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Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

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Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#231

Post by einhverfr »

zanny wrote: post #155
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…

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 think the problem though is that language is ever-shifting. This leads to insanely stupid grammar nazi arguments over things like "Who does this belong to?" vs "To whom does this belong?" And that argument has been going on for at least a century.

Regarding glyphs you have a number of problems. These include phonetic shifts. So for example, in English we have a word like courtyard. This is a compound word with two components, court (from French) and yard (from Old English). Both of these come from the same PIE root. Now this isn't too bad with court and yard, but let's look phonemes of another sort: what PIE kw- vs gw-. gw- became qu in Old English (hence words like queen), while kw (which becomes qu in the Romance languages) becomes wh (what, where, whorf, whirl). This is still arguably separate from a w sound as most people I know pronounce where slightly differently from wear.

Combine this with the fact that we have lost letters (thorn and eth, primarily) which refer to distinct phonemes which we now use th for.

To come up with an optimal language, I think you'd have to make it fully prescriptive and heavily spec'd out (like computer languages are) but this isn't the way human language works. I suppose someone, probably me, has to point this out, and if you didn't get the subtle jab at discussions of pronoun cases, please re-read this sentence, slowly.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#232

Post by hattenn »

(Here's the comment I posted on StackOverflow, I wanted to share it here too.)

I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I'm just repeating the same stuff (on another note, I hope I am).

This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will always be language barriers.

English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about "making people speak their language". I have seen this many times. But it's just ridiculous. We don't need more than one language. Having more than one language:

1) Creates a language barrier, thus slowing down advancement. 2) Gives people a reason for discrimination, just like nationalism, racism, and religion.

When you say that "If just one little girl in Brazil sticks with programming because an answer on this site helped her finish her first project, well… that’s not good enough!", it sounds like a really humble thing to do, but it in fact is the opposite. You are overlooking the fact that there's a lot of information regarding programming and many other things in many different languages already. I'm not a native speaker of English, and I learned English thanks to my interest in programming. First I started with reading stuff in my own language, then I realized that I could learn much more if I read stuff in English. And that's how it should be.

I don't care if it's English or any other language, but we only need one language, not three, not two, only one. The rest is just noise.

To wrap it up, disguised by a seemingly humble thing, you are supporting language barriers, by supporting languages. I'd expect better from you guys.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#233

Post by einhverfr »

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…

> 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 this fragmentation would be much less if they had a phonetic writing system in the first place.

This is why Latin, which had such an alphabet, didn't split into mutually unintelligible dialects like Romanian, Spanish, and French, right?

> We can still read old texts, even though our pronunciation of the words has changed vastly. 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, but practically speaking I don't see this as a big problem.

But this wouldn't be the case if we wrote English phonetically today.

For example, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/Gawain?rgn=main;view=fulltex...) is one of my favorite pieces of Middle English literature, and exactly contemporary to Chaucer. It's hard enough to read without some knowledge of Middle English but you'd be totally lost if we wrote nait instead of knight.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#234

Post by dcarmo »

hattenn wrote: post #232

(Here's the comment I posted on StackOverflow, I wanted to share it here too.) I haven't read all the comments, so forgive me if I'm just repeating the same stuff (on another note, I hope I am). This is a horrible idea, if you ask me. Language barriers are there because there are languages. If you keep supporting languages, there will always be language barriers. English speakers, especially Americans, feel bad about…

I totally agree with you. It's not because it's English per se, it's because we need one universal language. English is the better choice because all the code that we have to write is based in... English. "while", "for", "if", "switch", "return", those are all English words that weren't picked at random: they have actual meaning on what you're doing. If you are programmer and don't know English, you'll never be a great programmer because you'll never understand the basics of the programming language you're working with. By the way, I'm Brazilian. You want to start programming? Great, learn English first. It's not hard and it's gonna make more good than harm to you.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#235

Post by mimighost »

maximgsaini wrote: post #67
frade33 wrote: post #9

Adoption of English language is one of the major reasons, why 3rd world countries like our, India and Pakistan are thriving in IT. I feel sad for nations, who are stubborn in their adoption of English language, merely out of political reasons. Even from a political perspective, this is sad, because you can't convey your point of view to others. Oh and by the way, India is 2nd and Pakistan is 3rd largest country by nu…

I see English as more of a liability for a country like India. Only 10% of the Indian elites have any sort of proficiency in English. Indians never developed an 'infrastructure' around their native language like China did, which results in a debilitating problem for India. There is a big language barrier in India. A poor Chinese kid doesn't need to learn a foreign language to be hired as a full time programmer. But i…

>> A poor Chinese kid doesn't need to learn a foreign language to be hired as a full time programmer

Not really true.

