Why English sucks as the language for international and scientific communication

My, what a collection of old chestnuts. * All his bugs are features: malleability and adaptability are English's strengths. * Most languages proliferate their vocabulary to express all the needed shades of meaning, English uses Norman/German vocab to distinguish formality just as Japanese uses wago/kanji compounds. * Basic English's claim to a limited vocabulary only makes sense if you ignore the many implicit phrasal verbs that are even more inaccessible to learners that ten-dollar words are. * Relatively isolating morphology vs. more inflection isn't really a feature or a bug: it just correlates with a relative reliance on syntax rather than morphology to communicate. Interlingua is even more isolating IIRC. * Every language has ambiguities. * How is it possible to invent and impose an artificially created vowel system under the conditions where it is impossible to do something as simple as spelling reform?

Spelling reform is surely needed, but the ferst wun to spell rite shall lede us.

English has succeeded not only because it is the voice of global hegemony, but also the voice of global resistance.

International English can't happen as something people create in a lab and try to impose in the world. It comes when you have a dictionary and grammar of Standard Indian English and Standard Filippino English and Standard Nigerian English, where people are comfortable speaking English to a non-American or non-British standard. It will be pluricentric.

"I am not trying to argue that we should now give up English for international or scientific communication, or try to replace it with this or that other language (except possibly in a limited way, e.g., see below on Basic English). I am not proposing to use Interlingua, Esperanto, Latin, Italian, Chinese, Russian, or anything else: I am maybe saying that we should have used Interlingua, Esperanto, Latin, Italian, Chinese, Russian, or something of the sort (probably any of the above would have been better than English) "

He really lost me when he suggested that Chinese would be a better scientific language than English. First, he didn't say which Chinese language or dialect. It's truly remarkable how many Chinese people cannot understand each other even though they speak the same language. Second, all Chinese languages are far harder than English to master speaking. Finally, writing is yet another steep learning curve.

Seems like English for international and scientific communication is like Javascript for the internet.

The large size of the English lexicon isn't just a result of the Norman invasion and subsequent merging of Old English and Norman French. During the renaissance, a huge number of words were consciously imported into English from classical Greek and Latin by scholars and scientists seeking to make English a better language for learned discourse. The so-called "inkhorn controversy"[1] arose when some other writers objected to all these new, foreign-sounding words, particularly those for which there was already a suitable alternative in English. Despite the objections, many of the new words did gain acceptance, and the English lexicon swelled accordingly.

So it's a little ironic that one of the author's chief complaints is partly a result of scientists trying to turn English into a scientific language in the first place.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkhorn_term

No one got up one morning and said, "You know what? We really should be conducting all of our business in English." It was the result of many years, and many different accidents of history that led to English having its current position in the world. World War II, the growth of American industry, the dominant position that the US has played in research and business, and the growth of the computer industry in the US all led to English being adopted world-wide. And you're not going to change that now.

Every language has its own trade-offs. It's totally true that English has crazy spelling, a huge vocabulary, and lots of ambiguous syntax. But it uses a simple alphabet, and doesn't have a centralized body making decisions about its direction, which also gives it flexibility.

So yes, maybe Spanish or German would have been a better choice. But that implies that there was a "choice" to be made. There wasn't.

It's definitely true that this has resulted in native English speakers having advantages over other people. But unless we decide to use an artificial language that is native to no one, there will always be some native-speaking group with an advantage. Fortunately, the diversity and flexibility of English are such that even if someone has an accent or stilted syntax, they're still (largely) accepted, and are able to get their points across.

For me it seems a global language strength lies, in fact, in this ambiguity, loose standards and acceptance of errors (in pronunciation, for example) - I'm thinking like HTML - it really can be buggy and still render text fine. French, German or Polish, on the other hand, are like XML - sure, it's strict and there are all these rules - but boy, try to make a mistake and it will blow in your face ;)

The thing is, there are no perfect language, just like programming languages. You will always find advantages and disadvantages of them at some point.

Yes, I agree with the author on the points that he is making, but comparing to other languages, I think that English is one of the easiest languages that can be learned and understood easily.

"Ease" is an important aspect in the context of languages, since people all around the world are not using latin alphabet and to get them using the language as fast as possible requires to eliminate some parts of the language like the meaning of the words for instance.

"Like" can be used for several different categories such as liking somebody/food/something. It is not the same for other languages, there are different words for liking somebody and liking something. Which puts more learning curve to get going with the language. Sure, you can express yourself better if you have time learn everything.

I guess this was one of the important reasons why English took off as well. (I might be totally wrong on this)

Interestingly I find this topic kind of similar to programming languages. Most of our interns in the company prefers Ruby over Java when they are learning web development. Because they can get something working during the day. On the other side, ones that choose java are spending time with configuring their libraries to compile the project. They will both eventually find out the advantages and disadvantages of both over the time.

One and two are not a problem; three is. German, Italian, and Korean might have been better choices in that regard. French has some frustrating silent letters and horrifying irregular verbs (although not to the scale of English)

Any human language would fail at one point or another when you need a strict interpretation, a strict pronounciation, and a strict syntax. It's a inherent human species trait to make the language evolve in inconsistent ways on all fronts.

A good candidate would have to be specially created with unambiguity in mind, like with formal languages, but as importantly, it would have to be aggressively controlled to avoid any misuse or divergence of usage. The later is most probably impossible in practice: enforcement would not scale. A simple question: how would a user of that language deal with a concept for which no word exists? The only possibility is to formulate that concept in lengthy sentences (Ents do speak like that), until a word is officially adopted by the language conformance body. Of course, people wouldn't be able to wait for that adoption each time they stumble on the issue, and it's bound to happen all the time. From then, one or more unofficial words would pop up for ideas yet inexistant in the language lexicon, and of course subtle semantic differences would crop up among these variants. Or maybe the author is implying that agglutinative languages don't suffer from that problem?

I am only talking about vocabulary, because this issue alone is enough to demonstrate the problem. For grammar, Lojban and a few other artificial languages have been created with syntactical unambiguity as a goal.

I more than agree. The tragedy is the contender to the throne is Mandarin Chinese (with it's tonality). You will beg to have your perplexing English back.

> "there is no such English word as costlily;"

There isn't? I've certainly used it as such.

I understand the issues with English and well Latin is a great scientific language BUT...

English is the most spoken language in the world. There are 4 times as many second language speakers for each native English speakers. I totally get the issues listed. I am a native English speakers with horrible Spanish skills and 4 years of ancient Hebrew and Greek studies.

English just works as a language for people and it is 100% about the content that is available in English as opposed to every other language.

It's interesting how there is an International Academy of Sciences San Marino that uses Esperanto as its language platform.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akademio_Internacia_de_la_Scien...

Once I read that German is the language of science.

I'm sorry HN people for not remembering exactly where, but it easy to find a ton of results about this on Google: http://bit.ly/1CewLMB

I've always found such linguistic criticisms of human languages to be quite intriguing. Most are used to thinking of programming languages as "tools" (though there are persuasive arguments for them being more like materials), and consequently this axiom leads to the implication of using the right tool for the right job.

Yet we seldom see such ideas for human languages - that some could be better for expressing certain concepts than others. Is it because the huge keyword count of human languages necessitate us to desire a single lingua franca for quick communication, or is it a fear of cultural insensitivity?