Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing" thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce.
On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances.
And honestly, the spelling's not that bad. Having spent years as an English teacher abroad, spelling was just never an issue. It's easy to complain about, but it's just not a big deal in practice.
[1] I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine. And normal dictionaries won't even tell you which verb takes which.
As a non-native speaker who started to regularly use English in my 20's, I find pronunciation is the hardest part. As mentioned in the article, "The fine distinctions of English vocalism are beyond many adult learners’ phonetic abilities, which is why some foreigners pronounce modal and model the same, or bird and bed the same, or seat and sit the same, and so on." Pronunciations in Spanish, Italian, Japanese, etc. are much easier to manage. Although most adult learners can never pronounce as good as native speakers, it is much closer in the latter cases.
I find another "undesirable feature" mentioned in the article, "absurdly large multilayer vocabulary", is quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages belonging to the same family, like German, French, Spanish, etc. For my untrained ears, English and German are more similar to each other than Mandarin (my native tongue) and many dialects in southern China.
At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and striving to be world languages).
To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily because words were often alike (sometimes the same words have different meanings, "false friends"). But of course in contrast to french, one does not have to learn conjugations, gender of words, etc.
But after having reached an intermediate level of both english and french, things started to change. Perfecting your English skills progressively gets harder, whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language.
As it turnes out, English is huge. The english dictionary is huge. It is basically the size of the german dictionary and the french dictionary combined, as it draws words from 3 main sources French, Old Saxon and Scandinavic, and then was happy to incorporate words from all over the place. So you have the word "hunger" (germanic root, compare german "Hunger") and "famine" (romance root, compare french "faim" meaning hunger and "famine" meaning famine). To this day, using english on a daily basis and reading many english books, I see a lot of words I have not yet learned.
The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.
At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.
No, spelling is really bad and pronunciations are far worse! Pronunciations are just absurd.
As a non-native English speaker, with close to native fluency in written English and slightly (or maybe quite) worse in its spoken form, I do understand the importance of Engish as a universal language, esp. in today's world, but fixing its spelling and pronunciations would really be helpful. I find it strange that there are no steps towards it, or if there are maybe I am not aware of that.
I mean there is no damn reason to pronounce beard and heard[1] differently unless of course because it's just supposed to be so. And did we really had to say creature and create[2] this distinctly?
According to this view a perfect language would have... what? So are we in the same game as in computer language, with this discussion about how many features should we allow?
My view on this may be uncommon: Less features for computer language migth be better in some cases, but more features in human languages is always better, because the human brain will make the best out of it.
Taking a simple case: two idioms with the same meaning is bad in python, should be removed if possible. Two words with the same meaning in English (e.g. to use/to utilise, tired/fatigued) is good, because both words will fork away and each carry subtle differences that will be powerful.
English is highly unsuitable, but not for this reason.
>There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception).
I don't see the problem with making the verb express how probable or feasible the action is, aside from the fact that you have to remember how to conjugate the verb instead of adding an adverb to express the uncertainty (which certainly avoids memorizing, since you can reuse the same adverb with almost every verb).
Also, English got by for centuries without canonical spelling. For the OP's underlying point, I'm not sure that's an improvement, since people could spell things more "naturally," as many children do now when learning to write. But it does show that irregularities can be reined in after they are already in common practice.
> I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine.
I'm not convinced just because it sounds odd to me.
Language is a tool to facilitate information exchange. It doesn't matter how "superior" one language is to another for any given reason, if a language provides limited opportunity to exchange information then it is not valuable. The incentives to learn English exist because the value of exchanging information in English is strong in the present-day sociopolitical context, and the malleability of the language played a large role in making that so as cultures and languages blended together in early day America. When translation becomes effortless and/or integrated into society in a near seamless fashion, the distinguishing value of information exchange in the spoken word will be diminished. I have no speculation on the long-term prospects of the written word.
This is a good time to say that I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time. If anyone finds this kind of conversation interesting I highly recommend checking out The Great Courses "Language A to Z" audiobook / audio lecture series. It's incredibly fascinating.
So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the emotional one:
I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.
>I have no speculation on the long-term prospects of the written word.
Marshall McLuhan made such speculation in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.
