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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The history described in this article is fascinating, but it does nothing to prove the article's thesis that English is uniquely "not normal".

All it does is describe how it's different, principally, from continental languages in the German and Latin families. Which, you know, you might expect when it comes from a big island off the coast.

Only English has spelling bees? In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of characters -- much, much more work. English has no genders and less present-tense conjugations? Again, Chinese has no genders and no conjugations. English uses a weird word "do"? Chinese has a weird word "le".

I'm only using Chinese as an example because I took a few semesters of it in college... but the idea that English is somehow an "weird" outlier in the world of languages doesn't seem to have a shred of supporting evidence from this particular article.

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This article struck me as ignorant enough that I gave up before it got to the history, which may have been interesting. Every language has things unique about it, otherwise it wouldn't be considered a different language. Picking a couple from English (some of which are really arbitrary, others not even true) proves nothing.

Yes, English has some unique features. But rather than every English speaker going around thinking their language is some massive exception, I'd like people to understand that English has been subject to essentially the same forces as every other language, and makes plenty of sense given the history of Britain. But I think many of us anglophones want to hold on to a sense of uniqueness rather than acknowledge our commonality with the rest of humanity.

Indeed. If there was a language that had nothing unique in it, then it would be unique for the mere fact of not having anything unique in it.

Not to mention, English is way easier to learn and use than almost every other language. Simple English is competitive with Esperanto in terms of ease of learning.

To prove some of these:

In Russia, they teach the correct spelling up until grade 11. In fact, when graduating from high school, you are commonly required to take a test where you write down correctly a story that a speaker dictates to you. This is unheard of in English-speaking countries because it would be incredibly easy to do.

I started learning French and English at the same time in school and was not otherwise exposed to them. By the end of 6 years, I could speak English but not French.

Spanish/Portuguese for me is somewhere between English and French in terms of ease of learning.

Being a native English speaker, having taken a few years of Russian back in college, and having just recently been mutually trolled by some coworkers into completing the Duolingo course on Esperanto, this notion of simple English being easy strikes me as implausible.

First, I'd argue that simple English compares unfavorably to the expressiveness of Esperanto given a similar investment of effort. Due to the way that Esperanto uses prefixes and suffixes to form more complex ideas, it takes a ludicrously short amount of time to start playing with and bending the language in what I can only assume are entirely legit ways.

Second, Russian spelling is pretty darned regular / phonetic. I'll believe you that spelling is taught up until grade 11, but for the life of me I have no idea why. Given my extreme reliance on a spell checker to save me from embarrassment English, I'd posit that it's by no means because English is easier to spell—and my undergraduate major was journalism. Maybe in we in English speaking countries just give up on doing English sans spell checker earlier? My comprehension is pretty mediocre in Russian, but I can certainly sound out unfamiliar words and spell spoken words reliably...

Also, a plug for the Duolingo Esperanto course: It's great fun, and is a very short path to getting a basic grasp on another language. Plus it has a baked in idealism that I love for the same reason I love Star Trek (see: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/03/the-regrettable-decli...)

Well, it's taught up until grade 11, because the vast majority of students cannot learn to write without major mistakes up until grade 11 of 3-4 days a week of 40 min Russian classes. This is purely Russian spelling - not Russian literature. Russian literature is a separate class.

  To put it in perspective, that is the same amount of time you spend learning math and 2x more than you spend learning history, geography, physics, etc.

In fact, in the school where I went to where English is taught as a second language, after 7 years, English becomes English Literature. So I learned to write English without mistakes before learning to write Russian without mistakes being a native Russian speaker, regularly writing in Russian and never interacting with native English speakers.

Sounding out words is not the issue. The issue is writing correctly in ambiguous cases.

Here is a good example:

http://videotutor-rusyaz.ru/uchenikam/teoriya/144-pravopisan...

This deals with whether you put one letter н or two in adjectives suffixes. Basically it depends on a lot of factors and there are many exceptions. There are also other suffixes each of which has specific rules based on a number of factors such as what the root of the word is, how it is formed, and the meaning of the word.

