26 ms·
The Unsuitability of English (2015)
- qb45 11y agoReminds me of certain quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup. My personal pet peeve is when you concatenate two words to end up with something sounding completely different, say in finite infinite. Just doesn't make sense at all.
- rvense 11y agoThis 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.
- Mithaldu 11y ago> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Probably true, but not because of the vowels, but because of rhythms and consonants for languages other than english. Particularly vowels are divisive, and to take spanish as an example, consider this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ Watch it with your mouse cursor off, and read the spanish bits, then sound them out, then check whether you got it right. (If you know spanish, find someone who doesn't.) As an english person, you'll get a lot of them wrong. However most people from the european mainland will get most of them right, especially germans like me. Barring the ll sound, and the rhythms, spanish sounds very close to how a german would read it. Yes, there will be accents, but nothing as strong as you get with a european mainlander speaking english. And that is entirely because english vowels are a mess that can only be conquered by memorization.
- moomin 11y agoWell, strictly speaking everyone has an accent, including native speakers. But being able to pass for a native is perfectly possible; in fact my brother can do it in France, a country that is famous for spotting foreigners a mile off. How did he do it? He spent several years there and really worked at it (he can also do a convincing range of British accents). His one regret is that he nailed it in a somewhat bucolic part of France, so the cool Parisiennes just assume he's a paysan. Is it harder? Yes. Impossible? Far from it. Although I'll bet you elocution lessons would help (my brother hasn't done any).
- Turing_Machine 11y agoI used to know a woman who learned French in Belgium (her husband was career military, and they were there for quite a long time). When she visited France, they all assumed she was Belgian.
- bonoboTP 11y agoI agree as a Hungarian who speaks English and German. German pronunciation was much easier to learn and not just because of the writing system. Simply the whole phonology is closer (except for the German throat-R, we roll our Rs in Hungarian). English has this weird flow to it, this kind of liquidlike smeared sound. And the intonation and stress is also very alien. It's also usually easier for a beginner to understand another beginner from a different country, than a native speaker pronouncing the same (simple) sentences.
- carlob 11y agoI don't think that it's a matter of accent. I cannot speak for Spanish, but adult Italian learners do have an accent, but being that in general written Italian is pretty much phonetic and we only have 7 distinct vowel sounds however you mangle it you can probably approximate it well enough to be understood. Some things are really hard in Italian like the GL in aglio (garlic), but for example most Romans tend to turn it into a semiconsonant (like the first i in ieri). So basically you'll be understood. Contrast that with French, that is also mostly phonetic but has a lot more vowels (around 17), that is also a language that is usually much harder to learn to speak as an adult (but it's not so bad if you just want to read. And maybe that is why everybody has this stereotype of the rude Parisian that never tries to understand a foreigner speaking French (though there might be more to the rudeness of Parisians).
- ApplaudPumice 11y agoIn english words change meaning just by slightly changing accent. Ship, sheep buy, by sheet, shit see also http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/homophones-same-pronunciation-different-meaning http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/homophones-sam... Also english doesn't (compared to italian) is filled with exceptions.
- igravious 11y agoWiktionary lists bi, buy, and by as homophones to bye https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bye https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bye IPA: /baɪ/
- DanBC 11y agoMany people are going to pronounce "buy", "by", and "bye" exactly the same way. The only way to tell the difference would be from how the word is used in a sentence.
- foldr 11y agoThe difference between 'ship' and 'sheep' and 'sheet' and 'shit' is the difference between a tense and a lax vowel. Italian doesn't make use of this distinction, so it's hard for Italians to hear the difference, but it's a perfectly ordinary distinction in vowel quality used in many languages. There is no difference at all in the pronunciation of 'buy' and 'by'.
- stordoff 11y agoThis also varies between English accents. Many American-English accents will pronounce "Mary", "merry", and "marry" the same, but in British-English they all sound different.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pcrh 11y agoIt might be worth noting that the author is English. The English have a very peculiar relationship with accent, in that one's accent is one of the prime indicators of social class in their country. As such the author may be unknowingly over-emphasizing the role of distinct vowel pronunciations, assigning their importance to intelligibility or understanding rather than merely to accent.
- pera 11y agoI know a few people who started learning Spanish as an adult (20+) and developed a perfect accent after a couple of years of speaking Spanish only. It's not common, but it is possible. What I find funny about English is that even native speakers don't know (or agree) how to pronounce some words :)
- danieltillett 11y agoThat is because there is no official English.
