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

271–280 of 319 posts

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#271

Post by hibbelig »

wirrbel wrote: post #215
crazygringo wrote: post #136

Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce. On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances. And hon…

At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages). To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily b…

I'm sure there are a lot of French idioms, too. Is it less important to learn them than the English ones?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#272

Post by lisivka »

netheril96 wrote: post #179
gbog wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no subjunctive tenses > no tones etc. According to this view a perfect language would have... what? So are we in the same game as in computer language, with this discussion about how many features should we allow? My view on this may be uncommon: Less features for computer language migth be better in some cases, but more features in human languages is always better, because the human brain will make the best out of…

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?

These features are allowing to build more complex sentences using less words and/or make them shorter. After translating of thousands of sentences from English to my native language for opensource projects, I found that word-to-word translations are about 30% longer in average, while translations of sentences of text are about 10% shorter in average, sometimes even 3x shorter. Direct consequence is that it is easier to understand shorter text, because of limited size of short-time memory. I.e. shorter text adds few points to IQ.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#273

Post by wirrbel »

Armisael16 wrote: post #260
wirrbel wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah that point might have been a bit exuberant. Nevertheless, after 3-4 years I think you have covered most grammar topics, maybe excluding passe simple and subjonctive. In English you'll continue to learn new concepts such as "contact clauses" etc

I'm only doing this because of the topic of conversation, but you probably meant to say that your point was a bit exaggerated instead of exuberant (which means something along the lines of energetically happy). That's the only mistake I noticed reading through, so I have to congratulate you - I wouldn't've noticed you weren't a native speaker.

thanks (for the compliment and for correcting me)

Using words that just don't perfectly fit is probably a good illustration of differences between a speaker of near-native proficiency and a native speaker. Choosing odd words here and there.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#274

Post by e2daipi »

trophycase wrote: post #213

I seem to remember reading something about how English has one of the highest, if not the highest information to syllable ratio. I think that might give clues as to its ubiquity.

I believe that you are referring to this[0] study. It has since been published (2011), though it's not openly accessible.

Page 8 of a presentation by the author[1] shows that out of 7 languages (Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, English, and Mandarin) English is the second most information dense language, Mandarin being the most. Spanish is characterised by a fast rate of low-density syllables.

A Spanish to English comparison (eye-balling) would be that Spanish is spoken at a rate of 7.8 syllables per second vs 6.2 for English (≈ 22.9% faster). (Spanish compared as a lot of comments are referencing its simplicity)

English, compared in the referenced study, achieves the highest information rate, is spoken at a moderate-slow speed with a high information density.

[0] http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri... [1] http://neukom.dartmouth.edu/docs/pellegrino-presentation-dar...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#275

Post by ktRolster »

jeena wrote: post #252
ktRolster wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, I guess the only tip I have is to make a concious decission to want to improve on that, that at least is the first important step as far as I can see. I'll try to integrate some of the things you point out into my daily life, we'll see how it goes :D

Good luck! I'd love to hear how it turns out (in a year or two? lol)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#276

Post by ktRolster »

majewsky wrote: post #238
ktRolster wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One thing that helped me avoid a German accent while speaking English, was to imitate a heavy German accent and observe what was really the essence of it, then just avoiding these "mistakes". For example, here are the things that make up most of the German accent of English: - pronouncing "th" as "s" (Germans apparently don't know how to put one's tongue tip on the upper teeth) - pronouncing "w" as "v" (like the Germ…

good tips

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#277

Post by josinalvo »

kuschku wrote: post #165
joolze wrote: post #84

This is absurd. First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you basically brute force your way through the family to find your word. Now he complains about the pronun…

> Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language. That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several tim…

> That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several times worse.

Are they, though? Take a fixed set of rules for english pronunciation. Add a list of exceptions. Is this list as big as the list of nouns of portuguese, spanish, or french? (we can define as big in number of words, or try some information theoretical construct, or even go to some psicological measure, should one exist. I am still betting that the english pronunciation, evil as it is, is not as bad as a gender to every noun)

(I am a native portuguese speaker, and only got mad about gender in nouns when leaning french)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#278

Post by panglott »

dasil003 wrote: post #4

This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace. Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period…

Support for English is wide but shallow. Compare to indigneous mother tongues where support is narrow but deep, with a small community of committed speakers passing on their language to their children in the face of massive social and institutional pressure from the majority society to abandon it.

If English ever came under serious pressure, many would abandon it in an instant.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#279

Post by panglott »

moron4hire wrote: post #97
curun1r wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too). Spanish seems like it would've been the best c…

I would not be surprised if a very large component of the dominance of English is due to a dominant British Empire flowing directly into a dominant American empire, with a sidetrip into the near complete destruction of European economic output during WWII. Because the British and the Americans in the aftermath did not horde their academic research away from Europe (unlike Russia), it created the massive incentive tha…

To some extent. But less because the British forced it on everyone than because Nigerians, Indians, Filipinos have all found it useful for their own purposes: these are all polyglot societies in which the elevation of a regional language would advantage one ethnic group over others.

But how did English become so dominant in Europe? It seems mostly like the Nordic countries heavily adopted English as an international language, and this was a major beachhead for English. German and Russian had historical baggage, but why not French, historically the standard?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#280

Post by panglott »

wolfgke wrote: post #24
dasil003 wrote: post #4

This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace. Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period…

> Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. One reason is that many 20th-century totalitarian regimes had a problem with Esperanto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-ce... lists Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Soviet Union and Imperial Japan.

Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. (IIRC it is widely spoken in China as an alternative to English.)

Esperanto is only considered a "failure" in terms of its original goal of becoming the second language of every educated person in the world. Not even any natural language, even such a powerful one as English, has ever achieved anything so ambitious.

Post reply on HN