Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjzzleep | Hacker News Reader

I applaud efforts like this. zmguy writes that we should work to defragment the world. But who are english speakers to expect everyone to speak english? I think we need more fragmentation. We've defragmented enough already.

Diversity is a great thing. The more diverse we are, the more diverse our worldviews are and the more creative we become. Maybe there is more conflict, but who is to say that more conflict is a bad thing? As I recall there were studies on different personalities in multilingual people. (Although I believe it's true observing myself, you know how every study can have a study disproving it).

When I started learning programming there were a few resources available only in russian on russian forums(RE related) same with chinese. At the same time people who didn't know any better think russians are technologically behind and still do.

I recently had a discussion with someone in the University who was blaming them(them including russians, chinese speakers and others) for not making information more readily available to him. China, Japan, Russia, Iran, probably a bunch of Arab countries, Germany(although this one is argueably moving to english as scientific language) have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language.

If the numbers are right [1] (which i doubt, i assume both the chinese and the english l2 speakers to be much more) then maybe it is us who should make more available in chinese. Also keep in mind that for a very long time Arab was the defacto scientific language of south east asia.

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

edit: i don't normally ask for explanations, but if you downvote i'd appreciate an explanation in this context.

While I do want defragmentation of technical and scientific research (imagine the duplication that occurs given that lack of a unified scientific research dependency tree), I specifically qualified myself with "...as a second language." A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck, not to mention probably a dozen generations in the future before it would happen. But realistically the future global language of Earth is probably going to be Arabic, Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it. I can't remember to attribute this quote/sentiment accurately but here it goes... "The war against the West will not be won on a battlefield but in the wombs of our mothers..." I also can't speak to the accuracy of the claims in the following link, but they are thought provoking and worth a watch/read. http://religionresearch.org/martijn/2009/05/05/islamizing-eu...

I'm curious why you think that Arabic is so predestined to be "the" language of the future. I'm saying that, as the number of people who speak English (840 million) is four times as many as the number who speak Arabic (221 million). That's not even including the lack of mutual intelligibility between different flavors of Arabic.

Because s/he is extrapolating a curve based on the current birth rate.

> Arabic speakers are reproducing at a rate that virtually guarantees it.

That's ridiculous. In the 1970s, Chinese birth rate was ~5/woman [1]. It turns out that dynamic systems change with time.

Anyways, to get back on topic: more accessibility will only improve things.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

Some other HN comment I can't remember mentioned this: A logistic curve looks a lot like an exponential curve if you can only see the "start" of it ;-)

"They're outbreeding us!" has been a recurring fear among first world whites for a long time now, c.f. all that "Club of Rome" stuff from the 70s.

I don't think it is something to fear if it is true. It's just a trend that is talked about. I don't personally care what demographics make up the future population.

> "A world where everyone speaks one language would be boring as fuck"

Diversity is great, but a world in which everyone can fluently converse with everyone else would be the exact opposite of boring. In fact, I would say that this sort of universal communication would be great because diversity is great; it would allow all of those different cultures to share their cultures with others, with greater ease.

Of course the best of both worlds is a world where everyone is multilingual, with everyone sharing at least one language with every other person. I think this is more likely than a world in which Arabic is the universal language. I think that the increasing coverage and accuracy of machine translation will create a synthetic/"soft" version of the universally multilingual scenario. Right now machine translation is still fairly shit (although still serviceable!), but I don't think that will be the case in 50 years.

I would love a world where most people can communicate with everybody regardless of "native" tongue and that would prolly lead to a new golden era of mankind in creative and humanitarian areas. Not so much in science I suppose. They already talk to each other fine. The trend certainly seems to be english taking over. Which is fine since it is such an expressive language beatutiful in ways. All other major langs will probably remain and you guys will look kind of silly only knowing the "global" language but in time latin american culture will catch up with you and spanish and potrugeese will be your second lanugages. Maby they already are?

I don't know if the claims on the birth rates amongst Muslims is true, but even if they are, are you sure you're not talking about birth rates amongst Muslims and Muslim-majority countries as opposed to Arabic speakers?

