Why Write in English? | Hacker News Reader

Why Write in English?

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34 pointslermontov40 comments

The article is about writing, in the higher sense of book authoring, in a second language and the emotional issues related to that. I can't fully identify with it, as the most I've written in my second language are posts and comments like this one.

But there's something to be said about the connection between a language and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. I believe they form an ensemble, so much so that our emotional response to one is inevitably tied to the other.

For example, I spend more time reading and writing in English than in my native language, which happens to be Italian, even though I live and work in Italy. This has certainly a lot to do with the subject of my education, job and interests (guess what...) but I cannot exclude that it's also based on a certain feeling of "otherness," or alienation, from my country's mainstream culture.

That being said, I do consider contemporary English to be technically superior to Italian in almost all respects. It's easier, more flexible, more expressive, more concise, and more complete. The only exception would be its utter, inexcusable, almost criminal, irregular spelling.

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

> That being said, I do consider contemporary English to be technically superior to Italian in almost all respects. It's easier, more flexible, more expressive, more concise, and more complete. The only exception would be its utter, inexcusable, almost criminal, irregular spelling.

For German I consider it exactly the other way round. German is much more exact: Long compound substantives are very easy to express in German but difficult in English (in this sense I consider German as more expressive and concise). The grammar in German might be ugly and unforgiving (it really could be simplified - just my opinion) but makes it much more complicated to express sentences that can be misunderstood. English might be easy to learn at the beginning, but becoming really good in English takes a horrible amount of time. For example it is in my opinion much easier to become good in French than in English. Additionally there is no really "standard English" as there is in French or in German (Hochdeutsch). What is actually the authoritative ressource for English to clear up what spelling, punctuation etc. really is the correct one?

The correct one is whichever works best at the time. In English it is, or use to be, common to use different registers for different occasions.

How can one even say then that a spelling a punctuation is wrong in English if there is no authoritative ressource with which one can answer the question?

as long as you are consistent, it really doesn't matter. Even in academic or technical writing (i am in Australia), you can use american spellings or british spellings and noone really cares. Perhaps you have to let go of the "one true way" of spelling/grammar, if things seem to work fine without it.

I rather think about school: How can teachers even mark wrong spelling if there is no standardized spelling? The same holds for punctuation of course, for which up to now I really could not find any ressource with authoritative character where to put commas in the English language.

There are specific guides within certain contexts. An educational setting may use the Meriam-Webster dictionary as the definitive for spelling, and the English textbook as the definitive for punctuation. Outside of specific contexts, there is no absolutely correct way of doing things.

The metric is "Did the message get passed, and did I not sound like an idiot?"

There are many authoritative resources. Pick a dictionary or thesaurus or a grammar guide from the version of English you want to learn and use that as your reference.

When I say a version of English I mean British English or American English or Canadian English or Australian English or some other version of English. They all have differences in spelling (colour vs color etc) and differences in phrases and idioms.

English is so varied because it has travelled all over the world and changed in so many ways as a result - hence the forementioned varieties of English. For better or worse, it has become the international language of science, technology, business, and entertainment. In our internet age, that means it changes even more rapidly than other languages that don't have such global reach.

There's pretty wide agreement among textbooks and style manuals for English spelling and punctuation. They do differ a bit at the edge cases, but particularly when it comes to spelling people are going to assume you're uneducated if you go your own way.

It's as if you are describing the differences between Java and Scheme :)

There is no authoritative source for English grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Common usage decides what is correct, essentially. Organizations or groups may decide to use certain style guides, for example, the APA style guide or the Chicago Manual of Style.

English grammar and spelling are like manners and customs. There is no single "right" way to be polite but there are things that are commonly accepted by most people to be impolite and therefore "wrong." It can be hard and confusing. I have a phd in the humanities and I still find myself questioning my grammar or struggling to explain why something a student wrote in a paper is wrong. (I usually fall back on things like "this is unclear" and "it would be more elegant to write something like this..." But like manners or even music, once you have internalized the "rules" you know when you can break them and when you can't.

Would it be better to have a single official standard English? Maybe but good luck getting all the English-speaking countries to agree on that.

We'll never give up our non-standard and confusing spelling. It's part of the charm of the language.

Ciao. I'm a student of Italian philology, and I do find your comment interesting for obvious reasons. I also speak English very fluently.

I find English to be a dumbed down language, and reading long and complex sentences in it gives me unbearable pain, with about every grammatical function contained in different words spread all over the sentence, and little to no clue for what's linked with what. I never read literature in English because it is incomprehensible (even tho I easily read technical stuff in it). And I can't stand English pronunciation.

Italian on the other hand offers nice possibilities for prefixes and suffixed that modify a word's meaning, allowing for deriving new words rather easily. The noun-gender system and verb conjugation allows for more complex sentences to be built more fluently and pleasingly, without compromising legibility. Vowels are actual vowels. Italian has a small set of simple and nice sounds, whereas English has upwards of 40 different sounds you need to learn in order to speak near-native. And Italian sounds just cool and lovely.

I don't know how you can think that English is more flexible and more expressive. All that makes English feasible is the fact that it's spoken in the US.

