The Unsuitability of English (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The Unsuitability of English (2015)

chronicle.com

171 pointsr721313 comments

Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce.

On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances.

And honestly, the spelling's not that bad. Having spent years as an English teacher abroad, spelling was just never an issue. It's easy to complain about, but it's just not a big deal in practice.

[1] I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine. And normal dictionaries won't even tell you which verb takes which.

Also cf "I like washing the dishes right after dinner" vs "I like to wash the dishes right after dinner."

And "I stopped smoking" vs. "I stopped to smoke".

English suffers from the same problem as UNIX: they're both good enough.

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

Right, like there's a certain "peak" at which the value of consistency does not justify the learning curve required to maintain that consistency.

English isn't elegant, but it is very expressive, with plenty of scope for nuance.

But relatively rigid ("strongly typed"?) languages like Latin and ancient Greek were also very expressive, so I'm not sure that's a convincing argument.

As for Unix - it's the Java of operating systems.

I'd love to see the Haskell or the Lisp of operating systems, but we seem stuck around 1975 as far as OS research goes.

> As for Unix - it's the Java of operating systems.

What do you mean by this? IMHO Java's goal was ubiquitous mediocrity: a cross-platform VM for a language suitable for large teams of interchangeable workers. We had Lisp operating systems (and hardware) back in the day, and it didn't catch on.

I don't think Java actually started that way. It was a lab experiment gone rogue, starting as a way of shoehorning complex application code into the very primitive web browsers of the mid-late 1990s. That never really caught on, but it was fashionable enough for Sun to invest in developing JEE as a way to build sophisticated server-side apps. Back then, we were hacking apps together with CGI and server-side includes - so primitive, so insecure. IBM took to the field with Sun and started selling Websphere so management could feel better spending millions on licenses rather than using that crazy open source stuff, and it all rolled from there.

I like the Latin/strongly typed analogy.

Also in my opinion, word order is easier to deal with instead of tons of endings for parts of speech.

Genera is the Lisp of operating systems. :-)

I'm not sure what the Haskell of operating systems would be like.

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

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

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

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

The main difference: ZetaLisp was developed specifically as a language and its implementation for a certain type of Lisp Machines as an OS language.

Common Lisp OTOH is a domain independent Lisp standard with only very few specific OS-related features.

I agree, and I suspect a lot of the suggestions given in these comments is post-facto reasoning. At one time as I'm sure you know, while Middle English was quite well established, Latin was the "Lingua Franca" of the "civilized" world due to the institutional networks of the Church and the university. Plenty of flat and embarrassing Latin, which we still have, was written at this time (with a number of its classical features modified), that could provide much fodder for a similar article some 900 years ago. Were it to have gone on, and had English died out, leaving us with few examples other than Beowulf, the memoirs of elite regents, letters between statesmen and the like, we might have another impression altogether.

Instead, Imperial England left on the world a linguistic legacy to which we adhere out of convenience of circumstance, and probably will for the long foreseeable future: "learn once, enjoy commerce and education everywhere!"

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

No they both are so widely used that its easier to deal with them instead of trying to change the status quo.

The other languages look harder because a) you don't know how to acquire languages easily and b) you don't speak them yet.

> no subjunctive tenses > no tones etc.

According to this view a perfect language would have... what? So are we in the same game as in computer language, with this discussion about how many features should we allow?

My view on this may be uncommon: Less features for computer language migth be better in some cases, but more features in human languages is always better, because the human brain will make the best out of it.

Taking a simple case: two idioms with the same meaning is bad in python, should be removed if possible. Two words with the same meaning in English (e.g. to use/to utilise, tired/fatigued) is good, because both words will fork away and each carry subtle differences that will be powerful.

English is highly unsuitable, but not for this reason.

You are conflating language constructs with words. More words may be fine, but more "features" are not. Frankly, those "features" are more like bugs. What on earth is the usage of masculine or feminine nouns, or irregular past tense/participle, or to/ing difference?

There's a theory that languages have sometimes evolved extra redundancy to help with understanding in noisy environments (in every sense of noisy, but especially if it's physically difficult to hear someone). This could be viewed as akin to a parity bit in telecommunications, where it's deliberately redundant to increase the chance of detecting errors on a noisy channel, or with other ECC methods of correcting them.

Noun gender might conceivably work that way some of the time, for example if there are nouns that otherwise sound fairly similar but are distinguished by their genders; if you heard an article or an adjective that agreed with the noun, you could get an extra clue about what it was.

An example that I thought of in Portuguese is ato/ata, two closely etymologically-related words with different grammatical genders. The former means 'act, deed', while the latter means 'record, minutes (of a meeting)'. If there were a context in which these could be confused when spoken, surrounding words would likely reveal which one had been said.

I'm not sure whether this is commonly understood to be a likely reason that languages actually have systems of agreement.

Edit: another example of an agreement mechanism that people have to spend time studying is agreement of verbs with their subjects (in various ways depending on the language -- for example Hebrew and Arabic verbs agree with their subject in gender!). This is more complex and more effort to learn than in languages that don't do this or do it less, like Chinese and Swedish (which don't even mark person or number in the verb). You can imagine that this redundancy is sometimes helpful when you mishear either the subject pronoun or the verb itself, like the different between "we want" and "she wants" or "we know" and "she knows" -- if you didn't hear for sure whether the subject pronoun was "we" or "she", having it be fully or partially marked in the verb conjugation would help you figure out which it could have been.

There are communities that aspire to degender their terminology because of pseudonyms and sensitivity to problems of the transgender community. They revert to 'They' as singular agendered personal pronoun. As this is also the word we use for multiple people, conversations about Alice and Bob fork meanings at every usage; Are we talking about Alice, about Bob, or about Alice and Bob? Even a simple sentence often has multiple occurences of personal pronouns, so you get a combinatorial explosion of ambiguity. None of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-specific_and_gender-neu... have adoption to the point where they would be immediately understood by 1 person in a thousand, so it's really difficult to navigate the taboo.

At least it's 'only' a few pronouns - it may sound awkward now, but not so awkward that it couldn't become acceptable in a timespan of decades or less. Compare to the many languages that assign a gender to every noun, where you'd have to make up a whole new set of endings or something. (Of course, there are also plenty of languages with no grammatical role for gender whatsoever.)

Singular "they" is incredibly widely adopted and would be and is easily understood by 1000 of 1000 native English speakers, and would be and has been understood by them for centuries: as the Wikipedia article (directly linked to by yours) says, "the singular they had emerged by the mid-14th century and is common in everyday spoken English". If we've been able to deal with this supposed combinatorial ambiguity for ~700 years, how bad could it be? If we can deal with singular and plural "you", why not singular and plural "they"?

It's certainly not common, even amongst "PC" types or whatever, to want to eliminate gendered pronouns entirely; just that everyone gets to be called the pronoun of their choice (regardless of whatever genitals they were born with), and when the antecedent is of indeterminate gender, a pronoun of indeterminate or at least not a male-default gender is chosen. So Alice and Bob can still be "she" and "he" respectively if they so choose, and there's no confusion there; "they" still refers to both of them. But when a person wants to tell the story of Alice and Bob, that person is "they" or maybe "she" or sometimes "he" - just not "he" by default.

Anyway, slicing up our pronoun space into male/female is entirely arbitrary. Perhaps Alice and Bob are the people chosen for these kinds of stories because our pronouns are gendered; if our language categorized people in different ways than gender, we would chose people as examples along those lines instead. And what do we do when we have a story about Adam and Bob? They're both "he"! How ever do we deal with the combinatorial explosion of ambiguity? And yet people somehow have managed to tell stories with multiple men in them for millennia...

Suppose Adam is tall and Bob is short. Maybe English ought to have different pronouns for men of different heights (or hair colour, or...). It would help relieve this terrible ambiguity here. And yet we get by without this precision in our pronouns.

Perhaps Adam is black and Bob white. Should they have different pronouns to distinguish them? If you say no to that and feel like that maybe might even kind of be a bad idea because of the rigid line it draws between two people created equal, well, now you know why people might be opposed to gendered pronouns.

Some languages have the notion of politeness encoded in, which can often help distinguish pronouns in stories between children and adults, or royalty and their subjects. English doesn't really have this (at least not at a grammatical level), and yet somehow I don't feel my language to be particularly enfeebled without them - I can tell stories about little girls talking to their mothers, or male peasants talking to kings, just fine.

Singular general-neutral "they" has been indeed been around for centuries, but my impression is that its use to refer to specific, named, individuals is novel (e.g. "Please ask Bob what they want for lunch", meaning what Bob the individual wants for lunch). I will admit it feels a little cumbersome to me, but I'll deal. It's a logical way for English to evolve, and fills some genuine needs in the language.

And as with "you", I suspect that if "they"'s use as a gender-neutral pronoun expands, "they all" will soon emerge as an (unofficial?) replacement for the plural.

"Suppose Adam is tall and Bob is short. Maybe English ought to have different pronouns for men of different heights (or hair colour, or...). It would help relieve this terrible ambiguity here. And yet we get by without this precision in our pronouns"

Hm... Let me hijack the current state of languages the other way around: why would we have distinctions at all? Why would we need to express distinctively about animate and inanimate, or about the existing number of colors (when the entire spectrum can be botched to fewer hue names), or to make a distinction between single and non-single (English "you" FYI), or a lot of other stupid differences that force us to think about when we're communicating? Why wouldn't we drop them and market this as a feature, emphasizing the fact that we can speak that way "just fine"? Actually, you know what? Why wouldn't we drop communication entirely?! That would be a wonderful final goal, wouldn't it? I may sound like trolling, but it's important to see the whole picture - the goal of the communicating act in its essence is to transmit perceived distinctions. Now, we can shape the language used for this communication by pushing it either in one direction - of evolution (by gaining the ability to make even more distinctions), which is an open end indeed and that may seem overwhelming, or in the other direction - involution, which (hey, good for us -) has only so much to be reduced to!

Science (including the part addressing languages) is a bitch, isn't it? We have one less linguistic aspect available for politics now!

Yes, redundancy helps in noisy environment. But this is only the tip of the iceberg, and the mistake here is to think human languages are "communication tools". If they were, they could be easily simplified, replaced by better tools, etc. But languages are much more than "communication tools". For example, inside us, ideas have to mold themselves in a given human language framework. So do dreams, many parts of memories, etc. There is no "communication" here, if communication is transmission of information bewteen two or more agents.

So, to take an extreme, if a language was much harder to learn but much more feature rich for non-communication purpose (e.g. a better language to dream in), it could very well be much better to choose the complex language over the simpler one, even if the learning part is harder.

These features are allowing to build more complex sentences using less words and/or make them shorter. After translating of thousands of sentences from English to my native language for opensource projects, I found that word-to-word translations are about 30% longer in average, while translations of sentences of text are about 10% shorter in average, sometimes even 3x shorter. Direct consequence is that it is easier to understand shorter text, because of limited size of short-time memory. I.e. shorter text adds few points to IQ.

