The Unsuitability of English (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#301

Post by conceit » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 7:23 PM UTC

gbog wrote: post #153

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…

> 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…

Very helpful right now having words, that have the same meaning, to convey a different meaning.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#302

Post by conceit » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 7:36 PM UTC

MattConfluence wrote: post #300

> For many concepts there are four different roots: one Anglo-Saxon, one Norman French, one Latin, and one Greek. Funny how he left out Norse, since that is where English gets the word "root" from.

Most of the Greek would come with the Latins. But are you sure Anglo-Saxon doesn't include the Norse already? The name Angeln comes from a region in Germany near the border of Denmark.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#303

Post by cbr » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 8:03 PM UTC

School-Cotton wrote: post #225

cbr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say we pick a random person and make them learn a completely unrelated language. Sometimes they will learn faster than others, like Spanish or Swahili vs English or Mandarin. Why would we expect them all to be the same difficulty?

An easy-to-learn writing system is a massive help when learning a language, but the writing system isn't part of the "language" as linguists understand the term. Just a representation of it. So I totally believe that it's easier to learn English than Mandarin (and maybe easier to learn Spanish than English) because the writing system gives you more hints, but that doesn't have anything to do with the (spoken) languag…

    I totally believe that it's easier to learn English than
    Mandarin (and maybe easier to learn Spanish than English)
    because the writing system gives you more hints, but that
    doesn't have anything to do with the (spoken) language,
    strictly speaking.

Sorry, I wasn't actually trying to bring up the writing system at all! I put both English and Mandarin in the "harder" category, even though English's writing system is simpler (though still not as simple as many).

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#304

Post by cbr » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

chaoky wrote: post #130

cbr wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say we pick a random person and make them learn a completely unrelated language. Sometimes they will learn faster than others, like Spanish or Swahili vs English or Mandarin. Why would we expect them all to be the same difficulty?

It's not a question of inherent difficulty, which doesn't make sense to quantify absolutely. It's all about how similar it is to the random person's native language, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically etc... Obviously Portuguese would be faster for a Spanish speaker to learn, since they are very similar in many aspects (in fact, they are both very conservative Iberian Romance languages) than it would be f…

Why doesn't it make sense to talk about the inherent difficulty of a language? I agree that some languages are related and this eases learning (PT to ES, PL to CZ) but why can't we look at learning speed on completely unrelated languages? For example, get some monolingual Quechua speakers and some monolingual Tamil speakers, and have them each learn the other language. Which group learns faster? The group that learns faster is learning the easier language.

I realize that this isn't practical to actually do as an experiment with all the world's language pairs, but I do think it demonstrates that inherent difficulty is a thing.

One thing that sort of shows this, though it's kind of distorted by writing systems, would be charts like this from language learning companies: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang... For example, they think for an English speaker Swahili is easier than Nepali is easier than Finnish.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#305

Post by indubitably » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 8:55 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #154

beat wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English and Unix are both strong arguments that "good enough" is the best way to communicate, that being more rigid and formal and, well, consistent, is actually counterproductive.

English isn't elegant, but it is very expressive, with plenty of scope for nuance. But relatively rigid ("strongly typed"?) languages like Latin and ancient Greek were also very expressive, so I'm not sure that's a convincing argument. As for Unix - it's the Java of operating systems. I'd love to see the Haskell or the Lisp of operating systems, but we seem stuck around 1975 as far as OS research goes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/46zwse/lati...

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#306

Post by gohrt » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 10:20 PM UTC

newman314 wrote: post #151

flatline wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chinese is more full of double (or more) meanings than any other language I've studied. Chinese literature and poetry are famous for playing on multiple meanings of a single character or sound.

To be clear, I was referring to everyday conversational Chinese. The play of words with any sort of literature or poetry isn't the normal usage.

Your original example was wordplay in literature.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#307

Post by wolfgke » Mon, Feb 22, 2016, 10:47 PM UTC

panglott wrote: post #280

wolfgke wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pe…

> 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.

What evidence do you have the the number of Esperanto speakers are increasing? The best source I could find

> http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/1480

thinks that this question is very difficult to answer: Depending on the data that one considers the number of Esperanto speaker can be increasing or decreasing (first diagram hints at a strongly decreasing number since about 1990, second at an slowly, but steadily increasing number).

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#308

Post by danieltillett » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 12:25 AM UTC

panglott wrote: post #291

vacri wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

If you notice, the of people/peple is /i/, which is different from the of edible/edbl that is /e/. The general rule of English taught in kindergartem is that the silent makes a vowel letter "say its name". That's the difference between "mat" and "mate" or "kit" and "kite" (or "nit" and "nite"). Similarly, doubled consonants make the preceding vowel "short", as in "holy" and "holly", where the former vowel says its na…

>Spelling reform isn't going to be solved by a browser extension replacing words

If you read my essay on why I wrote the extension, you will see that there have been more than 70 serous attempts to fix English spelling all of which have failed for the various reasons I list.

Cut Spelling is a step in the path to reforming English spelling, not the end - don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#309

Post by jodrellblank » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 3:03 AM UTC

panglott wrote: post #298

jodrellblank wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Esperanto has certainly caught on. It just hasn't been more successful than English has been, which was always kind of a ridiculous goal anyway. Many of the reasons people give for learning a language are highly ideological and often propaganda. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. There is more to a language than network effects; languag…

Esperanto has certainly caught on - well it hasn't died out, I'll give it that. And you can probably do more things and more varied things in Esperanto than many niche regional languages, particularly online ( https://www.reddit.com/r/esperante ktp.) . But it hasn't caught on in any official sense, it's learned and used by people who want to learn and use it, not by any big formal groups who think it is the fairest, the cheapest, the most reasonable, the xyz-est option for them, or because they think providing their non-Esperanto related services in Esperanto would be useful to their customers or profitable for their business.

"no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. - That's a view I haven't considered before, but I might go with it for regional languages; if you ignore a regional language with few speakers then you are ignoring those people - but even native Esperantists speak another native language as well, and most people speak a native language better than they speak EO. So ignoring it because "nobody speaks it" doesn't close off communication completely from any one person, it just changes the lines of which languages could connect you to different people.

Esperanto has only carrots - an apt analogy, when English has Hollywood films, the hyperstimulus of carrot cake spiced latte, to literature's austere plain carrot. EO might have only carrots, but it doesn't have a killer-app carrot. Say it was the ... language of extreme sports - how many people would want to pick it up then?

It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language? - I could quote a lot more of Claude Piron's essay which I linked, but the whole thing is quite interesting. He certainly wasn't arguing for forcing everyone to learn English, he was for forcing English native speakers to learn Esperanto (or potentially something similar), as well as everyone else learning it, out of a kind of idealism for fairness and equality and putting everyone on a more level playing field as far as communication goes, as much as for just money saving. (Something I think wouldn't really work).

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#310

Post by balladeer » Tue, Feb 23, 2016, 4:28 AM UTC

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…

> honestly, the spelling's not that bad

No, spelling is really bad and pronunciations are far worse! Pronunciations are just absurd.

As a non-native English speaker, with close to native fluency in written English and slightly (or maybe quite) worse in its spoken form, I do understand the importance of Engish as a universal language, esp. in today's world, but fixing its spelling and pronunciations would really be helpful. I find it strange that there are no steps towards it, or if there are maybe I am not aware of that.

I mean there is no damn reason to pronounce beard and heard[1] differently unless of course because it's just supposed to be so. And did we really had to say creature and create[2] this distinctly?

1. http://www.etni.org.il/farside/funpoem.htm

2. http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...