- wolfgke 11y agoAt least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_United_Nations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...
- notahacker 11y agoBut for a tiny, well connected island Britain has a remarkable diversity in pronunciation. Even speakers of "RP", a supposedly region-neutral "educated" accent which is as close to "official" British English as we've ever had permits variations in pronunciation so marked that speakers of one variant can find speakers of other variants' pronunciation of a particular word comical.
- vacri 11y agoBritish spelling is not the British accent. One estimate had the English accent changing about every 25 miles as you travel through Britain. Have you seen Hot Fuzz? In it, the police visit a farmer with a strong West Country accent, and take an interpreter with them. All parties are speaking English in the scene, but the farmer's words are so strongly accented, the interpreter has to translate. That scene was based on a direct observation that the writers made while researching the film...
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
- ktRolster 11y ago> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language). Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.
- jeena 11y agoI find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite. I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.
- NolF 11y agoIn Spanish culture correcting someone miss-pronunciation is quite common. It's one of the reasons why it can be quicker to master the language by immersion that in an ultra-polite society found in English speaking languages. The best way to work on your accent is to record yourself and listen to it. Ideally you would have a native say it in a native manner. Movies, TV shows, and particularly audiobooks (with the printed copy) can be a great sources to work on it. I have encouraged my co-workers to correct my English lately (12 years in Australia). They've been teaching me some of the local sayings, and correcting my pronunciation etc... Things that in Spain would have been picked up and addressed much sooner.
- jeena 11y agoRecording myself is an interesting idea, I will try that. I also told all my coworkers to correct me but of the 10 people I cpeak to often only one does, for which I am super thankfull.
- ktRolster 11y agoThe first tip is to learn to listen to yourself. If someone ever corrects you, that is gold. 1) Focus on the vowels. They will help you get the resonance right (the resonance is how you hold the muscles in your mouth, so the sound seems to come from the back of your throat like in Russian or the front of your mouth like in Korean) 2) Focus on the rhythm of the language. I'm sure you know what I mean here. 3) Focus on the intonation: what pitches do they have? Scottish has kind of a lilt, for example. 4) Try to notice "phonemes", and I put it in quotes to expand the idea to mean "what native speakers consider important". For example, Mandarin speakers can't hear a vowel change to save their life, but if you get the intonation slightly wrong they glare at you. 5) Focus on details, listen to how letters change when they are between other letters, etc. (Watching to how people respond to your speech can be helpful, especially if they don't understand. Small words especially. For example, a listener might get confused and not understand the world "Lip", even though they would understand "Literally", if your "L" is slightly off) 6) Don't underestimate the value of correct grammar in improving your accent. Incidentally, I learned of the existence of this as formal theory from David Stern (although his focus is on stage accents which is a little different) Also, if you have any tips I'd love to hear them too :)
- umanwizard 11y agoYou're wrong. I learned to speak French at age 17 with no accent. That counts as "adult" by any meaningful metric. Edit: By "no accent" I of course mean "indistinguishable from a native French speaker". Everyone has an accent so technically "no accent" is meaningless.
- dasil003 11y agoThis 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.
- danieltillett 11y agoWe 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_T...
- jes5199 11y agoBut we don't actually know what having access to a babelfish does to language learning. It's easy to assume it would make learning a second language obsolete, but a counterproposal is that it makes the other language(s) more accessible to learn - for example, I've picked up enough Chinese characters to navigate a Chinese ecommerce site by using Google Translate until I started to recognize patterns myself
- danieltillett 11y agoThis is true, but given human nature it unlikely that people will both to go to the effort of learning a second or third language once there is an easier approach.
- curun1r 11y agoWhich is a shame, since the value of learning a second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc) language isn't limited to being able to converse with the people who speak it. Learning a new language can help you understand the world and yourself to a greater degree than is possible when you're forced to think inside the confines of a single language. It's a trippy feeling the first time you realize that you're unable to translate something from an acquired language into your native language not because you don't understand what you're attempting to translate, but because none of the words in your native tongue feel right. But it eventually starts to happen a lot and you realize that there's so much that you weren't able to easily conceptualize because you were constrained by the limits of your native tongue.
