I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks English, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if English has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized Island in the Northern Sea.
Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.
The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.
I recommend Journey to the West out of the four. Kind of like an RPG-esque journey about a monkey and his gang traveling in search of Buddhist scriptures. You'll get to learn about Sun Wukong, who is the basis for a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and (I believe?) Korean spin-off characters, like Goku from Dragonball[1]
Another good option is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which will cover a good portion of Chinese history (in a mythological way). A lot of the characters like Zhu Geliang [2] are still highly influential in modern Chinese culture.
Chinese literature is indeed very rich, especially the ancient poetries/verses, from Tang and Song dynasty. They are indeed the essential part of, not only Chinese, but East Asian aesthetics in general.
Writing lends persistence and faithfulness to the original.
Oral traditions tend to be divergent and mutable.
Even such changes as the introduction of the printing press, and cheap paper, had profound impacts:
• Copies were now letter-for-letter identical.
• Reproduction costs fell by 2-6 orders of magnitude.
• Translation to the vernacular became viable. It was cheaper to bring the book to the reader (translation) than the reader to the book (learning Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, etc.).
• Literacy grew -- from 5-10% in 1500 or so to 95%+ by 1900.
Of course, the number of published works grew, as did the literary canon, to the point it's a largely meaningless term (or has been subsumed by pop culture).
I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
I don't mean to be rude, but how many other languages do you speak? There's an almost ineffable depth to nearly every language on this earth, and there are hundreds of them with very large literature corpuses. Naturally, maybe speaking two languages, you are familiar only with literature in those languages. Also, remember that English, being spoken by so many people, its literature is naturally more divulged and widely known. Nonetheless there are truly unique characteristics to almost any language, so much that you could fill a lifetime of study in any one of them.
The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-)
I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?
(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)
Could it instead be that the language that people find pleasing changes over time, so that, as a modern reader, your tastes are naturally more attuned to modern writing?
The genres you list are very popular in the English world. It's fine of course but to use that to argue for a supremacy of English language literature doesn't strike me as a very solid argument. It would be like saying that Comics are superior to Bandes Dessinees because you enjoy super heroes a lot. Or that American cuisine is the best because you love hamburgers, tex mex and slow cooked meat. Nothing wrong with that but it's very subjective.
The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output.
Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?
Russian and French 19c literature are the two obvious counter-examples. I admire the attempt to reframe the question in terms that allow you to claim English is pre-eminent though.
So, basically, if they don't have the breadth of literary genres that English does, they're not as good. That's a horrible metric to judge literature and literary value by.
What is your native language? Mine is Polish, for sci-fi I could not enjoy Stanislaw Lem translated to English. On the other hand I really enjoyed translation of H.P. Lovercaft to Polish.
I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged.
I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.
some people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling
I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.
... written by English or American authors, have
a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner?
How about other non-English language authors?
Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.
I have the impression that basic German is quite technical. You can be poetic, even very poetic, but it is not easy. You can, however, easily describe the relation of one thing to another in detail.
English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
According to which method of counting?
Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."
In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.
You're citing information from two different studies that could very well have used different methods for counting lemmas. The text in between the two bits you quoted illustrates the extent to which this is the case: Alongside your study of 20-year-olds finding that they recognize ~42,000 lemmas, there's an earlier study of people about the same age finding that they recognize between 12,000 and 17,000.
The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.
Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.
Hm, that was supposed to be the total count, not for single speakers.
Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.
Hm, I also seem to remember that German has a thinner dictionary. I suspect that lemmas in German are difficult to count, as there are so many compound words. Apart from the joy of teasing fellow Britons for their stupidity, I don't see why an average German adult should recognise 40% more lemmas when the languages are so related.
Wikipedia[1] says there are more words in the German dictionary - but I suppose this depends how you count compound words, and what you take as contemporary words, too.
> I have the impression that basic German is quite technical.
What does this mean?
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.
It’s also the lingua franca of tech. There isn’t any way to say “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” or “8-Way associative cache” in French or any other language without severe lingual contortions.
This is of course cheating since these two languages are fairly close to each other (although Technical German tends to be more descriptive and somewhat more accurate than Technical English on average, at least that's my overall impression across a bunch of fields). Both also happen to have a full complement of technical and engineering terms for almost anything (including computers due to some parallel developments), though these are often not so related (esp. mechanical eng.)
"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.
As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.
Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficult (for humans, not so much).
The English bias in phone keyboards and autocorrect systems is awful. There are lots of issues with verbal forms and diacritics. And if you dare to write in more than one language at a time, all bets are off.
I think this is one of the places where some public funds could make for good, useful research. Microsoft, Apple, and Google aren't interested in creating the perfect keyboard and autocorrect system for non-English languages, they will do the bare minimum and won't improve until someone shows them there's a better way (and it starts hurting sales).
German just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like:
- Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization
- Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending
- Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten"
- Neugier = curiousity: "new" + "greed"
I do wonder if this "composibility" is actually the norm for languages and English is just the odd one out. Having a large vocabulary from other languages (e.g. Latin) obscures the meaning of some word roots (e.g. particula - pars + diminutive, just like in German) so you have to just memorize it as one chunk. So perhaps the benefit of other languages like German is just their purity/consistency.
I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious.
Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".
The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:
c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).
> The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:
... meaning you can't understand many terms if you only know English, because they are actually french/latin/greek. "Cache" is actually an example of this.
Strictly on a UI/UX basis, it beats most other online dictionaries for not being annoying A.F.
I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.
I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.
It is just a question of orthography. In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word. In English, they are usually (but not always) written with space. So "Christmas tree" is "Weinachtsbaum". This is sometimes made out to be much more mysterious than it is, as if German is more "composable" or something, but the only difference is the typographical space.
English is just more difficult to spell because there no simple rule for when a compound is written with or without space (or with a dash, as is sometimes the case). E.g. Christmas is Christ + mass, but is written in a single word.
It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between.
There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?
In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.
Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.
While you are correct to some extent, I do find German to be much more consistent in this regard.
In many cases this may just be due to English's distance from it's root (i.e. Latin, French). As it was pointed out below, "syntax" is also a composition of two simpler words - they just aren't words we know. In German, there are also loan words from Latin and French, but I do have the impression it is not to the same extent, and the German language is quite consistent.
As a German native speaker I find German much more confusing in this regard.
Maybe this is because I don't know the rules in English well enough[1] but for German I can give you a few examples of the complications we have to deal with:
From grandparent:
> In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word.
This is true, but the difficulty is to know when two or more nouns are considered a compound noun (Zusammensetzung) or just a group of words (Wortgruppe).
For example consider the following (real) street names:
- Schleißheimer Straße
- Hohenzollernstraße
- Leuchtenbergerstraße
Straße is simply street. Schleißheim is the name of a place.
Schleißheimer Straße is written as two separate words because the rule [2]
says that combinations with geographic names ending in -er that signify a place
(and not the people living in that place, for example) are usually not
considered compounds. A simple counterexample would be Hohenzollernstraße with Hohenzollern referring to the House of Hohenzollern.
Now consider a case like Leuchtenbergerstraße. Leuchtenberger can refer to the place called Leuchtenberg or the Duke of Leuchtenberg. It would be written Leuchtenberger Straße if it had
to do anything with the city of Leuchtenberg, maybe leading to that place. If it is named in the honor of the Duke it would be written Leuchtenbergerstraße.
Another problem is that often nouns are not simply slapped together.
Adding an additional s (Fugen-s[3]) between the words is very common.
For example:
traffic is Verkehr, sign is Zeichen, traffic sign is not Verkehrzeichen but Verkehrszeichen.
On the other hand: tax is Steuer and transfer tax is Verkehrsteuer, but not Verkehrsssteuer.
dog is Hund and leash is Leine. A dog leash is a Hundeleine, addding an additional e in this case.
Sometimes nothing is added but something removed: crown is Krone, prince is Prinz and a crown prince is a Kronprinz, leaving out the final e in Krone.
Compounding in German is complicated and weird.
[1] The only rule i know is: "It's written as two words, except for a few well known exceptions." I suspect that there is more to it and I'd be happy for any enlightenment.
Laptop and notebook comes to mind. Maybe English does have this mechanism but to a less extent?
Interesting enough, Portuguese also does compounding to some extent (Bear in mind it's a romance language).
My favorite English feature is how you can pick a substantive and use it as a verb. Mostly makes sense, specially if there's evident connotation behind the substantive.
Interesting with zwischenspeicher... In Finnish terminology "cache" is "välimuisti" which seems to be the same kind of word-construction.
I have wondered how people came up with translations to computer terminology. In retrospect, borrow from the German language, of course - as the saying goes, they have a word for everything!
It just occurred to me that there are two very different kinds of caches which aren't really distinguished by terms:
- Cache, as in processor cache: total access mediation, i.e. all operations go through the cache. Cache bypass might be possible but rare in practice.
- Cache, as in application cache (e.g. redis/memcached/@lru_cache): thing were you put some result to recall later conditionally. Exactly the opposite of total access mediation: application needs to explicitly use cache.
The first one I'd call Zwischenspeicher. The second I'd call Ergebnisabrufspeicher.
Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean much it doesn't exist. If only, because we have to be able to teach it efficiently to people with no mastery of the english language.
Your Google translation is no good. Sets is an English word, and it would be associative (feminine form). That being said, the reason I, as a French speaker working in tech/research, prefer to discuss tech in English, is because:
1. There is always new terminology being invented in conferences or bleeding edge R&D. There is no official translation for most of these terms. You could translate them, but most people wouldn't be quite sure what you mean.
2. Anything I write in English is immediately accessible to 20x more people. Writing about tech in French means sacrificing most of my audience. English really is the lingua franca of tech.
It doesn't bother me at all, even though it's not my native language. The world needs a lingua franca (of tech and everything else), and English fits the bill quite well. It's much less overcomplicated than many other languages. I make many more grammar mistakes in French, because French grammar is full of arbitrary nonsensical rules. No thanks.
"collection of things," mid-15c., from Old French sette "sequence," variant of secte "religious community," from Medieval Latin secta "retinue," from Latin secta "a following"
I did not use Google translation. I went to the French Wikipedia articles, which used cache associatif.
But even if you want to quibble word choice, the fact remains that there's no severe linguistic contortion. Sure, French doesn't permit chaining nouns in the same way that English does. But the de chains are still permitted, and aren't much more wordy.
Tangential: it's worth noting that this is a historical circumstance rather than something that has to do with French in itself. When a new domain arises that a language didn't previously have words for, like computing, "home-grown" (as opposed to borrowed) words can be more or less successful. Take the French Academy for example, whose attempts at purging French of English loanwords[1] has had mixed success. (And see also the Central Hindi Directorate[2].)
We learned a lot of Afrikaans tech words in computer science in high school in South Africa. It's pretty useless for me. I've never used any of it since, and have forgotten most of it.
Fellow Afrikaansie here. There were some very novel Afrikaans words for computer terminology in that school computer science handbook... However none of it seems to be that useful or much used at all, and English accesses the latest tech and many major western tech hubs.
