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Comment by geff82 | Hacker News Reader

I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks English, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if English has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized Island in the Northern Sea.

Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.

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> it is the language of great literature

The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.

I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.

  ... written by English or American authors, have 
  a very refined way of pleasing the reader.

Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner?

How about other non-English language authors?

Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.

I have the impression that basic German is quite technical. You can be poetic, even very poetic, but it is not easy. You can, however, easily describe the relation of one thing to another in detail.

English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..

> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.

According to which method of counting?

Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."

In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Vocabulary_size

Hm, that was supposed to be the total count, not for single speakers.

Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.

Hm, I also seem to remember that German has a thinner dictionary. I suspect that lemmas in German are difficult to count, as there are so many compound words. Apart from the joy of teasing fellow Britons for their stupidity, I don't see why an average German adult should recognise 40% more lemmas when the languages are so related.

You're citing information from two different studies that could very well have used different methods for counting lemmas. The text in between the two bits you quoted illustrates the extent to which this is the case: Alongside your study of 20-year-olds finding that they recognize ~42,000 lemmas, there's an earlier study of people about the same age finding that they recognize between 12,000 and 17,000.

The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.

Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.

> I have the impression that basic German is quite technical.

What does this mean?

> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.

This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.

Wikipedia[1] says there are more words in the German dictionary - but I suppose this depends how you count compound words, and what you take as contemporary words, too.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...

I don't mean to be rude, but how many other languages do you speak? There's an almost ineffable depth to nearly every language on this earth, and there are hundreds of them with very large literature corpuses. Naturally, maybe speaking two languages, you are familiar only with literature in those languages. Also, remember that English, being spoken by so many people, its literature is naturally more divulged and widely known. Nonetheless there are truly unique characteristics to almost any language, so much that you could fill a lifetime of study in any one of them.

The person you're talking to is German, so the answer is presumably at least two. :-)

I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?

(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)

Could it instead be that the language that people find pleasing changes over time, so that, as a modern reader, your tastes are naturally more attuned to modern writing?

I speak 4 languages and have read literature for 3.

The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, thrillers).

Surely it helps that English borrows heavily from the Romance languages, among others.

some people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling.

some people are so earnest to cast aside or denigrate their culture in a display of cosmopolitan/xenophilic signaling

I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.

Russian and French 19c literature are the two obvious counter-examples. I admire the attempt to reframe the question in terms that allow you to claim English is pre-eminent though.

Please name 10 popular high fantasy novels spanning multi thousand pages in French and Russian.

Not the OP, but FWIW Jules Verne was French...

So, basically, if they don't have the breadth of literary genres that English does, they're not as good. That's a horrible metric to judge literature and literary value by.

I never mentioned anything about 'good' or 'judge'.

My point was about breadth, which is factual to the best of my knowledge.

QED

What is your native language? Mine is Polish, for sci-fi I could not enjoy Stanislaw Lem translated to English. On the other hand I really enjoyed translation of H.P. Lovercaft to Polish.

I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged.

I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.

My native language is Bengali, far removed from English. I speak French and Spanish too, but not as well as English.

You are right about translated literature, though that was not my primary point.

The genres you list are very popular in the English world. It's fine of course but to use that to argue for a supremacy of English language literature doesn't strike me as a very solid argument. It would be like saying that Comics are superior to Bandes Dessinees because you enjoy super heroes a lot. Or that American cuisine is the best because you love hamburgers, tex mex and slow cooked meat. Nothing wrong with that but it's very subjective.

The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output.

Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?

I am not arguing for the supremacy of English literature, just the volume and breadth of those genres, which you apparently agree with.

I read and speak German, English, French and Farsi (Persian) fluently.

You're critiquing a very narrow interpretation of a sentence written by someone in a second language.

Unlike some languages, German has articles, so his meaning (the language) is likely clear.

There are some 7000 languages i the world, and maybe half of those even have a writing system at all, let alone libraries full of literature.

There are a few heavy-hitters, though. I'd expect China, for example, to have written some great literature over the years.

(Epistemic status: I don't actually know anything about Chinese literature, and I welcome correction on this point.)

