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Comment by capableweb | Hacker News Reader

Question: What are your mother tongue(s)?

Similarly to people thinking less of the country they were born/raised, I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones, maybe that fits in here as well. Some sort of bias it seems.

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My mother tongue is English. I studied Japanese to degree level so I feel at least moderately qualified to comment on it.

English is grammatically fairly simple, having dispensed with much of the (redundant) complexity found in its European brethren (gender, case, almost all inflection). I would argue that that makes it fairly easy for beginners to develop a basic command of it. Its main problems are its unpredictable spelling (does any other language come close? French is a bit of a mess, but nowhere near as bad as English) and its love of a phrasal verb (what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?).

My native language is french and learned english at a young age. Saying that french spelling is nowhere near as bad as English is insane to me.

French is hard to encode but easy to decode. ai, aix, é, aient are all (more or less?) the same, so reading is fine, but working out which to write can be tough.

French has bigger problems though. That keyboard for a start.

'ai' in Northern French is pronounced like è (and so tends to be considered the standard pronunciation). Southerners tend to pronounce everything like é.

Aix is also the name of several towns, in which case the 'x' is not silent.

what do get up/on/down/over have to do with each other?

Thank you! It is heartening to hear this from a native speaker. Phrasal verbs are… a pain. “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”? Oh, the list is long.

> “Burning up” pretty much is “burning down”?

Except that if you are burning up, you have a fever, but if you are burning down, you might be planning on illegally collecting some insurance money :)

Houses that are burning up are also burning down, but people who are burning up are not also burning down.

A structure burns down (to the ground). Anything else (including people) burns up.

"The house burnt up", is not proper, but people say it and everyone knows what you mean.

Then there's the saying of what you're referencing, "burning up" as in you feel like you are "on fire", when you are sick.

Phrasal verbs are probably the hardest part of being fluent in English.

People will understand what you mean, but it won't sound right.

I learned both English and Japanese as third/fourth languages and English grammar does _not_ make sense compared to Asian languages that has comparatively very logical forms, usually with minimal modifiers that doesn't change the entire sentence structure.

I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.

> I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.

This is the correct approach.

That's how native-speaker kids learn grammar. First learn to speak the language. Then many years later, learn how to say _why_ what you're doing is the right way.

> I frankly gave up with English grammar and just did whatever feels right.

I think that's what most people do, including native speakers.

Besides, there ain't no One True Correct™ English grammar in the first place. This is both what makes it a fun language but also vexing.

The best feature of English is that you can be pretty trash at it and make yourself understood. I've had great friends with terrible English.

I've never heard the term "phrasal verb" but one similar case that doesn't use verbs pops up in my head all the time, "down {for,on,with}":

  - "I'm down for  that", I am prepared and willing to do that
  - "I'm down on   that", I don't like that practice
  - "I'm down with that", I do like that practice

That's American. English would be:

I'm up for that.

I'm not ok with that.

I'm ok with that.

As an American, the "down" slang sound weird.

The most I've heard in the wild is a short "I'm down.", you wouldn't say "I'm up." (unless you're saying you woke up, or you're high, or your gambling is going well)

Other than that, your versions are more common in the US as well, from my experience.

edit: Thinking more on it... "I'm up for that" would be used if you were slightly hesitant. "I'm down for that" implies a lot more confidence.

I dunno, American here and to me being up for something and being down for something are pretty equivalent. I don't hear any hesitancy in "I'm up for whatever".

The English verb system can be devilishly difficult, my favorite example being this "conjugation" of watch:

She must have had been being watched.

= It must be the case that someone watched her for some duration of time prior to the current moment in the story (which is either a hypothetical story or narrative of the past).

That's a very fun example. However I'm a native English speaker, and I can't imagine actually writing a sentence like that. It's technically grammatically correct, but no one speaks like this. You would say "She must have been watched", alternatively "She had been watched".

Mm, I think it could come up quite naturally as "she must have been being watched" in something like:

  Two detectives are watching security film.

    DETECTIVE 1
  And then from 9:07 to 9:14 she started acting very cautiously, but –

  Detective 1 rewinds the tape by a few seconds and gestures at the screen.

    DETECTIVE 1
  – from this angle you can tell that she's making an effort to not seem suspicious. I wonder why?

    DETECTIVE 2
  She must've been being watched.

I do agree that form "must have had been being —ed" (with "had" in there as well) is an especially rare form, but in context, native English speakers understand what it means!

I wonder how many other constructions there are that native speakers don't really produce but that they still consider grammatical or as not even being unusual.

I have read the “must have had been being” over and over again and as a native English speaker, I still can’t understand what it means. I hesitate to call it ungrammatical, but instead throw down a challenge: can you actually use it?

Sure! Using "had been" rather than "(has) been" indicates that something may no longer be the case, e.g. "she's been well (and still is)" versus "she had been well (but is not necessarily still well)". So in my example

  She must've been being watched.

suggests that, at that point in the security footage, she might still be being watched. If the detective had said

  She must have had been being watched.

it would additionally imply that, at that point in the security footage, she was no longer being watched (but had been). So let me rework the story a bit:

  Two detectives are watching security film.

    DETECTIVE 1
  She's acting ordinarily, but I see fatigue written on her face. I wonder why.

  Detective 1 leans back in their chair and muses.

    DETECTIVE 2
  She must've had been being watched. The state security service monitors high-profile civilians occasionally, and a few days before this she was acting very cautiously, almost as if she was suspicious of something.

(Also, I think I falsely portrayed the universality of such a construction. Although I think some native English speakers would accept it as grammatical, many might not!)

No, this is just wrong. You are conflating two tenses. Must can be present (be) or perfect (have).