"I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time"
On the topic of languages, I wonder if the Germans have a word for this yet... If so, English speakers should totally import it as they did Shadenfreude.
This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the marketplace.
Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.
> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time.
Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too).
Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.
We are going to have the technological equivalent of a Babel fish [1] soon, so we should expect that basically everyone will just learn their native language unless they like learning languages as a hobby.
From what I understand, spoken Chinese is not terribly difficult compared to something like English with its immense number of ambiguous and arcane grammatical structures. The most unique aspect is the use of tones, which at least often results in shorter words. Orthography is a different story, and could be aided by a phonetic script (see Finnish, Korean, or Cyrillic for instance).
Support for English is wide but shallow. Compare to indigneous mother tongues where support is narrow but deep, with a small community of committed speakers passing on their language to their children in the face of massive social and institutional pressure from the majority society to abandon it.
If English ever came under serious pressure, many would abandon it in an instant.
Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise.
As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside:
"An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm
Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991).
The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94).
The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say.
I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1].
English about very basic knowledge exist then I say want word convey way exist word is?
Nah, I don't really believe it.
* The first sentence was more or less direct word-to-word mapping of a Korean sentence meaning "If I have a very basic knowledge of English, then I can convey what I want to say?"
I suspect that people say "it's very easy to speak [English] badly" because the worst they've ever encountered is a still half-decent attempt at English grammar (with years of training by the speaker), because anything below that is totally unintelligible and won't attract any attention.
I was on a conference call the other day with A gaggle people trying to fix a technical problem. We had a Brit, 4-5 accents/language competencies from India, a Chinese person, a heavily accented Vietnamese person, heavy Boston speaker, various NYC and "lunged idland" dialects and a Texan.
It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.
With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what you are trying to say.
Exactly this and in addition it's also relatively easy to understand other people speaking English. This is really a key strength of English language, i.e. low barrier to entry.
On the other hand, consider Danish language: similar grammar to English, also many almost same words, but one needs lots and lots of learning/practice to be able to speak to and understand other Danish speakers.
I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). English also lacks a gender system which might make it easier than some European languages.
That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".
After perusing their site a little and looking at their examples, I can see why this is considered a lost cause. There are a number of even "basic substitutions" that don't jive with the way I've heard words pronounced or how I pronounce them myself.
For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me.
I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey...
All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.
This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents.
And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whose native language is being replaced by it, I know that English is a perfect example of this.
>Japanese uses two different syllabaries (one symbol per syllable) plus a selection of about a thousand Chinese characters sprinkled in amongst them
A bit of a nitpick, but this isn't really accurate. The Jouyou kanji[1] contain 2,136 Chinese characters that all Japanese people must learn in school. In addition, the Jinmeiyou kanji[2] (used for names) contains an additional 843 Chinese characters. And it's not uncommon for speakers of Japanese to know many more. There are more than 50,000 Chinese characters listed in the daikanwajiten[3] with Japanese pronunciation (most are not used in either Chinese or Japanese). In fact, the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese has increased with the use of computer input[4].
The central axiom of linguistics is that no language is inherently more expressive than another. Yes, that means that conjugation and declension is no more complicated than strict word order. Grammatical gender provides redundancy, and conjugation allows for subject pro-drop. Orthography has nothing to do with the actual spoken language and things like "phonetic" pronunciation are not really an intrinsic feature of any language. Any language can be matched with a phonemic orthography; the only reason written English hasn't been is due to historical inertia.
First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you basically brute force your way through the family to find your word.
Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language.
And the phonetics? Go try out fucking Czech. I've heard it's legitimately impossible to become fluent in Czech. Or Austrian dialect, which has something like 4 different "r"s.
"Hawaiian no consonant is ever followed by another consonant" ... yeah you also frequently run into the german nightmare of neverending words like "humahumanukanukaapuaa". You think that's a better way to deal with things? An easy to pronounce marathon?
The large vocabulary is undesirable? The large vocabulary, with extreme possible specificity, is what makes English so attractive for scientific application.
And complaining about grammar? English has one of the easiest grammars to learn and get started with, sure it will take a few decades to not make any mistakes, but for just getting going, it is remarkably easy. No genders (some languages have 5 or more genders for things, see czech), no conjugation.