An overwhelming majority of the Muslims are not Arab and do not speak Arabic [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_world#Countries_with_the...

Considering most of the world use a left to right latin script, I don't see how arabic would spread more effectively than English.

> Considering most of the world use a left to right latin script, I don't see how arabic would spread more effectively than English.

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Is that fifty-one or fifteen?

Fifteen.

Quite the opposite is happening in the long term throughout the Arab World and neighboring regions. As we speak, Iran (speaks Farsi) is presently at fertility rates below the rate of replenishment.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-a-demo...

See figure 6 here:

http://www.aei.org/files/2012/03/21/-fertility-decline-in-th...

As a native Arabic speaker, I think you're incredibly wrong about Arabic ever becoming a dominant language world-wide. There are several reasons for this.

First, Arabic itself is an incredibly fragmented language. Almost every country or region that speaks it has its own colloquial version of it which may or may not be mutually intelligible. As a Lebanese person I can understand Syrians fairly easily, Jordanians with a bit of straining and the other person speaking slightly slower than usual, Egyptians with a lot of straining and speaking slowly and Saudis not at all. Theoretically, we could communicate using the formal(written) Arabic, but most people, especially newer generations, tend to suck at that as it's a much more difficult language that's learned only in the context of school and pretty much almost never used outside, at least in Lebanon, that is. The colloquial languages are to the formal Arabic as French/Spanish/Italian are to Latin, basically.

Second, all good universities I know of in the region teach in English or French rather than Arabic. Though the trend is tipping towards English of late. This is because most of the region was put either under British or French mandate after the Ottomans were ousted during WW1. This was detrimental in many ways which I won't go into, but one of the good things that came out of it was that they established many schools and universities. In fact, most of the good ones I know were founded by French, British or American missionaries during that period.

Third, well, the internet(and media in general), English is the dominant language in media most people consume. I learned English from watching cartoons as kid. I've almost never stepped foot in an English speaking country(except for a couple of weeks in the U.S. 2 years ago) and yet I can speak, and write, with almost native proficiency.

While I agree to what you're saying, the use of Arabic is not disappearing in the rest of the Arab world as in parts of Lebanon. Some Lebanese see themselves as "non-Arabs", when Lebanese are nothing but Arabs. Those who are in an identity struggle are using French and English mostly, and can't speak Arabic well. I have Lebanese relatives, and some words they say in Arabic are really heavy Arabic words that even we don't use. They still avoid saying that it is indeed, Arabic.

I am Palestinian-Jordanian and I do understand almost all slang accents fairly well. The only one I have trouble with is the Moroccan/Algerian. I understand it as long as they do not inject French or Berber words and speak slowly.

The levant accents are extremely similar that the gulf cannot really differentiate between Syrian, Jordanian, Lebanese and Palestinian (although we see them as distinct and can pick up which accent is spoken from just a word or two). The same phenomenon is seen in the gulf. Iraq is pretty distinct, yet closer to the gulf. Everyone understands Egypt as it is pretty close to Standard Arabic (just like the Levant), although its quirks have become known through songs, movies and shows which are dominated by Egyptians.

As for Standard (or Classical) Arabic, everyone in Jordan (or most of the Arab world) who went through some sort of schooling can speak it, and understand it perfectly. The news, newspapers and any formal event is given in proper Arabic. All Arabic literature, books, and writings are also in Standard Arabic.

My point is, while I agree with you that the use of Arabic is degrading, I doubt it will ever be overtaken by French or English (depending on where you live). English and French are being seen as a symbol of being educated, and those who are uneducated try to speak English or French (albeit terribly). Some who like to show off, or have some sort of identity struggle, rely heavily on French or English. Outside of these insecurities, Arabic is pretty much always in use.

I agree with you on all of the points you listed. However, while all Arabs can understand the formal Arabic perfectly, many struggle to write it or express themselves in it, and that is not just a case of identity crisis.

