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Comment by biswaroop | Hacker News Reader

Turkey and Indonesia do not use Arabic for communication. There's an Arabic continuum, and Saudi Arabic is rather different from Moroccan Arabic. There are subtle cultural differences preserved in the diversity of language.

England, Kenya, and India all speak English, but English is merely a common language, and a lot of cultural differences come from the linguistic diversity in each of those countries.

Culture is a result of multiple factors, one of which is language. Monolingualism is certainly one large step towards a homogenous culture.

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It takes a few weeks of practice to be able to intelligbly understand someone from India, Kenya, England, the US, or Australia, if you're from one of the others. Cadences and idioms are all off.

This is dramatically overstated. It immediately predicts that British television would have no audience in the US and Australia.

Does it? I think it just means that there's a fair number of things to learn before the dialog makes complete sense. Context fills in many of the gaps, I know that I still miss some cultural references, rhyming slang, and such, even after watching a fair number of British shows.

According to your interpretation, it would be just as fair to say "it takes a few weeks of practice to be able to understand someone from the US, if you're from the US". I feel justified in not interpreting it that way.

If you're an American to whom general-audience American television doesn't make complete sense, and who misses many of the cultural references, then I'm quite relieved that I have a different interpretation.

I've seen a fair amount of British TV, and I'm fairly comfortable with the idioms and vocabulary differences. Less so than American TV, but I think that's fair, since I'm not immersed in the culture.

I've seen much less Australian TV, but a lot of the slang was utterly unfamiliar to me, in what I have seen. I'm sure that if I watched more, it would become more familiar.

I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

> I don't understand what is so controversial about the idea that other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences.

Nothing. What's controversial is equating "other places use the language slightly differently, and it can take some time to become accustomed to the differences" with "it takes a few weeks of practice to intelligibly [sic] understand someone from another place".

The first of those, yours, is a very weak claim. The second is a very strong one.

I said "this is dramatically overstated" and you're trying to contradict me by saying that a much weaker version of the claim is true. Yes, it is, that's what "overstated" means.

What I'm saying is that you took the strongest possible interpretation and knocked it down as a strawman. If there are several possible interpretations of someone's argument, and one of them is obviously flawed, then it's not very generous (or constructive, IMO) to attack the flawed interpretation.

You speak of the principle of charity [0]. Something that has long vanished on many internet forums, where people are quick to take the most absurd and least likely interpretation of a statement and argue against it. Especially when being pedantic about certain word phrasing or word choices (to which the OP would often respond with "You know what I meant.")

My best friend is Australian, the idioms are often nonsensical or require a bit of thinking due to being a variant of an idiom I'm familiar with. e.g "a roo loose in the top paddock"

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

English is not my native language, and I can barely tell the difference between Indian, Kenyan, British and American English. Cadence and idioms are all equally off. Certainly it's not "weeks of practice".

I think that the qualifier "if you're from one of the others" applies to your case.

I think this is truer than most people realise.

We often modify our speech for the audience - put someone in a party situation where they are the odd one out and it will be harder for them to follow along.

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