Most discussions regarding Chinese literature would start with the big four (novels): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Chinese_Novels

I'm queueing up one of these as the next book I'll read. Thanks for helping me out!

I recommend Journey to the West out of the four. Kind of like an RPG-esque journey about a monkey and his gang traveling in search of Buddhist scriptures. You'll get to learn about Sun Wukong, who is the basis for a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and (I believe?) Korean spin-off characters, like Goku from Dragonball[1]

Another good option is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which will cover a good portion of Chinese history (in a mythological way). A lot of the characters like Zhu Geliang [2] are still highly influential in modern Chinese culture.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Wukong#Influence [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang

Chinese literature is indeed very rich, especially the ancient poetries/verses, from Tang and Song dynasty. They are indeed the essential part of, not only Chinese, but East Asian aesthetics in general.

Does a work need to be written to have literary merit?

No, but strictly oral works are not very accessible unless someone writes them down. (Or, I suppose, records them.)

Writing lends persistence and faithfulness to the original.

Oral traditions tend to be divergent and mutable.

Even such changes as the introduction of the printing press, and cheap paper, had profound impacts:

• Copies were now letter-for-letter identical.

• Reproduction costs fell by 2-6 orders of magnitude.

• Translation to the vernacular became viable. It was cheaper to bring the book to the reader (translation) than the reader to the book (learning Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, etc.).

• Literacy grew -- from 5-10% in 1500 or so to 95%+ by 1900.

Of course, the number of published works grew, as did the literary canon, to the point it's a largely meaningless term (or has been subsumed by pop culture).

Agreed. As a native Arabic speaker, I would argue that Arabic is the language of poetry.

It’s also the lingua franca of tech. There isn’t any way to say “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” or “8-Way associative cache” in French or any other language without severe lingual contortions.

Then explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else?

>Then explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else?

Probably because some French law mandates it.

They haven't gotten over the whole "lingua Franca" thing.

Well, it will take the British and Americans a long time to go over the same thing as well when the time comes...

Get back to me in 20 years and we'll see how that went.

Who said it has to be in 20 years? It took a couple of centuries for the French.

Gigaoctet isn't exactly a severe linguistic contortion though.

They actively avoid loan words from English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française#Anglicisms

Except weekend. They couldn't come up with a better word for that ;)

I use "fin de semaine" and people understands it perfectly.

Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages.

P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation looks completely different?

Here are the Translations for weekend for each Romance language and Latin:

French - fin de semaine

Spanish - fin de semana

Romanian - sfârșit de săptămână

Portuguese - final de semana

Italian - fine settimana

Latin - volutpat vestibulum

Notice how only Latin looks completely different. I wonder if google translate is broken.

For Portuguese at least it's most likely translating word-for-word. The term is "fim-de-semana" ("fim" rather than "final", and hyphens signifying a compound word)

Isn't it vacancelle in French? Never heard fin de semaine... although most just say le weekend.

I have never heard vacancelle in France. But le week-end all the time. Even my kid’s school teachers used it. “Bon week-end!” Never heard fin de semaine even among my old country neighbors in Provence. My anecdote doesn’t make it fact of course. Most French people I know don’t pay any attention to the Academie Française.

In German it's Wochenende (Woche = week, Ende = end), which is literally the literal translation. ... de.wiktionary.org tells me it was adopted from English, too, after World War I.

Huh. I did not know it was such a young word. :)

Ancient Romans just didn't use weeks, so the translation is probably a modern one. The closest to a weekend is a market day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae

Kind of. TFA mentions this:

> In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part.

The Academy encourages the avoidance of loan words, but very few people in France actually listen to the Academy. Spend ten minutes in any French tech company and the Academy goes out the window.

Octet is actually a more precise word as it implies there are 8 bits (or people, or things...)

Byte only represents a group of bits.

Technically true, and there were some weird-ass byte sizes in the early decades of computing, but the 8-bit byte has been universal for, I think, around 40 years now?

> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem”

How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?

Something like

リニキス　カーネル　ネットワークイング　サブシステム

It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.

I think that the proper term is "Linuxカーネルネットワークサブシステム" meaning "Linux Kernel Network Subsystem".

What is katakana?