I suspect this is the case for my languages, especially those spoken in very few countries or by smallish population groups, especially when the language speaking group is not Geographically close to other populations of a grammatically closely related language.
I am busy studying Georgian because I am relocating to the eastern European country. However I remain doubtful that Georgian will be that useful for technical computer stuff, because it has only around 4 million speakers and is linguistically close to almost no other widely spoken language.
I will find out soon, as my language skills and experience with the place collide.
In Spanish we have also technical terms for those. I guess it's the same with most other languages. However it's true that there are some terms without a proper translation and it's obviously more international to use the English ones.
I thought that too. until I had to talk in english full time and realized how much was transliterated informally in conversations and how those terms were corrupted into the national language. what you call lingual contortion only seem odd (to me and you since you also mentioned a romance language) because romance languages were the trend setters at some point and now have very refined processes to change the language and be more permissive of foreign words creeping in, since they understand the power of allowing or not this to happen. but over time, they will officialize new words in the romance language just fine. english is no better or worse at this.
case in point, every single "fancy" word in english cames from the roman dominion over the channel. it was fancy to talk like the emperor. and that is only one of the subtle aspects that rome knew how to play on the colonies cultural subjugation.
Do you mean how the Normans conquered and ruled England after the invasion of 1066? Lots of foreign words come into a language when your rulers speak another language. Often the conquered populations are completely converted to the ruling people language.
> In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part.
The Academy encourages the avoidance of loan words, but very few people in France actually listen to the Academy. Spend ten minutes in any French tech company and the Academy goes out the window.
Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages.
P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation looks completely different?
Here are the Translations for weekend for each Romance language and Latin:
French - fin de semaine
Spanish - fin de semana
Romanian - sfârșit de săptămână
Portuguese - final de semana
Italian - fine settimana
Latin - volutpat vestibulum
Notice how only Latin looks completely different. I wonder if google translate is broken.
Ancient Romans just didn't use weeks, so the translation is probably a modern one. The closest to a weekend is a market day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae
For Portuguese at least it's most likely translating word-for-word. The term is "fim-de-semana" ("fim" rather than "final", and hyphens signifying a compound word)
In German it's Wochenende (Woche = week, Ende = end), which is literally the literal translation. ... de.wiktionary.org tells me it was adopted from English, too, after World War I.
I have never heard vacancelle in France. But le week-end all the time. Even my kid’s school teachers used it. “Bon week-end!” Never heard fin de semaine even among my old country neighbors in Provence. My anecdote doesn’t make it fact of course. Most French people I know don’t pay any attention to the Academie Française.
Technically true, and there were some weird-ass byte sizes in the early decades of computing, but the 8-bit byte has been universal for, I think, around 40 years now?
Translation of "Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem" = Subsistema de red del núcleo de Linux.
Translation of "8-way associative cache" = caché asociativa de 8-vías. I don't see severe lingual cortortions here.
The handicap for Chinese and Asian languages is charactersets and input. A finite phonetic alphabet is a tremendous technical advantage when keyboarding, and alternatives really haven't proved superior.
(I'm entering this via soft-keyboard and stylus, painfully, with many typos. The fact that the interface could be trivially modified, but hasn't and isn't, and yet remains so deficient, doesn't speak well to prospects here.)
In Chinese, "Linux内核网络系统", literally "Linux Kernel Network System". Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language generally uses full meaning-to-meaning translations of technical terms as much as possible, and only occasionally uses phonetic nouns (e.g. 安卓 "Anzhuo" for Android) or English words (e.g. "Linux").
Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to some very unfortunate contortions, as the Chinese language is much less suited to phonetic transcription as compared to syllabary-based languages like Korean or Japanese. There's no "one obvious way" to map a foreign name onto the Chinese sound-set, and even when you do, there's likewise no obvious way to choose the corresponding characters (and you must be cautious to avoid characters with unwanted meanings or connotations).
Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)
Although that is somewhat of a simplification, it is certainly more true of Chinese than of English.
The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.
The vast majority of country names in Chinese do not contain 国 but are rather purely phonetic transcriptions. Only a handful of countries have 国 in the common name.
That's true, but I think the full name usually has, just as the full names of Beijing Shanghai Tianjin etc contain 市 even though the short names doesn't.
And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.
Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …
Sounds like this won't be news for you, but for others in the thread, the Chinese sometimes play around a lot with puns and rhymes in transliterated names.
With phonetic systems like Japanese and Korean, terms like this regularly get represented as-is in the script. Sometimes they don't get translated, as you can see plenty of jargon in this Korean wiki page on C++. [0]
One example is 'computer' -> 컴퓨터 in Hangul. It's still 'computer', just pronounced with the Korean pronunciation rules.
The Japanese first adapted writing from Chinese; this adapted system is called kanji and is highly similar to, and often homographic with, Chinese hanzi. However, Japanese and Chinese have very different phonological structure: Chinese is mostly comprised of monosyllabic words, whereas Japanese has lots of polysyllabic words. This makes it more difficult to do phonetic transcription in Japanese kanji than in Chinese hanzi.
The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words.
As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد" after all.
> There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد" after all.
There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler.
Katakana [1] is one of the two syllabary writing systems in Japanese, with Hiragana [2] being the other. IIRC katakana is the one where every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, so transliterated loan words with consecutive consonants end up growing vowels in the middle. They also have kanji (characters), and various romanization systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese). It's really amazingly inefficient.
Japanese uses three distinct character sets in writing: Hiragana (a syllabary), Katakana (another syllabary) and Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Kanji are usually used together to write native Japanese words, whereas Katakana is used almost exclusively for loanwords.
Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".
Maybe the greatest success and failing of English is that it has never undergone the rigour of standardisation of many other languages. While most other world languages have all at times had a central authority dictating what is right or wrong, English has a history of pluralism (particularly from American vs. British English, but also from other sides). This makes for difficulties (regional variation, different pronunciations, etc.) but I think easier to approach as an outsider, and also flexible to changing use over time.
It wouldn't, couldn't go through standardization like that.
The article misses emphasizing or properly mention English's success started not in conquering but overcoming conquerors.
It's hard to think of English as having a single source, as what remains of that gets very small as you go back in time. The language in England and thereabouts overcame several invasions. Roman, Viking, a couple of invasions you'd call French now, among others... they all left their mark, or more accurately the native population absorbed a sizable portion of the invaders' language and established and re-established the dominance of the English language in the area.
If you take a beginners' course in French you'll probably get the line that English is 60% French, badly pronounced and it's true! (more or less)
It would sure be hard to standardize something that has a habit of repeatedly bolting on large chunks of other languages, nevermind it's modern regional inconsistencies.
On the topic of English and speaking it better each day: the funny „upside down quotes” are an instant giveaway that you are German. It’s not really a correct typographic treatment of quotes in English (or almost any language except German, afaik).
It's mostly a sign of typing English on a German keyboard that automatically produces „fancy quotes‟. They work similarly on Chinese or Japanese keyboards, but it's harder to accidentally use them to write English text with wrong 「fancy quotes」, because switching the layout is mandatory for those. Personally I do switch between German and English keyboards to type in those languages, but I guess most people don't bother.
Curious. How do you quantify expressiveness? English does not seem that expressive to me. English, German and Esperanto are way too related also to be making a comparison (which was kind of the criticism against Esperanto).
Could you give a couple of examples?
Also, I have to disagree with the statement that it is the language of great literature. I counter argue those would be French, German, Greek, Latin, Literary Chinese etc, depending on the period. I am not saying there is no great work in the English language, however your statement implies something different (the majority of great work in a period or style utilized that language).
I believe that English has many problems, from crazy grammar rules to horrendously inconsistent spelling. But to say it is not expressive is absurd, and suggests that you haven’t read any great English literature. This is not to say that the cultures you mentioned and many other have not produce their own great literature, of course.
I meant examples of expressiveness over German.
Edit: You were comparing English with other languages and implied it is more or as expressive as the majority of languages (or at least the ones you are familiar with). Thus my question.
I cannot think of a a good example right now, but as a native German speaker, I do sometimes find myself wondering how to express a certain thought in German.
English grammar feels more flexible to me than German, and English seems to be more suited for colorful idioms.
Fellow German here. From a grammatical standpoint German is a really flexible language while English isn‘t. I only recently found out about it during my Latin studies (selftaught) and comparing Latin to German and English. The problem with expressing a thought in German might be a side effect of the ubiquity of English in so many fields: we are just used to think in English terms that it becomes a second nature.
English has so many idioms that are nearly impossible to translate elegantly. "go to town on somebody", for example; a good part of learning English is not just learning grammar and vocabulary (although those are necessary), but learning all these idioms (which is kind of an open-ended process).
It really doesn't matter which language it is, as long as it's not super hard to learn. The hard reality is, if you have N languages and speakers, to communicate without coordination either they have to each learn N-1 other languages or just 1 with O(1) coordination. The rest just happens naturally via network effects.
Agreed. As a french, I wish english were a mandatory official second language everywhere : forms, menus, schools, movies and signals.
I get the emotional attachment to ones own language but making it easy for the entire humanity to communicate is a much more important goal. It trumps culture and history. It trumps nationalism.
And why english ? Well i don't care. It could be anything really.
But the only thing that is used by most people than english is chinese, and it's only use way more locally or contextually as english, while being more complex.
English has very simple tenses, few symbols, not required accents and the industry and culture already use it massively all around the world.
It's full of useless complexity and artifacts like all language, but it's there.
Let's all add it to our toolbelt and be done with it.
It always feels constraining for me when I want to convey an emotion. For example, in English one would say "soft kitty" but in Russian you have at least 10 options: мягкая (simple "soft"), мягонькая (diminutive "soft") + кошечка, киса, кисонька, кисуля, кисулечка. Depending on the choice, you can sound tender or childish or like an old lady.
It's definitely not an exhaustive list of how you can call a cat, there are also funny augmentative options for male cats: кошак, котище, котяра, котофей. Spanish also feels amazing because of its extensive use of diminutives and augmentatives. But yes, English is the best language for technical or business purposes because it's so concise.
I love the Finnish language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (Swede) if he had only learned Korean because Korea is the neighbour and if I had only learned German or France because those are our big neighbours. No, Finnish brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks Finnish, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if Finnish has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized country in the North.
Let‘s appreciate Finnish, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe Finnish can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.
English is in no way intrinsically special, but for some reason many people speak it nowadays. Not so for Finnish, even though it could very well be better suited to the purpose (I don't speak a word of Finnish myself). Most of the text you copied applies as well to Finnish as to English, but I doubt that "Finnish [...] makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet." English also doesn't, but it comes a lot closer.
In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1].
China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].
It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.
In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis.
> It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.
The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer.
I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.
