Hacker News Reader

Comment by Typhon | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite pessimistic concerning the future of multilingualism. Small, isolated communities manage to preserve their language for century, but a community the same size in a big city can lose its language in the space of a generation or two.

EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.

View on HN

Well, I sort of disagree. As my handle implies, I'm named after a Numidian King (160-104 BC). I'm one of the "Kabyle people", a Berber ethnicity from Algeria, North Africa.

Although I was born in Algiers, we spoke Kabyle at home and most Kabyle people I know who were born elsewhere did, too.

If you go to cities like Tizi-Ouzou (one hour or less away) and Bejaïa, Kabyle is the lingua franca. That's the language people use to talk to each other. But you'd be understood if you spoke another Algerian language (Algerian dialects are a mish-mash of mostly Arabic, Kabyle, French, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish), or French.

So for me, I just go there and I can just speak Kabyle in a small zone containing a little more than 2 million people (there are many more in neighboring cities, and many, many more in other cities, but that's the "HQ" with the highest capita/km² speaking the language daily).

I use five languages daily living in Algiers (5 million people). Though I think you're partly right for the "retaining the language" part since Algiers didn't retain the "original" language: it mixed a bunch of them and then retained that.

That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).

English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.

Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too.

Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.

Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.

But in most cases you don't have a pick of which extra language to learn.

People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.

I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. For me it was English, Latin (hated it) and French (as third language I also could have chosen Russian (would also have interested me) or ancient Greek).

>> People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British).

> I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school.

You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.

> You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything.

I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".

You don't think the fact that English was more useful to you had anything do with your liking it more?

There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.

I think teaching the grammar first makes sense in German since this is the difficult and ugly part. In my opinion if this does not become a second nature you will be uncomfortable to communicate in German since otherwise you will always think uncofortable seconds how to build the correct case etc. . In other words: You will have difficulties becoming fluent if you aren't confident in the grammar.

At least in Japan, learning English lets you speak to all foreigners. The expectation is that everyone who can't speak the native language at least can speak English.

This leads to most English being spoken in the country having no native participant. Having too idiomatic English will probably lead to harder communication.

For computer parsing the language, this might matter. For humans learning the language, it accounts maybe one percent of the total effort to acquire it.

We humans all have the same hardware processing language. If some spoken languages were _actually_ more complex or too complex for that hardware to process, they wouldn't be spoken.

I think the point is not if something is out of reach of a basic human, but more that if it takes 10 years to reach basic proficiency, then it's not a language that will be fit to share with a huge amount of people from different backgrounds.

Now, I personaly think that if French actually reached a point where it would be shared as common language by billions of people it would have been broken down to a more efficient form. Creoles and other dialects derived from french all seem to get rid of the redundant bits.

Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free.

> Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free.

Depends on what you consider as free.

For example German (more inflected than English) has a rather free order of clauses (where the order tells about the emphasis the speaker wants to express) opposed to English.

On the other hand, in English words are often used in a more flexible way than in German (even if you use a similar construction in both languages), because the stricter grammar makes this less comfortable in German than in English. For example: "iron" (en) is "Bügeleisen" (de). In English one can use the verb "to iron" for using the iron while in German there is an own verb "bügeln" for this. Just using the same word for an object and something you do with it is already interfered by the German grammar, in which verbs have to end in "en" or at least "n".

What do the terms inflected and irregular mean?

Inflected language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection

"Irregular" means that a perticular word does not obey the usual rules for inflection (an example of such a rule verb (without to) + "ed" -> simple past, e.g. "jump" -> "jumped"). For example "go" -> "went", "sing" -> "sang". You will usually simply have to learn those.

Weirdness of a language is completely subjective

This isn't true.

English grammar is also easier or you can use simple subset of English. However that can not be said for Italian, German, French or Russian. They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. The hardest subject for English is "tenses" and you can also use small subset of them.

I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.

> They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning.

I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language.

TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.

The problem isn't the extra grammar rules, the problem is having to learn the gender of every single word in order to use the language correctly.

Usually you get a pretty good feeling for the rules that determine the gender for many nouns (at least for me in Spanish, French and Portuguese), so that for many nouns this will only be a problem at the beginning.

For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter.

Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).

Quite obviously, it is a PITA, which is why English dropped using gendered nouns in the first place - originally Old English had gender, but over the course of the middle ages virtually all traces of it disappeared, simplifying the language.

When memorizing words, memorize the article, too: «die Blume», «le soleil». Never omit the article. Then it's easy.

Something like 80% of the world population uses ungendered language.

Gender and tense questions make a lot of things really complicated! There are only two tenses in english, really. Compare to Spanish/French conjugations, or German declination questions.

(Because this is HN) in a way, English ends up being very LISP-y (more CL than Scheme though). There are very few base constructs, and some special vocabulary, but most "grammar" is really just vocabulary. Future tense isn't a tense, it's using 'will'.

There's hardness because of all the dialects, and particles. Though I don't really know of a language where particle use isn't of a similar difficulty.

English isn't very complex, but it is highly irregular and it has an absolutely massive vocabulary. It's easy to learn enough to be able to scrape by, but difficult to learn to speak fluently.

Italian is easier to pronounce (only 7 vowel sounds) and almost 1 to 1 to the written word (but 3 different signs for the k sound, still easy to read).

However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?

When has rational choice theory worked for anything other than a thesis defense?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com