Japanese uses three distinct character sets in writing: Hiragana (a syllabary), Katakana (another syllabary) and Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Kanji are usually used together to write native Japanese words, whereas Katakana is used almost exclusively for loanwords.

Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".

Katakana [1] is one of the two syllabary writing systems in Japanese, with Hiragana [2] being the other. IIRC katakana is the one where every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, so transliterated loan words with consecutive consonants end up growing vowels in the middle. They also have kanji (characters), and various romanization systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese). It's really amazingly inefficient.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

Why is everyone posting squares?

Unicode characters probably aren't all rendering on your end due to your font.

The Japanese first adapted writing from Chinese; this adapted system is called kanji and is highly similar to, and often homographic with, Chinese hanzi. However, Japanese and Chinese have very different phonological structure: Chinese is mostly comprised of monosyllabic words, whereas Japanese has lots of polysyllabic words. This makes it more difficult to do phonetic transcription in Japanese kanji than in Chinese hanzi.

The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words.

As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all.

Thank you for explaining this to me! (And thank you to everyone else's comments too of course). This is fascinating.

> There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد‎" after all.

There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliteratio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads

In Chinese, "Linux内核网络系统", literally "Linux Kernel Network System". Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language generally uses full meaning-to-meaning translations of technical terms as much as possible, and only occasionally uses phonetic nouns (e.g. 安卓 "Anzhuo" for Android) or English words (e.g. "Linux").

Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to some very unfortunate contortions, as the Chinese language is much less suited to phonetic transcription as compared to syllabary-based languages like Korean or Japanese. There's no "one obvious way" to map a foreign name onto the Chinese sound-set, and even when you do, there's likewise no obvious way to choose the corresponding characters (and you must be cautious to avoid characters with unwanted meanings or connotations).

Sounds like this won't be news for you, but for others in the thread, the Chinese sometimes play around a lot with puns and rhymes in transliterated names.

Here's a terrific twitter thread about Chinese nicknames for NBA players: https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en

An example from the thread[1]:

Stephon Marbury - 马政委 "Marburyist Political Commissar"

This is a pun on "Marxist Political Commissar," since in Chinese both "Marbury" and "Marx" are spelled with the same first character "ma" ("horse").

[1] https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400

Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)

Although that is somewhat of a simplification, it is certainly more true of Chinese than of English.

The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.

The vast majority of country names in Chinese do not contain 国 but are rather purely phonetic transcriptions. Only a handful of countries have 国 in the common name.

That's true, but I think the full name usually has, just as the full names of Beijing Shanghai Tianjin etc contain 市 even though the short names doesn't.

And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.

Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …

I recently learnt the Chinese name for San Francisco: Old Gold Mountain. From the gold rush days.

Similarly, New Gold Mountain is Melbourne Australia near where the Australian gold rush started soon after.

With phonetic systems like Japanese and Korean, terms like this regularly get represented as-is in the script. Sometimes they don't get translated, as you can see plenty of jargon in this Korean wiki page on C++. [0]

One example is 'computer' -> 컴퓨터 in Hangul. It's still 'computer', just pronounced with the Korean pronunciation rules.

[0]: https://namu.wiki/w/C%2B%2B

Tangential: it's worth noting that this is a historical circumstance rather than something that has to do with French in itself. When a new domain arises that a language didn't previously have words for, like computing, "home-grown" (as opposed to borrowed) words can be more or less successful. Take the French Academy for example, whose attempts at purging French of English loanwords[1] has had mixed success. (And see also the Central Hindi Directorate[2].)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise#A...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hindi_Directorate

We learned a lot of Afrikaans tech words in computer science in high school in South Africa. It's pretty useless for me. I've never used any of it since, and have forgotten most of it.

Fellow Afrikaansie here. There were some very novel Afrikaans words for computer terminology in that school computer science handbook... However none of it seems to be that useful or much used at all, and English accesses the latest tech and many major western tech hubs.

I suspect this is the case for my languages, especially those spoken in very few countries or by smallish population groups, especially when the language speaking group is not Geographically close to other populations of a grammatically closely related language.

