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Comment by herculity275 | Hacker News Reader

> He said that if he could have chosen a language, instead of English, to be the world’s shared second language, then it would be Swahili or colloquial Indonesian. He said both of these languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language, so all the weird edge-cases have worn away, and they are as smooth and beautiful as a river stone. No weird grammar. No weird tones. No exceptions.

I have no knowledge of Swahili and perhaps it really is all that but this statement makes no sense - English, French, Russian, Arabic and plenty of other languages have been learned by millions of people as their second language yet they still have plenty of weird grammar, exceptions, and edge-cases.

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Swahili and Indonesian are primarily second languages, used as lingua francas amongst large and diverse populations, so linguistic changes are mainly driven by non-native speakers, as opposed to the languages you listed

Swahili and Indonesian were primarily second languages, in the 20th century. But now they are very much first languages as people are learning them from childhood simultaneously with their ethnic language.

perhaps we should qualify the claim by pointing out that 20th-century swahili and indonesian are simpler than creoles, but have now been replaced by more complex creoles

This is a great observation.

A clarification comment here to help explain what is going on here- re: the 'non-native' part of the comment above.

Swahili specifically is a second language to a population speaking a very very diverse set of first / primary languages.

Swahili is spoken in East Africa - Burundi, Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Somalia ( southern tip) Rwanda, Tanzania.

Kenya and Tanzania have the largest part of speakers and in Tanzania, there are over 20 'first' languages and in Kenya , there are at least 20 'first' languages as well.

Also important to note that Swahili is formally taught in primary / grade school, alongside either English or sometimes French, to a population that already speaks a different first language used by a much smaller population.

The point here is that there are many many first languages that are sources for "borrowing" into Swahili but that borrowing has to be adopted across all Swahili users who will not share that first language.

This means that only the 'easiest' / 'lowest friction changes' make it through over time into Swahili as all words also have to be accepted by speakers having other "first' aside from the ones that each word or language component was 'borrowed' from.

Most people who speak Swahili speak it as a second language. This process - when the majority of speakers of a language are non-native - tends to simplify a language. For example, Swahili has a much simpler set of sounds than most other Bantu languages, many of which are tonal (Swahili is not tonal), and many of which have three or four way contrasts in their stop consonants (Swahili has two), and some of which have click consonants (Swahili has few "unusual" sounds).

This. Spanish it's almost dumb simple, widely spoken; and Iberian Spanish has few exceptions (the c/z/s spelling split avoid spawning a nazi grammar every two paragraphs as it happens in South American Spanish), and yet, he chose... Indonesian.

At Iberia, Spanish was almost the lingua franca between the Occitan branch speakers, the Galician-Portuguese speakers and the Leonese/Asturian ones in the Middle Ages and beyond. It had five vowels compared to the seven ones from the Catalan/Valencian or the 7-8 (if not more) of the Galician-Portuguese. And it got loanwords from all the Iberian romances overtime (and a bit later French and Italian).

Spanish has inflectional grammar, which is the one language feature most constructed languages do away with first (with weird exceptions like Volapük that are mostly known for their obscurity) because it's so hard to learn for newcomers.

What does it means?

EDIT: how you mean how papá (daddy) is different from papa (the pope)? Yes as a french that is my main difficulty with spanish.

no, 'inflectional language' means that different independent axes of meaning are encoded in a single word. french verbs are inflected for time (present, imperfect, simple past, simple future), mood (indicative, subjunctive, conditional, imperative), number (single, plural), and person (first, second, and third). so 'parler' can be realized as 'parle', 'parles', 'parlons', 'parlez', 'parlent', 'parlais', 'parlait', 'parliez', and so on

https://www.wordreference.com/conj/frverbs.aspx?v=parler lists all of the forms unless there are other inflected forms that are only preserved in literary french

the crucial thing that distinguishes inflections from simple agglutination (where instead of the isolating 'will talk' that english uses, you write the future as 'willtalk') is that they interact. so, for example, second-person plural indicative present 'parler' is 'parlons'. second-person singular indicative present 'parler' is 'parles', pronounced [paRl]. second-person singular indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlais'. so you might guess that second-person plural indicative imperfect 'parler' is 'parlonais' or 'parlaisons', depending on which order the suffixes go in, but it's not, it's 'parlions'

that's a lot to memorize for a new language learner. there are 36 distinct forms of 'parler' in that page, and the reason 'parler' is used is that it's a regular verb; some verbs have even more

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusional_language describes the concept in english and https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langue_flexionnelle in french

ok but as a native french speaker I find spanish much more intuitive than french. We french people have in common with german people in that we struggle with some sounds like the 'r' but that is the only real struggle when learning spanish. The rest is fairly easy. Everything is pronounced the way it is written.