This one single issue is already more complex than anything in English.

There are a ton of other suffix and word conjugation issues you have to worry about.

The only rule in English that I can think of where you have to interpret a sentence in your head before saying it is "I" vs "me".

Example:

He told Tom and me to get ready.

If John and I get married, we’ll have two kids.

> "I" vs "me". Example: "He told Tom and me to get ready." vs "If John and I get married, we’ll have two kids."

For both those sentences, "me" and "I" are interchangeable. In the second, "me" is more common in speech. The "I" in the subject and "me" in the object rule is only hard-and-fast when it's the only word in the subject or object.

I think the uniqueness of English can kind of be quantified by its rate of divergence. That is what the author sort of gets to by saying that there are no mutually intelligible languages.

I think that if we could quantify that rate (by time) of divergence, we may see that English is pretty far on one end of the scale.

Consider that the fall of Rome and the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain occurred at roughly the same time (~500 CE). Then compare how far English has diverged from other Low German languages, to how far Spanish and French have diverged (also consider that those languages were already on their way diverging from Latin with a head start on English). English diverged a lot faster.

As to why English diverged faster, I don't think the author gives particularly good reasons. "Inter-linguistic" migration/settlement waves are not unique to Britain. Most of his arguments for English can be applied to French.

The Celtic Gauls were "invaded" by Latin speakers, and to some extent started adopting it as a second language. Then Germanic Franks (and others) started flowing into and settling into parts of what is today France, again adopting the language. Then waves of Norse speakers settled into Northern France and that had an effect on the language. But through all of that, French still isn't as divergent from Latin as English is from Old Low German. What is the difference?

I think the actual answer is probably largely due to geography/topography. English diverged faster because it was more isolated, and left more to its own devices without as much contact with its divergent siblings. I think the extent of contact with siblings is the force that keeps languages from diverging.

It's probably the same reason that Japanese is so divergent (from whatever it is that it diverged from). Similarly, it's why small "isolate" groups tend to cluster in mountainous regions. Basque/Georgian/Korean would probably not exist today if they had originally developed on some flat plains in the middle of Eurasia.

I went a bit long on this topic, but there was an argument for the author to make. I kind of wish he had made it.

Fun fact: American English and Mandarin Chinese are pretty much the only languages where "r-colored vowels" exist. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-colored_vowel

> In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of characters

When I started learning Chinese I just memorized the 214 traditional radicals and from there I could pretty much infer the meaning of every character.

That's nonsense. For a typical (phono-semantic) character, only one radical corresponds to meaning (which is really vague, such as "tree", "water", "man" and so on), and the rest correspond to another character that this character sounds like.

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

You misunderstood, I think... I'm saying if you know the 214 radicals and you see the character for e.g. house, you'll understand the character(s) and even sentences (sometimes).

If you know the radical 黑 and 死, then you can easily infer the meaning of 黑死病. Even though the third character is not a radical, you can spot the radical for 'sickness' there. The other component looks a lot like the radical for 'skin'. So that last character's meaning is actually something like 'skin-disease' or 'disease of the skin'. The three characters combined basically means 'black death'. As in the plague.

Maybe you can guess some hand-picked examples, but that's it. Your analysis of 病 is incorrect. It's a phono-semantic compound of 疒 (sickness) and 丙 (pronounced "bing"). From this you can deduce that 病 is pronounced similar to "bing" (or used to, in ancient Chinese) and has sickness-related meaning.

Some characters actually do combine the meanings of several radicals, for example 孝 is a child carrying an elder on their back or something; it means "filial piety" (respect for elders). But there are not that many of them, and you have to know the final meaning anyway, otherwise it's hard to guess.

At least I was right about 'sickness', which was the vital clue here.

And I can "guess" a lot more than hand-picked examples, using this method I've understood everything from store signs and logos to large parts of children's stories. Granted, I've learned a lot of characters also.

There are many recommendations to learn Chinese this way.

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