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

As a non-native speaker who started to regularly use English in my 20's, I find pronunciation is the hardest part. As mentioned in the article, "The fine distinctions of English vocalism are beyond many adult learners’ phonetic abilities, which is why some foreigners pronounce modal and model the same, or bird and bed the same, or seat and sit the same, and so on." Pronunciations in Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc. are much easier to manage. Although most adult learners can never pronounce as good as native speakers, it is much closer in the latter cases.

I find another "undesirable feature" mentioned in the article, "absurdly large multilayer vocabulary", is quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages belonging to the same family, like German, French, Spanish, etc. For my untrained ears, English and German are more similar to each other than Mandarin (my native tongue) and many dialects in southern China.

> quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages

It's fun like that; I've studied a trivial amount of Dutch and German and kept running into words where the root was present in English in some really weird way. For instance, one of the first signs I saw at AMS was 'uitgang' (exit) which is clearly the same root as 'gangplank' and 'gangway' and which shows up in some really old folk songs (Why dois your brand sae drap wi bluid, and why sae sad gang ye, O?). Or "rustig", which is just "quiet", but has a certain specific rough-hewn country-living feel to it when you use it as the English word "rustic".

They also seem to use the old-fashioned form of the helper-verb "will" ("wil") to mean want/desire (as contrasted with "shall", which has been replaced in modern English, at least in America.)

And, of course, the word for boy-child is "jongen" - pronounced "young'n", like you're from Appalachia or something. (Actually, I think there are a lot of things like that. Don't put down the people with the 'uneducated' accents, they have a perfectly legitimate linguistic history.)

"Gang" (in that sense) isn't all that weird. It's just "going" with different vowels. "Uitgang" -> "out going" -> exit.

I came to England in my 20s and am now often complimented on my pronunciation:

Try to over exaggerate the way natives speak your target language, almost as if you were mocking them (Do it by yourself first, not in a conversation as that might make them punch you).

Watch QI and try to speak like Stephen Fry does, or if you want a US accent do the same with American shows. After a while you get the hang of it and you speak more natural.

I am in no way able to trick English people into thinking that I am one of them, but other foreigners always assume I am English, to Americans I just sound British.

At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages).

To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily because words were often alike (sometimes the same words have different meanings, "false friends"). But of course in contrast to french, one does not have to learn conjugations, gender of words, etc.

But after having reached an intermediate level of both english and french, things started to change. Perfecting your English skills progressively gets harder, whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language.

As it turnes out, English is huge. The english dictionary is huge. It is basically the size of the german dictionary and the french dictionary combined, as it draws words from 3 main sources French, Old Saxon and Scandinavic, and then was happy to incorporate words from all over the place. So you have the word "hunger" (germanic root, compare german "Hunger") and "famine" (romance root, compare french "faim" meaning hunger and "famine" meaning famine). To this day, using english on a daily basis and reading many english books, I see a lot of words I have not yet learned.

The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.

At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.

> The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.

> At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.

Are you seriously suggesting that French does not have idioms?

I'm puzzled by this, as a French speaker. But strangely, I have heard it being said quite often by people from a variety of native languages. ( never by people that have had to live in a French speaking country )

It could be the structure of the courses. When learning English, you almost go straight to learning those idioms Especially the idiom-like infinite collections of verb + preposition. In French, on the other hand, you will spend an enormous amount of time learning grammar, the exceptions and the exceptions exceptions, and of course stuff like noun genders. It can make you think that learning French is all about technique, while learning English is all about knowing an infinitely large vocabulary while the truth is just that French grammar is awful and writing without spelling mistake is a challenge even for well educated French natives.

> whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language

I'm also German and had French in upper school for five years, and that was certainly not true for me. In fact, I've yet to encounter a language that you can "complete" within three years of a normal school curriculum.

(I'm not talking about living abroad or specialized language learning curriculums, where you can get proficient in well less than three years.)

Yeah that point might have been a bit exuberant. Nevertheless, after 3-4 years I think you have covered most grammar topics, maybe excluding passe simple and subjonctive. In English you'll continue to learn new concepts such as "contact clauses" etc

I'm only doing this because of the topic of conversation, but you probably meant to say that your point was a bit exaggerated instead of exuberant (which means something along the lines of energetically happy).

That's the only mistake I noticed reading through, so I have to congratulate you - I wouldn't've noticed you weren't a native speaker.

I think exuberant is quite a charming word to use in that context :)

thanks (for the compliment and for correcting me)

Using words that just don't perfectly fit is probably a good illustration of differences between a speaker of near-native proficiency and a native speaker. Choosing odd words here and there.

> At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation)

There's no "one, official pronunciation" in French. Far from it. There are several ones, within France, and across French-speaking countries.

What? Do you have any example? I'm not sure I could come up with ten words that are pronounced differently by different kind of French.

'Vingt' and 'moins' are such examples, because their orthographies are so nonsensical that some consider letters to be pronounced and not some others (a bit like 'often' in English).

The parisian dialect is to my knowledge the reference dialect that you can focus on, and it is the prestigious dialect. The situation is different in English where the situation is not clear at all. That however was not the point I was trying to make, rather, I wanted to point out that the volume of the language is more compact, so you reach the point earlier where you "polish" your skills.

How and where do you learn this dialect? How does it differ from 'generic French'?

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

'Parisian dialect' just sends to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_French.

Dictionary size is perhaps a poor metric for comparison. An interesting breakdown [1] discusses many different dimensions of language complexities.

A few interesting points:

- 33 unique English words make up 50% of written texts, an d3,000 unique English words make up 95% of English texts. If the notion that 600 French words make up 90% of French texts, does that make French easier or harder than English in this regard (having to know more words, or having to interpret more definitions from context)?

- If you come from a language with gendered nouns, is learning a geographically close language with gendered nouns easier than learning one without gender-specific articles? How does the reverse hold?

- How does regional dialect factor in the language learning? Idioms change in American English from region to region but most words and grammars stay the same. Can the same be said of French, or German? I can drive 100km in Germany and have to say a simple sentence like "I would like apple wine" three very different ways (with, from sight different words) to sound fluent.

from my experience, gramatical gender is always more difficult than no gener, even when you have a native tongue that employs a grammatical gender. In romance langauges, the moon is feminine ("la lune"), in german it is masculine ("der mond"), so for both french and german speakers learning english ("a moon") should be easier, because it does not require learning an additional bit or two of information.

I would argue that dictionary size does not matter for basic language skills, but becomes more important the closer you get to native proficiency.

I'm sure there are a lot of French idioms, too. Is it less important to learn them than the English ones?

No of course not, GP just sucks at French, but doesn't notice this.

> I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine.

I'm not convinced just because it sounds odd to me.

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

> honestly, the spelling's not that bad

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

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

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

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

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

>There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception).

I don't see the problem with making the verb express how probable or feasible the action is, aside from the fact that you have to remember how to conjugate the verb instead of adding an adverb to express the uncertainty (which certainly avoids memorizing, since you can reuse the same adverb with almost every verb).

Language is a tool to facilitate information exchange. It doesn't matter how "superior" one language is to another for any given reason, if a language provides limited opportunity to exchange information then it is not valuable. The incentives to learn English exist because the value of exchanging information in English is strong in the present-day sociopolitical context, and the malleability of the language played a large role in making that so as cultures and languages blended together in early day America. When translation becomes effortless and/or integrated into society in a near seamless fashion, the distinguishing value of information exchange in the spoken word will be diminished. I have no speculation on the long-term prospects of the written word.

This is a good time to say that I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time. If anyone finds this kind of conversation interesting I highly recommend checking out The Great Courses "Language A to Z" audiobook / audio lecture series. It's incredibly fascinating.

So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the emotional one:

I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.

Most similar language to English, except for Frisian, is Dutch. Here's an admittedly imperfect graph showing this : https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lex... . French, Spanish, Italian , Portugese and Romanians can often understand each other to a limited degree as all are modern mutations from Latin. English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a little Dutch.

The Dutch not liking English is probably just a little neighborhood rivalry. As I understand it, they don't like the Germans for some more recent transgressions.

I have some English knowledge as a non native speaker, and dutch was like Chinese for me, until some said something similar to this.

Not that I can speak or write anything but sometimes some isolated words make sense for me because of the English similarity

There are some somewhat systematic vowel correspondences -- easier for Dutch → German than for Dutch → English but maybe still interesting to know about. For example, as an English speaker who had studied German, written Dutch made a lot more sense for me when I learned that Dutch ui corresponds to German au (for example huis/Haus (Eng. house), uitgang/Ausgang (Eng. *outgoing)). Although so does ouw (bouw/Bau, bouwen/bauen, vrouw/Frau).

I speak English, and some German. I find Nederlands to be totally confusing. Maybe my Dutch lightbulb just hasn't turned on yet.

> English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a little Dutch.

Allow me to suggest some simple, easy-to-digest sample audio. Try listening to one of these five times. :P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRvPFK5Ss4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPiGqzZRGA

I am a native anglophone and know a bit of German, but have never learned any Dutch. I find Dutch very strange because looking at it or listening to it it feels as if I ought to understand it, but in fact (usually) I mostly don't.

I guess what triggers the ought-to-understand feeling is that things like letter/n-gram frequencies, word lengths, etc., match English fairly well. A bit like looking at the output of a Markov chain text generator or an RNN trained on English.

(Spanish is, for me, more or less the opposite. Given a page of Spanish text I can generally decode it pretty well, albeit slowly, on the basis of other languages I know -- English native, French fairly well, schoolboy Latin -- but it doesn't trigger that feeling of recognition in the way Dutch does.)

I did not get from TFA that the Dutch don't like English. Also I don't think that's true at all (source: I'm Dutch). According to an older HN submission (can't find it right now) the netherlands is, with the exception of the UK, the country with the highest percentage of people speaking English (96%), and I don't know of anyone not liking it.

Good to know it is just this organization having the awful ideas. ;)

Btw- I've worked with some great Dutch developers and am in awe of all of the talent there from the things I've seen over the years. The language isn't bad either. :) Just saying it's a mutt language like English, but mutts are good things. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness.

A friend of mine grew up in a family scattered across Holland, England, France, and Germany, with a grandmother matriarch in Holland. He was raised mostly in England, so English was his first language. The rule of his grandmother's house was that you could use words from Dutch, English, German, or French, but you had to use Dutch grammar.

It was from him that I learned the formula "Dutch is just German with a fire sale on vowels."

> I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages.

You're calling out Dutch as a bastard? Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans. If anyone bastardized the Germanic language group, it was English.

Yes, one needs to know four languages in order to be able to coin a word in English.

" Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans."

Well, except for the Flemish dialect of Dutch. That has quite a lot of French in it.

"I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time"

On the topic of languages, I wonder if the Germans have a word for this yet... If so, English speakers should totally import it as they did Shadenfreude.

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

Beef jerky?

Bullshitters don't tend to proactively preface their statements with caveats on their own credibility, but I take your point. I'm essentially parroting information obtained from others in my own words, likely imperfectly. I'm not spinning yarns on my own personal theories and opinion while presenting them as The Truth.

Sorry, was replying to parent comment with a bit of humour rather than directing at you.

Fair enough, no worries even if you were!