It's not directly pertinent, but the slow triumph of Greek culture over Roman culture after the conquest of Greece is one of the most fascinating parts of ancient history. The Roman elites not only spoke Greek, they sent their kids to learn in Greek schools, they regarded Greece as the center of drama, philosophy, medicine..it's really quite amazing how deeply enamored with Greece the upper echelons of Roman society became. And not just as a passing fad, but consistently over a period of centuries.
Latin was the language of the day-to-day humdrum masses, as you say it's what a patrician would use to order a soldier or guard or lawyer around before going back to discussing fine cheeses or what have you in Greek.
>Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror, and introduced her arts into rude Latium. Thus flowed off the rough Saturnian numbers, and delicacy expelled the rank venom: but for a long time there remained, and at this day remain traces of rusticity.
I once visited a customer in Finland. In the office, they spoke english around me. Curious, I asked if they were just being polite by speaking english instead of Finnish when I was present.
They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.
Both Chinese and English are interesting and relatively unique in how lossy they can be and still convey information. And I think that's a significant benefit in being a lingua franca.
And chinese can be learned - see any trader in a nation on the Chinese border. Tonality isn't that bad, actually - especially when the language isn't unintelligible when the tones are wrong - same as how English isn't unintelligable when vowels are wrong (unlike Japanese for example).
Written Chinese is, however, a big stumbling block to its universality. Though, given how rarely I even write English without a computer aiding me, that distinction is becoming less meaningful.
I've come to see most everyone knows three languages: that of their parents, that of their state, and English. The advantages of having those three be the same are significant.
In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary.
This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well).
And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.
For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken.
"I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.
The first three are grammatical, not so much the last three. I agree most speakers of English (native or otherwise) could figure out what someone saying the last three intends. But you're saying that this is a special fact about English. That if I attempt to speak in 'broken Spanish' or 'broken Japanese' and produce the equivalent of 'me want food' in Spanish or Japanese, that Spanish and Japanese speaker would just shrug their shoulders and say 'who knows what he means'?
It's a general property of natural language that speakers can produce ungrammatical sentences and yet be understood by other (perhaps more fluent) speakers. English isn't special that way.
I can't comment on Japanese, but broken Spanish can be confusing (to me) due to verb conjugations. Conjugations are also a major sticking point for new learners of the language since they have a big impact on meaning but can be hard to remember.
For example, changing a single letter in "quiero" ("I want") can have a big impact on its meaning by becoming "quiere" ("He/she wants") and "quieres" ("you want").
But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.
"Man chased the woman" and "woman chased the man" have completely different meanings in English. In many languages, switching around the two nouns like that wouldn't necessarily change the meaning, and in others you'd at least be able to pick out that something had gone wrong.
The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example.
I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.
I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is.
All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.
I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English.
Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.
Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents.
Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down).
It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.
> Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.
That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.]
This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures.
Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.
> Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.
Quite. As I have observed before, The Guardian is all too often The Daily Mail for leftie intellectuals. These days, even as something of a leftie intellectual, I find myself often unable to tolerate it at all. And in general I have less and less patience with overly polemic or political points of view - it honestly just gets boring and doesn't make the world any better for anyone.
EU has/is failing? I guess - in a glass-half-empty way - like everyone around the world is dying.
EU deliberately promotes multilingualism and, I'd argue, successfully[1]. English is (deservingly and also ironically) the most common language spoken in EU.
No, the EU is failing. Merkel has spearheaded the importation of millions of people who (along with their descendants) will NEVER thrive in the information economy, and who will accelerate their fiscal demise as their native population ages.
Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese.
That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.
IMHO spoken Chinese is not so bad. The grammar is simpler than English (no verb conjugation is a big one), and with the exception of tones, the phonetic inventory is fairly straightforward to learn. Although individual characters are frequently homophonic, treating groups of them as words (as you do in English) reduces the number of homophones significantly. If you're only going to learn Mandarin without the written language, it's very much doable, and possibly even easy depending on how quickly you pick up on the tones.
Written Chinese is, of course, a totally different matter.
On the bright side (and I am saying this genuinely) if you enjoy wordplay, puns, and double-meanings, Mandarin is hilariously awesome at it, even compared to English, which is no slouch itself.
>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].
Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.
Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?
> I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.
I've always wanted to know if this is true or not, but I've never found a good answer. I know the FSI rates Chinese at roughly 2000 hours of instruction to their definition of fluency (compared to 500 for other european languages like french or german), but I haven't found a similar comparison for chinese speakers.
The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, because of how kanji/hanzi work.
(English is, in turn, harder than languages such as Spanish because of its spelling weirdnesses.)
The early weirdnesses stop mattering pretty quickly. Stuff like irregular verbs, you just get used to. The things that make languages hard are things that still trip you up years into learning the language.
In English, that'd be spelling. We have spelling bees! For a lot of languages, the idea of a spelling bee is unthinkable, because spelling is just not a problem. But in English, we have spellcheck on computers, we have native speakers constantly correcting each others' spelling.
In Chinese, that'd be reading/writing characters. At least in English, if you forget how to spell a word, you can just spell it out phonetically. In Chinese, there are thousands of characters, and if you forget how to write one, you're screwed. In a famous essay, someone forgot how to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and asked his friends at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, and none of his friends could remember, either (we're talking native Chinese speakers in the PhD program for Chinese).
A good case but I'm looking for something more objective, like actual studies counting the hours. Moser is a famous text that gets posted on HN a lot but this is basically the most critical text there is, and it gets to the point where he's unfair and contrived, since it's written to be comical as opposed to accurate.
'Why x is so damn hard' can be written for any other language. All language are equally complex. chinese writing might be hard but it makes up in other area.
You can't make such a strong claim as "all languages are equally complex" with zero evidence, especially if you're replying to a comment that gives plenty of evidence that Chinese is harder.
I will grant that Chinese is easy in some ways and hard in others. I'm saying that most differences in difficulty fade away, years into learning a language. The things that remain are disproportionately worse, for Chinese.
In China, everyone takes compulsory English courses from a fairly young age. Due to the importance of it as a school subject, preschool children are regularly placed into English classes to help them get an early leg up on the language.
In the US of A and most other English speaking countries, nobody bothers learning anything but English; the minority of people who do learn a second language tend to go for something relatively easy like French or Spanish.
While this says nothing about the inherent difficulty of learning these languages, it does speak to the differing language learning priorities at a national level.
FWIW Chinese (Mandarin) is my native language and I still found it harder to learn than English. But that’s because I consumed mainly English media and pop culture growing up.
That has a distinct advantage, though - I practically learned English by osmosis. I had to look up words very often in the beginning, but it felt so effortless and natural. (Native German speaker) DVDs helped a lot, because for US and British movies, they usually contain two audio tracks, the German translation and the original.
Yeah, it feels like gradually transitioning to English as the primary language would be the one of the best ways to improve the economy in most EU countries (as well as non-EU countries to some extent) since it would dramatically boost skilled immigration, and also make their citizens more educated and make communication with foreigner easier.
The French would lose their mind if they read your comment. It seems like France has a very strong linguistic inferiority complex compared to all other EU countries. English proficiency in France is among the lowest in the EU.
I blame mandatory dubbing. I found it very difficult to find English movies in English, while in countries where subtitling is standard, English proficiency is higher.
French here. It's true and it's a huge problem. People confuse accepting another language in your life and abandoning yours.
They are very attached to their language, it's part of their identity. Some part of france even still have a few people trying to protect a local dialect like the nissart or the breton.
All in all, the ability to speak english is pretty low in france, and I think it hurts the country more than it helps it.
We have our own world for computer... So what ?
It's time for europe to make english an official second language for all countries.
People can speak theit own language as much as they want, but they should all be able to communicate together. Vote together, build together, fill the same forms and share cooking receipes in an easy way.
Having a democracy in 25 languages is too much of a challenge.
"EU to make English official language, Brexit called off"
Language preservation is alive and well here too, parts of Wales are very keen on preserving the language, which interestingly is similar to the Breton language. Whilst living in Wales I once knew a French guy from Breton, he was able to pick up Welsh fairly quickly.
I've noticed this in Germany as well. Most people over the age of 40-50 have quite poor English skills, at least outside of the largest cities. Even young people in their 20s are markedly worse at English compared to young people in Denmark or Sweden, where dubbing is only used for cartoons and movies aimed at kids.
Maybe dubbing is the reason, or maybe it's simply due to living in a country of ~85 million people with one language. When you have so much content and research in your native language, you can get quite far without having to learn any foreign languages.
Boosting immigration isn't necessarily a desired outcome. Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated? Compared to, say, German or Chinese?
I agree with the benefit of English as the contemporary lingua franca, but these two reasons given don't make sense to me as a driver for "transitioning to English".
> there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English
While I agree it's unlikely that Chinese will usurp English's place as the global lingua franca (and the orthographic system is actually the main issue, but people could adopt Pinyin instead), it did function in this sort of role once in East Asia (look at the history of Japan, Korea, for instance).
It seems like it would be more accurate to say that the orthographic system was the lingua franca. The characters were used to communicate across vast distances between people that would not be able to talk at all to one another if sitting in the same room with their hands tied.
> China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English
Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese?
On the other hand, I have known lots of Spanish and Chinese people who are utterly incapable of saying just a single English sentence which is somewhat comprehensible.
>Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese?
I think they are referring to the Chinese writing system being very loosely coupled to the pronunciation (in contrast to languages like Spanish or Korean).
Yes, I was referring to the writing system. It appears that the correct term to be used is "logosyllabic", not "symbolic".
> Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.
'Lingua franca' is a Latin borrow phrase that literally mean "Frankish Tongue". It has a specific meaning and nuance in English, it doesn't mean Italian:
English is combination and splice of several languages. A few hundred years ago, writers found it much more extravegent to borrow French words, and Latin words, to say the same phrases. Usually, English is the most 'plain', then the French equivalent/derived, and then Latin is the most eloquent descriptor.
For example: Kingly (English), Royal (French), Regal (Latin)
We will borrow words from other languages with no problem - it just needs to become common enough. We have no "English Acedemy" that dictates the language - although you could argue that is a problem, given how it's been changed in America and abused by everyone, and has complex exceptions with no real decent rules (Although as an English native speaker, I'm not sure if that's just because I havent learnt those rules recently)
> English speakers are not snobs; we borrow nice words and turns of phrase from wherever we encounter them.
“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.” —James Nicoll
And, I'm sure people have heard of it before, there's a semi-conlang that proposes to remove all Romance borrowings from English called Anglish [1]. There's also "Uncleftish Beholding" which tries to explain basic atomic theory using only native words [2].
The best point that the article touches on is that English is a good "neutral" language for countries like Sudan and entities like the EU with many different languages spoken. There is a bit of a snowball effect where any language having the advantage of being spoken as a cross-cultural communication language further incentivizes learning that language for people wishing to communicate in that manner. I think such a universal language existing is good for the world, it's just somewhat unfair how such a language gets chosen. English is an adaptable language, but I think much more importantly, English has been native language of one superpower or another for the past 200 years
I completely understand how someone would feel attacked by the fact that their children or grandchildren may not fluently speak the same language due to the influence of English. But at the same time, though the author somewhat dismisses it, this seems pretty nationalistic - though we shouldn't ignore that promoting English due to chauvinistic nationalism is just as silly.
