Hacker News Reader

Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

My two biggest disappointments about English:

- I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Turns out that's bollocks. It's a logographic language. I can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano (unless of course we get Mandarin instead).

- I started reading a lot of English because found tons and tons of material on the English web. And then on closer look this English web turned out to be utterly dominated by the US. Want housekeeping advice? Well we have these funny cardboard houses, just drill a lot of holes and then replace entire walls because it's cheap. Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths. Now when people on HN complain that other people assume everything is in California by default, I laugh heartily, tingling all over with schadenfreude.

View on HN

English is the javascript of languages: full of warts and enforcing a status quo that sucks but everyone has to learn it because this is the world we live in.

Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots.

Romance languages would be like scripting languages (Python, Ruby, lua, etc.): once you know one the others get really easy.

Greek would be like Lisp: had a lot of influence on current languages, dwindled a bit, but is still around.

> Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular

It might be, mostly, regular. But it is hardly beautifully pure, it is almost as mongrel as any other European language.

And of course now that there are quite a few speakers it is importing words even though native Esperanto style words could easily be created.

To continue your analogies, German would probably be Rust (german grammar is strict and pretty inflexible but leads to correct linguistic output), and Mandarin would be C++ ( because you have to learn so much syntax before you can do anything). (no offense to anyone)

I would think Mandarin would be closer to perl, no? The grammar and syntax are quite reasonable (as a native English speaker), but the character set is difficult to memorize and write. Doubly so if you go somewhere that prefers traditional characters over the simplified characters.

Word order isn't too flexible or wild, and aside from measure words, there aren't really any modifiers or compounds like romance language gendered words or German's obscenely long nouns.

If you want to make an analogy to a language that uses a strange character set, I’d point you at APL.

Have a look at Interlingua too. It's essentially a modernized, simplified Latin. You can readily understand it in spoken and written forms if you're used to the major western languages (English, French, Spanish, Portugese and Italian), and use it fluently in a few weeks.

I wish it was the official EU working language.

continuing the analogy with other languages I've tried to learn:

German is like Rust: everything has to conjugate properly. Difficult to compile a sentence, but once compiled it has a very specific meaning.

Khmer is like Go: simplicity as a virtue. No tenses, no genders, no conjugation. Just slap the words together. But expressing complex concepts takes a lot of words.

Esperanto could be OCaml: reasonably straightened and cleaned but still on the "practical" side.

For a Haskell equivalent, I'd take Lojban.

"Esperanto would be like Haskell: beautifully pure and regular but no one uses it except for a passionate community of die-hard zealots."

You say "would be" like that's not already the case! (for both examples)

Sanskrit could also be like Haskell.

Structured. Very precise rules. Yet nobody speaks it in practice.

Also while on the topic, may I point out that there are some things you could say in some languages that are nearly impossible (AFAIK) to say in English.

Let me give an example.

(Okay how do I — for the benefit of all of you — express something in English that I'm trying to prove is impossible to express in English?).

Consider the statement: Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States.

How do I express a question in English that asks this "order-number" of Biden such that the answer is "46"?

Something like "Joe Biden is how many-th President of the United States?"?

But I can't ask that because there's no such word(s) "how many-th" in English!

Yet it's trivial to express this in plenty of languages. I belive German is one language where this can be easily expressed. It's trivial in the Indian languages that I know.

In English I would have to ask something like "Biden is the n-th President of US. What is n?", which is totally lame.

I hope you understood what I'm trying to convey.

If you want to get started about these kinds of things look up "declension" on Wikipedia [1].

I'm not a language expert so I don't really know what I'm talking about (perhaps experts can contribute and correct me), but the tldr is that:

* the declension situation of modern English is primitive

* German has 4 cases of declension

* Latin has 5 cases of declension

* Sanskrit & Hindi has 8 cases of declension

* Ukrainian declension situation also seems to be fairly advanced

In languages with more cases of declension, it's apparently easier to express certain things.

I hope this was useful.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

"How many presidents have their been, up to and including Joe Biden"?

> can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano

In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin.

If people from, say, Germany, France, Italy, China, Egypt, India, Brazil, Spain, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina get together in a room, the odds are English would be the language most of them would be familiar with, even though it's not any of their native language.

Over here in India people in different states natively speak totally different languages, with totally different scripts and everything.