Not a word but Stewart Lee's "Loch Ness" bit is my favourite take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlcuV_Dojwg

My main beef is that English is, for lack of better words, imprecise.

This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.

English is one of the few languages you can read a million books, known every single grammar rule, and still sound like a complete idiot when speaking a word to somebody else (even if you're right)

no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!

One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.

Try saying that in Japanese or Chinese. Not the same effect.

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

Even in my one year of Chinese, I learned a great appreciation for the ridiculous puns that can be made in Chinese. It's also remarkably concise. I think most computer programmers, if exposed to Chinese, would really admire its clarity and simplicity. It's like the Lisp of natural languages.

I wonder if English would be the c++. Large complicated mess, popular.

Egad, no! English is like Perl. It looks strange, but it's actually pretty simple and flexible, despite the ideas held in place with duct tape. Right->{}?

C++ is absurdly obtuse and complicated, for no good reason. It's not simple or flexible at all. If it were a natural language, it would be dead already. Native speakers would have been conquered by another people who could actually understand each other relatively unambiguously. Like English speakers.

To be clear, I was referring to everyday conversational Chinese.

The play of words with any sort of literature or poetry isn't the normal usage.

Your original example was wordplay in literature.

You raise an interesting question as to whether the language can be separated from the culture. I'd wager that there's a ton of imprecision in Asian languages due to culture where a lot of communication is unspoken and relies on context. Korean-Canadian working as a manager in China and finding that I don't know how to communicate with my team even after 1.5 years on the job. Part of it is that I suck at being a manager, but part of it is that my team expects me to be able to read their minds. Chinese people tell me that the normal thing is to say something and mean something else.

If you separate language room the goal of communication and the context of culture, it's easy to analyze language differences the way you would analyze the difference between Python and Swift. But that analysis may not be so useful or applicable in day-to-day life.

What is your point exactly? How does that joke in anyway counter the point that ambiguity is a prominent feature in all languages? do you honestly believe that because this joke doesn't translate, there can't possibly exist jokes based on double entendre or other ambiguities in the target language?

It's possible to construct ambiguous sentences in any language, including Mandarin.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=9916

Is ambiguity in language always a bad thing? William Empson wrote in Seven Type of Ambiguity that "The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry", and he seemed to know a thing or two.

I speak 8 languages and can tell you it's the same in every single one of them...

I speak a couple languages and also noticed imprecision in each of them. What is interesting is where in the languages the imprecision occurs. It often seems to be a reflection of cultural values. In some Asian languages there is great importance placed on age-based social status. So the English pronouns he/she are replaced by pronouns that reflect age rather than gender. So on the one hand they are less precise because they don't indicate gender but more precise because they indicate age. And the titles for family members have many gradations. For example the English word "uncle" - there are different words for father's older brother, father's younger brother, mother's older brother, mother's younger brother.

I don't speak as many languages as you (chapeau btw.) but I do think there are differences in precision between languages. By far the most imprecise language I know, and I suspect this is by design (politeness), is Japanese. It basically has no subject and most of what we'd call grammar is derived from context. I suspect this language must be amazing for poetry, but I'm not good enough to be able to tell.

The most precise language I know is German, although this is also my native tongue, so I could be biased here. German has most of the grammar of Latin (4 out of 5 cases) and together with always distinct subjects (no you singular/you plural confusion) and compound words (need a new word? go wild!) it allows for very succinct communication. Great for technical specs, essays etc. Describing feelings can get tough, on the other hand - anything that you can't define exactly tends to sound lazy. That's where the Romance languages with their Subjunctive have the upper hand...

So my point is, IMO there are some profound differences in what languages are good at. All of them are able to communicate any piece of information, but how natural it will sound, depends on the language. Just like programming languages are usually Turing complete, yet (so far) have their strenghts and weaknesses depending on the field of application.

>By far the most imprecise language I know, and I suspect this is by design (politeness), is Japanese. It basically has no subject and most of what we'd call grammar is derived from context.

First, the obligatory, any claim that a particular cultural element causes a particular language feature needs tremendous evidence; languages evolve on their own.

Second, Japanese has very explicit subjects, they are what comes before the は or が particle. By convention, stating the subject in a sentence is optional and generally omitted if it could be understood from context. You could argue that this is an imprecision, but if you need the precision for something, then just state the subject. There is only a 1 syllable overhead for doing so (beyond the syllables in the subject itself). From a technical (read linguistic) standpoint you could argue that what is marked by は and が is not really "subjects", but something else ("topics"), which is technically correct[0]. One could also argue that Japanese does not have adjectives, which is also technically correct, but both of these say more about how the field of linguistics chooses to model and define terms than about Japanese itself.

Third, Japanese has a very well defined grammar. Unlike English, it is largely not based on word order, but by particles that follow phrases to indicate what part of speech said phrase is (and yes, in my experience, this is very useful for poetry). Admittedly, colloquial Japanese sometimes omits these particles, but when they do so the sentences are arranged in very standard forms turning it into a word order based grammer.

[0] Mostly. Sometimes は and が really do mark the subject.

>I have no speculation on the long-term prospects of the written word.

Marshall McLuhan made such speculation in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man

>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.

This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace.

Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.

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

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...

But we don't actually know what having access to a babelfish does to language learning. It's easy to assume it would make learning a second language obsolete, but a counterproposal is that it makes the other language(s) more accessible to learn - for example, I've picked up enough Chinese characters to navigate a Chinese ecommerce site by using Google Translate until I started to recognize patterns myself

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

Which is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to translate something from an acquired language into your native language not because you don't understand what you're attempting to translate, but because none of the words in your native tongue feel right. But it eventually starts to happen a lot and you realize that there's so much that you weren't able to easily conceptualize because you were constrained by the limits of your native tongue.

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

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

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

In english it is very common to say that you are a "mommy" or "daddy" of your pet. It sounds normal and acceptable.

In Slovenian it sounds like you're a mental patient who thinks they gave birth to a dog. So most people switch to English to express said sentiment since we imported it from US television.

Even though we have a direct translation for the word "mommy", all the submeanings do not directly translate. So we sometimes use them as separate different words.

I have to say even in English you sound like you are unhinged if you say you are the mommy or daddy of a pet.

The concept here that is trying to be expressed is that you are the loving owner of the pet - loving like a parent is of a child. I am sure that this concept exists in Slovenian even if expressed using different words.

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

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

> People have begun to say this in the US

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

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

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

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

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

I've come across the latter concept myself despite only speaking english, and basically intend to learn another language for the reasons you mentioned. Not 100% sure which one, though.

This same concept exists within a language too.

I can only speak for English, but there are many concepts that can only be expressed in "high" English. You can be faced with trying to explain some concept to someone when they don't have the vocabulary to understand. You can simplify what you say to get across a shadow of the idea, but it just does not feel right.

I've noticed that after I switched to watching most English movies with the original audio track, rather than the German dub. To the point where my usually-German internal monologue would sometimes flip to English because some idioms are only available in English, and I wouldn't notice until several sentences later.

In Firefox, the Perapera plugin is far easier.

I think that with global media we're much closer to having a generation where everybody at least understands English, than getting to the point where automatic translation is pleasant enough that you could read Anna Karenina translated by a machine and find it enjoyable.

But then again robots can make cars, yet some people still buy hand-made supercars. So probably translators will have to stick around to translate art.

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

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

Like "consider it"

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

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

[1] should be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...

(general note: please use desktop rather than mobile-specific URLs wherever possible. In this case, the mobile fragment identifier gets mishandled on desktop browsers, going to the "Shaltanacs" section instead. The desktop URL with fragment identifier works on mobile and desktop alike.)

Interesting bug there for wiki. I just checked and the link is broken on mobile for the desktop version too.

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

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

From what I understand, spoken Chinese is not terribly difficult compared to something like English with its immense number of ambiguous and arcane grammatical structures. The most unique aspect is the use of tones, which at least often results in shorter words. Orthography is a different story, and could be aided by a phonetic script (see Finnish, Korean, or Cyrillic for instance).

yeah, Chinese is heavy on sounds and glyphs unfamiliar to Westerners, but is really light on syntax and grammer. So: high barrier to entry, but not that steep of a learning curve?

Chinese speaking: easy. The accent is not particularly harder than any other language. The grammar is mostly simple.

Chinese writing: doubles the difficulty of the language.

If you think of it, the hardest part of any language is the vocabulary. That is going to take the most time, because there are so many things you need to know. I am still learning vocabulary in my native language.

Chinese essentially takes the most difficult (time-consuming) part of the language and doubles it. It's also a very fun part of the language

So many homophones and minimal distance tonal pairs! (Needless to say, puns and word play figure a lot into their humor.)

On the other hand, there's no conjugation, no gender, and no pluralizations. So there's that.

Chinese characters aren't totally devoid of phonetic meaning. They are often structured so that their pronunciation is hinted towards.

Nevertheless, Chinese people already know pinyin but choose to use characters anyway. You could compare the urgency of completely switching Chinese to a phonetic system to standardizing English spelling or French verb conjugations, but that's ignoring the cultural factor.

Overall I'd be very skeptical and suspicious of the view that the Chinese writing system needs to change. Mao Zedong forced a switch to simplified characters on the mainland ostensibly to improve literacy, but the comparably more prosperous and educated Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau seem to be doing just fine with traditional characters. In my view, this switch was a needless violence against Chinese heritage by the CCP and I'd hate to see anything like that repeated without a very very good reason.

Honest question: Is encouraging non-native speakers (especially given China's increasing global role) to learn Chinese not a sufficient reason? I understand that you're suspicious, but I have no involvement other than an interest in learning the language in the future.

Perhaps today some/many Chinese look upon Mao's action unfavorably, but if it improves productivity for future generations was it worth it?

Pinyin is already a romanization that is very useful for encouraging non-native speakers. Pinyin use was also heavily pushed by the CCP, but has never been used as an option for replacing characters. Pinyin is even the preeminent method of facilitating computer input, and yet there seems to be no temptation even among the laziest internet users to drop the extra step of selecting a logographic symbol. Frankly, there is no option in existence for replacing Chinese characters.

I admit that languages evolve, and if there is ever an actual contender to make writing in Chinese significantly easier to use and learn, then a separate conversation should be had (I think this is true of all languages and scripts). However, there are a few reasons this probably won't ever happen.

Firstly, any phonetic system currently used for Chinese immediately loses the semantic complexity behind characters that not only allows the reader to guess its meaning based on the context and the components within the character, but the potential for deeper poetic meaning behind the use of certain characters and the way they look.

Secondly, all Chinese dialects can share a writing system specifically because of its non-phonetic nature. Were pinyin to suddenly displace characters, it would be useless for millions of people who don't know Mandarin.

Finally, the forced implementation of simplified characters has fractured the Chinese speaking world. Simplified versus traditional characters are not just a statement on what's more useful in a pragmatic sense but a political and cultural statement on what it means to be Chinese.

If that debate is so heated when all that has changed is the way characters look, imagine the implications of abandoning the 5000 year old system completely. Combine that with recent Chinese history -- the Opium War, embarrassment by the hands of foreigners, European and American hegemonism -- and the notion of changing a fundamental part of Chinese identity in order to cater to foreigners seems absurd.