I do think in the end, people will glad if in X*100 years the vast majority of the world will be able to communicate with each other in one language. The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination
I'm a native (British) English speaker, and I actually can find it quite hard to communicate with non-native speakers, because they don't understand my accent. It's not particularly strong as British accents go (nothing like Glaswegian or Geordie for example), but it really caused problems when I moved to a research group which was made up of primarily English-as-a-second-language speakers. The other thing I found was that while their speaking ability was good, their written grammar was generally poor; I'm the resident proof reader in each of the places I've worked.
Many of the people spoke what is apparently described as 'Euro-English' which has many borrowed phrases from other languages, or what native English speakers would see as mistakes but which are relatively easy to understand between non-native speakers.
I’m a British native that works almost entirely with people with English as their second language, mostly remotely. To be effective you need to adapt your language and accent to fit the global English style, and adapt to individual dialects on a country by country basis. It seems a little counter intuitive, but English is genuinely a global language and not owned by the English anymore, so it’s important to adapt to fit that if you want to be understood.
US native here, so perhaps I'm just failing to see past the absence of leftovers from Noah Webster's efforts to violently excise any evidence of French influence from the language, but, to me, Southern English English seems about right for that description.
I'd say that it's basically just the lowest common denominator of English. Imagine an English where any accent is acceptable as long as you're consistent and any regional vocabulary is okay so long as it's well known (e.g. either "torch" or "flashlight" is okay, "soda" is okay but "pop" is not). You then have "global" English.
I’m American and I certainly don’t think “torch” to mean flashlight is well-known. The overwhelming majority of people in the US would not understand it.
Tolerance towards misuse of tense/plural, would be my guess. For example, oral Chinese doesn't distinguish between He/She/It, so we often mis{gender} people during conversation, though under the right context, it is clear what actual meaning is thus isn't really blocking effective conversation, but is not correct either.
I guess that does say something about English being a "good" international language. Native speakers, too, often have extremely hard time understanding foreign accents and even some "almost-native" accents; mutual understanding is an even more difficult problem for non-native speakers. This has to do with the unusual character of English vowels compared to the "continental" languages. For example, if you hear an English speaker read Latin, you would never guess it is Latin: the "say it right" guides tell one to pronounce 'e' as 'ay' etc.
I wonder if "Singlish" is the future. It's a dialect of English spoken in Singapore, but due to the Chinese influence, it is sometimes stripped of all tenses, for example.
The opposite extreme happens too, many English/Australians have trouble distinguishing Canadian and American accents (especially North-eastern US). Conversely Americans may have trouble distinguishing New Zealand and Australian accents.
I don't think there is such thing as Euro-English, but a French-English, Spanish-English, Dutch-English, because every non-native speaker will make grammar/vocab/pronunciation mistakes depending on his/her primary language.
as Americans, my wife and I laugh when we watch British TV shows because we can't understand half of what they are saying. Fortunately we have a DVR so we can repeat things 4 or 5 times to figure it out.
"The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination"
These things choose language, geography, and culture for virtually everyone on the globe. The entirety of the Americas south of the US border speak the languages they do because of the rape and genocide of their ancestors on a colossal scale.
Hell, English itself was borne out of repeated conquests, first the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, then the Normans.
Trying to disentangle yourself from the brutality of history is a losing battle.
>The entirety of the Americas south of the US border speak the languages they do because of the rape and genocide of their ancestors on a colossal scale.
Binary is the universal language of classic computers based on electromagnetic physics.
Assuming quantum computing or some other unforeseen technology doesn’t replace other forms of computing then we will likely all be relying on binary in one way or another.
Isn’t that like saying pressure waves are the universal spoken language, so it doesn’t matter if English wins, it’s all pressure waves at the end of the day.
Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor.
One of the most enjoyable things I used to find about travel was experiencing and dipping into other cultures and trying out a little local language picked up from phrase books etc. These days people seem to prefer practising their English on me as I'm a native English speaker.
I miss those global differences more and more as everyone adopts English and global brands.
Google translate is really bad. Greek to English is terrible plainly. German to English the same -- was trying to prove a point about the meaning of a phrase and speed typed skipping umlaut. To this day I am not sure what the inference is to result in such a distant translation if you forget a single Umlaut. Every time I have to correct a friend's/family's work that used Google translate I facepalm. I suggest people learn to use dictionaries again (type of dictionary depends on application).
I wouldn't trust my life on Google translate, i.e. while traveling.
Native German speakers do not usually forget umlauts (since they are separate keys) and so Google translate won't have the necessary training data to robustly handle German without umlauts. The output appears as gibberish because the language model can't distinguish the input from gibberish. That becomes more obvious if you intentionally input nonsense: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120
True. However, I claim Google translate is a lot of times used by non-conversant level German speakers, who don't have the right layout. I would expect Google translate to be trained somewhat adversarially. Example:
"Ich werde Bücher lesen" translates just fine. If we skip the Umlaut Google translate "forgets" the meaning of books. If we change the tense to present everything translates just fine.
Probably because it doesn't have full official status at the EU. Google has a ton of data for EU languages because documents have to be translated between them all.
It's an official language, but not a full _working_ language, something which seems to be slated to change within the next few years.
In my personal opinion, however, knowing the quality of "Irish" [1] that the translators will have, is that it still won't really help translation all that much if you wish to actually communicate with native speakers.
[1] There's a huge rift forming in Irish between the "Gaelscoilis" or "Urban Irish" that is learnt and passed on by non-native speakers and that which is passed on in the traditional areas. Unfortunately, there's also a lack of communication between the two areas, partly because they struggle to understand each other; natives from the traditional area often have to translate the non-traditional speakers' Irish to English in order to understand the meaning, for instance.
There's also the fact that the people creating the legal terms for the language often don't really have a firm grasp on the history or nuances of various words or the language, and are often themselves not native speakers. This led to a funny incident where they translated "dental hygienist" as "toothed hygienist" in the official dictionary of new terms. It's also likely to lead to a "Neo-Irish" that is completely divorced from the language as used in the Gaeltachtaí (traditional speaking areas); one linguist has even gone so far as to say it'll be "Irish in English drag", which looks truer and truer when you look at the errors they make and pass on.
I hope this will not be the case, because it would be yet another way in which we'd become dependent on computers and would be royally fucked if skynet would happen. Which probably wouldn't be too unrealistic if computers are smart enough to really understand and translate human languages with all their nuances and concepts like wordplays, humor and sarcasm.
Citrine (https://citrine-lang.org/ I am the author) tried to change this with respect to coding (it is a programming language that allows everyone to code in their own language and translate between parties). However, it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats). So it has failed and I realize that (I continue to finish it until 0.9 though, because I cant stop in the middle - I am a very neurotic person). It's hard for me. I feel hatred but I realize it just wasnt meant to be (but for some reason if something like this happens and you read an article like this the hate burns...). There is probably not even a way to save European languages anyway. So I just wanted to share this comment to let you know I was working on a technology that at least for coding tried to counter the influence of the English language and allows people to write code in their own language. However I also wrote this comment because I am very emotional because of the failure of this project. When I read an article like this - it's just ...unspeakable. Maybe I was too arrogant. Maybe the problem is too difficult. Maybe I interefered with some globalist agenda, maybe it's just Don Quixottish. Who knows? Anyway I had to share this train of thought. Maybe people just deserve to have their language (and culture) taken from them. Maybe it's just the way it is.
Death threats? Sorry to hear that. The project looks awesome!
European languages won’t die just because English is around, there are millions of people in Europe that don’t interact on a national or international scale, and are quite happy to continue with their language as it stands, that won’t change for a long time.
I think your project is a really great idea! Code often doesn’t translate well when variable and object names are poorly suggested due to translation issues, and there must be billions of lines of code that are limited to specific languages, which are locked out to non-speakers. Can I suggest you focus more on the language benefits on the home page? Did you think about applying this technique as a transpiler to an existing programming language instead of a new language?
If anything your project would help the gobalist agenda... I've seen so many companies dismantle their dev teams and outsource the coding to cheap labour in brasil.
My guess is such a system, no matter how noble the idea behind its creation, would only lead to management finding the cheapest bloke anywhere on the planet to write their code.
Some team at the end of the world who don't even speak english and barely enough $lang to code themselves out of a situation if their lives depend on it.
And corporate will be like "hey they are shit but they're the cheapest! and because our code is language and coder independent we can always move to the next emerging country once the current folks demands a pay raise! evil laugh"
I'd argue almost no one is having their language and culture taken from them (that was certainly the case in other times in history, but I find it difficult to find one today). There's nothing stopping you from learning another language, or using another language 50-70% of the time.
This is a completely transactional phenomenon. You want to communicate with more people, and be understood in almost any part of the world, and possibly make more money doing just about any job? Speak English.
Also, I notice the web page to your project is written in English, I imagine it was done for mass appeal right? That's kind of the point.
> If Citrine respects all languages, why is this website in English?
> As a developer, entrepeneur or scientist, you need to be able to read English texts. Citrine does not try to change that. However writing complex programs in a foreign language is a different story. The Citrine project aims to reduce the number of mistakes in software by allowing everyone the language they know best. The manuals will still be mainly in English although translations in other languages may appear in the future or maybe summaries. The Citrine project also encourages ambassadors to host language specific implementations of Citrine along with translated manuals.
No, I'm Dutch. Our language has been affected deeply by English. People even make a lot of spelling mistakes because of English. For instance, our government building has a spelling mistake in the sign of their main building, it reads: 'Hoofd Gebouw' but this is wrong in Dutch, because it must be 'Hoofdgebouw' (without the space, but in English you write it as 2 words instead of one).
People don't know a lot of Dutch equivalents for English words either, they use 'body text' instead of 'broodtekst' and 'database' instead of 'databank'.
Code bases are a complete nightmare because managers 'want English as the main language' but we lack the English words for lots of (financial) Dutch concepts.
A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language).
Our limited knowledge of English leads to a lot of confusing code as well (i.e. they use the word 'childs' instead of 'children' in code that deals with tree structures). Also a lot of database names and tables are full of 'poor English' (user_project instead of 'participant') -- maybe due to a limited vocabulary (trying to describe a word with multiple words etc). There are many more examples. These are just my experiences.
edit:
Due to the fact that English is not my native language my statements may sometimes a bit more rude than I intent. Sorry for that.
> A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language).
As a native English speaker living in NL I'm really curious about this, could you describe a situation? The few Dutch people I work with have outstanding levels of English, although being at a company where ~90% of people in my department are non-Dutch, so English is widely spoken, my observation is clearly very biased. Plus I live in Amsterdam which I hear is very different from the rest of the country in this respect.
Another native English person here, so usual disclaimers.
I have visited and traveled extensively from an early age around the southern Netherlands (Noord-Brabant) due to my parents meeting and befriending a Dutch couple whilst traveling there before I was born.
