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The Unsuitability of English (2015)

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Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#81

Post by bonoboTP »

danieltillett wrote: post #28
thinkpad20 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). Eng…

The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.

This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple.

I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people who only speak very rudimentary English.

So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English speaker.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#82

Post by reinhardt »

meric wrote: post #51
curiousGambler wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time" On the topic of languages, I wonder if the Germans have a word for this yet... If so, English speakers should totally import it as they did Shadenfreude .

There's a word for it in English starting with a B and is an analogy to an output of an animal, which I'm disinclined to repeat here.

Beef jerky?

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#83

Post by bonoboTP »

Mithaldu wrote: post #9
rvense wrote: post #3

This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents. And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whos…

> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Probably true, but not because of the vowels, but because of rhythms and consonants for languages other than english. Particularly vowels are divisive, and to take spanish as an example, consider this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ Watch it with your mouse cursor off, and read the spanish bits, then sound them out, then check whe…

I agree as a Hungarian who speaks English and German. German pronunciation was much easier to learn and not just because of the writing system. Simply the whole phonology is closer (except for the German throat-R, we roll our Rs in Hungarian).

English has this weird flow to it, this kind of liquidlike smeared sound. And the intonation and stress is also very alien.

It's also usually easier for a beginner to understand another beginner from a different country, than a native speaker pronouncing the same (simple) sentences.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#84

Post by joolze »

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 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.

And the phonetics? Go try out fucking Czech. I've heard it's legitimately impossible to become fluent in Czech. Or Austrian dialect, which has something like 4 different "r"s.

"Hawaiian no consonant is ever followed by another consonant" ... yeah you also frequently run into the german nightmare of neverending words like "humahumanukanukaapuaa". You think that's a better way to deal with things? An easy to pronounce marathon?

The large vocabulary is undesirable? The large vocabulary, with extreme possible specificity, is what makes English so attractive for scientific application.

And complaining about grammar? English has one of the easiest grammars to learn and get started with, sure it will take a few decades to not make any mistakes, but for just getting going, it is remarkably easy. No genders (some languages have 5 or more genders for things, see czech), no conjugation.

Sorry for the rant, but if you're just gonna post some BS one sided oped I'm gonna do the same. I personally don't think English is the best choice either. But one sidedness is ultra-obnoxious.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#85

Post by beloch »

Perhaps the time has come to start using phonetic spellings (e.g. An English specific subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet) in at least some contexts, such as signage. Wales would be a good place to start. If someone here has the patience to translate, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" into IPA phonetic English I'd sure appreciate it.

On second thought, maybe we should leave the Welsh out of this. Yes... That would be for the best.

Anyways, while it is certainly ambitious to start using phonetic spellings in a limited way, it's far from unprecedented. In 1929 the Turks walked away from the Ottoman alphabet entirely and adopted the modern Turkish Alphabet, which is basically the Latin alphabet with some phonetic characters added. The result is that modern Turkish sounds like it's written, and it's easy to pick up pronunciation from spelling. The Turkish alphabet is relatively simple compared to full IPA, which is part of its appeal.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#86

Post by stevebmark »

English is indeed a terrible language, with British / European versions being objectively worse. The improvements to English came from Noah Webster (of Merriam-Webster fame) who was the sole driving force in re-spelling words, "colour" to "color," etc. He helped remove the arbitrary rules as best as he could. This is a clear improvement, but some of his more aggressive changes didn't catch on. English needs another reformation, since it's unrealistic the language will disappear anytime soon.

It's always been reforming subtly, where we see useful abbreviations form colloquially, like goodbye is a contraction of "God be with you." You could even argue the use of "u" instead of "you" in text messages is a version of this.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#87

Post by notahacker »

vorg wrote: post #77
teek wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.

> conjugation and gender are just as complicated Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?

Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality. Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak

Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's population will be able to pick up muy rapidamente

(I have a feeling this is going to end up like the joke about eliminating all the problems with British spelling, which is achieved by progressively turning it into something sounding like comedy German...)

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#88

Post by douche »

bonoboTP wrote: post #81
danieltillett wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.

This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this, like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for "word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the same as "define"? Or will you just c…

If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s

If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into our own.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#89

Post by Swizec »

curun1r wrote: post #80
danieltillett wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true, but given human nature it unlikely that people will both to go to the effort of learning a second or third language once there is an easier approach.

Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to transl…

There is an established theory that language shapes your thoughts. If you only know one language, then you are confined to a single way of thinking.

Another interesting phenomena is that you are more logical in a 2nd or 3rd language than you are in your mother tongue, where you are more emotional. This can be a useful superpower.

Re: The Unsuitability of English (2015)

#90

Post by [deleted] »

qb45 wrote: post #2

Reminds me of certain quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup. My personal pet peeve is when you concatenate two words to end up with something sounding completely different, say in finite infinite . Just doesn't make sense at all.

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