Written Chinese is not possible to phoneticize, because the mapping of characters to sounds (including the tone) is many-to-one. The poem of shi was written to demonstrate this point [1].

The oral language could obviously be phoneticized, since you can't see the characters when someone talks. But I think native speakers think in terms of characters, not syllables. So you get puns based off of sound and meaning, and written Chinese takes advantage of the fact that characters uniquely describe a meaning, most notably in names. When native speakers discuss names (people, places, etc.) they often ask which character it is. In fact, it is apparently such a common question that foreigners learn the phrase pretty early on.

Language isn't just about productivity. The characters have a lot of character. In fact, you can communicate a lot simply with the choice of character, since there is a long history and connotation.

[1] http://www.fa-kuan.muc.de/SHISHI.RXML

Why hasn't Esperanto caught on?

Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise.

As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside:

"An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm

Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991).

The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94).

- http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistic...

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

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

Esperanto has certainly caught on. It just hasn't been more successful than English has been, which was always kind of a ridiculous goal anyway.

Many of the reasons people give for learning a language are highly ideological and often propaganda. "no one speaks it" is one of these: it usually just means that one thinks the people who speak it are not important. There is more to a language than network effects; languages tie together families and communities. If you are the kind of person who likes Esperanto and the company of Esperantists (open-minded, internationalist, cosmopolitan) appeals to you, then that is reason enough to speak it.

Languages have carrots and sticks driving people to learn them. But then, languages that have sticks are usually using them to beat the snot out of minority groups in order to assimilate them to the national state. Esperanto has only carrots, such as a rich literature (some translated into English) and plenty of maps.

The primary function of the United Nations is to prevent large-scale interstate wars. Translation is a small price to pay for that, and certainly less costly than trying to force everyone in the world to use and understand a single language. It's really more costly to provide translations than try to open English programs in every country, even in places where children have difficulty getting access to quality instruction even in their native language?

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

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

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

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

> Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream.

One reason is that many 20th-century totalitarian regimes had a problem with Esperanto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-ce... lists Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Soviet Union and Imperial Japan.

Ok. Why the downvotes? Is this untrue? If true, though not a good enough reason by itself, it is very interesting

I also don't understand why at the beginning I was downvoted...

Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that. (IIRC it is widely spoken in China as an alternative to English.)

Esperanto is only considered a "failure" in terms of its original goal of becoming the second language of every educated person in the world. Not even any natural language, even such a powerful one as English, has ever achieved anything so ambitious.

> Esperanto's success is really astonishing. Esperanto is widely spoken around the world, and has continued to gain new speakers and even many native speakers for over a century. No constructed language can boast anything like that.

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

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

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

"Gaining new speakers" is a less strong claim than "speaker population is increasing".

> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time.

Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too).

Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.

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

> conjugation and gender are just as complicated

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

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

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

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

>deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality

I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted". When you are writing to someone you are not very familiar and you want to sound more formal the way to go is to use a "implicit usted", which means you refer to the other person by name but use the third instead of the second person. Anyway, better avoid using "usted" directly, it sounds awkward in almost any situation.

'I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted".'

This varies a lot between different Spanish-speaking countries. Heck, in Argentina they still use "vos".

But that's different, because in Argentina they have replaced the second person and "tú" by the third person and "vos". For them it's not a formal addressing at all.

However, I won't deny that for most Spanish-speakers Argentinians sound surprisingly polite.

Gender is actually a useful layer of redundancy when listening to someone speak. If you miss a syllable or two you can fill in the blanks sometime if you caught the article.

Ditto conjugation. I actually like in Spanish how it's redundant if the pronoun is included, and alternately you can drop the pronoun for brevity.

For most situations, having the verb matching in person and number with the subject is enough redundancy. Conjugating also the gender bring the problem that every single thing you can name needs to carry a gender even if the concept of "gender" do not have any meaning.

What? Spanish conjugation doesn't seem so bad. Simpler than French, at least. Bigger challenge with Spanish is that conjugation of second person stuff varies by dialect - Argentines, Mexicans, and Spaniards do it differently.

What you say about the second person is true, but all the forms are understandable by all Spanish speakers and all of them are «correct». It is mostly a matter of style.

> I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly

I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy. What I find more difficult are all the irregular verbs.

On the other hand, I've been learning English for decades and oral communication is still difficult at times.

> I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy.

Did you get to Subjuntivo or Pretérito vs. Imperfecto yet? Unless you already speak Portuguese or Italian, that's when the verbs get tricky :)

Yes, I'm getting there :) I speak French which is somewhat similar. However, I feel that what is difficult are not the conjugations per se but the irregularities. Each irregular verbs is a new conjugation table to learn!

Robert Heinlein apparently felt the same way, "Galactica" the language of spacefaring humans was based largely on Spanish in his books

I would not be surprised if a very large component of the dominance of English is due to a dominant British Empire flowing directly into a dominant American empire, with a sidetrip into the near complete destruction of European economic output during WWII. Because the British and the Americans in the aftermath did not horde their academic research away from Europe (unlike Russia), it created the massive incentive that we continue to perpetuate today to publish everything in English.

In other words, Spanish is not more popular because Spaniards didn't invent the modern economy.

Languages have always spread through invasion. English is spoken in the US, Australia, much of India etc because English troops arrived, latin America speaks Spanish because Spanish with guns went there.

To some extent. But less because the British forced it on everyone than because Nigerians, Indians, Filipinos have all found it useful for their own purposes: these are all polyglot societies in which the elevation of a regional language would advantage one ethnic group over others.

But how did English become so dominant in Europe? It seems mostly like the Nordic countries heavily adopted English as an international language, and this was a major beachhead for English. German and Russian had historical baggage, but why not French, historically the standard?

For Europeans, [Interlingua][0] would be ideal. The people that made it looked at a bunch of European languages, and look a least-common-denominator approach to lexicon, phonology, and syntax. The resulting language looks a lot like Spanish lexicon and phonology, with simplified English syntax.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua

Support for English is wide but shallow. Compare to indigneous mother tongues where support is narrow but deep, with a small community of committed speakers passing on their language to their children in the face of massive social and institutional pressure from the majority society to abandon it.

If English ever came under serious pressure, many would abandon it in an instant.

The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say.

I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1].

1. http://www.cutspel.com

"There exists today a universal language that is spoken and understood almost everywhere: it is Broken English."

https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29

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

That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be more precise, English uses word order to do what most other Indo-European languages do with declination and conjugation.

The hardest part of learning German was getting used to V2 verb order (or similarly, verbs with separable prefixes). I can understand the rule perfectly fine, but parsing sentences in real time is extremely challenging.

> I wonder if that's unique to English though.

At least in the German language I'm not aware of a similar phenomenon (at least in this manifestation). The German grammar is rather complicated (which restrains, in my opinion unjustifiably, many people from learning German). This has in my opinion the "advantage" that it is "rather complicated" to speak or write something in German completely incorrect without at least being very unsure whether it is really correct. In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.

>In English, on the other hand, it is very easy to write non-idiomatic sentences or spell things completely wrong without noticing if you are not hinted by some fluent speaker.

This is the big strength of English. Even when you completely mess it up the person on the other side can usually understand what you are saying. Also native English speakers are quite tolerant of non-native speakers making a mess of the language - while we expect everyone to speak English, we don’t expect you will speak it without mistakes.

I have a different opinion on this topic, but this is the same discussion as strongly vs. weakly typed programming languages (I'm obviously on the side of strongly typed ones).

I will guess you are native German speaker :P

English is far from perfect and is not well suited to things where precision is required - laws, for example, probably should not be written in English - that is unless your aim is to provide lifetime employment to lawyers.

After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself.

For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me.

I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey...

All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.

You get used to the change very quickly. I often forget that I have the extension on and it will be 10 minutes into reading a long article before I suddenly notice that it is cutspel.

The one thing going for the approach is the barrier to entry is very low. No grand spelling reform, just organic change from the ground up one browser at a time :)

The site is inconsistent in it's own suggestions. "People" gets shorted to "peple", but "edible" is shortened to "edbl", losing its final e? And how do you tell that both L's are sounded in "holly"? I don't hear a difference in the sound of the Ls between 'holy' and 'holly', only the sound of the O. Why does 'eye' become 'y', which is not only a really bad contraction, but none of the rules suggest why the first 'e' is lost?

On a first reading, this new regime sounds like it's just as full of "you-just-have-to-knows" as the thing it's trying to solve - and it makes the context of the word even more important to figuring out what it means. For example, "eye" by itself is totally unambiguous. "y", suggested on the site, is the name of a letter (and the pronunciation of that is "why", not "aye"), and "ey" is yet another word with yet another pronunciation (contraction of "hey"). Nothing is gained from shortening "eye", and something is lost. I just don't see Cutspel actually solving more problems than it creates.

Finally, why is it "cutspel" instead of "cutspl"? The stress is on 'cut', so 'spell' doesn't need that unstressed E before the L, according to rule 2...

I can't answer for the rules of cut spelling as I did not develop it, but the nice thing about it that made me choose it was that it does not need to be implemented all at once. You can basically add each cut word one at at time to normal spelling.

I can answer why I chose cutspel rather than cutspl and that is it is easier to remember. It is the name of the chrome extension not the system of spelling reform which is called Cut Spelling.

If you notice, the <e> of people/peple is /i/, which is different from the <e> of edible/edbl that is /e/.

The general rule of English taught in kindergartem is that the silent <e> makes a vowel letter "say its name". That's the difference between "mat" and "mate" or "kit" and "kite" (or "nit" and "nite"). Similarly, doubled consonants make the preceding vowel "short", as in "holy" and "holly", where the former vowel says its name and the latter does not. Not to endorse Cutspel at all, but these are ordinary rules of English spelling that are taught to everyone at the beginning of elementary school. Cutspel looks very inconsistent, yes.

Another problem with English is that by college, educated people have so internalized its eccentricities that they have forgotten how difficult it is for kindergarteners to learn ;) The big advantage of spelling reform would be teaching children to read faster and more easily, so that more classroom instructional time could be spent on actual content rather than something as ridiculous as spelling. Spelling is now mostly a tool to reify social class. http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the...

Spelling reform isn't going to be solved by a browser extension replacing words, because some of the benefits of spelling reform involve things like disambiguating words that are spelled the same, like the noun "moderate" and the verb "moderate". http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.com/2010/09/luv-u-giv.html

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

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

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

    With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say.

Exactly this and in addition it's also relatively easy to understand other people speaking English. This is really a key strength of English language, i.e. low barrier to entry.

On the other hand, consider Danish language: similar grammar to English, also many almost same words, but one needs lots and lots of learning/practice to be able to speak to and understand other Danish speakers.

I wonder though, is this a feature of the language itself or the fact that we are so used to hearing broken English? Hardly a day goes by that I don't need to communicate in English with non-native speakers, and I've gotten pretty good at it. Even if your accent is terrible you can probably still communicate with me. Contrast with Greek, for example: the vast majority of its speakers are native, and the Greeks have a hard time understanding non-native speakers despite the language's clear and consistent phonology.