I have found levels of English there to also be excellent, one possible reason could be that English language television and radio broadcasts (BBC etc) have been available to the Dutch for decades, and in a lot of cases actively consumed. That was certainly the case when I was there as a child.
As a german who worked as a software dev in the netherlands for 2 years, I could't disagree more. The dutch speak a great english, even the homeless. I've never heard a better american style english anywhere else in europe and I found the dutch english often more clean than even received pronounciation.
Same goes for the code bases, they had the usual mess that codebases have but variable names weren't an issue.
I find your example of childs vs children to be bike shedding, the hard part about coding isn't the variable names. If you read haskell you would probably find "c" for child and "cs" for children, simply to keep the code terse.
While I strongly condone the form of backlash you received,
I am still happy that there is pushback.(sorry)
We as software devs battle complexity on a daily basis, and we achieve many of the things we achieve only because of collaboration.
Introducing an additional translation step into the process of coding sounds like a complexity nightmare, a debugging nightmare and a communications nightmare.
When working in an international team you still have to talk about the stuff, and as long as something like this doesn't ship with a perfect star trek like universal natlang translator people still have to settle on one language, except that the code they are looking at is now code they've never seen before.
Kudos for the effort, go do it as a hobby but don't be suprised that people get mad just by the very thought of being forced by management to work with something that puts even more complexity onto their shoulders.
And I'm happy that people want collaboration so bad that they are willing to speak and work in a language that they don't understand well in order to connect with peers from all over the world.
And don't take it personal that others don't digg the idea of having to work with something like this.
It's a cool idea, it didn't work. Move on and try the next cool idea, one day one of them will stick.
You're not the only one to have worked on something and then figured out a year into the project that there is no demand/ its technically unfeasible / there is some obscure paper from the 70s that had the same idea but discovered a fundamental flaw and dropped it.
To quote allan key:
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough.
I was surprised that such an in-depth article about linguistic dominance had so little to say about Latin. Historically, Latin in Europe seems to have filled a very similar role to that of English today, though not at the same scale perhaps. Even languages that weren't full-on adaptations of Latin have adapted Latin alphabets and words. The modern English we speak today has funny little relics of Latin grammar norms that had been adopted for no apparent reason other than to improve the "status" of English by making it more latinized (things like, not ending sentences in prepositions).
Also, it's interesting that the author proposed
> What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools?
Because I recall actually reading an article about how some schools in France were just now allowing the local language "Occitan" to be taught in some schools again, but historically they were very harsh on not allowing it. The fear back then was that if schools were allowed to teach in languages besides French, that the students would never bother learning French and would not be able to function as citizens. I think they've eased up, but I've seen that China has many of the same concerns about Mandarin adoption, especially in the far west portion.
I'm all for learning weird languages for the heck of it though. It's not like most people can actually recall and use the Spanish or French they learned in high school, so might as well teach something interesting to examine linguistic principles in general. I'm a fan of Esperanto for this because it's so easy, but every language has interesting differences (often with cultural implications) that learners can enjoy. But again, this is coming from a perspective of living in a country with the privilege of having English as the most common native tongue.
Occitan is all over the place in the South of France. Even city signs are in both French and Occitan. In some towns, even the street signs are bilingual, though I actually never heard anyone actually speak it. I was determined to learn it when I lived in Avignon, but I couldn’t find anyone to actually use it with! I had much more luck with just focusing on the southern French accent instead. My kids speak with a distinctive Avignonaise accent, saying “le pang” instead of “le pain” for instance. But to your point Occitan is apparently being taught in French schools in the South, but I think it’s an elective if I remember correctly.
Well my source is a Linguistics Textbook (Language Files, 11th Edition, p15-16) but it says that these changes happened as late as the 17th and 18th centuries because Scholars considered written Latin to be the ideal language (likely because most historical works had been translated to Latin at some point). So even though ending sentences in prepositions had been common for centuries in spoken English, that became frowned upon because it was not allowed in Latin.
Specific examples in the book of "rules" applied to English to match written Latin include:
- Don't ending sentences in prepositions
- Don't split infinitives
- Don't use double negatives
The chapter as a whole was actually about linguistic prescriptivism, but the Latin examples are pretty interesting nonetheless. 17th and 18th century seem pretty far past the point at which French would be the big influencer, but there's no doubt French did influence English as well (though more vocab it seems).
The internet is mentioned in passing, but the reason that English is dominating is that the vast majority of science, engineering and academia in general is published in English, and then is quickly added to the English language Wikipedia. If you want to be at the cutting edge of global technology, it is just easier (and sometimes important) to be able to read English directly. Translations can be problematic, particularly for technical subject matter.
As others have mentioned, other languages have played this role in the past, and probably will in the future.
Interesting -- do you think translators will slowly become obsolete before software "solves" the translation problem? Do you ever think there will be a point in the future where everyone can speak fluent English? It would seem the path of least resistance would be to eliminate the need for translators, and I'm not sure we'll live in a future where everyone speaks N languages, and just uses an app to translate between people.
The article is incorrect in its description of South Korean children increasingly having their tongues snipped in order to pronounce English words better.
That procedure was only done rarely, as far as I can tell from about 2002 to 2004. Immediately attracting heavy news attention there was even a government-sponsored video to scare people away from the procedure, which is virtually non-existent today. Fret not, there are still plenty of other opportunities for plastic surgeons in South Korea...
One thing to notice, however, is that Korean people would even consider that their tongues aren't naturally suited for speaking English, that's to say that their tongues could be different from other tongues. The idea of minjok (민족, 民族), meaning ethnicity or race -- the word itself a loan from fascist Japan during the Japanese Empire when Korea was annexed, though most Koreans are unaware of this --, is so strong in South Korea that indeed it might not seem strange for Koreans to believe foreign pronunciation naturally unsuited to Korean tongues. Similarly I recently saw Korean packaging that portrayed Korean digestive tracts as longer and more complex than those of "foreigners". In the South this "race"-based consciousness is fading away, in part surely because of English, the language that allows South Koreans to connect to the world. In North Korea it is far far stronger. There, along with the cult of the leader, the minjok really is the national religion, adapted from fascist Japan, which itself learned it from the German military (which trained the Japanese Army, which occupied and ruled Korea) and more generally the racist West of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Not that they didn't have their own home-grown prejudices in the region. Far from it, sadly.
Edit: All this said, it's both hopeful and ironic that even in North Korea the kids study English.
I love Korea, but it is literally the most racist and nationalistic place I have ever been. Japan might be just as racist, but in my experience, they are exceptionally polite about it.
Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion -- French, Spanish.
The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names.
> Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process
There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England (though there are of course lots of English-based pidgins/creoles). There does, interestingly, seem to be some truth in there being an increased 'simplification' as languages gain more speakers, but mainly at the level of morphology, and not necessarily in syntax/semantics or phonology. (For instance, English still retains /θ/ and /ð/, which are really rare sounds crosslinguistically, especially having both of them.)
Hindi is actually not so dissimilar to English in having been impacted by lots of different languages. Just as English is at its core a Western Germanic language (closely related to the Germanic languages of the low countries and neighbours), Hindi is at its core a northern Indo-Aryan language. But just as English was impacted by other Germanic languages (e.g. Norse) and then Norman French (itself a Romance variety acquired by Germanic speakers), and so forth, modern Hindi reflects the influence of a number of languages around the area of Delhi, including Punjabi, as well as heavy Persian influence (where Persian itself was already impacted by Arabic), and even retains some Turkic words carried into India by the Persianised Mughals, and then later on Portuguese and English.
English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.
> There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England
Actually, there's a plenty.
"Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff." [0]
As this article shows in more detail (and as I can confirm, being nearly bilingual), English is, grammatically, significantly simpler than most of the other (not only Indo-European) languages. (On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies. The proverbial example is "ough"; also, in some cases spelling was forcibly changed for political reasons, like "queen".)
I'm aware of the arguments. There's at least two things worth unpacking here: (1) creolisation =/= pidginisation, (2) not all language contact effects are the same thing as either of these.
English isn't uniquely weird, at least no more so than any other language, in any linguistic sense.
> On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies
Sure, in addition to typically keeping the spelling of words borrowed from other languages, even though those follow different conventions than does English spelling.
But orthography and writing systems are a bolted on thing, they're not part of 'language' in any deep sense.
Except it's not a creole, nor nowhere near it. For instance, a lot of the changes that we see in Middle English were already underway and documented even in our Old English texts. It's definitely outside academic consensus to consider the language a creole.
> English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.
Exactly. Not to mention that ease of learning is an extremely relative thing, and often comes down to what a person's native language is. Mandarin speakers would likely find Cantonese easier than English, for instance. And of course interest and necessity play a part in it as well; I actually met someone from Japan once who I could only communicate with through __Irish__. He found it much easier to learn because he was genuinely interested in it, so he could stick with it and focus on it.
On the other hand, global imperialism has always played a role in forging a lingua franca in many ages, just like Classical Greek in the Hellenistic period and Latin in Roman Empire. (Disclaimer: I'm not judging the morality of imperialism, just stating the fact.)
Many of the “cultural exports” are, however, essentially propaganda to glorify the power and righteousness of the American empire.
History has proven that this “soft power” approach to be incredibly effective. After all, we still study and celebrate similar texts from the Greek and Roman empires, even though they’re 1000s of years dead. Much less so those who they conquered, exploited, and enslaved.
While Hollywood definitely takes into consideration foreign markets when making films, the idea that their agenda is to propagandize the rest of the world is laughable. They make what sells, because all they care about is making money.
>Files we obtained, mainly through the US Freedom of Information Act, show that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD), a significantly higher figure than previous estimates indicate. These included blockbuster franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and The Terminator.
On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives.
...
When the CIA established an entertainment liaison office in 1996, it made up for lost time, most emphatically on the Al Pacino film The Recruit and the Osama bin Laden assassination movie Zero Dark Thirty. Leaked private memos published by our colleague Tricia Jenkins in 2016, and other memos published in 2013 by the mainstream media, indicate that each of these productions was heavily influenced by government officials. Both heightened or inflated real-world threats and dampened down government malfeasance.
Hollywood has in the past made films that were pretty explicitly propaganda. Look at all of the propaganda films of World War II, and those weren't forced production by the US government. Granted, at that point, the propaganda was for domestic consumption, not foreign consumption.
Furthermore, other countries definitely use films and film exports for propaganda--China really comes to mind here.
yes, I agree British colonialism is not a sufficient condition for making English the dominant language. that does not invalidate my original statement.
I can’t imagine imperialism was a significant factor. Relatively few people need to interface with the imperialist power; but the new wealthy market imperialism makes available to you incentivizes you to learn the language of that market.