I am busy studying Georgian because I am relocating to the eastern European country. However I remain doubtful that Georgian will be that useful for technical computer stuff, because it has only around 4 million speakers and is linguistically close to almost no other widely spoken language.

I will find out soon, as my language skills and experience with the place collide.

Système de réseau de noyau Linux? Cache associatif de 8 sets? Those aren't severe linguistic contortions...

Your Google translation is no good. Sets is an English word, and it would be associative (feminine form). That being said, the reason I, as a French speaker working in tech/research, prefer to discuss tech in English, is because:

1. There is always new terminology being invented in conferences or bleeding edge R&D. There is no official translation for most of these terms. You could translate them, but most people wouldn't be quite sure what you mean.

2. Anything I write in English is immediately accessible to 20x more people. Writing about tech in French means sacrificing most of my audience. English really is the lingua franca of tech.

It doesn't bother me at all, even though it's not my native language. The world needs a lingua franca (of tech and everything else), and English fits the bill quite well. It's much less overcomplicated than many other languages. I make many more grammar mistakes in French, because French grammar is full of arbitrary nonsensical rules. No thanks.

> Sets is an English word

"There is no word for entrepreneur in french"

Seriously...

"collection of things," mid-15c., from Old French sette "sequence," variant of secte "religious community," from Medieval Latin secta "retinue," from Latin secta "a following"

I did not use Google translation. I went to the French Wikipedia articles, which used cache associatif.

But even if you want to quibble word choice, the fact remains that there's no severe linguistic contortion. Sure, French doesn't permit chaining nouns in the same way that English does. But the de chains are still permitted, and aren't much more wordy.

"sets" is the English word you used

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sets#French

As others hinted.

Translation of "Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem" = Subsistema de red del núcleo de Linux. Translation of "8-way associative cache" = caché asociativa de 8-vías. I don't see severe lingual cortortions here.

> núcleo

I really like that word. I thought it was only used in IBM mainframe parlance.

Netzwerksubsystem des Linux-Systemkerns

achtfach assoziativer Zwischenspeicher

This is of course cheating since these two languages are fairly close to each other (although Technical German tends to be more descriptive and somewhat more accurate than Technical English on average, at least that's my overall impression across a bunch of fields). Both also happen to have a full complement of technical and engineering terms for almost anything (including computers due to some parallel developments), though these are often not so related (esp. mechanical eng.)

"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.

As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.

German just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like:

- Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization - Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending - Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten" - Neugier = curiousity: "new" + "greed"

I do wonder if this "composibility" is actually the norm for languages and English is just the odd one out. Having a large vocabulary from other languages (e.g. Latin) obscures the meaning of some word roots (e.g. particula - pars + diminutive, just like in German) so you have to just memorize it as one chunk. So perhaps the benefit of other languages like German is just their purity/consistency.

I believe it's just that the etymologies in English are more obscure. They're still fascinating, but they come from foreign roots a lot of the time, so they're not as immediately obvious.

Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".

Laptop and notebook comes to mind. Maybe English does have this mechanism but to a less extent?

Interesting enough, Portuguese also does compounding to some extent (Bear in mind it's a romance language).

My favorite English feature is how you can pick a substantive and use it as a verb. Mostly makes sense, specially if there's evident connotation behind the substantive.

The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:

c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).

https://www.etymonline.com/word/syntax

(One of my favourite wwebsites.)

> The English etymology is more indirect, but essentially means the same thing, by way of Latin and Greek:

... meaning you can't understand many terms if you only know English, because they are actually french/latin/greek. "Cache" is actually an example of this.

Or, putting on my optimist's glasses: learn enough English etymology, and you'll learn Latin, Greek, German, French, Italian, Hindi, Celtic, Klingon, ...

It's really interesting reading up on etymologies like that - thanks for the link!

This is what I meant about the meaning being obscured too much, so it has to be simply memorized as one chunk.

I ... can spend a lot of time at Etym Online. Some fun finds: vodka, pollution, pen, fiction, dough.

What do you think of Wiktionary? That's been my go-to for a long time.

Strictly on a UI/UX basis, it beats most other online dictionaries for not being annoying A.F.

I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.

I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.