I consider myself an Arab -- whether I'm proud of that is another issue, but there is not identity crisis. I can understand the news, read the newspaper, official documents, etc, etc, but I would not even dream of replying to a comment in Arabic as I can so easily do in English, and not just because I can't touch-type it, but because I would fail at expressing even simple ideas without a lot of struggling, trying to remember words that differ from the colloquial or(and especially) proper grammar.

While the case of Lebanese people is a bit extreme in this regard, all Arabs are slowly following suit in this regard.

You see, I was not saying that Arabic is so far gone now that nobody uses it, or even that not everybody in the Arab world uses it, that was not the point. I was only commenting on a trend. The parent poster suggested that Arabic was on a course to become dominant worldwide and I find that a laughable idea given the current state of it and its trend(slowly) into oblivion to be replaced by many colloquial languages that simplify the grammar and incorporate foreign languages into it the way this happened with Latin.

Yes, I mostly agree with this.

That's so true, I grew up speaking only Darija (Moroccan) and I have a hell of a problem understanding Arabs from the East. It's nearly impossible.

Population dynamics have nothing to do with the dynamics of memes. People are just vehicles for knowledge and ideas. Just because they receive some knowledge and ideas soon after birth, it doesn't mean they have to keep them. Just like they don't have to keep their religion or their "default" sexual orientation.

The people that will control what ideas win will be the ones controlling the media, social networks and communication channels. It doesn't matter if they are just 0.1% of the general population, their ideas will mater more than the ones of the 99.9%. And considering the kinds of ideas that float in the minds of some people, like the "the war against the West will not be won on a battlefield but in the wombs of our mothers" aberration (why do people even think of "war", there is no war, just a peaceful competition among ideas that float from one mind to another, there simply is nothing to fight for, ain't this obvious to all?!), I prefer this situation!

> who are english speakers to expect everyone to speak english?

I lost all awkwardness about this after meeting some Lithuanians on a train in Slovenia. If there's any nation you'd expect to support linguistic diversity it's Lithuania, where just speaking the native language was an act of resistance against Soviet oppression.

They spent the whole train journey bitching about these Slovenians who wouldn't speak English.

> When I started learning programming there were a few resources available only in russian on russian forums(RE related) same with chinese. At the same time people who didn't know any better think russians are technologically behind and still do.

Most of us who program or do science want it to be useful. Look at Linux - started by a Finn, but internationally successful (and not just in English-speaking countries - a lot of developers are German), because he wrote it in English.

> China, Japan, Russia, Iran, probably a bunch of Arab countries, Germany(although this one is argueably[sic] moving to english as scientific language) have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language.

Which means a lot of duplicated effort that could be better spent (duplicating science can sometimes be useful but if we could coordinate then we could be much smarter about it).

> maybe it is us who should make more available in chinese. Also keep in mind that for a very long time Arab was the defacto scientific language of south east asia.

Sure, there's nothing particularly special about English (well, there are a few conveniences like ASCII and the ease of new coinages, and the existing spread of people who know the language). I don't have a problem with non-English languages that are already major world languages in the field.

But let's stop deliberately erecting barriers to communication in the name of "diversity". Let's not turn Computer Science from a field where all participants can understand each other into a field where one half can't talk to the other half. Let's make education in English and other true world languages as widely available as possible (and stop wasting our children's time teaching them a language that would only let them talk to 5 million people, all of whom speak English anyway - bitter welsh guy here).

Up voted you.

As a non English native speaker and fluent in six languages, I think is very valuable that people have access to learning resources and tooling support in their native languages.

Wow, six languages. What languages do you speak, and how did you learn them?

Portuguese - native speaker

Spanish - I used to spend my summer vacations as a child, quite close to Spain, which allowed me to follow Spanish TV (80's no cable back then) and have a few Spanish friends

French - Three years at high school in Portugal. Lived in France for a couple of years while working at CERN.

English - Five years at high school. Reading English since the late 80's, as a way to get information about ZX Spectrum and similar systems in Portugal. Local press was quite limited. Working in international environments since I graduated.

German - Living in Germany since a few years. Always took care to learn the language.

Italian - Thanks to my knowledge with the other Latin languages, Italian friends, occasional vacations in Italy and lots of books and movies in Italian

Plus ability to understand Catalan, Galician and Mirandese.