Danish has rather complex and tortured phonology (to my ears), so I'm sure that's part of the problem; but English is pretty weird too.

I was on a conference call the other day with A gaggle people trying to fix a technical problem. We had a Brit, 4-5 accents/language competencies from India, a Chinese person, a heavily accented Vietnamese person, heavy Boston speaker, various NYC and "lunged idland" dialects and a Texan.

It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.

Yep. Often it is the native speakers that are the worst problem in cases like this. We tend to fall into “higher” English and use uncommon words or idioms. I have been in many situations where the non-native speakers talk to each other with no problem, but they get lost with my contribution.

I wonder if taught English is more standardised than native English. I can certainly think of things I hear regularly that might surprise even a native speaker. Couple of examples:

- The informal form of 'you' persists to some extent in parts of Yorkshire - "Where are you going?" often becomes "Where's tha goin'?"

- There is slang that I rarely hear outside of my immediate family (though I suspect it's more common than I realise) - "seef" for example (from "see if"), "I was seeing if it was in the car" is almost always "I was seefing it was in the car"

I think it is because non-native speakers all learn the same basic 1000 words (initially) and same most-frequently-used grammatical patterns. Native speakers know thousands more words and all the colloquial phrases.

I can understand foreigners (Americans, anyway) speaking Chinese pretty easily, because we all know the same (limited) vocabulary and grammar. I have real trouble with native speakers because they use all the short forms of the words and the grammar patterns that you don't learn initially.

There's also the flipside of that: rather than "higher" English, native speakers are also more likely to use fairly "sloppy" English, especially with pronunciation. When not thinking about it and speaking quickly, native English speakers, or at least American English speakers, tend to elide or merge syllables, which second-language speakers often find challenging to understand.

I've more than once found that the reason someone didn't understand something I said in English was just because, speaking quickly, I was leaving out 20-30% of the syllables, if you were to really try to pick out distinct ones. Americans hearing me speak would fill these in subconsciously, but second-language speakers can be thrown off. For example, if you listen to how I say a phrase like "no, morning won't work, because of the meeting" (11 syllables) when I'm speaking very quickly, you can only really make out 7-8 distinct syllables, roughly "nah, morn' won' work 'cause the meet'n".

Yes this is true - I guess I am just expressing my personal experience where I forget I am speaking to non-native speakers and use language they are unfamiliar with.

English about very basic knowledge exist then I say want word convey way exist word is?

Nah, I don't really believe it.

* The first sentence was more or less direct word-to-word mapping of a Korean sentence meaning "If I have a very basic knowledge of English, then I can convey what I want to say?"

I suspect that people say "it's very easy to speak [English] badly" because the worst they've ever encountered is a still half-decent attempt at English grammar (with years of training by the speaker), because anything below that is totally unintelligible and won't attract any attention.

Just trying cutspel - that's quite a cool idea.

Thanks :)

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

And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whose native language is being replaced by it, I know that English is a perfect example of this.

> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent.

Probably true, but not because of the vowels, but because of rhythms and consonants for languages other than english. Particularly vowels are divisive, and to take spanish as an example, consider this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ

Watch it with your mouse cursor off, and read the spanish bits, then sound them out, then check whether you got it right. (If you know spanish, find someone who doesn't.)

As an english person, you'll get a lot of them wrong. However most people from the european mainland will get most of them right, especially germans like me. Barring the ll sound, and the rhythms, spanish sounds very close to how a german would read it.

Yes, there will be accents, but nothing as strong as you get with a european mainlander speaking english.

And that is entirely because english vowels are a mess that can only be conquered by memorization.

Well, strictly speaking everyone has an accent, including native speakers. But being able to pass for a native is perfectly possible; in fact my brother can do it in France, a country that is famous for spotting foreigners a mile off.

How did he do it? He spent several years there and really worked at it (he can also do a convincing range of British accents). His one regret is that he nailed it in a somewhat bucolic part of France, so the cool Parisiennes just assume he's a paysan.

Is it harder? Yes. Impossible? Far from it. Although I'll bet you elocution lessons would help (my brother hasn't done any).

I used to know a woman who learned French in Belgium (her husband was career military, and they were there for quite a long time). When she visited France, they all assumed she was Belgian.

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

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

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

I don't think that it's a matter of accent. I cannot speak for Spanish, but adult Italian learners do have an accent, but being that in general written Italian is pretty much phonetic and we only have 7 distinct vowel sounds however you mangle it you can probably approximate it well enough to be understood.

Some things are really hard in Italian like the GL in aglio (garlic), but for example most Romans tend to turn it into a semiconsonant (like the first i in ieri). So basically you'll be understood.

Contrast that with French, that is also mostly phonetic but has a lot more vowels (around 17), that is also a language that is usually much harder to learn to speak as an adult (but it's not so bad if you just want to read. And maybe that is why everybody has this stereotype of the rude Parisian that never tries to understand a foreigner speaking French (though there might be more to the rudeness of Parisians).

In english words change meaning just by slightly changing accent.

Ship, sheep buy, by sheet, shit

Also english doesn't (compared to italian) is filled with exceptions.

Many people are going to pronounce "buy", "by", and "bye" exactly the same way. The only way to tell the difference would be from how the word is used in a sentence.

Wiktionary lists bi, buy, and by as homophones to bye

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bye

IPA: /baɪ/

The difference between 'ship' and 'sheep' and 'sheet' and 'shit' is the difference between a tense and a lax vowel. Italian doesn't make use of this distinction, so it's hard for Italians to hear the difference, but it's a perfectly ordinary distinction in vowel quality used in many languages.

There is no difference at all in the pronunciation of 'buy' and 'by'.

This also varies between English accents. Many American-English accents will pronounce "Mary", "merry", and "marry" the same, but in British-English they all sound different.

It might be worth noting that the author is English. The English have a very peculiar relationship with accent, in that one's accent is one of the prime indicators of social class in their country.

As such the author may be unknowingly over-emphasizing the role of distinct vowel pronunciations, assigning their importance to intelligibility or understanding rather than merely to accent.

I know a few people who started learning Spanish as an adult (20+) and developed a perfect accent after a couple of years of speaking Spanish only. It's not common, but it is possible. What I find funny about English is that even native speakers don't know (or agree) how to pronounce some words :)

That is because there is no official English.

At least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...

But for a tiny, well connected island Britain has a remarkable diversity in pronunciation.

Even speakers of "RP", a supposedly region-neutral "educated" accent which is as close to "official" British English as we've ever had permits variations in pronunciation so marked that speakers of one variant can find speakers of other variants' pronunciation of a particular word comical.

British spelling is not the British accent. One estimate had the English accent changing about every 25 miles as you travel through Britain.

Have you seen Hot Fuzz? In it, the police visit a farmer with a strong West Country accent, and take an interpreter with them. All parties are speaking English in the scene, but the farmer's words are so strongly accented, the interpreter has to translate. That scene was based on a direct observation that the writers made while researching the film...

I would expect that to have gone away to some degree with the rise of movies, radio, and television. Certainly it did in the United States. We still do have regional accents, of course, but I remember seeing a farmer from Appalachia on television getting subtitles when I was a kid. I doubt that ever happens today.

Still happens in the Netherlands, which is of course far smaller still. People switch from their local dialect to standard Dutch on TV, but still have accents that confuse city people or those living on the other side of the country.

I sometimes see American TV stations subtitle American-dialect speakers. Mostly this is due to audio quality, but it happens frequently enough with urban speakers of African American Vernacular English.

Standard English on television probably certainly helps speakers of less-prestigious lects understand Standard English, but not necessarily inspires them to produce it.

Oh, stewardess. I speak Jive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s

The UN also says North Korea isn't allowed to have nukes. Look how well that turned out...

The UN has no real authority on anything.

  >  Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent.

Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language).

Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.

I find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite.

I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.

In Spanish culture correcting someone miss-pronunciation is quite common. It's one of the reasons why it can be quicker to master the language by immersion that in an ultra-polite society found in English speaking languages.

The best way to work on your accent is to record yourself and listen to it. Ideally you would have a native say it in a native manner. Movies, TV shows, and particularly audiobooks (with the printed copy) can be a great sources to work on it.

I have encouraged my co-workers to correct my English lately (12 years in Australia). They've been teaching me some of the local sayings, and correcting my pronunciation etc... Things that in Spain would have been picked up and addressed much sooner.

Recording myself is an interesting idea, I will try that.

I also told all my coworkers to correct me but of the 10 people I cpeak to often only one does, for which I am super thankfull.

The first tip is to learn to listen to yourself. If someone ever corrects you, that is gold.

1) Focus on the vowels. They will help you get the resonance right (the resonance is how you hold the muscles in your mouth, so the sound seems to come from the back of your throat like in Russian or the front of your mouth like in Korean)

2) Focus on the rhythm of the language. I'm sure you know what I mean here.

3) Focus on the intonation: what pitches do they have? Scottish has kind of a lilt, for example.

4) Try to notice "phonemes", and I put it in quotes to expand the idea to mean "what native speakers consider important". For example, Mandarin speakers can't hear a vowel change to save their life, but if you get the intonation slightly wrong they glare at you.

5) Focus on details, listen to how letters change when they are between other letters, etc. (Watching to how people respond to your speech can be helpful, especially if they don't understand. Small words especially. For example, a listener might get confused and not understand the world "Lip", even though they would understand "Literally", if your "L" is slightly off)

6) Don't underestimate the value of correct grammar in improving your accent.

Incidentally, I learned of the existence of this as formal theory from David Stern (although his focus is on stage accents which is a little different)

Also, if you have any tips I'd love to hear them too :)

One thing that helped me avoid a German accent while speaking English, was to imitate a heavy German accent and observe what was really the essence of it, then just avoiding these "mistakes".

For example, here are the things that make up most of the German accent of English:

- pronouncing "th" as "s" (Germans apparently don't know how to put one's tongue tip on the upper teeth)

- pronouncing "w" as "v" (like the German "w") instead of as "u"

- sharper pronounciation of initial vowels (i.e. when a word starts with a vowel) and "h"

good tips

Yeah, I guess the only tip I have is to make a concious decission to want to improve on that, that at least is the first important step as far as I can see.

I'll try to integrate some of the things you point out into my daily life, we'll see how it goes :D

Good luck! I'd love to hear how it turns out (in a year or two? lol)

Thinking about it some more, I think it is essential to get the resonance right. And when you do get it right, it fixes a million other small problems along with it.

Focusing hard on the vowels is the easiest way I know to get the resonance

"Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent."

Taking on enough of a local accent to be understood is good. Losing your accent is a terrible cost that requires hard work to achieve. Why would you work hard to hurt yourself?

After all, chicks dig an accent.

You're wrong. I learned to speak French at age 17 with no accent. That counts as "adult" by any meaningful metric.

Edit: By "no accent" I of course mean "indistinguishable from a native French speaker". Everyone has an accent so technically "no accent" is meaningless.

