_Cyrillic_alphabet

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#230

Post by Debilski »

kudu wrote: post #183
zanny wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a real brutal grammar nazi trend I've been seeing recently on various sites - apparently, someone gets a buzz of self entitled superiority off of correcting someones grammar mistakes. Personally? I think English is insanely stupid, inefficient, and dumb. I speak it because I have to, not because I want to, because everyone else does it. If you think trying to get breakout success in a market with, say, a sof…

I wouldn't say Esperanto is 100% optimal, but it was created from scratch by linguists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Arguably, Esperanto was created by one hobby linguist about 125 years before today’s linguistic research, so I would not stress that too much.
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