In the example above, you would say: “She must have been being watched.”

To my ears, there's a difference!

  I am watched.            (present passive)
  I was watched.           (past passive)
  I have been watched.     (present perfect passive)
  I had been watched.      (past perfect passive)

  I am being watched.      (present progressive passive)
  I was being watched.     (past progressive passive)
  I've been being watched. (present perfect progressive passive)
  I'd been being watched.  (past perfect progressive passive)

  I must be watched.
  I must have been watched.
  I must have been watched.
  I must have had been watched.

  I must be being watched.
  I must've been being watched.
  I must've been being watched.
  I must've had been being watched.

I think is roughly it? Although now I'm beginning to doubt myself, and maybe it is just:

  I must be watched.
  I must have been watched.
  I must have been watched.
  I must have been watched.

  I must be being watched.
  I must've been being watched.
  I must've been being watched.
  I must've been being watched.

or really, maybe it's better to say those forms don't exist:

  I must be watched.
  I must have been watched.
  —
  —

  I must be being watched.
  I must've been being watched.
  —
  —

What's neat is that I can assign meaning to "must've 'd been", but it really teeters on the edge, sometimes sounding strange but acceptable and sometimes sounding simply wrong.

I can't find many examples of it, but there are a few I've found online:

"To qualify for a special enrollment due to a permanent move, you must have had been enrolled in other minimum essential coverage, such as under a job-based health plan, another Marketplace plan, or Medicaid."

"Sales must have had been in the same year as the tax return."

So perhaps it's best to say it's nonstandard but attested.

Oh my. You have got yourself in quite a pickle. “Must have had been” is simply wrong; in your examples, it should always be “must have been”.

> "Must have had been" is simply wrong; in your examples, it should always be "must have been".

As a matter of prescription, maybe, but as a matter of description? I think it's interesting. It is meaningful and it's something that English speakers produce. Here are other examples in the wild:

"To complete the request, the owner of the permit must have had been present at the time the citation was written, present a valid permit to the Tax Collector in person, have a copy of their citation, and pay a $7.50 processing fee to the Tax Collector if approved."

"Lankeshwar must have had been easy to defeat compared to new-age Ravanas."

It can even have a distinct meaning (rather than just being a variation), which is how I would interpret it. Which I think is cool.

It's perfectly fine to say "don't use this construction if you want to be taken seriously by so-and-so", but if its usage happens to be dialectal, for example, I don't think you can say those speakers are using their dialect of English incorrectly.

My mother tongue is Chinese and I find that English is the easiest second language to learn. English has more or less the same grammatical structure as Chinese, so I didn't have to learn structures like object -> subject -> verb as in Spanish or reflexive verbs or structures like "Me pleases programming" (Me gusta programar) that means "I like programming", or the sentence structure of topic -> object -> verb with all kinds of particles in Japanese. Yes, English has a few conjugations, but boy that is so much simpler than those in Spanish. And English pronunciation is easy for a Chinese, but boy other European languages are hard, as Chinese does not have alveolar R or double R as in Spanish, and don't even get me started on the pronunciations in French and German.

The Spanish sentence is exactly like the English sentence "Programming is pleasing to me", it's the same grammar and it exists

The structure is different, right? "Me gusta algo" does mean something is pleasing to me, but it's not the way how one would think in Chinese or English.

But the grammar is the same as "something pleases me", no difference at all

But there's other verbs, just like in English that you can use like this:

Disfruto de pasar tiempo con mi familia.

I enjoy spending time with my family

English writing can have unpredictable spelling mostly due to imported foreign words (looking at you French!) or inclusion of Old English.

imo that's better than having a whole other system like Katakana to import foreign words.

I feel like you just said that English has complicated spelling both because of its borrowed words and its native words. I think this could be shortened to "English has complicated spelling because of the spelling of its words." Or even "English has complicated spelling."

GP said "unpredictable" spelling, not complex. And I said "Old English".

I was saying it's unpredictable if you include Old English spelling and words (which you don't in Simplified English).

The remaining unpredictable words are imported foreign words, usually French.

There is no one particular subset of English you can exclude to simplify its spelling. I don’t really know what you classify as Old English, but whatever Simplified English is, it is highly unlikely it excludes Old English as traditionally defined, as the majority of the most commonly used words - italicised here - have such heritage. The spelling of such words is probably not the most troubling part of English orthography anyway.

English phonological rules are generally pretty complex for non-natives.

> I tend to find that people always think their first language(s) are the less logical ones

As a counter example, I think my first language (Hebrew) is more logical than English. It makes a lot more sense to me to put words that modify or add detail to other words after the word they are modifying instead of before (most notably, it seems strange to put adjectives before the noun they apply to, since logically you should first introduce a subject before adding more details to it). It also feels a lot more logical how in Hebrew you construct words from stems and templates rather than every word being essentially arbitrary.

Though I'll also readily admit that Hebrew has many problems of its own...

As a speaker of English, and Spanish, which has the adjectives after, I feel like putting the adjectives first is more expressive.

"A hot, juicy chicken leg" would sound less exciting if it was said "A chicken leg, hot, juicy" because the listener would first imagine the wrong chicken leg.

Spanish native speaker here. I must say learning languages is not my strong point, but I am convinced every other language is composed of arcane pronunciation rules consequence of mapping an unnecessary large set of almost indistinguishably phonemes.

I remember a Spanish colleague expressing his exasperation at “cucumber”. I had not noticed its inconsistency until that point.

(The Japanese equivalent that springs to mind is the word for Sunday, 日曜日, pronounced nichiyōbi. It includes the same Chinese character pronounced two completely different ways within the same word.)

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