However spanish people suffer much more than us when learning french because we don't pronounce words the way we write them in a reliable way and we have so many sounds that are so close to them spanish speaking people don't see the difference.

it's still a lot to memorize to get started, and as pointed out elsewhere in the thread, if your background is an isolating language like chinese, the entire concept of inflection is going to be an unnecessary obstacle

also, you're only talking about the most surface aspects of learning a language

in general pretty much every natural spoken language is equally difficult to learn, because if it's easier than what an average person can learn in their first five years of life, its speakers will invent new complexities that allow them to communicate more eloquently and efficiently. sometimes those complexities are very obvious like a larger inventory of phonemes (french has a lot of vowels, spanish doesn't), sometimes they're slightly more subtle (larger vocabularies, less regular inflection, phrasal verbs, higher segmental rate), and sometimes they're very subtle indeed (a larger inventory of idiomatic expressions, a greater cultural expectation that you will recognize literary allusions)

but about the same amount of complexity is are always there. conlangs and pidgins can avoid them (until they become native languages, as swahili and indonesian are, and i know someone who was raised speaking esperanto) and written languages aren't constrained by them because they don't rely on native language acquisition mechanisms

By how you accentuate the word while speaking and by context. papá has the accent in the last syllable, while papa in the first.

Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations.

But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech?

Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth and starting try to talk this way you’ll mess up for about the first 5 years.

I can do it. But of course a language which I know seems easy to me!

But point taken that most languages have conjugations + all that other stuff, too.

Yes but conjugations is not something you have to worry about, especially at the beginning.

In a language with articles, you can do mistakes in conjugation, yet if you use the article people will understand what/who is the subject and still understand.

When you learn a language, focus on present tense. By using words like before/after/yesterday/tomorrow you can keep using present tense and be understood by a native speaker and you are likely to learn quickly the past and present tense by listening to their answers. People usually understand that you are learning and don't mind you using present tense.

This. Also, you don't need to use compound conjugations at first. This might be wrong for the Spanish Iberian dialects the same way it's a bit wrong too in English, but if you don't say "I've just eat" instead of "I ate" everyone will understand you fine.

Spanish is not dumb simple. A friend transferred a PhD there and could never get to the level of comfortable conversations with her lab mates and had a hell of a time. Same with French or any European language not English to be frank (have German stories as well). So it’s perhaps not a great analogy, and folks who learned a language as kids or are polyglots should recuse themselves from commenting on how easy those languages are to others.

> Spanish it's almost dumb simple

Sure, the FSI ranks Spanish as a category 1 language along with other Romance languages, Norwegian, Swedish, etc which means it's simpler for English-speakers to learn than most languages, but I'm not sure I'd describe learning any natural human language as "dumb simple" -- at least for me, Spanish was the hardest thing I ever attempted to learn by a wide margin.

After a couple thousand hours spread over twenty years I could read simple texts and communicate simple concepts as long as I maintained an exhausting level of concentration and stopped worrying about conjugating properly. I eventually gave up after realizing that improving would require a significantly larger time commitment than I could afford.

I think it's true to a point in english as well.

For instance people on reddit (or here?) aren't actually writing as they'd write texts in Alabama or lecture notes in Manchester. English used online tends IMHO to have less classical idioms and less respect (or more avoidance) of the weird rules.

And I assume at some point countries with english as first language sill backport massively crushingly popular memes as idioms and many irregularities will become pedantic instead of the norm. After all it's not that long that English became the linga france, we've yet to see more pronounced changes IMO.

Russian has a huge population of native Russian speakers who understand all lexical, grammatic and phonetic quirks of their language. Then they call the shots.

It's curious that the quote mentions both Swahili and colloquial Indonesian, but your reply only questions Swahili's fitness (without mentioning Indonesian at all).

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