"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." -- James Nicoll
Not just that -- in some cases spelling of original English words was changed to align with certain political requirements. My favourite example is "queen": it was originally a perfectly norman Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Old English) word, "cwene" (pronounced more or less kweh-neh). When the French-speaking Normans conquered England, they accepted the local word for political reasons, but their scribes used the French way of spelling this group of sounds, that is using "que" like in Latin.
debt [1]: Originally spelled 'dette' in Middle English; the <b> was added to make it more Latin-like.
isle [2]: Originally spelled 'ile, yle', the <s> was added to make it more Latin-like. Funnily enough, in this case, the <s> was also added to the native English word 'iland', under influence from the new <isle>. [3]
The crazy thing about English is that some of the various crazy spellings were decided on a long time ago as a way to distinguish the linguistic origin of words (Greek vs. Latin vs. French, basically) for a reading audience that was highly educated, and in the 800 years since then nobody ever engaged in a systematic campaign of spelling reform.
In some ways, I think this reveals a lot about Anglosphere culture.
To be fair, several people actually have tried to reform English spelling [1]. Perhaps the most famous of these, at least in America, was Noah Webster (of Webster's Dictionary fame) in the 1800s. He's actually the reason Americans use 'color' over 'colour' and 'center' over 'centre'.
In previous centuries French and Spanish were dominate. English emerged in the last century for political reasons, not because it was easy to speak/learn.
I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.
> I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.
It is a fact. From wiki:
"During the time of the Hellenistic civilization and Roman Empire, the lingua francas were Koine Greek and Latin. During the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Greek in the parts of Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa where the Byzantine Empire held hegemony, and Latin was primarily used in the rest of Europe. Latin, for a significant portion of the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church, was the universal language of prayer and worship"
The article glosses over the fact that the US (and to a lesser extent UK) is a great exporter of its culture and language through movies, TV, and music. This is aided by the fact that the US has a values-based society where you don't need to be of a particular race or ethnicity to identify with it. I can't tell you how many people I've met traveling abroad who learned English by watching American shows and films.
> I can't tell you how many people I've met traveling abroad who learned English by watching American shows and films.
That essentially encompasses everyone that learns English well. It's the exception that doesn't aggressively use English media to accelerate their learning of the language. On a basis of living in the language to learn it, consuming US & British culture through media is the single best and easiest way to do it (if you aren't able to constantly be around other English speakers). Plus, it's a lot more fun than doing it solely the rote way.
English has also spread due to the enormous influence of English-speaking TV, film, radio and popular music. The internet has only accelerated this. But it's not all in one direction. People also have much more exposure to non-English media too.
I think many native English speakers probably don't realise just how smaller the internet feels when you're browsing in a language with a much smaller number of speakers than English.
English is also nice in that there is no "baked in" formal or informal use of the language. I think it breaks down barriers in conversations with a superior or a random stranger. I wonder if this has any larger scale effects...
And it's all because of the King James Bible! They used 'thou' there when talking to God because they wanted it to seem informal and portray him as a friend. It's quite funny how after it fell out of use, it was reinterpreted as the exact opposite, with people being more formal when talking to God.
There is and there isn't. Turning your Northern Alabama up to 11 might not have any impact when in Northern Alabama but sure won't do you any good in front of a SF VC. Likewise if your way of speaking is, ahem, on the "darker and more urban" side.
I don't know about all languages but Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin all have many formal and informal conjugations of words
Tibetan is very interesting in this way. Standard/Lhasa Tibetan has itself many registers, and then there is Classic Tibetan, Literary Tibetan, and I forget the proper term but there are also secret/esoteric forms specific to e.g. certain Buddhist and Bön teachings
Those are terms of address, and in English you can just avoid them entirely. In other languages you can't say some quite basic things, such as articles, without explicitly choosing a level of formality, which can be awkward.
The article laments the loss of oral languages as if this was a modern phenomenon. Oral languages were always being lost, for the simple reason that they drift. It's doubtful an oral language would be intelligible to its descendants after only a century or two.
Writing slows this down a lot, but what really slowed it down was the advent of the printing press.
It's still drifting. New words like "sexting" appear, and just read some Shakespeare for lost words.
I suspect the advent of recorded sound has had a huge effect on slowing down the drift or oral languages as well.
Just think, in the 1930's people wouldn't really know what people sounded like in the 1850's, unless they had a very long-lived relative. Here in the 2010's, we have those sound movies from the 1930's to refer to, even though most of those actors and actresses are long gone now. (And they're still perfectly intelligible, even if the slang is sometimes odd to our ears). And hopefully in the 2090's, they'll still have those 1930's movies around...
The influence still goes both ways--I read that American movie studios cut out dialogue that they don't think foreign viewers will understand because of English-specific wordplay or culture-specific references. (See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-10/saving-ho...)
Ever since I saw the movie Pacific Rim (2013) I have suspected that dialog in very expensive movies (that one was $190m) was a bit simplified so that translation could be easy for the Chinese market.
That movie was about robots fighting monsters and was named for its intended market as much as its subject matter: expecting complicated dialog given that seems ambitious.
It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.
This is the idea behind Esperanto, the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second, to avoid privileging native speakers and promulgating hegemony. (Granted, Esperanto vocabulary and orthography is quite Euro-centric.)
Learning a second language is difficult, especially one very unlike your native tongue. Native speakers of the de facto lingua franca always have a first-order advantage.
Language is more like a virus than like a system. People will speak whatever language to which they are exposed. If it enables them to express most of the information they need to express, they will expose others to that language (reproduction) and tweak it on their own to be more expressive (mutation). This implies that it doesn't matter which language is "better" according to some technical or moral metric we might construct, it only matters which language can reproduce and mutate the fastest.
To make an analogy that the Hacker News crowd will appreciate: English is the C to Esperanto's Scheme. C as initially conceived was just good enough to write Unix and thus reproduce itself further, mutating along the way until it was simultaneously everywhere and unrecognizable. Scheme is beautiful and powerful and yet still mostly confined to textbooks.
English is actually fulfilling the original goal of Esperanto:
> Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language that would serve as a universal second language to foster peace and international understanding.
We should be amazed at the global convergence on a language, even if it's not Esperanto, and it can accomplish all the same things.
The problem about Esperanto (aside from Eurocentrism) is that it has no real bulkhead to start from, unlike (to pick Esperanto-origin-era competitors) say French, English or Spanish.
Two other problems: 1) it's eclectic (i.e. its vocabulary is assembled using words belonging to other European languages), and 2) unlike English, it uses diacritics.
> the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second
The Esperanto movement does not strictly stipulate that. The phenomenon of denaskuloj, i.e. native Esperanto speakers (children born to parents who use Esperanto as their home language) is something that the Esperanto movement has been proud of for many decades now. Now, these native speakers might not get that much “privilege”, just some higher level of respect, but still, during my time in the Esperanto movement, I saw on various occasions grammatical disputes presented to a denaskulo in order to provide a "decisive" answer. If Esperanto scaled instead of remaining its niche pastime, it is easy to imagine first-language speakers of the language gradually being taken more seriously than second-language learners.
> It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks,
It's obviously not necessary as it is still far from the case that everyone speaks English, nor has it been the case historically.
It is true that lingua francas, link languages which acquire large numbers of non-native speakers are a common feature over time, spreading from obvious utility (trade etc.)
As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.
One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.
They provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many other features (take a look at e.g. Oxford University Press’s in-house style guide) – have been a feature of professional English-language typesetting. The public has grown used to them, and typesetting that fails to employ such things tends to look cheap and amateur (and therefore untrustworthy and not worth buying or citing) to a readership that publishers are trying to target.
So it isn’t enough that we have to be limited to ASCII, we have to be limited to only one of several typesetting engines as well? Your claim above that ASCII ought to be enough was already odd, but to defend it now you are going into even more absurd territory.
Furthermore, TeX’s feature set does indeed include a few basics, but it still lacks some typesetting features later made available in Unicode. This is one reason why modern TeXnicians appreciate being able to typeset TeX-formatted documents with Unicode characters included thanks to xetex.
You kinda did this, unintentionally mostly, which just resulted in every country coming up with their own incompatible encoding. Unicode tried to unify this mess again.
I’m guessing computers will get really good at translating between a at least a handful of prominent world languages. Think a fantastic Google translate with a flawless UI.
English is the PHP of languages. Good enough to solve your problem, and easy to understand, but not really elegant (and not without its quirks).
And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve.
And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers. (Japanese systems had support for Katakana later, Cyrilic wouldn't be so complicated and Arabic probably would have been harder, Korean would be hard and Kanji would just be plainly impossible in 8-bit systems)
I'd say JavaScript. PHP is a language that is used privately but JavaScript is the common language used publicly that everybody has to know regardless of your backend (native) language.
> And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve.
To be fair, they really don't have any effect on language as it's actually used. French people still say 'le week-end', despite how much the Académie raves about it. They still often drop the 'ne' in negative sentences as well, despite it being standard. Academies really only affect the written standards of a language, not how it's actually used daily.
> And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers.
Except movable type printing was available in China from the 11th century onwards, and solely printed the Hanzi [1]. And, likewise, if the other technology had been designed in China, it's likely support would have first existed for the Hanzi over the Latinate Alphabet. It's not really an intrinsic advantage as much a matter of coincidence on where things were developed.
"Although the Chinese were using woodblock printing many centuries earlier, with a complete printed book, made in 868, found in a cave in north-west China, movable type printing never became very popular in the East due to the importance of calligraphy, the complexity of hand-written Chinese and the large number of characters. Gutenberg’s press, however, was well suited to the European writing system, and its development was heavily influenced by the area from which it came."
It's more an issue of culture than anything. They preferred calligraphy, so not many things were done with moveable type (which did exist in China before Europe; it wasn't just woodblock printing). That said, there were still plenty of reports, up to the 19th century, of how widely things were printed and how cheaply they were available in China.
The bigger issue is what the culture valued more than anything.
The Gutenberg system used lead to cast the letters. As they wore down, they were easily remelted and recast. If you visit the Gutenberg museum in Mainz, they show how this works. It was a critical part of making the printing process efficient.
I don't know about French, but when I learned Danish in school we were definitely impacted by the standards body on the Danish language.
Sure, it doesn't change things overnight, but generation by generation these standard bodies can slowly but steadily push how grammar is taught in school and what language the is used in the media.
Yes, it impacts the standard that you will be taught in schools and hear on the media, as well as what you should use in formal situations. But, outside of the higher registers, it really doesn't impact it at all.
People rarely speak the standard as a native language, and we're much more likely to pick up our language from our peer group and parents. This does, of course, change with higher educated people, who are more used to using a higher register [1] of language that more closely follows the standard.
Also, not everyone speaks like they write; writing really should be divorced from language when talking about language change and such, as it's generally not indicative of how people talk since they're following set standards that are explicitly learnt, unlike language which is acquired naturally.
Since we're discussing language, I see this prefixed on several comments these days when the comment has nothing to do with "being fair". Its just added to a statement when making a counter point to not come across as hostile.
You're right; I'm definitely guilty of using it myself like that quite often (as above). It's mentioned in Collin's Dictionary [1] as well as in Wiktionary [2] as a replacement for 'in fairness' [3].