- danieltillett 11y agoThe 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]. 1. http://www.cutspel.com http://www.cutspel.com
- Scarblac 11y ago"There exists today a universal language that is spoken and understood almost everywhere: it is Broken English." https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/casimir.html
- pessimizer 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_%28Nerriere%29
- thinkpad20 11y agoI 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".
- danieltillett 11y agoThe thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.
- twelvechairs 11y agoOne of the major reasons english has succeeded is because it adapts (ie it doesnt have fixed rules). This means it is inclusive and future-proof. Imagine if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks like it is spelled incorrectly.
- wolfgke 11y ago> Imagine if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks like it is spelled incorrectly. This would prevent some domain scams, which I would consider as an advantage.
- danjayh 11y agoAs 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 :).
- beat 11y agoThe one that baffles me is how Chinese speakers (and other tone-language speakers) ever learn to speak and understand spoken English effectively. In English, tones (changes in pitch) are used to imply emotional shadings like sarcasm and surprise. In Chinese, tones are actually different words. It's hard for an English speaker to learn to pronounce tonal langauges (I did one year of Chinese, and my wife has a master's degree in it), but I'm amazed that Chinese people ever wrap their heads around all the unspoken, untaught meaning hidden in spoken English.
- lstamour 11y agoIf the anime I've been watching for almost a decade has taught me anything, it's that for Japanese at least, the clues behind sarcasm there and in English aren't quite that dissimilar. Tone of voice can still be used, you just have to be a bit more careful about it. Sometimes it just comes down to accent or word choice. After Googling, the consensus seems to be that sarcasm really comes down to the shared context in the conversation. If it's obvious and you both get the joke, the sarcasm worked. It's just as easy to miss sarcastic comments in English -- as not everyone says it with the same verbal emphasis. And of course, we can always understand sarcasm online. </sarcasm> (Okay, that was a poor joke... moving on...)
- aninhumer 11y agoJapanese isn't a tonal language, so it's not really comparable to Chinese in this regard.
- HelloMcFly 11y agoLanguage 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.
- purpled_haze 11y agoSo 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.
- tosseraccount 11y agoMost similar language to English, except for Frisian, is Dutch. Here's an admittedly imperfect graph showing this : https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lexical-distance-among-the-languages-of-europe-2-1-mid-size.png https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lex... . French, Spanish, Italian , Portugese and Romanians can often understand each other to a limited degree as all are modern mutations from Latin. English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a little Dutch. The Dutch not liking English is probably just a little neighborhood rivalry. As I understand it, they don't like the Germans for some more recent transgressions.
- erdojo 11y agoTrolls will say anything these days to get attention. If reality is up, someone will claim down is better. If something is cool, someone will say it sucks. I don't expect that English will become the global default language, but I do expect it will/is be a common backup. Why? Trade agreements over the last 40 years have dramatically increased global business collaborations. American companies took the early initiative - not just in one market but many. Smart foreigners knew early on that learning English was a way to make money, to work more easily with these companies who were investing mega bucks. English's pervasiveness had nothing to do with its suitability or superiority or any academic reasoning. It was a side effect.
- esaym 11y agoEnglish 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.
- kbenson 11y agoAnd like Perl, mastery can result in beautiful, concise and clear expression. I doubt this is a coincidence, as Larry Wall is a linguist.
- switch007 11y ago> 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... Only 200!? That's amazing.
- gardano 11y agoI cannot help but remember "The Ketchup Song (Aserejé) [0], whose lyrics are more or less a bastardisation of "Rapper's Delight" in Spanish. [1] Such a joyful embracing of purposeful misinterpretation of lyrics purportedly in English! [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0PisGe66mY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0PisGe66mY [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ketchup_Song_(Aserejé) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ketchup_Song_(Aserejé)
- tokenadult 11y agoThis 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] [1] original article: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-and-its-undeserved-good-luck/ http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-a... HN discussion thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080 [2] "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" by Justin Rye http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/ http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/
- ktRolster 11y agoEnglish 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.
- tankenmate 11y agoEnglish still declines personal pronouns; I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.
- atemerev 11y agoEnglish is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly unpronounceable. The best European language is, of course, Italian.
- tankenmate 11y agoActually modern English still has the remnants of declension (conjugation is to verb as declension is to noun); personal pronouns. I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs. You could argue that the genitive case (possessive) is also declension in English; i.e. <noun>'s, <plural noun ending in s>'.