Sorry for the rant, but if you're just gonna post some BS one sided oped I'm gonna do the same. I personally don't think English is the best choice either. But one sidedness is ultra-obnoxious.
This article from 23 November 2015 was followed up by a 3 December 2015 article by the same author (professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum) titled "English and Its Undeserved Good Luck," previously discussed on Hacker News.[1] The author is a renowned and very influential scholar of the English language, co-editor of the most authoritative grammar of the English language, the The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Alas, although Pullum is a very astute scholar of language (linguist), he is not a polyglot (learner of other languages) to any particular degree, and many of his points about the defects of English as a world language are unconvincing to any of us who know many different human languages. I know a variety of languages from several different language families (as disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), and I think the key point is that English is easy enough to learn, useful enough to learn, and geographically widespread enough to challenge the advantages proposed for any other language as a world language, including Chinese (which I speak well enough to have worked as a translator and interpreter and teacher of Chinese).
There is a whole website about why Esperanto never caught on as a world language (focused mostly on its linguistic features) by a writer who has considerably more acquaintance with formal linguistics and with a variety of world languages than the inventor of Esperanto ever had.[2]
English is easier than many languages: it doesn't have gendered nouns or adjectives almost at all (thank goodness), it doesn't have noun declensions, it doesn't have many verb conjugations (hello Russian!). It's biggest pain is tricky spelling and a list of irregular verbs.
JB Rye has little to say about why Esperanto didn't catch on - indeed if the kind of inconsistency he writes about was a reason for languages not catching on, where would English be?
Take the clockwork morphology which Rye derides because, genuinely, "truanta" in Esperanto doesn't mean the same as truant" in English(??) That same clockwork nature was described by Claude Piron in these terms:
You never feel quite secure in a foreign language. I have more than 40,000 hours of study and practice of English, but when I improvised the inaugural speech last Friday, since, as you know, I had to replace the Secretary of the Club of Rome at the last minute, I mistakenly said costed instead of cost. I suddenly realized that I did not remember what the right form was. Irregularity of grammar always puts non-native speakers in an inferior position.
[..]
In Esperanto you feel natural and at ease because you feel secure. You know that you can follow your natural reflexes. This is never the case in another language. I once pronounced indict as rhyming with convict. Why? Because I knew the word only through reading and I generalized the pronunciation pattern I had assimilated from derelict, depict, afflict and similar words. This happened to me forty (18) years after I had started learning English, a language I have never ceased to practice ever since. It shows that really mastering English is out of my reach, as is confirmed by the fact that, in spite of so much more practice than the average European, I still cannot publish a text in English without having somebody correct my language. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm
These kind of claims are what makes it stand out as potentially useful as a second language, despite being imperfect, compared to learning other natural languages.
Rye is doing the kind of 'Unix haters handbook' of nitpicking.
English is great. Sure it is probably one of the harder languages to learn for the non native speaker. But one thing is for sure, it is taking over the world. And that has a great advantage. Even to the point where the fundamental Baptist will proclaim Genesis 11:1-9 can even apply to today in that the "whole earth was of one language, and of one speech" and thus inviting God's judgment upon us.
And for me? I like it. It's like Perl. You don't have to be skilled wizard just to use it and hack something together that will work and get the meaning through, even if it is dirty.
This article is around the lines of why I think Spanish is the best language to rally around as the global language. It's phonetic, if you can speak it you can (for the most part, especially compared to other languages) read or write it by just knowing the basic rules of the written form. It's already in widespread use. It's modern and not behind the times so there are terms for everything, and it's Latin based so it has every root word that English does to grow from. It just makes more sense than an artificial language that doesn't have a 400+ million person headstart. For myself, I like the way it sounds too. I particularly dislike the Scandinavian languages and only slightly like German a bit more than those, and English a bit more than German. But to my ear (having lived in Europe), the Latin varieties are just as powerful sounding but also elegant (subjective of course). Latin languages like Spanish also have the advantage of interlingual comprehension. A well-educated native Spanish speaker (meaning college educated or similar), can understand the Pope when he speaks in Italian. Or know much of what a Portuguese speaker is saying much of the time. This doesn't apply as much to folks who barely know their own language, which is where most people pull their perceptions of groups like Spanish speakers from (desperate immigrants with little to no education). It's spoken across all 5 continents.
