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Comment by Typhon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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