It is just a question of orthography. In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word. In English, they are usually (but not always) written with space. So "Christmas tree" is "Weinachtsbaum". This is sometimes made out to be much more mysterious than it is, as if German is more "composable" or something, but the only difference is the typographical space.

English is just more difficult to spell because there no simple rule for when a compound is written with or without space (or with a dash, as is sometimes the case). E.g. Christmas is Christ + mass, but is written in a single word.

While you are correct to some extent, I do find German to be much more consistent in this regard.

In many cases this may just be due to English's distance from it's root (i.e. Latin, French). As it was pointed out below, "syntax" is also a composition of two simpler words - they just aren't words we know. In German, there are also loan words from Latin and French, but I do have the impression it is not to the same extent, and the German language is quite consistent.

As a German native speaker I find German much more confusing in this regard. Maybe this is because I don't know the rules in English well enough[1] but for German I can give you a few examples of the complications we have to deal with:

From grandparent: > In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word.

This is true, but the difficulty is to know when two or more nouns are considered a compound noun (Zusammensetzung) or just a group of words (Wortgruppe).

For example consider the following (real) street names:

- Schleißheimer Straße

- Hohenzollernstraße

- Leuchtenbergerstraße

Straße is simply street. Schleißheim is the name of a place. Schleißheimer Straße is written as two separate words because the rule [2] says that combinations with geographic names ending in -er that signify a place (and not the people living in that place, for example) are usually not considered compounds. A simple counterexample would be Hohenzollernstraße with Hohenzollern referring to the House of Hohenzollern.

Now consider a case like Leuchtenbergerstraße. Leuchtenberger can refer to the place called Leuchtenberg or the Duke of Leuchtenberg. It would be written Leuchtenberger Straße if it had to do anything with the city of Leuchtenberg, maybe leading to that place. If it is named in the honor of the Duke it would be written Leuchtenbergerstraße.

Another problem is that often nouns are not simply slapped together. Adding an additional s (Fugen-s[3]) between the words is very common.

For example: traffic is Verkehr, sign is Zeichen, traffic sign is not Verkehrzeichen but Verkehrszeichen. On the other hand: tax is Steuer and transfer tax is Verkehrsteuer, but not Verkehrsssteuer.

dog is Hund and leash is Leine. A dog leash is a Hundeleine, addding an additional e in this case. Sometimes nothing is added but something removed: crown is Krone, prince is Prinz and a crown prince is a Kronprinz, leaving out the final e in Krone.

Compounding in German is complicated and weird.

[1] The only rule i know is: "It's written as two words, except for a few well known exceptions." I suspect that there is more to it and I'd be happy for any enlightenment.

[2] https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/getrenn...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nouns#Compounds

It's not just orthography. English has been influenced by Romance languages and gained a tendency to write "of"s instead of compounds. This reverses the word order (order of words) and adds extra words in between.

There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?

In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.

Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.

> "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night)

Weihnachten comes from weih/geweiht meaning hol{y,ied} night.

Ah, thanks.

> I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.

Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficult (for humans, not so much).

The English bias in phone keyboards and autocorrect systems is awful. There are lots of issues with verbal forms and diacritics. And if you dare to write in more than one language at a time, all bets are off.

I think this is one of the places where some public funds could make for good, useful research. Microsoft, Apple, and Google aren't interested in creating the perfect keyboard and autocorrect system for non-English languages, they will do the bare minimum and won't improve until someone shows them there's a better way (and it starts hurting sales).

Interesting with zwischenspeicher... In Finnish terminology "cache" is "välimuisti" which seems to be the same kind of word-construction.

I have wondered how people came up with translations to computer terminology. In retrospect, borrow from the German language, of course - as the saying goes, they have a word for everything!

It just occurred to me that there are two very different kinds of caches which aren't really distinguished by terms:

- Cache, as in processor cache: total access mediation, i.e. all operations go through the cache. Cache bypass might be possible but rare in practice.

- Cache, as in application cache (e.g. redis/memcached/@lru_cache): thing were you put some result to recall later conditionally. Exactly the opposite of total access mediation: application needs to explicitly use cache.

The first one I'd call Zwischenspeicher. The second I'd call Ergebnisabrufspeicher.