For example:

(State — Language)

Karnataka — Kannada

Kerala — Malayalam

Tamil Nadu — Tamil

Andhra Pradesh — Telugu

Uttar Pradesh — Hindi

West Bengal — Bengali

Maharashtra — Marathi

These are just a few examples. There's atleast 28 states in India and even more languages. In most of northern India I think you can get by with Hindi. However, not everyone knows Hindi.

And when people from, say, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh have a conversation, then unless everyone in that group knows Hindi it'll likely be in English even though it's not the native language of anybody in that group.

> Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths.

Lmao. But these days I notice that most American youtubers (atleast the ones I'm subscribed to) would also mention the metric equivalent of whatever they're talking about. So kudos to them for being mindful of their international viewership :)

> In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin.

I hope you are right; but it's one of the observations of sociolinguistics that a more "prestigious" language eventually wins out, and until recently, prestige was synonymous with power. I hope that with the arrival of the internet we may be past that, and that English has reached sufficient critical mass to stay dominant even after the fall of the US; but if history is any guide, a new superpower may eventually replace it with its language. This happened to Greek, Latin, French and German; it could happen to English too.

I think English has embedded itself in the technology niche so deeply that it's not going away anytime soon.

Everything in tech is English based, from programming languages to kernel boot messages. Even the way we think about text doesn't let itself well to Kanji, never mind RTL languages. While GUI operating systems can handle that, your average recovery command prompt cannot.

Other languages might become dominant in new (or currently under explored) areas of science maybe in quantum computing, bioengineering and such, but computing is going to be tied to English for a long time.

Unless I am mistaken, the language of science in late 19th – early 20th century was German. And then it suddenly wasn't.

It's easy to start talking about something in a different language.

It's possible to translate most of the relevant literature into that language.

Changing the keywords in programming languages, HTTP headers, JSON field names, identifiers in library code, error messages embedded deep in boot ROMs and so on is much more difficult.

You seem to think that one needs to learn the human language to learn those keywords. That's demonstrably false, as evidenced by hordes of programmers who can barely read English sentences, much less write anything coherent. They already cargo-cult the programming language words without understanding the human language, and the actual spoken/written languages bear no influence on that. If Spanish becomes the dominant language of the web, some of them will learn to read and write Spanish while continuing to cargo-cult English programming keywords into those conversations.

If you remove American and UK influence, I expect the resulting English would rapidly mutate into its own thing, even more unlike US/UK English than the international dialect of English mentioned in OP.

Precisely what happened to Latin

I saw somebody say once that a hundred years from now, the default common language will be English as it is spoken in China.

> people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin

Several years ago I went to a resort town in Egypt, and all Egyptians working around the hotels there spoke Russian, because there were lots of Russian tourists. Later I've been told that just a few years prior to that, everyone spoke English instead. Apparently money talks in a more literal sense too.

Try taking a vacation on the island of Ischia in the Bay of Naples. We did.

We found out too late that Ischia was the island that mostly Germans went to after WWII, so most people there spoke at least decent German on top of their native Italian, but very few knew English.

If you’re an English speaker, you want to go to the nearby island of Capri. That’s apparently where most US and UK service personnel went on vacation.

The nearby Amalfi coast was frequented more by speakers of a third language, but by the time we got to touring the Amalfi coast we were just so exhausted from all the trying to communicate on Ischia that we kind of just gave up.

In Russia people call Moscow “default city” because if people are talking on the internet about something that is related to a location they usually mean Moscow. Also people from Moscow in conversations also always assume that everyone lives in Moscow.

IIRC that originated on the largest Russian car-related internet bulletin board. They had a rule about posting classifieds that said "if you're selling your car, you're selling in Moscow by default, if you are not, explicitly state your locality at the very beginning and at the very end of your ad or don't complain about people from Moscow calling you".

What is the name of that board?

Same in Poland. Warsaw is the default city.

This is like how on certain internet forums, people talk about American conditions as if everybody is in America. Start a conversation about labor conditions and people throw around W-2 as if it's some standard thing. Or someone will give you a summary of your rights as if you are in America ("at-will states").

I remember in the early days of the internet, when you came across a postcode field, it had to be a US postcode. 90210 was the only one I knew at the time, so that got put in a lot.

> I've been told in school that English has spelling rules.

Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers (and simple rule-based algorithms) can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words with most of the errors being minor issues about vowel reduction to schwa and stress placement.

