Hacker News Reader

Comment by energy123 | Hacker News Reader

Part of it is the English language doesn't have tools to express uncertainty without adding verbosity. For example, take what I said here, my sentence length increased by 25% by saying "part of it is" to communicate uncertainty. This gets tiring quickly for both the writer and reader. It becomes boilerplate.

View on HN

That's a good point. As a non-native speaker, I use Grammarly to improve my writing. But often, when I add clauses that indicate uncertainty, grammarly complaints about how I can be more concise by dropping those parts.

> the English language doesn't have tools to express uncertainty without adding verbosity

Well, there's always irony quotes. For example:

The new Apple lineup will "amaze".

Fair, we at least have the subjunctive, we just don't use it very often. If I were to start a sentence like this, I would be using the subjunctive.

(Which I believe has been confirmed by Gemini):

> Yes, the sentence "If I were to start a sentence like this, I would be using the subjunctive" uses the subjunctive mood correctly. > The subjunctive mood is used to express hypothetical or unreal situations, wishes, suggestions, or demands. In this sentence, "If I were to start a sentence like this" presents a hypothetical situation, and "were" is the correct form of the verb "to be" in the subjunctive mood."

But yeah, it doesn't get at the uncertainty expressed in other languages. Is there another mood for that or how do other languages handle it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com