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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 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.)

> 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 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.

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 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.

> 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.

" 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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)

>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.

"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.

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

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.

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!

Beef jerky?