English proficiency is a very important factor in job hunting in China also. Most of the good programmers I know have certain level of mastery in english, at least in reading. For sure, China has its own internet ecosystem, the same applies for the programmer community. But English is still the dominant language in computer science, a fact that will not be changed in near future.

China has its own english proficiency test, called "四级", literally "Level 4" or officially CET4 Test. It is required for all college students to pass this test when graduating, a huge pain for many. And we are not done :a higher level test, "六级"(Level 6, CET6) awaits for whoever wants to show better than average english fluency. Which makes thing worse, high score in those tests doesn't really guarantee real-world good english ability, so additional tests will be taken by companies themselves to make sure the candidates meet their requirement.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#236

Post by reidrac »

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.

I have exactly the same problem, a little bit aggravated by the fact that I seem to be a little bit dyslexic and sometimes I type something but I read something completely different.

People tend to be nice, so I just try to get the message through and don't think too much about it :)

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#237

Post by [deleted] »

nsoonhui wrote: post #208
zhte415 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> edit: I noticed I just wrote "de" instead of "the". Stupidest mistake I often make. I've worked with a lot of developers from China, who themselves work with developers in India. On a conference call the China sysadmin announces they've verified the C Jia Jia environment and the India developer totally knows what they mean. C++ in Mandarin is pronounced C Jia Jia. Don't sweat it.

I am a Chinese but I don't understand what do you ( or they) mean by "they've verified the C Jia Jia environment". Care to elaborate?

[deleted]

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#238

Post by dspillett »

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…

> No one mentioned it

We are used to subconsciously "translating" what is actually meant from the exact words used, in part because so many people speak English as a second language (that they aren't particularly fluent in), in part because English is such an irregular language in places due to its historical development so even native speakers get a pile of things wrong, and in part because a lot of people particularly online deliberately get it wrong (building their own slang, references, and linguistic in-jokes that often eventually leak out into the wider awareness), and of course also in part because people who do know what is right sometimes make genuine mistakes.

The trick in any language is not to be perfect: it is about getting your message across and understanding other people's communication. If your English is good enough that I can understand your meaning without any great effort on my part, and you can understand what I'm trying to say, then your English is good enough (in fact possibly better, at least formally speaking, than some people native to the language!). Of course you should always strive to improve your skills, but try not to stress over it too much.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#239

Post by gbog »

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"…

I have learnt Chinese and use it for work. Chinese characters have a personality of their own, you don't need to know the sound to remember them. You could even read perfectly Chinese and being unable to communicate orally. This very hard to understand or even believe when not experienced for real.

So yes, learning Chinese or Kanji has a steeper learning curve, but no, it is not that hard, and in fact from context and shape you can guess a possible pronunciation and meaning for unknown characters, sometime.

Re: Why Stack Overflow in Portuguese?

#240

Post by goshx »

zhemao wrote: post #211
goshx wrote: post #124

This is AWESOME! I even get emotional about this and here is why. TL;DR: I am a Brazilian and it would have been much easier for me if I had the resources I needed available in my mother language. Long story: I am a Brazilian. I was born in a small town in Brazil (population: 13k) and I only had access to public schools. Public schools in Brazil do have English classes, however all I remember was them teaching the ve…

> I never went to a real English school/class, as you can probably tell at this point by reading this No, I couldn't. You give yourself too little credit. Except for "way much fun", everything you wrote was perfect idiomatic English. I actually think a lot of us native English speakers are kind of jealous that we have little incentive to become proficient in a foreign language since so much of the worlds information…

Obrigado :)
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