You'll have a head start on Romanian as well. Probably you could understand quite a bit of it without doing any work at all.

Probably, never got around to try it though.

For learning and documentation, sure. But as another native Portuguese speaker, keep your code and comments in English, please! I really don't want to have to learn another human language just to read someone else's code.

(I shudder at the thought of having to code in, say, G-Portugol: http://gpt.berlios.de/site/)

Remember Spooler?

Once they had a Portuguese version of Pascal for learning purposes.

Remember Spooler

Not really, we didn't get them in our daycare :D

I never really read programming magazines; I had a couple of books, but it was the late 90s, so I learned mostly on the web.

> I think we need more fragmentation. We've defragmented enough already.

Are you fk kidding?! We aren't at even 10% of "defragmenting" the world's conceptual space... When we'll be close to 99.9%, then tell me it's "enough already". And when it comes to programming languages, we're reinventing the wheel over and over and over and over again because we don't have a small number (I'd call less than 5 a "small enough number") or dominant programming languages and VMs so we can just port features from one to another.

Same for all other aspects of computer science and engineering. Everything new takes aaaaaages to implement because we can't freaking standardize on a small number of languages and protocols.

> have vibrant scientific communities, that you can only understand if you speak the respective language

If you've ever worked on any half-serious scientific project anywhere in the world, you'll know that if you can't speak and read/write English fluently (the read/write part is more importantly than the speaking part in science), you're not part of any real scientific community but just of a pseudo-nationalistic group playing as if they are doing science.

Technology and science need standardization and homogeneity when it comes to langauges and communication, like at least 50% more language/protocols standardization and homogeneity than we have now, just so we can have more diversity of ideas.

If everyone spends 50% of their mental energy translating from one language/standard/protocol to another, whether programming language or natural language or whatever, you will have less diversity and less innovation because event if it may seem fun, any kind of "translation" type of activity is a huuuuuge drain that brings benefits to nobody.

And in software, we already spend 90% of our brainpower in translation-type-activities and reinventing wheels all day long, so I'd take anything that brings me less fragmentation in all aspects of my life at all costs, and do everything I can to impose even forcefully less fragmentation in all aspects of existence in general.

While I like the idea of arabic lisp (BTW it shouldn't be hard to make "arabic Clojure") simply because it looks so much better than english, I disagree with your reasoning in general. My primary language is russian and I'm absolutely sure we should defragment the world. And I'm completely fine with using english as the only language for computing-related stuff. No, we haven't "defragmented enough already". Not even close.

You may not know that, but there already exist programming languages "in russian". One is called 1С[1] and although probably unknown outside of russia, it's very much used for bookkeeping apps (because of being part of quite useful proprietary app, not because it's good). It's basically VB with "если" instead of "if". It proved to be totally useless and horrible. And there're more examples like that.

Translating docs and such to other languages is always good, but not crucial. The reason is: you need to know english anyway, because there is and always will be useful stuff written in english, so people who are crying over absence of russian docs instead of learning english (unfortunately there are plenty of them) aren't really worth paying attention, because they aren't really in trouble, they are just lazy.

One more example of fragmentation on language basis might be Ruby community. Even now there're two "main" mailing lists, one is japanese-only. Now it's not really a problem, because all important stuff is doubled in english, but a while ago it was not so easy for people that don't know japanese.

Why english and not chinese? Because english is fairly simple. Simple compared to russian, simple compared to chinese and japanese, simple compared to finnish. (Seriously, the only problem with it is the "correct" spelling is sometimes very far from how the word is pronounced). It might be not as expressive sometimes, but that's a matter to reflect about for language-lovers, not a real problem.

Hieroglyphic writing systems are complicated. I don't know chinese, but I do know japanese for some extent and the funny thing is even many native speakers cannot write properly in japanese… well, I know, many native english speakers cannot write properly as well, but for japanese it's even worse, seriously. And to be fair: I absolutely love japanese typography. Phone entries and posters look so much better in japanese than in latin/cyrillics. But it is complicated.