Due to these reasons and more (encouraging friendship with neighbors both here and on a national scale), I've fully embraced Spanish as a 2nd language as an American. It's a good thing.
There's a reason there's no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking Latin America.
As a native English speaker who has never learned another language beyond high school Spanish, I often feel sympathy for the plight of those who are forced to learn English later in life. I see many native English speakers with a tenuous grasp on the language, and from that and anecdotal evidence I know that it's a hard language. I remember how difficult Spanish, ostensibly an 'easy' language, was for me to learn. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I need to learn English late in life, and I'm sorry for what we've done to you, world :).
Perhaps the time has come to start using phonetic spellings (e.g. An English specific subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet) in at least some contexts, such as signage. Wales would be a good place to start. If someone here has the patience to translate, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" into IPA phonetic English I'd sure appreciate it.
On second thought, maybe we should leave the Welsh out of this. Yes... That would be for the best.
Anyways, while it is certainly ambitious to start using phonetic spellings in a limited way, it's far from unprecedented. In 1929 the Turks walked away from the Ottoman alphabet entirely and adopted the modern Turkish Alphabet, which is basically the Latin alphabet with some phonetic characters added. The result is that modern Turkish sounds like it's written, and it's easy to pick up pronunciation from spelling. The Turkish alphabet is relatively simple compared to full IPA, which is part of its appeal.
All languages have their problems. English is no better or worse than any other. Worrying about this is a waste of time. You can't change the world's lingua franca yourself. At best, you can perhaps try to get its orthography reformed.
English, like any other language, can communicate ideas well. And that is all it needs to do.
> Where Spanish has just five vowels (si, se, la, lo, tu), nicely spaced out through the acoustic spectrum, the English vowel system is a nightmare of more than 20 distinct vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs.
That almost reads as if the author does not believe Spanish has diphthongs...? Anyone who thinks that should spend some more time in the "aula".
> Even before we get to grammar, then, and the roughly 200 irregular verbs of our misbegotten language...
Shrug. I came into the English-speaking world midway through fifth grade. By the end of sixth, I was among the top performers in the area of spelling.
There is an intuition to some of the spelling which, combined with a decent memory, makes it fairly easy.
I think the underlying key to it is that there aren't that many choices for how a word, or part of a word, can be spelled. So even if you have to memorize the spelling by rote, you're not memorizing the actual letter-for-letter spelling; you're only memorizing which of the plausible ways of spelling that word applies to it. That is a lot less information.
If you happen not to remember a spelling, then you can hypothesize the several plausible ways in which it may be spelled. These possibilities reduce the problem to a multiple-choice question, rather than cold recall, which is easier since the choices jog your memory.
For years the Western world dreamed about a universal tongue. It's here now, and it's English. Every complaint in the article is correct, but ask yourself this: if you had to choose between English and nothing, which would you choose?
What a silly article, he should read some Wittgenstein, the purpose of a language is to communicate - English has won the darwinian race to become the global standard for this - stop moaning, accept it and get over it, there is nothing you or anyone can do now.
Many dimwits believe Mandarin will take on this role - zero chance (unless by force) it's too late, Mandarin does not have the geographic reach and is fatally handicapped by it's crazily difficult to master, pictorial text representation system, which even natives struggle with.
All Human languages have faults and are difficult.
The effort and time to master a foreign language is huge for most of us, therefore the benefit must be equally huge.
English is the only langauge that provides enough benefit and thus incentive to learn, for the vast majority.
English also has by far the largest vocabulary - therefore must be the best system we have,to describe abstract ideas or to represent reality.
The only factor I can think of that might stop English being understood by nearly every human within a couple of generations or so is real time translation, which would actually be a shame I think.
While I understand that the article is more about academic fun than seriousness, it does annoy me that articles like this go "X is not ideal! Y is better than X at foo, and Z is better than X at bar!". You never get a gestalt comparison, just "English is a shit language, because Spanish is better at this one item, and Hawaiian is better at this one item, and Swahili is better at this one item".
