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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

Excellent comment.

English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written because the alphabet of those languages contain all the consonants and vowels. This isn’t the case with English.

Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on.

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>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on.

It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the language is a mish-mash of other languages, readily borrowing words from everywhere, and this is why it seems so sloppy. Some other, highly regular language like German would never have become the international language of trade because those languages aren't sloppy, and so aren't very good for non-native speakers to use daily, and aren't products of a culture that got rich from trade.

As for tiny differences in pronunciations being used to discriminate against people, try learning German and moving to Germany and see how the natives treat you. You'll always be an outsider there, because you're never going to learn the language or pronunciation to that level as an adult, and the culture is known to be pretty insular. English-speaking cultures are generally far more welcoming to immigrants and people who don't speak the language like a native, and it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.

I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.

Yes.

Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil.

It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.

English becoming the "international" language for the west has nothing to do with English as a language, and everything to do with geopolitics and economics.

As for being treated as an outsider, I actually moved and lived to the US for close to a year. I made tons of effort to try and speak good English. On the face of it, the locals were very appreciative - French accent is so romantic, am I right? In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.

I would like to hear from someone who lived in Britain for a year, but I think British people are far more tolerant and willing to listen.

(Failing to realise the L in would, should and could is silent, so would and wood are pronounced identically, is half the French accent.)

> In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.

I found this quite interesting about Japan. I went on vacation there recently, and especially in more rural places many people do not speak English. I don't speak Japanese, just picking up a few words while there. The people there put an immense amount of effort trying to understand what you're saying, e.g. somehow we managed to explain to a taxi driver the location of our hotel using only some elementary words like water, station, train tracks, up/down/left/right, yes/no, please/thank you. They are also very appreciative and often find it quite funny/interesting when you try to speak Japanese, even just simple words. As another example we also had an incident where a random passerby noticed we were trying to find our way, so (I assume) he asked us where we were trying to go, and then led us to the right bus stop. IME any similar situation in the US would more likely lead to people avoiding eye contact or pretending to be busy than trying to help, certainly not proactively without being asked to

I think you reversed cause and effect. English became the world's lingua franca not because of its inherent quality, but because the British Empire once conquered the world, and then the United States took up the baton.

Basically the same reason why Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese. It's not because the languages were "better" in some way, but because it was conquered by speakers of those languages.

And a side effect of being a global language is that you will have to get used to everybody from India to Australia to Kenya speak your language. English speakers are expected to meet widely different dialects even at the most formal business meetings.

Most languages weren’t in the running. However, Spanish, French, Latin, or English could easily have become the international trade language. German was in the running for Scientific publishing etc yet somehow English won in multiple domains.

And it doesn’t just win officially. I’ve seen groups without a common language default to English with people translating back and forth to other languages as needed even when more than one language was known to several members of the group. It’s not absolute, but there does seem to be an inherent advantage to English when translating across multiple languages.

The "inherent advantage" of English is basically the same advantage of Facebook and Instagram: people use them because other people use them. When a Korean meets a Greek, chances are that neither knows each other's language but they both know English. So they converse in English.

I’ve seen groups use English even when other languages are more well known in terms of number of people or levels of fluency.

Broken English works better than broken French / German. Not sure about Spanish, but something is going on beyond English winning because it was already ahead.

English is the lingua franca, because English is the only language adaptable enough that it can refer to itself with a Latin phrase that literally means “French”.

Sorry, I have to chime in here again with more linguistic pedantry: "Lingua Franca" doesn't mean "French". The term referred to a trade language spoken throughout the Mediterranean [0], named for Western European traders (the Byzantines called all Western Europeans Franks).

French later became one of many lingua francas, but that was after the term was already in common usage to refer to any language used as a bridge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

It becomes more correct when you consider that the reason for 'Franks' being applied to all Western Europeans is that it was used as a name for themselves by a big part of that population—the people who went on to become the French.

> English is the only language adaptable enough that it can refer to itself with a Latin phrase that literally means “French”.

lolinder has already pointed out that this is untrue, but I should note that it's also logically impossible - the Latin phrase referring to French would be lingua Latina, the Latin tongue. If you interpret lingua Franca as Latin, you get "the Frankish tongue", which is a variety of Germanic.

Never in the course of history has "the Latin phrase referring to French" been "lingua Latina". If anything "lingua rustica" or "lingua Romana", but that was before vulgar Latin—not Latin—had evolved into a separate language.

> it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.

Which, while I'm here geeking out about linguistics anyway, allows me to break out one of my favorite tidbits about the history of English:

"Broken English" is super easy to understand in large part due to the fact that Modern English was forged as a sort of pidgin at the intersection of Old English, Scandinavian, and then French. The crazy admixture of peoples in England between 800 and 1200 meant that most of the complicated grammatical bits of the language got sanded down to the essentials. English lost grammatical gender, its full case system, noun classes (mostly), most declensions, and on and on.

What replaced all that is actually a relatively simple grammatical system (on the scale of Indo-European systems) that relies a lot more on adding words than on modifying suffixes. And adding words is a game anyone can play—you may not pick the same modifiers as a native would, but you'll get your point across!

Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?

Probably not.

Most of our words are content words, and the near-duplicates are, as you say, the result of borrowing from various other languages. These words don't serve a grammatical role and we could make do without them just fine.

The words that serve to replace grammatical features that exist in other Indo-European languages are a very small subset of our words—words like "will", "may" the prepositions, and similar. Non-natives will reach for other words to substitute for these grammar words when they're unsure which grammar word to use, but I don't think that's why those other words exist.

"The Year 1000" by Lacey and Danziger explains this well in slightly more detail, with some references, for anyone that would like to learn more. The other reference I have on the shelf that I will check for this is David Crystal's "The Stories of English". Any other good references out there?

English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too.

English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners.

It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it.

Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.

>English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language.

Yes it is, and you say so yourself:

>Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography.

>A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners.

Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation.

>but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it.

Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example.

>But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy

Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.

Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.)

Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn.

I don't believe that English borrows more profligately than any other language. Historically it was hugely influenced by Norman French but nowadays I'd suggest more languages borrow from English than English does from other languages. The eternal fight between the Académie française and the people who actually speak French over borrowed words vs "native" ones is a good example of this.

> Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn

If Latin was tbe second language and Spanish/Italian was not there yet, what was their main language then?

Celtic languages like Gaulish or Germanic ones like Frankish.

... and if you think that German is "orderly and precise" then you've obviously never had to learn its plurals.

I have. German is complicated, but it's regular. The plurals are crazy, but they're regular: once you know the rule for them and how they map to singular/plural and case and gender, you can apply it everywhere.

"Orderly and precise" doesn't mean simple. A Rube Goldberg machine can be orderly and precise, while still looking like a ridiculous amount of unnecessary complexity.

> As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch?

That has more to do with the way the Dutch administered their colonies than anything else. Take Indonesia for example, they didn't push Dutch that much and instead let Bahasa Indonesia stay the lingua franca. While some people could speak Dutch and there were some schools, it's not been pushed on the population. See this answer on reddit discussing this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hg6sz3/how_c...

On the other hand, French is also a frustrating language with complicated grammar yet a lot of people in Africa still speak the language. That's due to the different philosophy of French colonialism which was the so-called "mission civilisatrice" (as an example see Jules Ferry's speeches among many others). A part of that was enforcing the use of French within its colonies.

> The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on.

I speak a few languages (French, English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Chinese), some fluently, some less so and, honestly, in all of these languages, I can use tiny differences to other people based on social status, geography etc... It's easy in Mandarin despite me not being able to speak it that well. Japanese has a lot of variation between regions. I can quickly tell the level of education of someone speaking French (my native language) as well as guess where they're likely to be from, etc... I don't think that English is any different from any other languages on those points.

English is a mess but the pronunciation seems to be fault tolerant. Most skilled speakers can understand people that butcher the complicated pronunciation because it is highly diverse even among native speakers that notionally speak the same dialect. I do wonder if the extreme globalization of English has distilled a robust core that is pronunciation resistant. I have noticed that international English makes word choices that limit pronunciation ambiguity.

Agreed. For so many words in common usage, English spelling (vis-à-vis pronunciation) is aggressively misleading, deceptive, pain-inducing.

In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunate that English lazily conquered the internet without any kind of preventive maintenance rooted in critical thinking. It's not nutty (maybe just futile) to argue that English desperately needs fixing. The distributed nature of English should be encouraging for experimentation.

Most native English speakers just roll over and succumb to Stockholm Syndrome.

Every would-be/aspiring spelling reformer has mentally composed a manifesto of righteousness.

If you want to reform spelling of English words, the thing to do is to start. There's no one to make a prescriptive mandate, and it anyway wouldn't work.

Distributed means opt-in only. Which means naming & categorizing & organizing.

Hum but English has simpler features that make it easier to learn than most languages. Sure, the phonetic is hard and I'll always have an accent and people will always just guess my country at the first sentence I utter, but:

- nouns have no gender !!!!

- conjugation is extremely simple (only one variation for 3rd person singular for most verbs!!)

- tenses are limited !

- vocabulary is 40% French-Latin and 60% Germanic, most of Europe and America can use the subset they prefer

- the writing is latin, simple to learn, complete enough to describe well the sounds

- the native community is immense, with a large interesting cultural body of work, making it interesting to learn

- it's easy to start communicating but it can be extremely rich in higher levels of language: you start talking quickly and then can move to beautiful structures later: there is a quick reward and a long term reward

There is nothing unfortunate it became default, there is simply no better lingua franca today. We could try Japanese or Chinese, Hindi or Spanish, but they all have way more quirks and way less qualities !

I strongly reject people saying that English became default by historical chance, it could have stayed French, moved to German or Spanish, it SHOULD be Chinese, but all of them are too hard for adults to learn as quickly as English and never as rewarding. Just think of the time it takes to learn an ideogram-based writing system, all that to end up able to read only communist propaganda or very old poetry for instance...

Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France and England were sniffing around Australia, France again was distracted by its wars.

Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français

Sure maybe, but French, my native language btw, is inherently more complex, less rich in vocabulary, idiosyncratic in its habit to follow latin in writing but deviating from it in spoken form, it's just not as good as English so we're quite lucky at least.

I feel it's hard for me to make spelling mistakes in English, which is not my native tongue, but VERY EASY to make them in French, that I studied and used for decades: there is an inherent beauty to English, in its simplicity, we should not dismiss. (yes I'm re-reading three times to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong lol)

If you're arguing from simplicity, Mandarin actually has very simple grammar - much simpler than any of the other languages you mention (no gender, no inflections, no declensions at all), and learning to speak it is not as difficult as people seem to think. Learning their ridiculous writing system (which is morphosyllabic, not ideogram-based) is another question.

The reason Mandarin is not an international language and English is, is because learning English as your L2 gives you the ability to speak to people in the United States and England and Australia and New Zealand and India and lot more besides, where learning Mandarin gives you the ability to speak to people in ... China (and even then, historically, only one small part of China).

Yes, I live in Hong Kong now and I know the Chinese languages have ridiculously simple formal grammar (that doesn't mean their brain doesn't have to do complex inference - is it better not to say what you meant or simpler to just write it ?).

The ridiculous writing system is indeed my problem with it - and the ridiculous variations in tones too but they swear it's easy if you're born in it... which is ofc the problem: a lingua franca works if adult merchants can learn it.

> nouns have no gender !!!!

English nouns have a person/nonperson gender distinction that requires agreement by relativizers.

Compare:

1. The girl who I met yesterday

2. *The burger who I ate yesterday

This gender distinction is hazily applied to the third-person pronouns he (person), she (person), and it (nonperson), which is why different people may see referring to babies with it as normal usage, or as grossly offensive.

That's not grammatical gender. Most people can distinguish between persons and nonpersons and map that onto the correct pronoun or relativizer to use.

But in German the girl you met yesterday is neuter, and the burger you ate yesterday is masculine, and you need to know that to form a grammatically correct sentence about them.

That is grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is a property inherent to words that requires agreement by other words. There's no other definition. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inanimate_gender .

You failed to distinguish the concepts even in your own terms; a girl is a person, and a burger isn't, and you need to know that to form a grammatical sentence about them.

The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary.

Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday.

A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "he".

Noun classes aren't arbitrary in general. Conflation of random objects with male and female life forms is arbitrary. But it's more arbitrary than is typical for noun classes.

Taking sex-based gender distinctions for our example, we can observe that Chinese speakers aren't able to correctly choose between the English pronouns he and she, despite the fact that this distinction isn't arbitrary in the slightest (and Chinese speakers routinely make it themselves in other contexts!). The reason is simply that their native language doesn't make the distinction, not that the distinction is theoretically difficult to make.

>>There is nothing unfortunate it became default, there is simply no better lingua franca today. We could try Japanese or Chinese, Hindi or Spanish, but they all have way more quirks and way less qualities !

All of this is secondary, the real deal is more knowledge, especially useful knowledge is generated, and has been generated in the English language for a while now.

If you want access to the knowledge ecosystem of the world, want to learn skills, trade, want jobs, want to do business you have to learn english.

The other cultures just never caught on with this one simple thing. You have to make rationality, scientific temper and coherence the very foundational basis for your society. And then you need run these processes for long. Decades to centuries for your language to now become the carrier of knowledge. Until then other arguments are irrelevant.

What are the other languages you speak fluently ? You're right of course, the diversity of English knowledge (and entertainment, sometimes as important) is dizzying and that's why I even learned it in the first place.

But there's something strange with English knowledge: it's never quite deep. I find French materials are always a bit deeper, a bit more complex, we don't try to explain to 5 yo all the time, we don't always insist so much on the high level introductory stuff - we have a way to explain extremely complex concepts to more people I find. Just a feeling: when I want to explore I use English but when I want to dig I find more interesting stuff in French.

It's very frustrating because I live abroad now, in Hong Kong, and only use English with my friends, partners etc. And sometimes I want to explain to them, give them something to read, but it's only in French because no English speaker ever tried to think to dig deeper, to give more perspective, to ask the right questions etc :D

> In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written

Some other languages. Just considering the Latin alphabet: French pronunciation is so far from spelling that spelling bees used to be (may still be) prime time television. Words in Spanish and Portuguese may be written in a deterministic fashion, yet pronounced quite differently in different countries.

And sure, German spelling does reflect pronunciation…because the spelling has been changed from time to time to match shifts in pronunciation…specifically the pronunciation used by a small number of people in Niedersachsen. Elsewhere in Germany (much less Switzerland) the local pronunciation can be incomprehensible. (This was the case in the UK and France until the advent of radio and then especially TV).

And that’s just four examples using basically the same alphabet. This phenomenon is common to all living languages. Even dead languages, for that matter: the Latin and (classical) Greek pronunciation I had to use in high school was a UK version different from that typically used in the USA or (based on one person I met), Sweden!

And do you really think the same thing doesn’t happen with Arabic, Hindi et al?

English ain’t so special.

It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English). However, it's much more difficult to guess the spelling from the pronunciation due to the number of homophones and silent letters.

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