English is the Microsoft of languages. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Part of the insanity of English grammar and spelling is that it's a weird polyglot mashup of Old English/Frisian, Norse, French, Latin, Greek, and then whatever random bits of a hundred other languages. This flexibility is also a strength, in comparison to more ossified and standardized languages. To borrow another software analogy, English is the bazaar.

On a completely different front, gendering sexless nouns is just silly, as an English-native speaker. At least German mostly puts things that don't have an actual gender as neuter.

The one argument I'm aware of about grammatical gender is that found in the prologue of the second edition (1858) of the work titled De l'origine du langue of Ernest Renan, which holds that it may have originated in what I'll call sexual dialects, which diverge because of little intersexual social contact, and words most used by females become feminine, and those most used by males become masculine. He cites that in Indian dramas men speak Sanskrit and female Femprakrit, though I couldn't find anything about the latter. He also writes, little before this, that the older the language, the more apparent the grammatical gender, because of the instinct of ancient peoples to attach sexual identity to even the inanimate. The more modern the language, the lesser the effect of grammatical gender. He cites indeed English for being the most simplified in this respect.

Grammatical gender is not merely about masculinity or femminility of words. For example, "giornata" is a femminine italian word meaning "the part of the day from morning to the evening", derived from "giorno", a masculine word which means "daytime, (whole) day (i.e. 24 hours). This is a feature of femminine past participle, which carries the meaning of quickness, something that happens at a certain time, a hit (testata: headbutt) etc.

As you say, English is a dumbed-down language which is exactly why it has become the language of science and not any of the inflected languages such as German (which used to be, certainly the language of chemistry), Italian or Spanish etc., In English, prepositions and auxiliary verbs make explicit the ideas in a statement. This is not an especial advantage in literary works but in terms of precise communication it's a winner. For a detailed discussion I recommend 'The language of science from the fall of Latin to the rise of English - Scientific Babel' by Michael D. Gordin.

As for very great literature, the English have Shakespeare (sadly unread by you) but you have Dante (sadly unread by me). I mean in the original!

I am a globetrotter and now in France working at a tertiary institution. I learnt french only for a few months, when I was younger (elementary school) as it was one of the compulsory languages to learn. Overtime, I lost it. On getting here, I tried to pick it up but was very intimidated. To add insult to injury, they don't want to hear me speak the phonetic/queen's English Lang. It is even not understood by them; hence, I speak the basics (most times grammatically wrong). They tend to speak English but the conveyed message is often confusing let alone torturing to me. I often cry and on many occasions, I think there is a systemic racial profiling going on here given that I am dark skin. I appreciate them picking an additional language and improving their skills via me, yet I am intimidated by not allowing me speak their language but must communicate in English. The whole experience seemed to be a new-age skills transfer - French<-English. They are using folks from the 2nd/3rd world as the 1st world folks cannot stand the harassment - they would have left the job.

An interesting observation is that my thinking changes as I learn/improve on the French Lang. I sometimes think the English folks could have been more picky all the while i.e. the systemic racism is higher with them. I tend to see the culture in French - love/friendship even I have my reservations (history has shown that they could be dangerous - colonialism). I see the hidden traits in French (Lang.), which is fearlessness/aggressiveness and English,\ (Lang.) which is respectfulness with a possibility of deception in it.

My impression (and I believe that it's a good thing) is that English is swallowing languages word for word. Polish for example - Poland is a country pretty much positively obsessed with US, especially the older people. There's a lot of concepts that we literally take over from English, for example "pro choice". We're living in an increasingly Western global culture. It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages.

>> It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages.

What languages, outside of neighboring ones, are being heavily influenced by Chinese?

I'm saying that it's surprising to me given their population and economic force. This is the moment I realized that they have gone a completely different direction.

Is the initial comment

"It's surprising that we're seeing so much Chinese influence in our languages."

missing a 'not'?

Straightforward reason: English is now the true globally significant language.

Another point, English is the most prestigious language in most parts of the world. In Asia, where I am from, English has already become or is fast becoming the most prestigious language. So, you gain lots of more respect, larger audience and more consequent benefits if you write in English rather than in any other language.

It may be bad for many other languages but that's one of the facts.

Writing in your non-native language:

* Czech-born Milan Kundera started to write in French after having moved to France.

* Jack Kerouac was born to French-Canadian parents and brought up speaking French; yet, he wrote in English.

"French novelist Proust said that a novelist that wants to have a defined style should write in a foreign language," said Algerian-Italian writer Tahar Lamri. "That's because a foreign language forces the author to hunt for the proper imagery because they don't have an extensive vocabulary at their disposition." (From DW's article "Non-native authors bring fresh perspective to language", http://www.dw.com/en/non-native-authors-bring-fresh-perspect...)

More interesting question - why sing in English?

There is a huge number of bands around the world who end up singing in English, as if they never considered using their native tongue. And it's not that they have anything unique to say in English! You could make something that stands out but you end up sounding like a clone of clones.

This puzzles me to no end.

Also, why do British singers (at least some of them) sing in American accent? Adele for one. Her spoken speech is so different for her singing one.

    why do British singers (at least some of them) sing in American accent?