You get similar articles in the vein of animal comparison: "The human is physically feeble and weak, because our vision doesn't match that of an eagle, our jaws don't match those of a jaguar, and we can't swim like a dolphin", when in fact, we're physically just fine. Jaguars don't have eagle eyesight either, nor can they swim like dolphins.
> then went on to discuss how English managed to attain its astonishing (and increasing) global status despite its manifest unsuitability.
Not that mysterious: the global superpowers of the 19th (UK) and 20-21st centuries (US) both spoke English, and both were significant exporters of culture. If you wanted to be a have instead of a have-not, you were better off speaking English than Spanish, Hawaiian, or Swahili...
I love the English language. Its quirks an inconsistencies reflect the turbulent, chaotic history of the speakers of that language. From the original ice age settlers, who left little or no trace of their language even though the British are largely descended from them[0], to the Celtic invaders who brought Celtic language and culture to the British Isles around, 2500 years ago, to the Anglo-Saxons who came 1000 years later laying the base of the English language, and finally the Norman invasion which brought its own words. Apart from migrations and invasions of the homeland, there was direct borrowing from French and Latin, as well as probably many non-European influences from the colonial era.
But I can see how these things are just annoyances to people who are just trying to learn English to communicate. In any case, we are stuck with English, that's network effects for you.
[+] [-] crazygringo|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings. There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones. I could go on... Every language has its annoyances.
And honestly, the spelling's not that bad. Having spent years as an English teacher abroad, spelling was just never an issue. It's easy to complain about, but it's just not a big deal in practice.
[1] I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine. And normal dictionaries won't even tell you which verb takes which.
[+] [-] muddyrivers|10 years ago|reply
I find another "undesirable feature" mentioned in the article, "absurdly large multilayer vocabulary", is quite nice in the sense that it helps learn other languages belonging to the same family, like German, French, Spanish, etc. For my untrained ears, English and German are more similar to each other than Mandarin (my native tongue) and many dialects in southern China.
[+] [-] wirrbel|10 years ago|reply
To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily because words were often alike (sometimes the same words have different meanings, "false friends"). But of course in contrast to french, one does not have to learn conjugations, gender of words, etc.
But after having reached an intermediate level of both english and french, things started to change. Perfecting your English skills progressively gets harder, whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language.
As it turnes out, English is huge. The english dictionary is huge. It is basically the size of the german dictionary and the french dictionary combined, as it draws words from 3 main sources French, Old Saxon and Scandinavic, and then was happy to incorporate words from all over the place. So you have the word "hunger" (germanic root, compare german "Hunger") and "famine" (romance root, compare french "faim" meaning hunger and "famine" meaning famine). To this day, using english on a daily basis and reading many english books, I see a lot of words I have not yet learned.
The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to reach an intermediate level of english.
At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.
[+] [-] sdegutis|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] balladeer|10 years ago|reply
No, spelling is really bad and pronunciations are far worse! Pronunciations are just absurd.
As a non-native English speaker, with close to native fluency in written English and slightly (or maybe quite) worse in its spoken form, I do understand the importance of Engish as a universal language, esp. in today's world, but fixing its spelling and pronunciations would really be helpful. I find it strange that there are no steps towards it, or if there are maybe I am not aware of that.
I mean there is no damn reason to pronounce beard and heard[1] differently unless of course because it's just supposed to be so. And did we really had to say creature and create[2] this distinctly?
1. http://www.etni.org.il/farside/funpoem.htm
2. http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...
[+] [-] gbog|10 years ago|reply
According to this view a perfect language would have... what? So are we in the same game as in computer language, with this discussion about how many features should we allow?
My view on this may be uncommon: Less features for computer language migth be better in some cases, but more features in human languages is always better, because the human brain will make the best out of it.
Taking a simple case: two idioms with the same meaning is bad in python, should be removed if possible. Two words with the same meaning in English (e.g. to use/to utilise, tired/fatigued) is good, because both words will fork away and each carry subtle differences that will be powerful.
English is highly unsuitable, but not for this reason.
[+] [-] Maken|10 years ago|reply
I don't see the problem with making the verb express how probable or feasible the action is, aside from the fact that you have to remember how to conjugate the verb instead of adding an adverb to express the uncertainty (which certainly avoids memorizing, since you can reuse the same adverb with almost every verb).