- umanwizard 11y agoEnglish has way more diphthongs than French does, and French spelling is also much more regular than English (99% of the time, I can predict what an unfamiliar French word means if I see how it's spelled. This would be much harder in English, which is my native language.)
- paride5745 11y agoAs an Italian native speaker, I do not fully agree. Italian is great, but often is too much rhetorical and "slow" to convey a message, while English is quicker and allows you to "hack" the language in a unique way. I do not love English, but I think that it is good enough and the quicker language to use out there (albeit one of the hardest to master properly). Italian is excellent, especially compared to other (major) European languages (hello French and German). But it is not the quicker language to learn at an acceptable level IMHO.
- atemerev 11y agoPerhaps, but this is not a language feature. The only reason that English looks like an easy language to learn is that everyone is now adjusted to less-than-perfect English of non-native speakers. And if you choose to speak Italian (or, G-d forbid, French), you'd better do it well enough.
- awaworht 11y ago>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]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-Wa_Jiten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-Wa_Jiten [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_ways_of_writing_Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_way...
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoAll 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.
- prostoalex 11y agoIthkuil is a fairly interesting language to explore for efficient communications http://www.ithkuil.net/ http://www.ithkuil.net/ with a great back story http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beg...
- jiiam 11y agoI just want to point out to all those who believe that "with minimal effort you can get your point across in English" that it simply isn't true. You think you can do it with just a few years of learning, but talking in English to someone you share a language with is entirely different than talking to someone of a very distant origin. I remember trying to do it with my classmates in our very similar accents, with our common lexicon, as opposed to talking to Asian people during visits abroad (I am European). Even with fellow Europeans from a different country it's not easy to get the message across, even between similar languages like Spanish and Italian, to the point that if you're from Spain and need to get something in an Italian shop, you're probably better off by speaking Spanish, statistically it will be understood much easier than English. To sum up, English is not easy at all. It's just a bit easier and surely worth the effort given the great amount of resources already available in English, including the giant pool of speakers.
- music 11y agoEnglish to me is like Scheme(Lisp). They share very simple(not a synonym of easy) syntax, yet actually knowing(owning) either is very different from simply knowing their grammar.
- aminok 11y agoEnglish, the PHP of natural languages.
- Randgalt 11y agoYes, of course nothing of worth has been created with English. What bollocks.
- joolze 11y agoThis is absurd. 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.
- kuschku 11y ago> 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. That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is several times worse. > The large vocabulary is undesirable? The large vocabulary, with extreme possible specificity, is what makes English so attractive for scientific application. Wrong. Having a word for every topic is what makes english useful – but that doesn’t mean a large vocabulary. If you build words piece by piece – say, "backyard-filled-with-children" (kindergarten) or "spirit-of-the-time" (Zeitgeist) or "joy-of-someone-else’s-pain" (Schadenfreude) they are easily understandable, people need a tiny vocabulary to understand even the most complex words or legal terms, and it’s easily writable, too. > 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. LOL. Ever tried understanding all the different versions of time in English? Simple past, past progressive, present progressive, simple present, etc and your brain starts melting.
- beloch 11y agoPerhaps 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.