For the incredulous, here's 56 table-based search-and-replace rules that get you to about 85%: https://www.zompist.com/spell.html

Various other authors have their own slight variations on this, but typically it comes to 40 - 70 algorithmically-applicable rules. I wish more students got taught some variation on spelling rules like that, because they're much closer to the real rules of English spelling. It's only slightly worse than French, who we ripped off most of the modern orthography from. (Such table-based rules for French get above 95% pretty easily.) The thing is that, in both languages, this is a decidedly one-way process. Guessing how something is spelled from the sound is hopeless.

Getting to 80% may be easy, but getting to 100% is close to an AGI problem.

Words like read (present vs. past tense) or Nice (the adjective vs. the French city) can be pronounced in two different ways. Same with an address / to address, a present / to present etc.

Determining which way to use is impossible without understanding the text. You can get pretty far by using some simple heuristics. For example, when the word read is preceded by "have", you almost always want to use the past tense pronunciation, but if it's preceded by "to", you want the present tense. At some point, though, you will hit the "time flies like an arrow" vs. "fruit flies like a banana" problem, and simple sentence analysis will not be enough.

Another issue with English is that it likes to mash words together, and most pronunciation rules are not ready for that. While "Black Lives Matter" might be easy to pronounce, #blacklivesmatter is not. Getting this wrong sometimes leads to hilarious results[1].

I'm blind and I use a speech synthesizer daily, so I'm familiar with most of these issues. I haven't found a single piece of software that actually solved them well. This is still much better than languages like Hebrew, though, as they require you to manually insert vowels in the appropriate places, a task modern computers are not ready for.

[1] https://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/?utm_source=go...

Yes, I was thinking of speech synthesizers when I wrote my comment :) Closing the gap is devillish and requires increasingly complex grammatical analysis and more and more rules. One of the big barriers for early speech synthesizers was enough RAM/ROM to cram all the text-to-phonetic transformation rules.

I believe that modern approaches mostly use deep learning. And definitely still aren't perfect. I don't use speech synthesizers regularly personally as a tool, but synthesized speech is common enough that I do hear obvious stress errors in synthesized speech every day. Probably because English orthography is most opaque about stress, which basically doesn't exist as far as the writing system is concerned.

> synthesized speech is common enough

I'm curious: where do you encounter much synthesized speech? In my ‘fairly general’ usage (if there is such a thing), I only hear it in YouTube tutorials when the author is totally reluctant to both use their voice and do on-screen text.

Bus stop announcements on transit, those annoying interactive phone menus, people asking Siri math questions they should be able to do in their head, stuff like that.

> Words like read (present vs. past tense) or Nice (the adjective vs. the French city) can be pronounced in two different ways. Same with an address / to address, a present / to present etc.

lead is somehow even worse than read.

Would be 99% for Standard German with its quasi deterministic pronunciation. Going from sound to spelling isn't hopeless, either.

I caught up with my old French teacher, who also taught German in high school.

He told me there was value in doing dictations in French, but in German he just stopped because it was so simple. Kids would barely ever get anything wrong. I have to say I agree, having done a bit of both.

English has enough weird spellings that kids seem to have to practice it a lot. 85-90% isn't actually all that high, you're going to run into a weird one pretty soon if you're writing an essay.

> Excluding a couple hundred irregularities, native speakers can accurately predict the pronunciation of 85 - 90% of common words

That sounds pretty bad actually. You're saying most _native_ speakers can't predict the pronunciation of 10-15% of common words?

I wasn't great in Spanish at school, but the teacher was mostly correct that "you write it like it sounds". Much more so than English at least.

(for context: I'm native Dutch/French, but speak mostly English, and know a bit of Spanish and Portuguese)

Right, 85% for English sounds plausible. For Spanish, I'd venture much closer to 100%. For Chinese, around two thirds of characters contain a phonetic component.

In other words, English is around half way between Spanish and Chinese :-)

Oh, and in Spanish it is bijective: if you know the pronunciation, you pretty much know the spelling also.

The counter example for Spanish is b/v which is pretty much the same sound in most dialects nowadays, and it seems increasingly common to see misspellings online, e.g. baca for cow.

I'm a native English speaker who's studying Russian (my first real attempt at another language). I didn't actually realize how terrible English spelling is until studying a language with a mostly sane writing system (Russian Cyrillic).