>Japanese uses two different syllabaries (one symbol per syllable) plus a selection of about a thousand Chinese characters sprinkled in amongst them

A bit of a nitpick, but this isn't really accurate. The Jouyou kanji[1] contain 2,136 Chinese characters that all Japanese people must learn in school. In addition, the Jinmeiyou kanji[2] (used for names) contains an additional 843 Chinese characters. And it's not uncommon for speakers of Japanese to know many more. There are more than 50,000 Chinese characters listed in the daikanwajiten[3] with Japanese pronunciation (most are not used in either Chinese or Japanese). In fact, the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese has increased with the use of computer input[4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-Wa_Jiten [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_way...

The central axiom of linguistics is that no language is inherently more expressive than another. Yes, that means that conjugation and declension is no more complicated than strict word order. Grammatical gender provides redundancy, and conjugation allows for subject pro-drop. Orthography has nothing to do with the actual spoken language and things like "phonetic" pronunciation are not really an intrinsic feature of any language. Any language can be matched with a phonemic orthography; the only reason written English hasn't been is due to historical inertia.

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

It's not a question of inherent difficulty, which doesn't make sense to quantify absolutely. It's all about how similar it is to the random person's native language, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically etc... Obviously Portuguese would be faster for a Spanish speaker to learn, since they are very similar in many aspects (in fact, they are both very conservative Iberian Romance languages) than it would be for a Spanish speaker to learn Polish. On the other hand, Polish would be easier to learn than Spanish for a Czech speaker. None of these are objectively more "difficult" or "complex" than one another. They are just "different".

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

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

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

An easy-to-learn writing system is a massive help when learning a language, but the writing system isn't part of the "language" as linguists understand the term. Just a representation of it.

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

On another note, it's not clear to me that "as phonetic as possible" makes a (written) language easier to read, since our brains process words/morphemes as chunks, rather than sounding them out letter-by-letter (this is how reading Chinese is even possible). So semantic vs. phonetic writing should be thought of as a tradeoff. As an easy example: spaces between words are not phonetically justifiable (there is no pause between words in natural speech), but they sure help reading comprehension a lot.

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

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

This is absurd.

First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you basically brute force your way through the family to find your word.

Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language.

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

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

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

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

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

> Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language.

That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several times worse.

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

Wrong. Having a word for every topic is what makes english useful – but that doesn’t mean a large vocabulary.

If you build words piece by piece – say, "backyard-filled-with-children" (kindergarten) or "spirit-of-the-time" (Zeitgeist) or "joy-of-someone-else’s-pain" (Schadenfreude) they are easily understandable, people need a tiny vocabulary to understand even the most complex words or legal terms, and it’s easily writable, too.

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

LOL. Ever tried understanding all the different versions of time in English? Simple past, past progressive, present progressive, simple present, etc and your brain starts melting.

> "backyard-filled-with-children" (kindergarten)

A kindergarten is most definitely a backyard filled with children. You would call that a "playground", most likely. Or just a backyard filled with children. A kindergarten is a daycare center for children aged 2-6.

Yes – that’s why the AWO decided to name their Kindergartens Kinderhäuser instead.

> That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several times worse.

Are they, though? Take a fixed set of rules for english pronunciation. Add a list of exceptions. Is this list as big as the list of nouns of portuguese, spanish, or french? (we can define as big in number of words, or try some information theoretical construct, or even go to some psicological measure, should one exist. I am still betting that the english pronunciation, evil as it is, is not as bad as a gender to every noun)

(I am a native portuguese speaker, and only got mad about gender in nouns when leaning french)

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

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

Pronunciation vs. pronounce.

The only solution is to learn every word twice.

> First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet.

No, he doesn't. What he says is: "it has probably the worst alphabetical writing system in the world", and "What an alphabet does is spell out the sounds of words at the level of consonants and vowels. And I don’t think you can find a language that does it worse or more perversely than English does."

I think you've misunderstood the structure of the paragraph in which he says those things. He mentions Chinese and Cambodian not to say "these would be better" but to say "you might want to respond to my complaint about English orthography by saying these languages are worse, but that would miss the point because they're the way they are because they're non-alphabetic, and what I'm claiming is that among alphabetic systems English has a particularly bad one".

> The large vocabulary [...] is what makes English so attractive for scientific application.

What Pullum says is: "You may think of this as a rich lexical treasure-house that we should prize; some might call it a needless and memory-burdening overstock of alternatives, reminiscent of the cereal aisle of a modern supermarket. The English lexicon could have been far less profligate, given a little forethought." In other words: yeah, it's good to have a wide variety of ideas represented in your vocabulary, but the English lexicon is redundant and could have been markedly smaller without substantial loss of expressivity and flexibility.

(I am not sure whether I agree with him, but I'm pretty sure I disagree with you if you're suggesting that science benefits particularly from the rich vocabulary of English. Technical terms can be, and are, imported into any language; that's not where English is unusual; and science doesn't make particular use of e.g. the ability to distinguish between {cow,beef,veal} or {sheep,lamb,mutton} or {sleepy,tired,fatigued,knackered,exhausted,weary,...}.)

This article from 23 November 2015 was followed up by a 3 December 2015 article by the same author (professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum) titled "English and Its Undeserved Good Luck," previously discussed on Hacker News.[1] The author is a renowned and very influential scholar of the English language, co-editor of the most authoritative grammar of the English language, the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Alas, although Pullum is a very astute scholar of language (linguist), he is not a polyglot (learner of other languages) to any particular degree, and many of his points about the defects of English as a world language are unconvincing to any of us who know many different human languages. I know a variety of languages from several different language families (as disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), and I think the key point is that English is easy enough to learn, useful enough to learn, and geographically widespread enough to challenge the advantages proposed for any other language as a world language, including Chinese (which I speak well enough to have worked as a translator and interpreter and teacher of Chinese).

There is a whole website about why Esperanto never caught on as a world language (focused mostly on its linguistic features) by a writer who has considerably more acquaintance with formal linguistics and with a variety of world languages than the inventor of Esperanto ever had.[2]

[1] original article:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-a...

HN discussion thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080

[2] "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" by Justin Rye

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

English is easier than many languages: it doesn't have gendered nouns or adjectives almost at all (thank goodness), it doesn't have noun declensions, it doesn't have many verb conjugations (hello Russian!). It's biggest pain is tricky spelling and a list of irregular verbs.

English still declines personal pronouns; I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.

Yeah, but you'll still be understood easily if you fail to do so.

An example of one that's almost disappeared, other than in the most careful or formal speech: "who" and "whom".

The problem with English is you have to memorise the vocabulary multiple times, you have to memorise the word, often how it declines, and also do the above for written because they way it's spelled and spoken is usually not consistant. Not to mention the fact that there are tons of words which sound almost identical but have different meanings. You're deriding Russian for having issues, and yes it's complicated, but once you learn the rules you can largely speak it. Words sound as they are spelt for the most part, decline predictably based on rules, and you can often figure out a word based on what it is built from. So all you need to do is learn the rules and build up your vocabulary, the rules for declension are consistant as are the spelling.

Russian.....thy gender confoundeth beyond all declensions.

I agree. I have Chinese parents, studied in Hong Kong until I was 9, and had Chinese classes every weekend until I was 18, and I can say my English is vastly more fluent than my Chinese in terms of writing, and only much more fluent in terms of speaking and listening to Mandarin. I've retained by fluent ability to listen to Cantonese and fluent enough to speak it, but I'd still say my English is better because I find it hard to crack jokes in Cantonese. I have heaps of advantages in learning Chinese and it is very hard for me.

It would be easier if I still lived there, of course.

JB Rye has little to say about why Esperanto didn't catch on - indeed if the kind of inconsistency he writes about was a reason for languages not catching on, where would English be?

Take the clockwork morphology which Rye derides because, genuinely, "truanta" in Esperanto doesn't mean the same as truant" in English(??) That same clockwork nature was described by Claude Piron in these terms:

You never feel quite secure in a foreign language. I have more than 40,000 hours of study and practice of English, but when I improvised the inaugural speech last Friday, since, as you know, I had to replace the Secretary of the Club of Rome at the last minute, I mistakenly said costed instead of cost. I suddenly realized that I did not remember what the right form was. Irregularity of grammar always puts non-native speakers in an inferior position. [..] In Esperanto you feel natural and at ease because you feel secure. You know that you can follow your natural reflexes. This is never the case in another language. I once pronounced indict as rhyming with convict. Why? Because I knew the word only through reading and I generalized the pronunciation pattern I had assimilated from derelict, depict, afflict and similar words. This happened to me forty (18) years after I had started learning English, a language I have never ceased to practice ever since. It shows that really mastering English is out of my reach, as is confirmed by the fact that, in spite of so much more practice than the average European, I still cannot publish a text in English without having somebody correct my language. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm

These kind of claims are what makes it stand out as potentially useful as a second language, despite being imperfect, compared to learning other natural languages.

Rye is doing the kind of 'Unix haters handbook' of nitpicking.

That English in particular is a bad language to be the international standard is no argument that any other language in particular would be a good international language.

It may just be that any particular language is bad to be the international language, for reasons that are peculiar to it. And these are the reasons that English is bad, from someone who loves it deeply.

English is great. Sure it is probably one of the harder languages to learn for the non native speaker. But one thing is for sure, it is taking over the world. And that has a great advantage. Even to the point where the fundamental Baptist will proclaim Genesis 11:1-9 can even apply to today in that the "whole earth was of one language, and of one speech" and thus inviting God's judgment upon us.

And for me? I like it. It's like Perl. You don't have to be skilled wizard just to use it and hack something together that will work and get the meaning through, even if it is dirty.

And like Perl, mastery can result in beautiful, concise and clear expression. I doubt this is a coincidence, as Larry Wall is a linguist.

This article is around the lines of why I think Spanish is the best language to rally around as the global language. It's phonetic, if you can speak it you can (for the most part, especially compared to other languages) read or write it by just knowing the basic rules of the written form. It's already in widespread use. It's modern and not behind the times so there are terms for everything, and it's Latin based so it has every root word that English does to grow from. It just makes more sense than an artificial language that doesn't have a 400+ million person headstart. For myself, I like the way it sounds too. I particularly dislike the Scandinavian languages and only slightly like German a bit more than those, and English a bit more than German. But to my ear (having lived in Europe), the Latin varieties are just as powerful sounding but also elegant (subjective of course). Latin languages like Spanish also have the advantage of interlingual comprehension. A well-educated native Spanish speaker (meaning college educated or similar), can understand the Pope when he speaks in Italian. Or know much of what a Portuguese speaker is saying much of the time. This doesn't apply as much to folks who barely know their own language, which is where most people pull their perceptions of groups like Spanish speakers from (desperate immigrants with little to no education). It's spoken across all 5 continents.

Due to these reasons and more (encouraging friendship with neighbors both here and on a national scale), I've fully embraced Spanish as a 2nd language as an American. It's a good thing.

There's a reason there's no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

Yes, though the gendered nouns and verb conjugations are a chore. No language is perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of better.

English has verb conjugations too. Grab, grabbed, grabbing etc. While we do have a few gendered nouns such as blonde vs blond. I will grant you gendered nouns on the whole, but you're still only standing on one leg (gendered nouns) which is a relic but overshadowed by any number of facts in Spanish's favor.