English: Diverse, comprised of many elements from many languages, lots of little quirks, ability to express the same thing multiple ways, far from perfect but totally dominant.
Thought experiment, or maybe just a crazy thought: what if the European Union would prefer to stop using English after a hard Brexit and starts looking for an alternative lingua franca.
What if a EU directive was then issued, mandating Esperanto as a de jure national language in each of the member states, in addition to the existing national languages. Schools all over the EU start to offer it as the first choice for a second language to learn. Cultural works in Esperanto are subsidized.
Having established a big base of speakers and being constructed to be very easy to learn, the language then spreads virally and becomes the new global lingua franca.
The EU leaning on English even more heavily after Brexit is already likely, since there's no longer a large country that would benefit from having the core language. Note that EU working English isn't exactly the same English as we're used to--there's a tendency to use some false cognates that are common across Romance (e.g., using "assist" where native English speakers would mean "attend").
> But there are small parts that are (natively) Irish speaking, called Gaeltacht
Unfortunately they're likely to be gone within 50 years or so. The government really doesn't care about them, and just pays lipservice to the language.
And you can be damn certain they wouldn't have picked Irish as their official language if the UK hadn't already selected English (same with Malta and Maltese). It was because they didn't have to choose between Irish and English that they were able to pick it at all.
I say not plausible at all, and I'm a fan of Esperanto. If Esperanto is going to get adopted anywhere, it would have to start in the far east (China mostly). The fact that Esperanto has phonetic pronunciation that matches the spelling of words, strongly regular grammar, and latin roots that make learning French or English easier makes it more plausible that it would mostly appeal to a nation which needs to improve literacy and communication quickly for economic reasons, and doesn't want the cultural baggage of another nation's language would choose it. Also, Esperanto has some socialist roots to it that could appeal to China.
Europe had a chance to embrace esperanto back in the day, gave it a heck no. And without English, the default lingua franca, would definitely be French.
One complaint about English is that double negatives are not grammatically correct. The word "not" is so important it should be re-enforced in someway. Spanish supports double negatives. The French add redundancy with "ne" and "pas".
It's worth noting that American gangsters often talk with double negatives and the U.S. military use the phrase "repeat NOT" since their discussions are often mission critical. But I am certain their are countless examples of harm because someone in a hurry, omitted the word 'not' in a discussion or email.
Double negatives are grammatically correct English. Consider the sentence, "I do not think that course of action would be unwise."--that is a double negative, and I know of no one who thinks there's even a hint of problem with that sentence.
One facet of double negatives is that the English sense of negative + negative = positive isn't universal. In French, double negatives remain negative; consider "Je ne sais jamais rien." The literal translation is "I never know nothing," but the correct translation into English is "I never know anything."
>"I do not think that course of action would be unwise."
That's a funny example, as it can be read both literally ("I like it."), and passive-aggressively ("I don't dislike it."). So while double negatives might not be grammatically incorrect, they are often ambiguous.
> That's a funny example, as it can be read both literally ("I like it."), and passive-aggressively ("I don't dislike it.").
You seem to have those backward.
"I don't dislike it" is what it literally means. That's the opposite of being passive! "I like it" is reading an implication which isn't literally there and is more passive.
There'a a really important difference here. Someone can not think that something is not unwise, but that does not mean they think it's wise. A double negative does not cancel out - you loose important literal meaning when you do that - not even just an implicit idiomatic meaning.
English does have double negatives, and they're grammatically correct when used properly. They simply cancel each other out which differs from Spanish where they add emphasis.
It actually depends on your dialect. Many dialects of English use negative concord [1], which is what exists in Spanish and other languages (not emphasis) instead of having them 'cancel each other out'.
For example, in my native dialect, "I ain't never had no need for none of them fancy toys" means "I never had any need for any of those fancy toys". It has nothing to do with canceling out other negatives or emphasis; if one thing is negative, they all need to be.
Spanish double negatives aren't emphatic, they're 'grammatical'. If you need one ('Nadie lo sabe') you cannot add another one for emphasis, and if you need two ('No lo sabe nadie') you cannot remove one for less emphasis.
The funny thing is that, in colloquial English, "Don't do nothing without asking me for permission." means "Don't do anything without asking me for permission".
My complaint with English is how there is often no difference between a noun and a verb. Sometimes several words that could be either are stacked and it really trips up my parser. It's also common to see badly translated software where what should have been a verb is translated as a noun, or vice versa.
This English dominance is pretty strong in coding, most Chinese coders in China use English to code because programming languages are written in English (aka the if loops and more advanced and they occassionally sprinkle in Chinese characters as variables, comments can also be Chinese) and I've seen Latin American friends using English as well to code when they come over and can't speak English well even. It is pretty much the lingua franca in coding.
It can be quite difficult though; we had a Chinese PhD student in our research group and while his coding ability was amazing and everything 'just worked', decoding what he actually meant in many cases was very difficult.
I think this attitude, from more liberal media, towards English is interestingly, alternative. I would say after WWII, in a post colonization world, learning English, is a self-conscious, choice. It means access to, not even arguably, the biggest/best/most up-to-date information pool, on this planet, and the economical opportunity comes with it.
As a Chinese national, I would sincerely say learning English is probably the best investment I made during my college, the ROI is incredible. Not to mention, since it is so pervasive, learning English is actually much cheaper than other languages, the barrier is much lower.
Whatever history behind it, English, for its current status in the world, should be considered as an asset for us mankind, that we are finally blessed a pragmatical global lingua franca.
English is a very easy language to learn the basics and be understood (say unlike German), but a difficult one to master. It could do with some major spelling reform and simplification of some of the archaic grammar, but overall it is not a bad common language for the world.
I think instead of chiding people who use English as a second language "poorly", we should look at their mistakes for what they are - the influence of another language - and see if we can't incorporate the ideas that caused them into English, if the ideas are good. Newspeak isn't fiction, languages really do shape how you think. We should continue evolving English to be suitable for expressing more modes of thought.
> we should look at their mistakes for what they are - the influence of another language - and see if we can't incorporate the ideas that caused them into English, if the ideas are good.
Except it doesn't work like that. Languages change because native speakers change them, not because some grammatical body adopts things and tries to force it on everyone.
> Newspeak isn't fiction, languages really do shape how you think.
Yes, it is fiction, and no, languages do not shape how you think. This is known as linguistic relativity [1] and it's strong form has been _thoroughly_ debunked, whereas the weak form is highly skeptical, with most arguments coming from Lera Boroditsky, who fails to control for several factors and also hasn't yet published her famous study on the matter (which was set to be published roughly 16 years ago).
>Except it doesn't work like that. Languages change because native speakers change them, not because some grammatical body adopts things and tries to force it on everyone.
I'm not suggesting an institution should do this. I'm suggesting individuals do this.
>Yes, it is fiction, and no, languages do not shape how you think
I have anecdotal experience in thinking differently in different experiences, which doesn't say much for anyone else but makes me personally skeptical of your assertion. I don't think I would count this as "_thouroughly_ debunked", more like "extensively debated". I also don't put much faith in unpublished studies. Regardless, my main point stands even without invoking linguistic relativity.
There are literally no mainstream linguists that support linguistic determinism, the 'strong' form of linguistic relativity. [1] That much is 100% true; sure, you see articles about it pop up from time to time, but they're often not written by linguists, and are often quickly debunked.
As to the 'unpublished studies', that one was by Boroditsky, one of the, if not the, main proponents for the weak form of linguistic relativity.
But, your anecdotal experience doesn't really count for much when comparing it to the studies that have been done on it. Anecdotally, I know someone who didn't believe General Relativity to be true; that doesn't make it any less true.
English gained popularity as it was THE language of popular movies, music and then later Internet. Just like in the past you needed Latin to be able to read books and communicate with educated people around the world, today you need English. And in my eyes it's OK, we need some standardization in communication to be able to understand each-other, and English is a good practical choice as it's fairly easy to learn.
The trend towards English isn’t universal. In Vietnam universities have just scrapped English as a requirement and replaced it with Chinese. And in tourist areas all over the country people are scrambling to learn Chinese in order to serve the deluge of Chinese tourists. I imagine this is going on in many other parts of Asia too, accelerated by China’s “Belt and Road” policy.
The biggest advantage of English: no central authority or standard. You can invent your own neologisms/slang/loanwords at your leisure and it will spread virally if useful.
There isn't any cultural resistance to language change, the competition is for efficient/descriptive communication not adherence to 'correct/proper pronunciation'.
The internet has given impetus to the global adoption of English becuase that is how most of the internet's functionality is exposed.
The internet supports many languages, but if you want the latest/best/coolest stuff tends to appear in English, especially for young people, but they are the ones who are most likely to adopt a new language.
not only that but it comes with access to learning material built in. Still though, English is probably not the majority spoken language, much less absolute majority, even on the net, especially if proficiency is a factor.
The linked page notes that the Alexa provided stats might be considered inaccurate.
Either way, it has youtube.com on place 2. If that is counted as English, which I simply suppose were the case, "English is used by ..." is highly misleading in this context. Surely they don't analyze the video contents, maybe comments as proxy, never the less for music and the like the language doesn't even matter. Proficiency is a factor because a play button is neither English nor Japanese.
They compare UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1 (that's Latin-1) and a Cyrillic encoding. That's it. They simply don't analyze the Chinese market. Which is not surprising because Alexa is after all into advertising and focused on a target group. They include baidu, but probably only for comparison. I can't explain the mismatch any other way, that is the mismatch of English 50% compared to .de, .cz, .jp, .ru etc. each only ca. 2%. .de on second place ... wut?
English speakers are highly biased to rest on the assumption, because it's comforting. I can't even blame anyone for that. It's a shit language, but the comfort is the language has the grammar that is an easy learning.
“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 riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
But at least english pays proper tribute to the languages it took from (at with greek that I'm personally familiar) by adopting specific spellings.
Words spelled with "ph" for the f sound are spelled like that because they are derived by greek words. In latin languages elephant is spelled like elefant, making tracing the history of the word much harder
> An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue … Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better
What I don't like about the English language is the pronunciation. I would like to pronounce English like Spanish or any system in which every letter has a unique sound.
My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?
English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the subjunctive mood, but it is used in a more limiting set of circumstances (If I were you...)
I agree, it is very hard to master the special cases of English. A paper might communicate ideas with perfect clarity and still be filled with subtle mistakes. After entering STEM academia, I have been exposed to more English writing by non-native speakers. It made me appreciate the difficulty of mastering English. It also made me sympathetic to some deeper criticisms of English beyond the inconsistent spelling rules. For example, the overuse of articles and the verb "to be".
Ha, I'm in a similar position - I'm a scientist and I work with two people who speak Slavic languages, and they miss out 'the' and 'a' everywhere, because they don't exist in that language family. I also work with a Chilean, and he's the opposite - he adds in 'the' and 'a' everywhere, even when it's not necessary! The Germans I've worked with have generally been the best I've found both at speaking and writing.