To increase the probability of appealing to customers in the (currently) largest and most profitable market. Moreover, singing with a US accent does not endanger sales elsewhere, including the UK.

   This puzzles me to no end.

The answer is economics. When you want to sell a product, it makes sense to fine-tune it as much as possible to the largest, most profitable market, and then re-use the product infrastructure (e.g. production, design, marketing, delivery) to other markets.

For a very long time, starting with the British empire, the largest, most affluent market has been English speaking, and since the end of WWII it was the US.

This lead to the emergence of a US-focussed music industry that resells its goods in the rest of the world . A similar phenomenon is at play in other domains like films. As US customers can always easily access products tailored to their preferences, which includes a strong preference for English-language lyrics, it has become economically essentially impossible to be globally successful with (non-instrumental) pop music that is not sung in English. This is a self-reinforcing phenomenon.

Interestingly, the dominance of English as voice of pop-music, evaporates as soon as instrumental music is considered: Techno, House, DnB, Dubstep etc shows no dominance of native speakers of English.

For a variety of reasons, I expect that English will not be as dominant in the future:

- Rise China as biggest, most affluent unified market for pop-music. This will lead to a preference of the Chinese customer for music. This market will be so large and lucrative as to compensate for the lack of Chinese as second-language, which is powerful for English.

- The massive lowering of the cost of music production, marketing and (in particular) distribution. The more cheaply we can produce music, the more it makes economic sense to target niche markets.

In my experience, independent bands starting small tend to flock to English everywhere too, without many prospects. Most then understandably stay small.

"When you want to sell a product, it makes sense to fine-tune it as much as possible to the largest, most profitable market"

Not if it's totally cornered and over-saturated.

There are plenty of independent bands singing in local languages. Few of them make it global. More imporant, humans are herd animals and often (not always) emulate others, especially others that have had success. If you've grown up in an environment saturated with English-language pop-music, like a lot of the world has, then the idea to sing in your native language might seem absurd or a fool's errand.

You need to think historically. The dominance of English language pop music emerged at a time when music was distributed as vinyl records. They were very expensive to produce and distribute. Basically, to recoup the cost of producing and distributing vinyl, you had to sell an extremely large number (millions) of identical products, so you can industrialse the process. You target the most lucrative market (US), carter mercilessly to that market's demands, and homogenise (by way marketing in all forms) as much as possible the consumers, so you can sell as many copies of as few products as possible. You amplify this process by reusing production, distribution, marketing and reselling the product in less lucrative markets.

While the economics of producing and distributing has changed, the change was too recent to have affected the dominance of English in this field, a dominance that was a reaction to the market forces described.

Social evolution typically trails technical evolution.

China is already a huge factor in film - remember that awful Red Dawn remake where the North Koreans were inexplicably invading the West Coast? The original script had the antagonists being the ChiComs, which makes more sense (at least as much as the original did...). The studio decided that wouldn't play in Peking[1], and those sweet, sweet international box office dollars won out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_it_play_in_Peoria%3F

Agreed.

The rise of China can be seen in other markets too, e.g. luxury car makers increasingly factor-in Chinese taste.

Some of the responses are saying that it is about marketability and while that is certainly true for some musicians, it isn't true for all -- optimistically I would even say most.

For example, I remember an interview with the German group Milky Chance where the main song writer said that he has never written a song in German http://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2015/05/22/milky-chance-pe...

In these cases I would say it is a result of the popularity of English music and people wanting to emulate the music that they like. "I like these songs and they are in English so if I write songs like these then I will write them in English."

   wanting to emulate the music that they like.

Yes, but the reason they like this music, is (to a substantial degree) because others (in their relevant peer group) like that music. Ultimately a lot of people like a specific form of music, because it has been mass produced, and mass marketed to them.

One of the social functions of pop-music is to help form and sustain group identities. E.g. Reggae is associated by some/many with being relaxed, easy-going, liking ganja etc. For such group formation to function, it is vital that a lot people do in fact listen to this music.

The best way to get a large number of people to like a small number of musical genres, is truth heavy marketing and restriction of products on offer.

In the past, production and distribution of records was only economically feasible for a small number of products ...

The problem is, they end up with no audience since it already listens to whatever they are trying to emulate.

I remember an interview with Klaus Meine of the Scorpions (a very successful German heavy metal band) about why he wrote songs in English. There wasn't any deep reason for it, it was just that all the rock music he listened to when growing up was in English, so it was natural that when he started writing songs he wrote them in English.

English is a hub language. I travel outside of the US, I meet the locals, I meet other foreigners also visiting, and chances are we all speak English.

Learning a foreign language is a time consuming and expensive endeavor. If you are not blessed to have English as your native language, and you are struggling financially but interested in upping your skill level or marketability, which language do you study? Which language makes the most sense?

In many cases, the answer to those questions is English. I also pity students of English. It's a horrible, horrible language as a student. I say this being a native English speaker with moderate literacy in Japanese and Chinese.

Very similar reason the answer to "why are manhole covers round" is that manholes are round; because you want to make money by selling your English test to the large number of people who read English.

Network effect.

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