Spanish is mostly phonetic, which for dyslexics makes them easier to learn. This has been proven. The benefits to Spanish over alternatives are long-reaching.

Such as that English is a linguistic island or that Spanish orthography is objectively the best on Earth for natural, world-languages. It was also better put together with the inclusion of the '¿' '¡' marks. It's a fantastic piece of orthography. As far as being a chore, if I didn't speak English or Spanish, I'd much rather be asked to learn Spanish between the two and would prefer to not waste my time with English or similar nonsensical language.

Mastery in any language is a lifelong effort but Spanish has the linguistic gold standard for its written form. While it's still another language and not 'easy', there are savings on effort and time overall to reach fluency. I speak both daily. In programming terms, it would be just "the best tool for the job".

English conjugation is much simpler, there are usually only one to two forms per tense instead of six.

Yes, but that has advantages of its own including you can speak more concisely in Spanish. Thus even that isn't a complete negative and it's probably Spanish's most difficult aspect to learn. English is going to lose to Spanish in a linguistic head-to-head on almost all fronts other than the fact it's more popular (a big deal in itself but that's not what we're discussing).

As someone who speaks both, and picked up Spanish later on in life (post-30), the fact I appreciate Spanish more as a language is a testament to its great design.

As a native English speaker who has never learned another language beyond high school Spanish, I often feel sympathy for the plight of those who are forced to learn English later in life. I see many native English speakers with a tenuous grasp on the language, and from that and anecdotal evidence I know that it's a hard language. I remember how difficult Spanish, ostensibly an 'easy' language, was for me to learn. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I need to learn English late in life, and I'm sorry for what we've done to you, world :).

The one that baffles me is how Chinese speakers (and other tone-language speakers) ever learn to speak and understand spoken English effectively. In English, tones (changes in pitch) are used to imply emotional shadings like sarcasm and surprise. In Chinese, tones are actually different words. It's hard for an English speaker to learn to pronounce tonal langauges (I did one year of Chinese, and my wife has a master's degree in it), but I'm amazed that Chinese people ever wrap their heads around all the unspoken, untaught meaning hidden in spoken English.

If the anime I've been watching for almost a decade has taught me anything, it's that for Japanese at least, the clues behind sarcasm there and in English aren't quite that dissimilar. Tone of voice can still be used, you just have to be a bit more careful about it. Sometimes it just comes down to accent or word choice. After Googling, the consensus seems to be that sarcasm really comes down to the shared context in the conversation. If it's obvious and you both get the joke, the sarcasm worked. It's just as easy to miss sarcastic comments in English -- as not everyone says it with the same verbal emphasis. And of course, we can always understand sarcasm online. </sarcasm> (Okay, that was a poor joke... moving on...)

Japanese isn't a tonal language, so it's not really comparable to Chinese in this regard.

Japanese and Chinese are probably more different from each other than either is from English. The big point is that Japanese isn't tonal

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

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

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

Phonetic alphabets have strong precedents - and have had strong backers - in English as well. See the Shavian alphabet[1] for a relatively recent example. Others were drawn up by such as Benjamin Franklin and Sir Isaac Pitman, famed for his shorthand.

One of the greatest impediments to these systems was that, while pronunciation may be picked up from spelling in a so-called phonemic system (assuming a bog-standard means of determining stress, which English doesn't have), spelling does not always follow from pronunciation - not unless you happen to speak precisely the English that the standards body prefers. English phonology, particularly when it comes to vowels, varies so wildly from place to place that any new, purportedly simpler system will be met with resistance from the majority of speakers to whom the system seems to be wrong, messy, and arbitrary. As a simple and common example, that of 'Mary, merry, and marry': do you collapse these three vowels, as many English speakers do, thus frustrating those who would like to make the distinction in print; or do you retain the three and in doing so create three new arbitrary-seeming spellings for words that to many speakers are homophones? Do you, as in Shavian, retain an R at the ends of "star" and "mother," or do you bow to common British pronunciations and excise these in spelling as in speech - something another phonetician, Henry Sweet[2], would have recommended?

(We see something similar in the promotion of and resistance to new programming languages: fixing some problems is not always enough to attract adopters away from a language which is at least doing the job. Imperfections stand out in novel tools, even if other improvements have been made and the imperfections are nothing new.)

Shorthand authors were well aware of the difficulties in teaching a "phonography," or phoneme-based system, to a duplicitous student body. This is one of the reasons that many English shorthand systems do away with almost all vowels, except perhaps to indicate where the vowel occurs and what broad family of like sounds it belongs to. Of course, eliminating vowels is one of the best ways to promote speed in writing; but there was also the problem that, where writing a vowel was desired (e.g. to differentiate 'tarp' from 'trap'), not all students will agree on which symbol ought to be used for each vowel sound - the sound varying from person to person, even within the same county or town. These shorthand systems were left ambiguous on purpose, so that teaching speed might be improved alongside writing speed. No need for a student to learn whether the first vowel in 'father' is indeed the same as the one in 'bought' - and from whose mouth, anyway?

It is possible that in an IPA-based system, English spelling may differ from person to person as widely as pronunciation does. Surely, however, that would make things more difficult for second-language learners than having to contend with one standard that happens to be riddled with inconsistencies? (Or perhaps not?)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sweet

But then whose phonology would we use? There isn't really an English, even if you restrict yourself to England itself. It's not just a matter of minor and systematic variations in vowels, either; laboratory (to pick an arbitrary example) has a different number of syllables and completely different vowels depending on who is saying it where.

Not an IPA text version, but I've heard that this is a reasonably good attempt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHxO0UdpoxM

Food for thought: do you think we should also get rid of spaces between words? They're not there in pronunciation.

If not, why not? They give a semantic hint to the interpretation of the sentence outside of pronunciation, allowing you to read/process it faster. I don't have any hard evidence to back it up, but I suspect making words look distinctive by spelling them in non-phonetic ways accomplishes the same thing.

All languages have their problems. English is no better or worse than any other. Worrying about this is a waste of time. You can't change the world's lingua franca yourself. At best, you can perhaps try to get its orthography reformed.

English, like any other language, can communicate ideas well. And that is all it needs to do.

> Where Spanish has just five vowels (si, se, la, lo, tu), nicely spaced out through the acoustic spectrum, the English vowel system is a nightmare of more than 20 distinct vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs.

That almost reads as if the author does not believe Spanish has diphthongs...? Anyone who thinks that should spend some more time in the "aula".

> Even before we get to grammar, then, and the roughly 200 irregular verbs of our misbegotten language...

Only 200!? That's amazing.

Shrug. I came into the English-speaking world midway through fifth grade. By the end of sixth, I was among the top performers in the area of spelling.

There is an intuition to some of the spelling which, combined with a decent memory, makes it fairly easy.

I think the underlying key to it is that there aren't that many choices for how a word, or part of a word, can be spelled. So even if you have to memorize the spelling by rote, you're not memorizing the actual letter-for-letter spelling; you're only memorizing which of the plausible ways of spelling that word applies to it. That is a lot less information.

If you happen not to remember a spelling, then you can hypothesize the several plausible ways in which it may be spelled. These possibilities reduce the problem to a multiple-choice question, rather than cold recall, which is easier since the choices jog your memory.

For years the Western world dreamed about a universal tongue. It's here now, and it's English. Every complaint in the article is correct, but ask yourself this: if you had to choose between English and nothing, which would you choose?

Nothing.

Rather no universal language and having to translate than forcing every child to learn this abomination of a language.

Maybe I’m biased as someone who had to learn english as second language, and had to memorize every word multiple times - just for the different ways of spellings, or composita (helpful vs. help and full, wtf?)...

People always complain about having to learn gender for the German words – but that’s 2 bits of data plus the pronunciation – which is the same as the spelling.

In English, you have the spelling, the spelling of various combinations, and different variations of pronunciations.

It’s hard to speak properly, impossible to learn, and its only benefit is that everyone speaks it.

It’s the PHP of languages.

> but that's 2 bits of data

As if brains store bits.

Smaller pieces of information are still easier to store in a brain than larger pieces of information.

What a silly article, he should read some Wittgenstein, the purpose of a language is to communicate - English has won the darwinian race to become the global standard for this - stop moaning, accept it and get over it, there is nothing you or anyone can do now. Many dimwits believe Mandarin will take on this role - zero chance (unless by force) it's too late, Mandarin does not have the geographic reach and is fatally handicapped by it's crazily difficult to master, pictorial text representation system, which even natives struggle with. All Human languages have faults and are difficult. The effort and time to master a foreign language is huge for most of us, therefore the benefit must be equally huge. English is the only langauge that provides enough benefit and thus incentive to learn, for the vast majority. English also has by far the largest vocabulary - therefore must be the best system we have,to describe abstract ideas or to represent reality. The only factor I can think of that might stop English being understood by nearly every human within a couple of generations or so is real time translation, which would actually be a shame I think.

Note that Geoffrey Pullum is a distinguished linguist, editor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and a frequent blogger at LanguageLog.

The tone of this article should be taken as more light than many here are; this sort of thing is a frequent hobbyhorse for linguists and mostly just evinces love for and humility about English.

But keep in mind that support for English is wide but shallow. There have been other international languages before and there will be again.

While I understand that the article is more about academic fun than seriousness, it does annoy me that articles like this go "X is not ideal! Y is better than X at foo, and Z is better than X at bar!". You never get a gestalt comparison, just "English is a shit language, because Spanish is better at this one item, and Hawaiian is better at this one item, and Swahili is better at this one item".

You get similar articles in the vein of animal comparison: "The human is physically feeble and weak, because our vision doesn't match that of an eagle, our jaws don't match those of a jaguar, and we can't swim like a dolphin", when in fact, we're physically just fine. Jaguars don't have eagle eyesight either, nor can they swim like dolphins.

> then went on to discuss how English managed to attain its astonishing (and increasing) global status despite its manifest unsuitability.

Not that mysterious: the global superpowers of the 19th (UK) and 20-21st centuries (US) both spoke English, and both were significant exporters of culture. If you wanted to be a have instead of a have-not, you were better off speaking English than Spanish, Hawaiian, or Swahili...

I love the English language. Its quirks an inconsistencies reflect the turbulent, chaotic history of the speakers of that language. From the original ice age settlers, who left little or no trace of their language even though the British are largely descended from them[0], to the Celtic invaders who brought Celtic language and culture to the British Isles around, 2500 years ago, to the Anglo-Saxons who came 1000 years later laying the base of the English language, and finally the Norman invasion which brought its own words. Apart from migrations and invasions of the homeland, there was direct borrowing from French and Latin, as well as probably many non-European influences from the colonial era.

But I can see how these things are just annoyances to people who are just trying to learn English to communicate. In any case, we are stuck with English, that's network effects for you.

[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_...

I just want to point out to all those who believe that "with minimal effort you can get your point across in English" that it simply isn't true.

You think you can do it with just a few years of learning, but talking in English to someone you share a language with is entirely different than talking to someone of a very distant origin. I remember trying to do it with my classmates in our very similar accents, with our common lexicon, as opposed to talking to Asian people during visits abroad (I am European).