My biggest observation is English basics are not that difficult (grammer rules are very easy) but the English writing system needs a total reform. Especially now that it is becoming the default international language (for better or worse).

English spelling could be greatly improved by adding accent marks to indicate long vowels. This would fix some of the most ambiguous cases (words like "read" and "live" and "epitome"), and wouldn't alter the spelling for those who want to stick with ASCII.

The funny thing is, most English text today is written on operating systems controlled by just three entities: Google, Apple and Microsoft. A spelling reform would really need to convince just these companies to adopt it in their soft keyboards and spell checkers.

Standardisation is sort of happening by default. In my work I don't both correcting stuff like "color", "optimized", "software license" unless it actually matters. Sometimes this comes in from international colleagues but half the time it's that my own country-folk haven't bothered to change their spellchecker defaults.

[Ironically my own spellcheck has highlighted 'standardisation' for me... and asked do I mean 'standardization' or 'bastardization'. Good question :) ]

"How is this word pronounced?" ― "Ugh, exactly how it's written? visible confusion"

Compare e.g. to "Worcester" actually being pronounced as "Wooster". Well, why don't you just spell it like this, then? Na-a-ah, it'll be fine.

P.S. Compare "In Russian, letter a is generally pronounced as English a in father" with "In English, letter a can be pronounced as а, эй, or (very wide) э, depending on what else surrounds it: ...". That's the main problem with English spelling: the language itself has way too many vowels to comfortably use only the basic Latin alphabet. Russian actually can, but instead it has much more variety in its consonants: look what Czech and Polish, which have similar problem, have to do to cope with it!

Good points. My biggest quip with Russian is when "е" (yeh) is written when it is actually the "ё" (yo) character. My second is the "г" character being pronounced as "в" when surrounded by "о"s. And I often make mistakes on how "о" is accented. I wish they would just use "а" when о is pronounced that way. Other than that, modern Russian writing is very sane. I honestly make more mistakes in English due to it's inadequate writing system, and thats my native language. Go figure.

Actually chuckled out loud at "stone-weights and horse-lengths" :D

I've decided English spelling is about like Chinese characters. If you see a new word you can make some guesses about how it is pronounced (many characters have pronunciation hints), but you won't really know until you hear someone pronounce it. I was told English is phonetic, and I believed it, but the fact that we had spelling tests through fifth or sixth grade suggests it is most definitely not. I'm guessing Chinese kids have about six years of learning characters before they have the standard set down. (3000 characters gets to 95% usage, in 6 years that's 20 a week for 25 weeks/year.)

> It's a logographic language.

You're tongue-in-cheek, presumably, but others were not:

'It is because of the widespread discrepancies noted above that Kono (1969:85) places English in the category of logographic scripts along with Chinese while Zachrisson (1931:5) goes so far as to contend that "English shares with Chinese the doubtful honor of being made up chiefly of ideographs, pictures of words which must be seen and remembered." Both views are wrong, Zachrisson's ridiculously so, since even sight words like "the" and "one" that are often taught to children without regard to "phonics'' are by no stretch of the imagination pictures totally devoid of phonetic clues, as witness th in "the" and n in "one."'

This is from the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John D. Francis.

Afaik Chinese hieroglyphs also have hints for pronunciation. I seem to have read in this very thread that something around 2/3rds have them. Doesn't change the classification of the writing system, though.

> - I've been told in school that English has spelling rules. Turns out that's bollocks. It's a logographic language. I can't wait for the US empire to fall so we can all switch to Castellano (unless of course we get Mandarin instead).

We will get Mandarin, if anything other than English, and you will beg, on your knees, weeping, to go back to English...

Can't wait for the Roman empire to fall, to have Latin replaced as a dominant cultural exchange language! In mere 1500 years or so.

Gallagher tells it how it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk

Spelling begins at 1:45. Starts by making fun of "Good Food" and ends with making fun of "go" and "do".

I wouldn’t expect English as the dominant language of tech, business, etc to change soon after US hegemony comes to an end. There’s a lot of inertia there.

No different than the fall of Rome, sans the extra 500 - 600 years of hegemony but that's totally offset by rate and reach of communication

>> Also everything is measured in stone-weights and horse-lengths.

And also (American) football fields, libraries of Congress and Olympic size swimming pools.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com