In Spanish we have also technical terms for those. I guess it's the same with most other languages. However it's true that there are some terms without a proper translation and it's obviously more international to use the English ones.

Perhaps you don't speak French? Both of these are very easy and not contrived.

"Sous-système du noyau Linux" "Cache associative à 8 directions"

"Subsistema de rede do kernel do Linux"

"Cache associativa (8-way)" or "Cache associativa por 8 vias"

See, not so difficult. :^) It's just that, for standardization's sake, it's best to just communicate in English.

Easy: "Sous-système réseau du noyau Linux" and "cache associatif octodirectionnel".

There are many other words much harder to translate than these ones, like "backslash", "hash map", "pipeline", "placeholder", ...

I thought that too. until I had to talk in english full time and realized how much was transliterated informally in conversations and how those terms were corrupted into the national language. what you call lingual contortion only seem odd (to me and you since you also mentioned a romance language) because romance languages were the trend setters at some point and now have very refined processes to change the language and be more permissive of foreign words creeping in, since they understand the power of allowing or not this to happen. but over time, they will officialize new words in the romance language just fine. english is no better or worse at this.

case in point, every single "fancy" word in english cames from the roman dominion over the channel. it was fancy to talk like the emperor. and that is only one of the subtle aspects that rome knew how to play on the colonies cultural subjugation.

"roman dominion over the channel"

Do you mean how the Normans conquered and ruled England after the invasion of 1066? Lots of foreign words come into a language when your rulers speak another language. Often the conquered populations are completely converted to the ruling people language.

yep. thats what I mean.

actually even the english way is quite cumbersome

languages like sanskrit and chinese which have built in word generators and preserved root meanings are much better and able to stand independently

not surprisingly indians and chinese have been better able to resist westernization

imo chinese is a very tech friendly language and has a good shot at becoming the lingua franca of tech in the near future

currently the chinese focus on science and innovation is fake and forced but could turn real in the next generation

The handicap for Chinese and Asian languages is charactersets and input. A finite phonetic alphabet is a tremendous technical advantage when keyboarding, and alternatives really haven't proved superior.

(I'm entering this via soft-keyboard and stylus, painfully, with many typos. The fact that the interface could be trivially modified, but hasn't and isn't, and yet remains so deficient, doesn't speak well to prospects here.)

hey thats one of the things i've worked on

see my first submission a few days ago on zh android ime with devanagari

with zhuyin and alternatives chinese input is not a problem and this is going to even be less of a problem with voice input in future

in fact the input problem only tightened the link chinese have to tech via their phones

but pinyin needs to go away or chinese will lose their culture in the long term latinization is going to lead to christianization

> Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem

"module réseau du noyau Linux ?" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/...

> 8-Way associative cache

"Cache 8-associatif" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/...

Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean much it doesn't exist. If only, because we have to be able to teach it efficiently to people with no mastery of the english language.

Subsistema de red de trabajo del núcleo de linux

Caché asociativa de ocho vías.

Maybe the greatest success and failing of English is that it has never undergone the rigour of standardisation of many other languages. While most other world languages have all at times had a central authority dictating what is right or wrong, English has a history of pluralism (particularly from American vs. British English, but also from other sides). This makes for difficulties (regional variation, different pronunciations, etc.) but I think easier to approach as an outsider, and also flexible to changing use over time.

It wouldn't, couldn't go through standardization like that.

The article misses emphasizing or properly mention English's success started not in conquering but overcoming conquerors.

It's hard to think of English as having a single source, as what remains of that gets very small as you go back in time. The language in England and thereabouts overcame several invasions. Roman, Viking, a couple of invasions you'd call French now, among others... they all left their mark, or more accurately the native population absorbed a sizable portion of the invaders' language and established and re-established the dominance of the English language in the area.

If you take a beginners' course in French you'll probably get the line that English is 60% French, badly pronounced and it's true! (more or less)

It would sure be hard to standardize something that has a habit of repeatedly bolting on large chunks of other languages, nevermind it's modern regional inconsistencies.

On the topic of English and speaking it better each day: the funny „upside down quotes” are an instant giveaway that you are German. It’s not really a correct typographic treatment of quotes in English (or almost any language except German, afaik).