Even with fellow Europeans from a different country it's not easy to get the message across, even between similar languages like Spanish and Italian, to the point that if you're from Spain and need to get something in an Italian shop, you're probably better off by speaking Spanish, statistically it will be understood much easier than English.

To sum up, English is not easy at all. It's just a bit easier and surely worth the effort given the great amount of resources already available in English, including the giant pool of speakers.

English to me is like Scheme(Lisp). They share very simple(not a synonym of easy) syntax, yet actually knowing(owning) either is very different from simply knowing their grammar.

I had a terrible boss (russian) long long time ago, and he made fun of me (in front of others) the way I was saying: three, free and tree - it all sounded the same (and still I have problems). I'm not a native speaker also (bulgarian). Nowadays I'm grateful to our son (~8 years old) who corrects us all the time, and it's kind of cool since this makes him feel good about it. I often would consult him when reading a book to him, how this and that is supposed to sound. He's even starting to correct my grammar, and learned early on about etymology (I had to geekimize him).

Oh, that boss is long gone, he had another strange thing - correcting e-mails, people wrote to the point he wanted to correct one brit (and he was not the easy kind). I understand he also wanted to be helpful, but done privately would've been appreciated, done publicly - not so...

English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable.

The best European language is, of course, Italian.

Actually modern English still has the remnants of declension (conjugation is to verb as declension is to noun); personal pronouns. I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.

You could argue that the genitive case (possessive) is also declension in English; i.e. <noun>'s, <plural noun ending in s>'.

English has way more diphthongs than French does, and French spelling is also much more regular than English (99% of the time, I can predict what an unfamiliar French word means if I see how it's spelled. This would be much harder in English, which is my native language.)

As an Italian native speaker, I do not fully agree.

Italian is great, but often is too much rhetorical and "slow" to convey a message, while English is quicker and allows you to "hack" the language in a unique way.

I do not love English, but I think that it is good enough and the quicker language to use out there (albeit one of the hardest to master properly).

Italian is excellent, especially compared to other (major) European languages (hello French and German). But it is not the quicker language to learn at an acceptable level IMHO.

Perhaps, but this is not a language feature. The only reason that English looks like an easy language to learn is that everyone is now adjusted to less-than-perfect English of non-native speakers. And if you choose to speak Italian (or, G-d forbid, French), you'd better do it well enough.

One of the major reasons english has succeeded is because it adapts (ie it doesnt have fixed rules). This means it is inclusive and future-proof. Imagine if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks like it is spelled incorrectly.

> Imagine if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks like it is spelled incorrectly.

This would prevent some domain scams, which I would consider as an advantage.

My interesting language anecdote is that I find it much easier to hear syllables in Chinese than in English; I have very sensitive hearing, but I can't distinguish consonants very well. My first language is Enlish, and I'm a mediocre Chinese speaker, so it's not easier for me to understand whole sentences in Chinese, but I'm much less likely to lose a word. I've always assumed this is because more of the information is conveyed in long, tonal vowel sounds, rather than the comparatively short high-pass consonants, which is the reverse of English.

Does anyone else have experience with this?

I'm not too impressed with the article. Any language that achieves worldwide domination is going to expropriate whatever words are convenient from other languages, and they'll never fit in properly with the rest of the language.

English is one giant polyglot of other languages, including a hilarious mixture of old English with French (from when the French conquered Britain).

English also has many dialects and accents, some of which are borderline incomprehensible to other native (whatever that means) English speakers.

"including a hilarious mixture of old English with French"

Also Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, Hindi/Urdu (more common in the U.K.), Spanish and Native American words (more common in the U.S.), German and Latin (more common in scientific and technical fields)...

On a side note, I've always had this question (Excuse me for the ignorance, English is my third language). I think most here would agree that there's just no rule in English on how a particular word would be pronounced (yes, there's a general layout, but the number of exceptions greatly outweigh them). So when a new word is added to the language, who decides how would it be pronounced, what its singular/plural form would be called and so on (no rules there as well)? Is it the one who added it, or some panel of 'experts' sitting at some University etc.? If it's the one who added it, does he/she give the list of all these in writing to the Oxford people (lest they might come up with their own conclusions)? The inconsistency in English baffles me.

There is no "central authority" for the language. When a word is created, it spreads by word of mouth. The pronunciation is sometimes quite volatile before it becomes generally agreed upon (take GIF as a recent and annoyingly prominent example). The general thing to look around for on the web is "neologism".

Trolls will say anything these days to get attention.

If reality is up, someone will claim down is better. If something is cool, someone will say it sucks.

I don't expect that English will become the global default language, but I do expect it will/is be a common backup.

Why? Trade agreements over the last 40 years have dramatically increased global business collaborations. American companies took the early initiative - not just in one market but many.

Smart foreigners knew early on that learning English was a way to make money, to work more easily with these companies who were investing mega bucks. English's pervasiveness had nothing to do with its suitability or superiority or any academic reasoning. It was a side effect.

Reminds me of certain quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup.

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

... or sometimes the exact the same meaning flammable/inflammable

My favorite are words with that have opposite meanings, like "cleave" and "shaft".

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

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

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

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

I cannot help but remember "The Ketchup Song (Aserejé) [0], whose lyrics are more or less a bastardisation of "Rapper's Delight" in Spanish. [1] Such a joyful embracing of purposeful misinterpretation of lyrics purportedly in English!

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0PisGe66mY

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ketchup_Song_(Aserejé)

I seem to remember reading something about how English has one of the highest, if not the highest information to syllable ratio. I think that might give clues as to its ubiquity.

You may have read that, but it's wrong. Actually, I think it qualifies as both wrong and not even wrong:

1. No two linguists would be able to agree on a definition of 'the amount' of information in a sentence. 2. Even for some arbitrary measure of information, it would depend on what was being said. Are we talking about banter between two friends meeting in the street, or a university lecture? 3. The idea that English is special for linguistic reasons is just wrong. It's a language like any other. They all have their quirks.

Utter nonsense.

I believe that you are referring to this[0] study. It has since been published (2011), though it's not openly accessible.

Page 8 of a presentation by the author[1] shows that out of 7 languages (Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, English, and Mandarin) English is the second most information dense language, Mandarin being the most. Spanish is characterised by a fast rate of low-density syllables.

A Spanish to English comparison (eye-balling) would be that Spanish is spoken at a rate of 7.8 syllables per second vs 6.2 for English (≈ 22.9% faster). (Spanish compared as a lot of comments are referencing its simplicity)

English, compared in the referenced study, achieves the highest information rate, is spoken at a moderate-slow speed with a high information density.

[0] http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri... [1] http://neukom.dartmouth.edu/docs/pellegrino-presentation-dar...

Ithkuil is a fairly interesting language to explore for efficient communications http://www.ithkuil.net/ with a great back story http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beg...

English is perfectly suitable, since most of the technical literature, describing how to build and maintain everything around you is in English. German and Spanish are also fine. There are fields, where German prevails (funny enough, one of them is oriental linguistics). English is lingua franca of science and technology and there is no alternative to that. This is cultural domination consequence everyone is facing.

the only reason an organisation located here would push against the use of English internationally, is the fact that the Netherlands is internationalizing at such a pace it's being increasingly used locally over here. In Amsterdam it's becoming less and less possible to order a coffee in Dutch. That's just fine though.

I wonder what linguists would consider the "best" current language in widespread use (at least 1M first-language native speakers say in a single dialect) for international exchange, taking into account all relevant aspects of the language including writing system.

As my professor once said, "Modern English was invented in the year 1066 for Norman conquerors to pick up Saxon barmaids".

Some history. Old English was a Germanic language (or a loose confederation of Germanic languages), best remembered today for Beowulf. It is a well and truly foreign language for English speakers, as different as modern German is from modern English.

Then, in the year 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy, and quickly conquered most of it. A trade patois formed almost instantaneously to facilitate communication between the Germanic-speaking English and the French-speaking Normans. This was Middle English. Unlike Old English, this is cleary English to modern speakers. A reasonably well educated English speaker can learn to read Middle English in a couple of weeks. "Translations" of Canterbury Tales can be found with the Middle English on one page, and a modern English translation on the other. (As an aside, I highly recommend Canterbury Tales. It's one of the most hilarious things I've ever read!) Middle English was the big step toward the messy, hodge-podge grammar and spelling we all know and perhaps love today.

The shift from Middle English to modern English took place during the reign of Henry VIII, famous for lopping off his wives' heads and establishing the Church of England (Henry VIII was the first monarch to reject Catholicism and embrace Protestantism, partly so he could get divorces and partly due to shifting power in Europe at this time due to technical innovations, but that's another story.). King Henry demanded that Oxford and Cambridge, the premier universities in England, start teaching in English rather than the Latin they had used for centuries. Professors were horrified. Give up the beauty and elegant perfection of Latin for that crappy trade patois the peasants use to sell fish and hurl insults? But they had no choice (Henry was, after all, fond of beheadings). So they did next best thing, which was to impose the beauty and consistency of Latin grammar on this crappy French-German trade patois.

("But didn't the Latin roots come from the Roman conquest of England?", some of you wonder out loud. No, it did not. Roman culture had little impact on England during their brief stay.)

One of the key results of this admittedly messy and violent history is that English is an extraordinarily flexible language. It is easy to learn a little, although a challenge to master. For all its terrible spelling, pronunciation, and grammar, English is very tolerant of error.

Another benefit is that English can and does absorb words from other languages, simply by mispronouncing them. Even grammar from other languages can be folded in. It still forms trade patois today - Creole, Chinglish, Spanglish, and other hybrids form whenever English encounters some less promiscuous language. Eventually, these work their way into the mainstream.

It's fascinating. You see disaster? You're welcome to learn Esperanto, a language scientifically designed to facilitate clean communication, that is spoken by no one but nerdy hobbyists. As for me, I'll be celebrating this glorious hot mess of a trade patois, a language that celebrates the complicated and always evolving nature of human cultures in its very bones.

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

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

> For many concepts there are four different roots: one Anglo-Saxon, one Norman French, one Latin, and one Greek.

Funny how he left out Norse, since that is where English gets the word "root" from.

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

is this even an argument against english? i can't really find the point he harps on about chinese and japanese for a bit (both objectively worse at being a lingua franca in so many ways) and then talks about spelling and pronunciation which i think misses the point entirely as these can be easily fixed with a modified simple english.

what language in widespread use is objectively better than english?

> what language in widespread use is objectively better than english?

For example, a good language should use lots of composita — you’d only know a small number of words, and be able to easily explain more complex words – each word is a description of its meaning.

You’d also want to have a way to use complex grammar, but be understandable.

English has nothing like these.

English, the PHP of natural languages.

It's kind of a shame Esparanto didn't take off.

(Estas ia honto Esperanton ne despegar.)

Yes, of course nothing of worth has been created with English. What bollocks.

English sucks like javascript. But, it is everywhere!

English sucks as a language. Bit of a no brainer.

It's here to stay, also a no brainer.

At best Chinese might take over, which is a harder language, so the article is all a bit pointless.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com