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BiteCode_dev

> It would be nice for English to no longer be practically required for people to become computer literate.

French here. We are terrible at english in my country.

Still, the fact most information in computing is shared in english is a god send. Sure, you have to learn it, but then:

- no need to search for it in so many languages

- no need to produce translations of tutorials/docs/comments in so many languages

- the community to share and communicated with is huge and diverse

- english is way more efficient than french, spanish, german or chinese to talk about technical stuff

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Genuinely curious about your last point (don't know much about the topic). Is english intrinsically better at this, or is it because of the presence of jargon? Is it a studied phenomena, or is it something most people feel?

I can see that being true. Many of the web sites I build are multi-lingual, and when designing for many languages, you have to take into consideration that certain languages take many more characters or words to express an idea than in English.

Off the top of my head, I believe we factor in 15% more text space for Spanish. German is something like 60% more.

When localizing software also it's a general rule of thumb that your on-screen UI spaces need to be something like 40% bigger than the English text that goes in them since the German equivalent is always going to be way bigger. It's common for it to turn out half-way through localization that some of your text doesn't fit anymore.

(FWIW, this also happens when swapping from ideographic languages to English - western localizations of Japanese video games often end up with very small text as a result.)

English has an incredibly simple grammar, comparatively speaking. There are only three verb conjugations (if you don't count auxiliary verbs) and one gender. Even naming variables is easier!

In my opinion, jargon helps, but English is just easier to learn and shorter to communicate.

My first language is Portuguese, and English was not so hard for me to learn. I studied a bit of French and it was ok, but not as easy as English. And this considering it should be a bit easier since Portuguese is my main language.

Now I'm studying German and... it's way harder than English and French. At least, way more verbose and which more complex grammar rules and conjugations.

English is usually shorter than other latin-based languages. It's longer than ideogram based ones but you don't have to learn 100000 symbols to express yourself in it.

It also has a very simple grammar compared to most languages. Take this sentence:

"I would like not to go to school today"

The french equivalent would be:

"Je voudrais ne pas aller à l'école aujourd'hui."

"would like" is a simple combination of two words, but in french you need to know the precise conjugation of it.

"not" is actually expressed as 2 words with "ne pas", which can be positioned in several ways.

Infinitive, like with "to go", is simple in english: just add "to". In french, each verb is different, like "aller".

Then you got "the" in any circumstances in english, but the "l'", could also be "le, la, or les" depending of the word after it. A;so remember that each word is either feminine or masculine in french, even a stone or the sun.

Then "à" and "école" got an accent. French has many of them, you need to know the right one, where to place it, how to pronunciation it and type it on the keyboard.

Finally, "today" vs "aujourd'hui". I know which one is easier to type in a bug report.

Not to say English doesn't have weird traps, but it's very, very relaxing compared to the rest. And much more efficient.

Also describing a view of the country side with it feels a bit limiting. But I'm not Shakespear :)

I painfully agree with you, as a French. So much so that I comment my code in English for brevity.

Regarding "aujourd'hui", this monstrosity litterally means : "to the day of today"..

Our dear language needs a reform, lest it will survive only as a roman dialect.

What French really needs is a comprehensive spelling/grammar reform. In Haitian Creole, "ne pas aller à l'école aujourd'hui" is written simply "pa ale lekòl jodi"! And one can just write "mwen" instead of having to differentiate "je" and "moi". (There's also a marker word "ta" that's entirely isomorphic to the English "would" in that it introduces a conditional modality.) Not coincidentally, English is basically a creole language as well. That's why it's so incredibly simple.

And then you have Korean.

오늘 학교에 가기 싫다 (I don’t want to go to school today)

Hangeul is a syllabary so anyone can read it, just like Latin. It was specifically designed in response to peasants not being able to read Chinese hanzi.

Things like the subject and topic can be and is omitted when it’s superfluous. (The above sentence omits the subject and subject particle. There is no topic here). English almost always needs to specify the subject, asides from very casual speech/slang. Korean, like english, doesn’t need to specify gender of nouns, and it also doesn’t need “a” or “the” markers. The location particle above could be dropped too.

However Korean does have complex honorifics and formality conjugations, which typically get longer the more formal/polite it is. Above we have the plain or dictionary form, which is usually the shortest form as well.

How would you express "would like"?

"I don’t want to go" and "I would like not to go" express different things.

One is expressing opposition right now, the other one is expressing desire or even a request, potentially while the action is already engaged. The first one is definitive, the second one is wishful thinking or negotiation.

I don’t see any practical difference other than using more polite, indirect language. The effect of “would like not to” is the same in the end with opposition.

I don’t think there’s a 1:1 translation of “would like not to”. I’d probably say something like “it’d be good if I did / didn’t do X”. Which is less direct than the equivalent “I do / don’t want to do X”.

Actually 가기(가) is the topic here unless I’m mistaken. I wrote this too fast last night.

In colloquial Japanese that would be three words: Kyou gakkou ikitakunai. The first word is "today" (unconjugated), second is "school" (unconjugated), and the third is the negative "wish" (volitional?) form of "to go" (iku > ikitai > ikitakunai). Subject (the speaker) is implied and neither the time nor the the topic/object needs to be explicitly tagged.

English has like 17 tenses, many languages only have 3 without any loss in expressivity. When learning English you need to learn each word twice (once to write, once to speak) - that's not the case with many phonetic languages.

English isn't inherently better as a world's language than anything else, it's just there, so it benefits from the network effect (it's more beneficial to learn language that has the most users, so it gets even more users).

> english is way more efficient than french, spanish, german or chinese to talk about technical stuff

That's your opinion or do you have supporting research to link to?

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