[+] [-] gavinpc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deciplex|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] conceit|10 years ago|reply
I'm not convinced just because it sounds odd to me.
[+] [-] HelloMcFly|10 years ago|reply
This is a good time to say that I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time. If anyone finds this kind of conversation interesting I highly recommend checking out The Great Courses "Language A to Z" audiobook / audio lecture series. It's incredibly fascinating.
[+] [-] purpled_haze|10 years ago|reply
I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.
[+] [-] newman314|10 years ago|reply
This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.
[+] [-] alanwatts|10 years ago|reply
Marshall McLuhan made such speculation in his book The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
>Now, in the electric age, the very instantaneous nature of co-existence among our technological instruments has created a crisis quite new in human history. Our extended faculties and senses now constitute a single field of experience which demands that they become collectively conscious. Our technologies, like our private senses, now demand an interplay and ratio that makes rational co-existence possible. As long as our technologies were as slow as the wheel or the alphabet or money, the fact that they were separate, closed systems was socially and psychically supportable. This is not true now when sight and sound and movement are simultaneous and global in extent. A ratio of interplay among these extensions of our human functions is now as necessary collectively as it has always been for our private and personal rationality in terms of our private senses or "wits," as they were once called.
[+] [-] curiousGambler|10 years ago|reply
On the topic of languages, I wonder if the Germans have a word for this yet... If so, English speakers should totally import it as they did Shadenfreude.
[+] [-] dasil003|10 years ago|reply
Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it are there.
[+] [-] curun1r|10 years ago|reply
Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too).
Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.
[+] [-] wolfgke|10 years ago|reply
One reason is that many 20th-century totalitarian regimes had a problem with Esperanto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Responses_of_20th-ce... lists Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain, Soviet Union and Imperial Japan.
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...
[+] [-] vinay427|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panglott|10 years ago|reply
If English ever came under serious pressure, many would abandon it in an instant.
[+] [-] jodrellblank|10 years ago|reply
Because the last thing Europe needs is another euro-language. It's easier to learn because it's deliberately made simpler - but it is still learning another language, and learning another language to any kind of fluency is still a multi year effort with thousands of things to memorise and practise.
As well as "no one speaks it" (approximately true), no areas speak it, no laws are written in it, no road signs are written in it, no maps, nothing to push anyone to learn it. And where not-using-any-agreed-interlanguage does cost, the costs are hidden or swallowed unquestioningly and the consequences brushed aside:
"An effective malaria control program would cost only $800,000 a year," says a French doctor fighting disease in Laos, "but there is no money to finance the operations. Simply no money. No money to pay the staff, no money to purchase equipment, no money to buy gas. There is simply no money." (5) But when the Twenty-Eighth World Health Assembly decided - against the recommendation of the WHO Secretariat - to add two languages to the four already in use, it accepted to earmark for its language services $5,000,000 a year, "to begin with" (6). It refrained from carrying out a cost/effectiveness analysis that might have determined if its decision would facilitate or complicate matters. As a matter of fact, observation of the functioning of international organizations shows that the addition of new languages entails for them only complications and added costs. True, a few States are put in a better position, since they can use their own language, but this involves no advantage for the organization as a whole, nor for most of the Member States. Yet, all international organizations have undergone the same evolution: they have kept increasing their language budget at the expense of the activities they were meant to perform. To save a child from malnutrition costs only $10 per year. This is the cost of one 7 word sentence in a document translated at the UN, (7)which translates many millions of words a year. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm
Translation is expensive. In the oligolingual system, every thousand words in an original text cost US$2030 for translation in seven languages (average for UN and WHO), or more than two dollars per word (Allen, Sibahi and Sohm, 1980, table 7). Such a sum seems more realistic than the figure of 36 cents a word given for the European Union (Rollnick, 1991). Apparently, the European Union translates daily 3,150,000 words, so that translation costs there, in the most conservative estimate, US$ 1,134,000 per day (Rollnick, 1991).
