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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#281

Post by kuschku »

josinalvo wrote: post #277
kuschku wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 theor…

That’s the thing, there are no real fixed rules.

Home vs. some, Foot vs. boot, versus vs. verses, they’re, their, there, etc.

Pronunciation vs. pronounce.

The only solution is to learn every word twice.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#282

Post by panglott »

Swizec wrote: post #162
danieltillett wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a personal hobby of trying to find one of these thoughts that only can be thought of in one language and not another and I have yet to find one. All modern languages seem to be able to be used to express all human thoughts that can be expressed with any language.

In english it is very common to say that you are a "mommy" or "daddy" of your pet. It sounds normal and acceptable. In Slovenian it sounds like you're a mental patient who thinks they gave birth to a dog. So most people switch to English to express said sentiment since we imported it from US television. Even though we have a direct translation for the word "mommy", all the submeanings do not directly translate. So we…

People have begun to say this in the US, and it drives me nuts as a native speaker of English. I do not find it normal or acceptable.

If you want kids, have kids or adopt them. Don't take an animal and twist it into filling your own emotional needs by treating it like a human infant.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#283

Post by tangled_zans »

If I had a dollar for every time I saw a native english speaker complain about how "hard" English is. . .

I think those that were born speaking English and never had to learn a second language start to feel insecure around literally everyone else who speaks both their own language and English.

So they make up this meme about how "English is the most irregular and complicated language in the world", and hey, now it's okay that they don't know any other language, they've gotten the hardest one down! Yay!

It's the most pretentious linguistic meme I've seen.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#284

Post by dragonwriter »

panglott wrote: post #282
Swizec wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In english it is very common to say that you are a "mommy" or "daddy" of your pet. It sounds normal and acceptable. In Slovenian it sounds like you're a mental patient who thinks they gave birth to a dog. So most people switch to English to express said sentiment since we imported it from US television. Even though we have a direct translation for the word "mommy", all the submeanings do not directly translate. So we…

People have begun to say this in the US, and it drives me nuts as a native speaker of English. I do not find it normal or acceptable. If you want kids, have kids or adopt them. Don't take an animal and twist it into filling your own emotional needs by treating it like a human infant.

> People have begun to say this in the US

I encountered it first in the 1970s -- when my age was in the single digits. It might have been new then, but few people seemed to think it was noteworthy, so I doubt it. So, I think "have begun" is somewhat of a misrepresentation.

> Don't take an animal and twist it into filling your own emotional needs by treating it like a human infant.

IME, virtually none of the people who use this language treat their pets "like a human infant", and many of them have either biological or adopted children as well as pets.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#285

Post by gjm11 »

lispm wrote: post #263
gjm11 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genera might be the Common Lisp of operating systems (as well as the, or at least an, operating system of Common Lisp). Is there a Scheme of operating systems?

Genera was originally developed in ZetaLisp. Later Cmmon Lisp was added and many newer parts of the OS were developed in Common Lisp.

Yup. (Was that intended as a correction to something I wrote? If so, I wasn't clear enough and I apologize.)

Regardless, it may be worth adding that ZetaLisp was one of the most important "source" dialects from which Common Lisp emerged, and that Symbolics people were heavily involved in the process. Genera wasn't so far from being "an OS of Common Lisp" even before there was a Common Lisp.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#286

Post by panglott »

danieltillett wrote: post #7
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…

We are going to have the technological equivalent of a Babel fish [1] soon, so we should expect that basically everyone will just learn their native language unless they like learning languages as a hobby. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...

We will not have a technological Babel fish until we have portable (power-efficient) computers that are both 1. roughly as or more intelligent as a human and 2. understands the world in the same way as a human, including both semantics and pragmatics of such things as humor.

This is not anything realistic in anything like the near term. Most of the automated translation software I've used can't even handle something like deixis through a text between two such well-studied and similar languages as English and Spanish. You're talking about a device that could translate between Scots, Tamil, and Huasteca Nahuatl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#287

Post by restalis »

jodrellblank wrote: post #23
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 the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise. As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are writt…

"To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year."

This reminds me of jokes I've heard where pretty much everything (no mater how absurd) could be made looking better or worse depending on the frame of reference which (as you'd probably guessed) was involving those poor starving children. On a more serious note, the starving children are such an effective demagogic ammunition, aren't they? Almost too convenient to completely eradicate!

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#288

Post by panglott »

mwcampbell wrote: post #266
vorg wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a Chinese, Japanese, and Korean talk to each other in English, they often can't understand an American who joins in the conversation. Perhaps Basic English , without nativisms like "stick around".

Maybe we native speakers should consider it an obligation to learn to speak and write in basic English without idioms, phrasal verbs, and other gratuitous features that make the language more difficult for non-native speakers.

Sorry, native speakers with language privilege will never give up on the idea that they speak "real" English, and the the "bad" English non-native speakers speak among themselves is anything other than a bastard pidgin.

What international business English would need is dictionaries, grammars, lesson courses, and people willing to have their kids speak it INSTEAD OF British- or American-standard English.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#289

Post by panglott »

panglott wrote: post #282
Swizec wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In english it is very common to say that you are a "mommy" or "daddy" of your pet. It sounds normal and acceptable. In Slovenian it sounds like you're a mental patient who thinks they gave birth to a dog. So most people switch to English to express said sentiment since we imported it from US television. Even though we have a direct translation for the word "mommy", all the submeanings do not directly translate. So we…

People have begun to say this in the US, and it drives me nuts as a native speaker of English. I do not find it normal or acceptable. If you want kids, have kids or adopt them. Don't take an animal and twist it into filling your own emotional needs by treating it like a human infant.

My only anecdata is that I have only noticed it in the past few years, and it makes my skin crawl. Don't know how to get good data on the extent or prevalence of this practice, sounds like a lot of work.

I'm describing an extreme, but I reckon it's the case that in American society there has been a significant increase in the use of animals for emotional work. As in treating domestic animals as pets and members of the family rather than work animals (for deterring vermin, hunting, guide work, &c.). Referring to pets by familial terms is a linguistic reflection of that.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#290

Post by gavinpc »

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…

Also, English got by for centuries without canonical spelling. For the OP's underlying point, I'm not sure that's an improvement, since people could spell things more "naturally," as many children do now when learning to write. But it does show that irregularities can be reined in after they are already in common practice.
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