English has the subjunctive mood as well, though it is phasing out of use. If you were to express a hypothetical, you would use "were" as the subjunctive tense. For example, the song title "If I were a rich man" rather than "If I was a rich man", or the previous sentence in this post.
yes, I had just realized that and added it as an edit.
I'm pretty sure you can ignore the subjunctive and still have it be correct, i.e. I don't think there is anything grammatically wrong with saying "If I was rich", at least in the sense that it wouldn't be picked up on in casual speech
For the most part, yes. Though, if you flip the word order, it immediately sounds off. "Were I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds reasonable. "Was I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds rather jarring.
Yep, and in a lot of other Indo-European languages as well. However, it's not a constant trend across languages as Finnish and Estonian both have more cases than their ancestor language did. It's likely that English will circle back around and start becoming less analytic as time goes on due to various things such as grammaticalization.
I think having to memorize a (fairly) arbitrary masculine/feminine prefix/postfix for nouns makes quite a few romance languages harder than they "need" to be.
Would be nice to have some slightly more rigorous spelling and tenses in English, though almost all euro languages have some quite irregular verbs.
As a native English speaker who has passable Spanish, I think the main hurdle, which I guess wouldn't be called a "complexity", of learning Spanish to a high level is understanding native speakers in natural conversation given how fast they talk.
Me too. My Spanish reading is probably at around a 12th grade level and writing somewhere around 9th grade, but my listening comprehension of native speakers is atrocious. I think it's just a matter of practice/exposure though
What is 'English grammar'? (Hopefully you don't mean spelling.) And what are examples of such exceptions? (English doesn't strike me as having any more exceptions in morphology or syntax than any other language, and has a simpler morphology than many languages.)
A lot of English's exceptions are things we hardly notice as native speakers. For example, we have a lot of irregular verbs. Of course other languages also have these, but oftentimes they fit into more neat patterns or small verb classes as in Spanish. Using verbs together is more complex than in other language (when do you add the word to?). We have a lot of nouns that you treat specially, like glasses/pants/deer.
English also has a lot of complexity. Comparison adjectives can be difficult, e.g. when to use faster or more fast. Certain ambiguous sentences are only able to be deciphered through sheer exposure to the language + context, which is not necessarily easily transferable across languages ("I can't find my shoes" means that you so far haven't been able to find your shoes, whereas "I can't eat pork" means that you prefer not to eat pork for one reason or another, whereas "I can't see infrared" means that it is impossible for you to see in infrared).
English also has a weird way of asking question compared to other languages, i.e. in many other languages (most?) you normally say something like "You want to buy a hotdog" or "What you want?" whereas in English we require a varying assortment of nouns and helper verbs.
None of these properties, which may not even be most of them, are unique on their own, but in combination they add up to quite a lot. It's hard for me to even think of all the rules like this since I'm a native speaker, but when learning Spanish I noticed how much more uniform many of its rules are.
In terms of things that are difficult for non-native speakers, English doesn't have grammatical gender, which takes an immense amount of time to acquire.
English's irregular verbs also fall into classes. There are only a couple of (very common) verbs like "be", "go" which are truly idiosyncratic. And English has the advantage of actually having very few verbal forms overall. Other than forms of "be", the present tense only has 2 forms (3rd person singular and everything else (e.g. "I go, you (sg.) go, he/she/it goes, we go, you (pl.) go, they go") and the past tense only one form (e.g. "I went, you (sg.) went, he/she/it went, we went, you (pl.) went, they went").
> Certain ambiguous sentences are only able to be deciphered through sheer exposure to the language + context, which is not necessarily easily transferable across languages ("I can't find my shoes" means that you so far haven't been able to find your shoes, whereas "I can't eat pork" means that you prefer not to eat pork for one reason or another, whereas "I can't see infrared" means that it is impossible for you to see in infrared).
These all have to do with modality and work the same way in every language I know.
> English also has a weird way of asking question compared to other languages, i.e. in many other languages (most?) you normally say something like "You want to buy a hotdog" or "What you want?" whereas in English we require a varying assortment of nouns and helper verbs.
This is true, and is fairly unusual (though French has some weirdness of this sort).
Verb irregularity is often overstated as a complexity in English. For example, my French-English gives 120-ish different classes of verb conjugation, but most people would say that it has ~4-ish classes, plus some simple modifications on top of that, plus random exceptions here and there. If you tried to group English verbs into similar conjugation classes, you'd arrive at probably a smaller number. It's just that, because English has so little conjugation left, it's easier to list out all of the exceptions as a single list.
English's problems generally stem from the Great Vowel Shift destroying our spelling (and ruining the remnants of the Germanic ablaut system for conjugation), and, most importantly, our proclivity for borrowing foreign words with foreign spellings and foreign conjugations. Doubly so when we can't even conjugate the foreign words properly (it's supposed to be octopodes by that rule, not octopi; octopuses is perfectly functional reasonable).
That really depends on the particular domain e.g. compare ‘Are you sure?’ to ‘¿Seguro?’. Also, at least spoken Spanish tends to reduce the amount of pronouns that otherwise are pretty much mandatory in English as in ‘I can drive a car’ vs. ‘Se conducir’
English pronunciation is extremely hard. There are virtually no rules, you have to memorize pronunciation of each word individually. It is neither simple nor logical.
No, English is pretty rough in both orthography and phonology: while it's nowhere near as bad as e.g. Chinese, English has a large number of vowel sounds compared to most languages, and several uncommon consonants that many people struggle with if not exposed from birth.Note how many non-native English speakers, no matter what their first language, struggle with dental fricatives ("th").
Dental fricatives are somewhat 'poor' sounds generally - they don't have a lot energy, so they tend to be difficult to recover in noisy environments. And note that even in English dialects these dental fricatives have a tendency to shift to other sounds (e.g. to alveolar stops).
While English pronunciation/inventory may be harder than say Spanish or Italian, I think it's pretty middle-of-the-road compared to other languages in terms of size of inventory/difficulty.
English is only roughly middling in terms of phonemic inventory (about 40). Romance languages tend to be on the phonemically sparse side of things, but Germanic languages have broader phonemic inventories. And while the thorn/eth are difficult to pronounce, I'll take those over Arabic's pharyngeals, thank you very much.
Every language has tradeoffs. Sure, Spanish might be easier to pronounce since the rules are more rigid, but on the other hand the information density is way lower. It takes 2-3 syllables of Spanish to communicate the same information as 1 syllable of English.
In the paper you link to, the information rate of English is about 10% higher than Spanish. That may not seem like much, but it's probably enough to matter.
As a fluent speaker of both languages I couldn’t say. In general Spanish requires less mental effort as you write what you say, whereas in English there’s always that particular randomness that’s otherwise arbitrary between how to write a word and how it sounds.
That doesn't really matter, you get used to more than a dozen quite different pronunciations within a week for basic talk, within a few months you can understand each other perfectly.
English is such a horrible language to learn, I pity non-native speakers. On that basis, the rule is: you're not allowed to criticize another person's English, unless it's their native one.
They didn't ask for this language, it was forced upon them.
It's not as hard as you think. Compare all the tenses in Spanish to English, for example. I live in Mexico and my peers usually think English is relatively easy.
Also, the US exports so many quality tv shows and movies that it's easy to find good English-native material for learning. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't know Disney movies. Meanwhile, try finding good Mexican television.
> Also, the US exports so many quality tv shows and movies that it's easy to find good English-native material for learning.
This is the most underrated factor when it comes to language learning in my opinion. It really does make a difference how much native material is available, and how interesting it is to the person learning the language.
Not because it makes the learning itself easier, but because it makes exposure once you hit the intermediate level that much easier, which means you can pass the intermediate plateau and reach a fairly advanced level without having to struggle through things you don't find interesting.
yes - so much this. I was just learning some European Portuguese before going to portugal and had great difficulty finding any "real" non-brazilian european portuguese to even get a feel for it. perhaps if people put together something along the lines of those 'awesome-<language/framework/etc>' github repos for language learning everyone could benefit :)
What a dumb article. You might as well put any language in there. Chinese, Spanish, English or Farsi... trying to say English is a problem in its title when it’s clearly people (and few, loud people at that) that are the problem
I'm a native English speaker who learned Spanish, and some Russian & Esperanto.
I'm thinking about Esperanto. Perhaps most relevant to this discussion is its benefit of being by far the cheapest workable global route to everyone being able to talk to and understand each other, even if haltingly. For some people, learning English is simply too hard. For the rest, it's still a very big effort, and Esperanto is extremely easy by comparison. In terms of global cost/benefit, Esperanto seems like a big win. (And it's fun.)
Further, I have started thinking that Esperanto should be everyone's 2nd language, simply because it's so easy to learn yet seems ~"complete", and more importantly, has been shown to make learning other languages easier to the point that overall you learn, say, more French (or probably English) if you learn Esperanto first, than if one spent the entire time studying French. So learn whatever you would have learned as a 2nd language, for the 3rd, and you saved time and got farther, overall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acqui... [wikipedia.org]). And it seems to me the easiest way for someone to better understand the grammar of their own native language, by seeing a simple & clean example. (Some in one forum I saw dismissed the studies, but when I read the dismissals it seemed a case of believing what you want, with the studies being more persuasive to me as they put much more work into it, but I would be interested in more info.)
(There are other interesting constructed languages each with their pros & cons, but none with nearly the same amount of traction or interest as Esperanto. It's interesting to consider, given all that has been learned in the field so far, how to "optimize" a constructed human language, considering various factors like ease, familiarity, beauty, efficiency, computability, or whatever one sees as most important. ... )
Claude Piron made an interesting/enjoyable video, I think in different languages, showing some benefits of Esperanto. Here is the one in English:
(edit/ps: I hope to use Esperanto when my personal organizer gets the ability to use multiple languages for the same "knowledge". AGPL: http://onemodel.org .)
(pps: had i noticed the "more" button I would have realized others in the discussion already wrote about this.)
English is the de facto lingua franca, and the fact I can use that phrase and you all know what it means proves there’s no “taking over”, English is uniquely welcoming to others
The fact that the idiom you picked there uses Latin to tell us that English is like French tells you everything you need to know about this status. It's ephemeral in the long term.
I don't know what our grandkids' children will be speaking. It certainly could be English or Mandarin. But languages change, even on this scale. Certainly there's economic value in having a universal language (and a social loss when languages fall into disuse, for that matter), but IMHO that's as far as it goes.
Mandarin is hamstrung by an impossible writing system, even in its various alphabetization schemes, so I do not see that as a reasonable winner. It simply requires too great an effort to reach functional levels of reading and writing proficiency, compared to competitors.
Meh. They changed it once already in the last half century. They can change it again. I'm no expert, but it's certainly not impossible to imagine a future where all international business communication is in pinyin or a descendant.
The English language is a scalpel. It's more expressive than any other language in history. As far as I'm concerned, the more widespread it becomes, the better.
Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.