The situation is quite different with the two multilingual systems, which rely heavily on translation and interpretation. With simultaneous interpretation, a loss of 10% and a distortion of 2 to 3 % are considered normal. The conditions are such that it is impossible to transmit a speech in another language without gaps and errors while it is being delivered. The interpreter must not only have a good delivery, a perfect mastery of both languages, a quick mind and sharp hearing, he must also be fairly familiar with the subject in order to repeat in the target language everything said in the original using the appropriate technical terminology and without dropping important elements. Such a combination of deep linguistic competence and vast technical knowledge can rarely be found. Hence the large number of inaccurate interpreters noted in UN documents (King, Bryntsev and Sohm, 1977, par. 89 and 94).
- http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/sociolinguistic...
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] danieltillett|10 years ago|reply
I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1].
1. http://www.cutspel.com
[+] [-] Scarblac|10 years ago|reply
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html
[+] [-] yongjik|10 years ago|reply
Nah, I don't really believe it.
* The first sentence was more or less direct word-to-word mapping of a Korean sentence meaning "If I have a very basic knowledge of English, then I can convey what I want to say?"
I suspect that people say "it's very easy to speak [English] badly" because the worst they've ever encountered is a still half-decent attempt at English grammar (with years of training by the speaker), because anything below that is totally unintelligible and won't attract any attention.
[+] [-] Spooky23|10 years ago|reply
It was a nightmare, and we were separated by a common language. But somehow, we understood enough to get it done.
[+] [-] jan_g|10 years ago|reply
On the other hand, consider Danish language: similar grammar to English, also many almost same words, but one needs lots and lots of learning/practice to be able to speak to and understand other Danish speakers.
[+] [-] thinkpad20|10 years ago|reply
That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".
[+] [-] maemilius|10 years ago|reply
For example, their basic substitutions convert "who" to "ho" - I doubt many Americans would think to pronounce these the same way - and "-ing" to "-ng" - which, while still more or less obvious, invokes a harder, more throat-y sound than the original to me.
I wish I had some grasp of pronunciation keys, as that would probably make this easier to convey...
All that aside, I can read the "advanced substitutions" with very little trouble. Though, I attribute that more to the amount of text in their examples than anything - context is king in English, after all.
[+] [-] tim333|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvense|10 years ago|reply
And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whose native language is being replaced by it, I know that English is a perfect example of this.
[+] [-] awaworht|10 years ago|reply
A bit of a nitpick, but this isn't really accurate. The Jouyou kanji[1] contain 2,136 Chinese characters that all Japanese people must learn in school. In addition, the Jinmeiyou kanji[2] (used for names) contains an additional 843 Chinese characters. And it's not uncommon for speakers of Japanese to know many more. There are more than 50,000 Chinese characters listed in the daikanwajiten[3] with Japanese pronunciation (most are not used in either Chinese or Japanese). In fact, the number of Chinese characters used in Japanese has increased with the use of computer input[4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-Wa_Jiten [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_way...
[+] [-] chaoky|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joolze|10 years ago|reply
First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you basically brute force your way through the family to find your word.
Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively remove words from their language.
And the phonetics? Go try out fucking Czech. I've heard it's legitimately impossible to become fluent in Czech. Or Austrian dialect, which has something like 4 different "r"s.
"Hawaiian no consonant is ever followed by another consonant" ... yeah you also frequently run into the german nightmare of neverending words like "humahumanukanukaapuaa". You think that's a better way to deal with things? An easy to pronounce marathon?
The large vocabulary is undesirable? The large vocabulary, with extreme possible specificity, is what makes English so attractive for scientific application.
And complaining about grammar? English has one of the easiest grammars to learn and get started with, sure it will take a few decades to not make any mistakes, but for just getting going, it is remarkably easy. No genders (some languages have 5 or more genders for things, see czech), no conjugation.
Sorry for the rant, but if you're just gonna post some BS one sided oped I'm gonna do the same. I personally don't think English is the best choice either. But one sidedness is ultra-obnoxious.
[+] [-] tokenadult|10 years ago|reply
There is a whole website about why Esperanto never caught on as a world language (focused mostly on its linguistic features) by a writer who has considerably more acquaintance with formal linguistics and with a variety of world languages than the inventor of Esperanto ever had.[2]
[1] original article:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-a...