It's mostly a sign of typing English on a German keyboard that automatically produces „fancy quotes‟. They work similarly on Chinese or Japanese keyboards, but it's harder to accidentally use them to write English text with wrong 「fancy quotes」, because switching the layout is mandatory for those. Personally I do switch between German and English keyboards to type in those languages, but I guess most people don't bother.

Curious. How do you quantify expressiveness? English does not seem that expressive to me. English, German and Esperanto are way too related also to be making a comparison (which was kind of the criticism against Esperanto).

Could you give a couple of examples?

Also, I have to disagree with the statement that it is the language of great literature. I counter argue those would be French, German, Greek, Latin, Literary Chinese etc, depending on the period. I am not saying there is no great work in the English language, however your statement implies something different (the majority of great work in a period or style utilized that language).

> Could you give a couple of examples?

Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Whitman

I believe that English has many problems, from crazy grammar rules to horrendously inconsistent spelling. But to say it is not expressive is absurd, and suggests that you haven’t read any great English literature. This is not to say that the cultures you mentioned and many other have not produce their own great literature, of course.

I meant examples of expressiveness over German. Edit: You were comparing English with other languages and implied it is more or as expressive as the majority of languages (or at least the ones you are familiar with). Thus my question.

I cannot think of a a good example right now, but as a native German speaker, I do sometimes find myself wondering how to express a certain thought in German.

English grammar feels more flexible to me than German, and English seems to be more suited for colorful idioms.

Fellow German here. From a grammatical standpoint German is a really flexible language while English isn‘t. I only recently found out about it during my Latin studies (selftaught) and comparing Latin to German and English. The problem with expressing a thought in German might be a side effect of the ubiquity of English in so many fields: we are just used to think in English terms that it becomes a second nature.

English has so many idioms that are nearly impossible to translate elegantly. "go to town on somebody", for example; a good part of learning English is not just learning grammar and vocabulary (although those are necessary), but learning all these idioms (which is kind of an open-ended process).

It really doesn't matter which language it is, as long as it's not super hard to learn. The hard reality is, if you have N languages and speakers, to communicate without coordination either they have to each learn N-1 other languages or just 1 with O(1) coordination. The rest just happens naturally via network effects.

Agreed. As a french, I wish english were a mandatory official second language everywhere : forms, menus, schools, movies and signals.

I get the emotional attachment to ones own language but making it easy for the entire humanity to communicate is a much more important goal. It trumps culture and history. It trumps nationalism.

And why english ? Well i don't care. It could be anything really.

But the only thing that is used by most people than english is chinese, and it's only use way more locally or contextually as english, while being more complex.

English has very simple tenses, few symbols, not required accents and the industry and culture already use it massively all around the world.

It's full of useless complexity and artifacts like all language, but it's there.

Let's all add it to our toolbelt and be done with it.

> expressive

It always feels constraining for me when I want to convey an emotion. For example, in English one would say "soft kitty" but in Russian you have at least 10 options: мягкая (simple "soft"), мягонькая (diminutive "soft") + кошечка, киса, кисонька, кисуля, кисулечка. Depending on the choice, you can sound tender or childish or like an old lady.

It's definitely not an exhaustive list of how you can call a cat, there are also funny augmentative options for male cats: кошак, котище, котяра, котофей. Spanish also feels amazing because of its extensive use of diminutives and augmentatives. But yes, English is the best language for technical or business purposes because it's so concise.

>it is the language of great literature

One language, of somewhat good literature.

Do you not think there is any English literature at all better than "somewhat good"?

What language do you think does?

I love the Finnish language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (Swede) if he had only learned Korean because Korea is the neighbour and if I had only learned German or France because those are our big neighbours. No, Finnish brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks Finnish, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if Finnish has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized country in the North. Let‘s appreciate Finnish, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe Finnish can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.

English is in no way intrinsically special, but for some reason many people speak it nowadays. Not so for Finnish, even though it could very well be better suited to the purpose (I don't speak a word of Finnish myself). Most of the text you copied applies as well to Finnish as to English, but I doubt that "Finnish [...] makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet." English also doesn't, but it comes a lot closer.

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