Why not spanish? I don't know. It would be fine to use spanish as "the" language, I guess. It just happened so the main language for computing is english. Let it be english. Fine.

[1] - http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%81%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%... (sorry, russian only)

> Translating docs and such to other languages is always good, but not crucial. The reason is: you need to know english anyway, because there is and always will be useful stuff written in english, so people who are crying over absence of russian docs instead of learning english (unfortunately there are plenty of them) aren't really worth paying attention, because they aren't really in trouble, they are just lazy.

Sadly, not everybody can have a good linguistic education from the go, it depends from a lot of factors, not just laziness.

> Why english and not chinese? Because english is fairly simple.

The notion of linguistic simplicity it's just bogus. English is simple for who? It depends from what is your mother tongue. English for a Dutch speaker is like super easy. But for a Chinese it is quite hard.

I'd say that Chinese is honestly a harder language because it is filled with too much idiosyncrasy. I think most Chinese people cannot decipher the meaning or pronunciation of new Chinese words they've never seen before.

And if they've forgotten how to write a character, then they are doomed without outside reference. I can use a word in English I've only seen or heard once in a novel event, and have a hope of using it passably.

Even looking things up in the dictionary is hard... for Chinese people. I've seen Chinese parents pride themselves on how skillfully their children use the dictionary. That's because it's hard and worthy of pride; the radical system is so random and unnecessary from an outside view. Chinese is worthy of the reputation that perl has had, and for the exact same reasons: it's capriciously idiosyncratic and ruthless to non-native speakers.

I'd also note that non-native language acquisition has been looked at by the US military, and I'm sure across the world, and I doubt that all languages are rated equally. I'm quite sure that Arabic and Chinese rate as very hard languages.

I suspect that english has been made easier for non-native speakers by a rich recent history of english being spoken by non-native speakers (particularly in America). This may have broken down expectations about the language that native english speakers have.

For example, a native english speaker will not have much difficulty at all when they encounter an Russian who speaks english as a second language and frequently miss or misuse articles. Although the native Russian speaker is technically using the english language incorrectly, native english speakers have adapted to expect and tolerate a very high rate of errors. This lowers the level of language perfection that is necessary to effectively communicate in english.

Speakers of languages without this sort of recent tradition of non-native speakers may find grammatical errors more jarring, because they have been exposed to them less often.

> Sadly, not everybody can have a good linguistic education from the go

Totally true! I hadn't, for instance. I had Internet. And while I believe my English is very far from perfect, at least you can understand me.

> simple for who

It's very common to hear about "simple != easy" on HN (maybe because of R. Hickey, idk) and this is just the case.

Easiness = Familiarity (subjective) Simplicity = "Does/is one thing" (objective)

English has simple grammar compared to most of languages I know, probably compared to most of non-constructed languages at all. It has simple writing system compared to Chinese, objectively. Even "lolcats English" can be understood quite easily, if you know English to some extent. You cannot write "lolcats Chinese", only pinyin (or kana, for Japanese). If some Japanese shows you a visit-card with his name in kanji only, you often have to ask him (if it's not some really common name/surname) how that is pronounced (even if you have seen that kanji before, because there are many variants of pronunciation!). I don't know what's about Chinese, but declension/conjugation in Japanese has far more cases than in Modern English (although probably can be said to be "more regular"). Russian declension is objectively more complicated than English (almost non-existent!). In it's turn, Chinese pronunciation is pretty hard to master if you don't have concept of tones in your language. I won't say anything about English this time, but Chinese pronunciation is objectively more complicated than Japanese, for instance. That means, if you speak Chinese, you won't have very hard time repeating what Japanese says, but not otherwise.

The concept of "simplicity" is so not bogus that even have been made attempts to invent some language, that will be easy (because it's simple!) to speak for everyone (esperanto). But as there are many people that don't really care for defragmentation, enlightenment, modernism and stuff like that — so, esperanto is dead now. Maybe it's for the better. Anyway, English doesn't have to be invented, and it's fine, although maybe not perfect as "the universal language". Fine is fine, that's what I'm saying.

Don't forget about Spanish!

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