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Comment by dataengineer56 | Hacker News Reader

The English icon has the Union Jack flag rather than the US flag, so it automatically elevates the service above Duolingo for me.

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English (Traditional) vs English (Simplified)

That meme is such a load of hogwash. In many ways, US English is closer to "traditional" than UK English. They've both diverged somewhat from what they were in the 17th century. Neither form has been "simplified" in any way.

As for the Union Jack: the UK has at least 3 rather different languages (English, Gaelic, Welsh), possibly a few more depending on how you count the different kinds of Gaelic.

Using a country flag to represent a language has always struck me as being silly. Only rarely do they map 1-to-1.

It's entirely a joke based on the two different versions of "Chinese" offered on most websites, it's not really meant to be taken seriously. But I've heard that there's an island in New England somewhere whose local accent is closest to Elizabethan English.

Tangier Island off of Virginia, in the Chesapeake:

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-isla...

Also, for what it's worth:

> Some people have characterised Tangier’s way of speaking as ‘Elizabethan’ or ‘Restoration’ English, but that’s nonsense. Languages aren’t static and the Tangier dialect has changed a lot because of its isolation. It’s a distinct creation of its own," Shores said.

Perhaps you’re thinking of Ocracoke, North Carolina[0]

[0]https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20190623-the-us-island-th...

Yeah, but there is a real difference between simplified and traditional Chinese characters. Traditional are more ornamental/complicated while simplified are ... simplified/minimalist .

Honest question, what's the meaning behind this joke? Is it just referencing the fact that American English drops "u" in the spelling of e.g. "color"?

It's primarily a reference to various language selection dropdowns offering "Chinese (Traditional)" (which is used in Taiwan) and "Chinese (Simplified)" (which is used on the Chinese mainland). That difference arises from Mao-era simplification of many of the most common hanzi characters to make them easier to write or distinguish.

Mixed with, yes, the variant spellings and word choices (e.g. chips/crisps/biscuits) that make it apparent to British English readers when something is American.

I think my confusion is more from the implication that variant spellings imply "simplification"—even at a glance, simplified and traditional hanzi differ greatly in complexity, whereas I don't see how "chips" is any simpler than "crisps", even as a joke....

EDIT: Of course, it doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things—feel free to ignore my pedantry over a silly joke :-)

This really isn’t a positive point. Flags represent nations, not languages, and it can be quite offensive to equate the two.

To use your example, there are plenty of Irish people who speak English but would resent being forced to identify with the Union Flag.

For another example that is very relevant today, there are plenty of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who hate Russia. Using the Russian flag to represent them would at best be distasteful.

That's actually a really good point that seems obvious, but I hadn't considered before. I wonder what a better solution is. ISO language codes[1], I guess?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639_language_codes

That’s the problem with conflating nations and language.

For example, the very first English video I got was a South African English accent.

It works to a first approximation.

Of the five languages I have configured in KDE, three of them are country-specific. So I use the flag indicator, which is far quicker for me to locate and identify out of the corner of my eye than would be a text label (which would require using the retina and thus more time and attention).

Sure, fine for personal uses. I mean broadly and generally.

As for English, the United States has far and away the largest number of native English speakers.

Not that I think the stars and stripes has any more right to represent “English” as a concept any more than the Union Jack. If you’re going on origin, why not the flag of England instead?

  > If you’re going on origin, why not the flag of England instead?

I actually really like that idea. The US and UK flags seem to represent more culture than language.

I mostly meant that facetiously as now we're entering the linguistic quagmire of trying to pin down an exact origin for a language, and furthermore (depending on your chosen definition of "English") the language itself predates the current flag of England, so even that is open to debate regarding its appropriateness.

The moral is: don't try to draw boxes around languages.

All that said, I do understand why someone would want to use flags as shorthand for language. It's wrong, but it's useful.

Rather ironic, considering that it’s a flag to indicate personal union of ownership of subjects and lands by the Scottish king who inherited the subjects and lands of England, but you prefer it to be the icon for the language of the state of England, a country in which its own language is more or less indecipherable in many places due to accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization.

You would be far more likely to understand any given English speaking person in the USA than in England. It should really be called American at this point.

> accents, dialects, and degeneration and creolization. There are just as many accents and dialects of English in the Americas as there are in Britain. Even your term "creolization" comes from Louisiana. It's a matter of perspective and something that all language learners will have the face, the difference between 'standard' English/Spanish/German and regional variations both within it's originating country and from abroad.

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