HN discussion thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080
[2] "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" by Justin Rye
http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/
[+] [-] ktRolster|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jodrellblank|10 years ago|reply
Take the clockwork morphology which Rye derides because, genuinely, "truanta" in Esperanto doesn't mean the same as truant" in English(??) That same clockwork nature was described by Claude Piron in these terms:
You never feel quite secure in a foreign language. I have more than 40,000 hours of study and practice of English, but when I improvised the inaugural speech last Friday, since, as you know, I had to replace the Secretary of the Club of Rome at the last minute, I mistakenly said costed instead of cost. I suddenly realized that I did not remember what the right form was. Irregularity of grammar always puts non-native speakers in an inferior position. [..] In Esperanto you feel natural and at ease because you feel secure. You know that you can follow your natural reflexes. This is never the case in another language. I once pronounced indict as rhyming with convict. Why? Because I knew the word only through reading and I generalized the pronunciation pattern I had assimilated from derelict, depict, afflict and similar words. This happened to me forty (18) years after I had started learning English, a language I have never ceased to practice ever since. It shows that really mastering English is out of my reach, as is confirmed by the fact that, in spite of so much more practice than the average European, I still cannot publish a text in English without having somebody correct my language. - http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/effects.htm
These kind of claims are what makes it stand out as potentially useful as a second language, despite being imperfect, compared to learning other natural languages.
Rye is doing the kind of 'Unix haters handbook' of nitpicking.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] esaym|10 years ago|reply
And for me? I like it. It's like Perl. You don't have to be skilled wizard just to use it and hack something together that will work and get the meaning through, even if it is dirty.
[+] [-] BuckRogers|10 years ago|reply
Due to these reasons and more (encouraging friendship with neighbors both here and on a national scale), I've fully embraced Spanish as a 2nd language as an American. It's a good thing.
There's a reason there's no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking Latin America.
[+] [-] danjayh|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beloch|10 years ago|reply
On second thought, maybe we should leave the Welsh out of this. Yes... That would be for the best.
Anyways, while it is certainly ambitious to start using phonetic spellings in a limited way, it's far from unprecedented. In 1929 the Turks walked away from the Ottoman alphabet entirely and adopted the modern Turkish Alphabet, which is basically the Latin alphabet with some phonetic characters added. The result is that modern Turkish sounds like it's written, and it's easy to pick up pronunciation from spelling. The Turkish alphabet is relatively simple compared to full IPA, which is part of its appeal.
[+] [-] TazeTSchnitzel|10 years ago|reply
English, like any other language, can communicate ideas well. And that is all it needs to do.
[+] [-] switch007|10 years ago|reply
That almost reads as if the author does not believe Spanish has diphthongs...? Anyone who thinks that should spend some more time in the "aula".
> Even before we get to grammar, then, and the roughly 200 irregular verbs of our misbegotten language...
Only 200!? That's amazing.
[+] [-] kazinator|10 years ago|reply
There is an intuition to some of the spelling which, combined with a decent memory, makes it fairly easy.
I think the underlying key to it is that there aren't that many choices for how a word, or part of a word, can be spelled. So even if you have to memorize the spelling by rote, you're not memorizing the actual letter-for-letter spelling; you're only memorizing which of the plausible ways of spelling that word applies to it. That is a lot less information.
If you happen not to remember a spelling, then you can hypothesize the several plausible ways in which it may be spelled. These possibilities reduce the problem to a multiple-choice question, rather than cold recall, which is easier since the choices jog your memory.
[+] [-] tomcam|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] garyclarke27|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|10 years ago|reply
You get similar articles in the vein of animal comparison: "The human is physically feeble and weak, because our vision doesn't match that of an eagle, our jaws don't match those of a jaguar, and we can't swim like a dolphin", when in fact, we're physically just fine. Jaguars don't have eagle eyesight either, nor can they swim like dolphins.
> then went on to discuss how English managed to attain its astonishing (and increasing) global status despite its manifest unsuitability.
Not that mysterious: the global superpowers of the 19th (UK) and 20-21st centuries (US) both spoke English, and both were significant exporters of culture. If you wanted to be a have instead of a have-not, you were better off speaking English than Spanish, Hawaiian, or Swahili...
[+] [-] force_reboot|10 years ago|reply
But I can see how these things are just annoyances to people who are just trying to learn English to communicate. In any case, we are stuck with English, that's network effects for you.
[0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_...