Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Weird English

nationalreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 110 posts

Re: Weird English

#61

Post by ziml77 »

Koshkin wrote: post #49
jamil7 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but very difficult to master on a native level The same can be said for all of the languages being discussed in this thread. I'm skeptical that English is any harder to learn at a native level than French, German or Polish.

I say, on the phonological level at least, French, German, and even Polish are easy . Their phonetics, both the consonants and the vowels, are straightforward. English, in contrast, is out of this world. (Its origin lies in the language of an island nation, after all.) So much so that it looks like their neighbors, the French, have huge difficulty with English pronunciation (and native English speakers, especially th…

It doesn't help that we screw with the pronunciation of loan words and then label anyone who pronounces them properly pretentious.

One of the worst destructions of foreign pronunciation has to be Notre Dame. It hurts me to say "noter dayme". More recently, having to pronounce La Croix as "lah croy" has also been annoying. But unfortunately for both of those it's objectively wrong to pronounce them the French way since they are proper nouns and whoever is using that proper noun defines how it is pronounced when referring to them.

Re: Weird English

#62

Post by LudwigNagasena »

mathieuh wrote: post #3

People always seem to complain about the etymological spelling of English but I love it. I love being able to look at a word and quickly know what its likely origin language was and get an idea of its meaning. N.B. I'm not a prescriptivist and I don't really care how you spell something as long as I can make it out. I'm just interested in languages and think it's really cool that looking at English words is like peer…

> Fair, it makes it more difficult for learners, but I'm not sure how relevant that is for a language unless you debase languages to being simply brutal ways of conveying meaning.

It makes it difficult for everyone. So many hours of L1 and L2 speakers are sunk for no good reason just because someone finds it cool to have “p” in “receipt”.

Re: Weird English

#63

Post by ScarletEmerald »

altacc wrote: post #12

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in compar…

Along these lines, there is a wonderful quote from James D. Nicoll from back in the days of Usenet:

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”

Re: Weird English

#64

Post by rich_sasha »

dghf wrote: post #21
rich_sasha wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tolkien also invented at least three full languages (Elvish, Orkish, Dwarvish). Though I believe he was well-versed in languages in the world so it's not learning laziness from his side.

Incoming pedantry: IIRC, Tolkien "only" invented two full languages, Sindarin ("Grey Elvish") and Quenya ("High Elvish"), if "full" means you could write a letter or have a conversation in it. He did create the foundations and some vocabulary for several others, like (as you mentioned) Dwarvish, and the Black Speech of Mordor, and Westron (a.k.a. the Common Speech), the language represented in the books by English (w…

I don't have much to say, other than it's nice to meet other (more knowledgable too) language nerds. Have a good day :)

Re: Weird English

#65

Post by LudwigNagasena »

bencollier49 wrote: post #4

I take the (facetious) position that English people don't learn other languages because we already learned at least two, if not three. cf. Uncleftish Beholding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

Learning a vocabulary with many sources is hardly comparable to learning a second language.

Re: Weird English

#66

Post by mlinhares »

ziml77 wrote: post #56
mlinhares wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, english is pretty easy if you're coming from a Romance language, simpler tenses, articles, prefixes, less use of gendered language (so you don't have to remember a tree is female in portuguese but male in spanish). My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese…

The flip-side of that pronunciation thing is that we're flexible on how things are pronounced. Just listen to the differences between British and American English or even regional differences in those countries. Us native English speakers know all the different ways our letters can sound, so differing pronunciations tend to remain recognizable as long as you don't form a homophone with another word that would work in…

Nah, that's no flip-side.

Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese have very different pronunciation rules (and accents) but you, as a speaker of any of these languages, would know how to pronounce any word you haven't seen before because the phonetics are consistent inside your accent, if you can read a word in Portuguese you know how it's going to be pronounced _in your accent_.

And this just doesn't exist in English as there are multiple words that are written the same but are pronounced differently. So while there are some rules as to how English is spoken the written language does not encode them, mostly because someone somewhere decided to use an orthography that would link the word to its source word in latin or french or whatever.

Re: Weird English

#67

Post by rich_sasha »

yorwba wrote: post #53
soneil wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way I've always understood this is that you can speak surprisingly bad English and still be understood. To a large extent you can just throw most of the right words in a sentence together and be largely understood - even if it sounds fantastically wrong. I'm thinking of things like .. in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička. If you don't understand how they mutate the word endings - and as far as I can…

> in Slovak, spoon vs teaspoon is lyžiča vs lyžička Isn't that just the diminutive? The English equivalent would be a "spoony." You might get looked at foony if you use that word to ask for a teaspoon, but if an English speaker understands what you mean, it's because they know their language well enough to guess the meaning based on a handful of words and the context. Similarly, I'd expect a Slovak speaker to underst…

If Slovak is anything like Polish in this regard, yes it is "just" a diminutive, but also a key word-creation mechanism.

In Polish, a screw is "śrubka", and "śruba" is a big screw - also a ship's propeller. "Kowadło" is anvil, and "kowadełko" (small anvil) is the anvil bone in your ear. "Łyżka" is a tablespoon and "łyżeczka" is a teaspoon, not merely "smaller spoon". "Suka" is bitch (either pejorative or very technical term for female dog), "suczka" (little bitch) is what dog owners and breeders actually call female dogs. And so on. Diminutives of words can end up having quite different meanings to the original words.

Re: Weird English

#68

Post by dustintrex »

jeroenhd wrote: post #48
altacc wrote: post #12

English is a beautiful slow motion car crash of multiple languages & influences and the result is a great language but I do pity anyone trying to learn it. When I was having difficulty learning the rules & oddities of another language, it really helped me to look back at English and remember that there are so many oddities, inconsistencies and variances, that most other European languages are easy to master in compar…

I think English is actually not that hard to master. What's difficult is writing it down . For every common word, English has a version derived from Celtic, Germanic and early French. Sometimes there are also versions with Latin or Greek descent. If you know any European language (stemming from Indo-European, languages like Hungarian and Finnish are something else entirely) then you'll quickly find words that you can…

As it happens, grammatically Chinese is much closer to English that Japanese, they're both SVO languages so basic sentences can be translated word by word. Today I eat apples = 今天 我 吃 苹果.

Japanese is SOV and has a topic/subject distinction foreign to English. 今日 りんご を 食べる = Today apples (object marker) eat, the subject is implicit.

Re: Weird English

#69

Post by bagacrap »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #65
bencollier49 wrote: post #4

I take the (facetious) position that English people don't learn other languages because we already learned at least two, if not three. cf. Uncleftish Beholding: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

Learning a vocabulary with many sources is hardly comparable to learning a second language.

hence "facetious" annotation

Re: Weird English

#70

Post by Borrible »

Asraelite wrote: post #57
Borrible wrote: post #24

Blame on you. That happens, when you make your own language open source. They tinker and fork it without any shame.

A funny thing is that there do exist "closed source" constructed languages whose use it legally restricted, like Loglan.

The world is a really strange place...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan

Thank you.

Post reply on HN