- boken 11y agoPhonetic alphabets have strong precedents - and have had strong backers - in English as well. See the Shavian alphabet[1] for a relatively recent example. Others were drawn up by such as Benjamin Franklin and Sir Isaac Pitman, famed for his shorthand. One of the greatest impediments to these systems was that, while pronunciation may be picked up from spelling in a so-called phonemic system (assuming a bog-standard means of determining stress, which English doesn't have), spelling does not always follow from pronunciation - not unless you happen to speak precisely the English that the standards body prefers. English phonology, particularly when it comes to vowels, varies so wildly from place to place that any new, purportedly simpler system will be met with resistance from the majority of speakers to whom the system seems to be wrong, messy, and arbitrary. As a simple and common example, that of 'Mary, merry, and marry': do you collapse these three vowels, as many English speakers do, thus frustrating those who would like to make the distinction in print; or do you retain the three and in doing so create three new arbitrary-seeming spellings for words that to many speakers are homophones? Do you, as in Shavian, retain an R at the ends of "star" and "mother," or do you bow to common British pronunciations and excise these in spelling as in speech - something another phonetician, Henry Sweet[2], would have recommended? (We see something similar in the promotion of and resistance to new programming languages: fixing some problems is not always enough to attract adopters away from a language which is at least doing the job. Imperfections stand out in novel tools, even if other improvements have been made and the imperfections are nothing new.) Shorthand authors were well aware of the difficulties in teaching a "phonography," or phoneme-based system, to a duplicitous student body. This is one of the reasons that many English shorthand systems do away with almost all vowels, except perhaps to indicate where the vowel occurs and what broad family of like sounds it belongs to. Of course, eliminating vowels is one of the best ways to promote speed in writing; but there was also the problem that, where writing a vowel was desired (e.g. to differentiate 'tarp' from 'trap'), not all students will agree on which symbol ought to be used for each vowel sound - the sound varying from person to person, even within the same county or town. These shorthand systems were left ambiguous on purpose, so that teaching speed might be improved alongside writing speed. No need for a student to learn whether the first vowel in 'father' is indeed the same as the one in 'bought' - and from whose mouth, anyway? It is possible that in an IPA-based system, English spelling may differ from person to person as widely as pronunciation does. Surely, however, that would make things more difficult for second-language learners than having to contend with one standard that happens to be riddled with inconsistencies? (Or perhaps not?) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sweet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sweet
- stevebmark 11y agoEnglish is indeed a terrible language, with British / European versions being objectively worse. The improvements to English came from Noah Webster (of Merriam-Webster fame) who was the sole driving force in re-spelling words, "colour" to "color," etc. He helped remove the arbitrary rules as best as he could. This is a clear improvement, but some of his more aggressive changes didn't catch on. English needs another reformation, since it's unrealistic the language will disappear anytime soon. It's always been reforming subtly, where we see useful abbreviations form colloquially, like goodbye is a contraction of "God be with you." You could even argue the use of "u" instead of "you" in text messages is a version of this.
- BuckRogers 11y agoThis 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.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoYes, though the gendered nouns and verb conjugations are a chore. No language is perfect.
- BuckRogers 11y agoPerfect is the enemy of better. English has verb conjugations too. Grab, grabbed, grabbing etc. While we do have a few gendered nouns such as blonde vs blond. I will grant you gendered nouns on the whole, but you're still only standing on one leg (gendered nouns) which is a relic but overshadowed by any number of facts in Spanish's favor. Spanish is mostly phonetic, which for dyslexics makes them easier to learn. This has been proven. The benefits to Spanish over alternatives are long-reaching. Such as that English is a linguistic island or that Spanish orthography is objectively the best on Earth for natural, world-languages. It was also better put together with the inclusion of the '¿' '¡' marks. It's a fantastic piece of orthography. As far as being a chore, if I didn't speak English or Spanish, I'd much rather be asked to learn Spanish between the two and would prefer to not waste my time with English or similar nonsensical language. Mastery in any language is a lifelong effort but Spanish has the linguistic gold standard for its written form. While it's still another language and not 'easy', there are savings on effort and time overall to reach fluency. I speak both daily. In programming terms, it would be just "the best tool for the job".
- tomcam 11y agoFor 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?
- kuschku 11y agoNothing. Rather no universal language and having to translate than forcing every child to learn this abomination of a language. Maybe I’m biased as someone who had to learn english as second language, and had to memorize every word multiple times - just for the different ways of spellings, or composita (helpful vs. help and full, wtf?)... People always complain about having to learn gender for the German words – but that’s 2 bits of data plus the pronunciation – which is the same as the spelling. In English, you have the spelling, the spelling of various combinations, and different variations of pronunciations. It’s hard to speak properly, impossible to learn, and its only benefit is that everyone speaks it. It’s the PHP of languages.
- chaoky 11y agoThe 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.
- cbr 11y agoLet's say we pick a random person and make them learn a completely unrelated language. Sometimes they will learn faster than others, like Spanish or Swahili vs English or Mandarin. Why would we expect them all to be the same difficulty?
- chaoky 11y agoIt's not a question of inherent difficulty, which doesn't make sense to quantify absolutely. It's all about how similar it is to the random person's native language, phonologically, morphologically, syntactically etc... Obviously Portuguese would be faster for a Spanish speaker to learn, since they are very similar in many aspects (in fact, they are both very conservative Iberian Romance languages) than it would be for a Spanish speaker to learn Polish. On the other hand, Polish would be easier to learn than Spanish for a Czech speaker. None of these are objectively more "difficult" or "complex" than one another. They are just "different".
- cbr 11y agoWhy doesn't it make sense to talk about the inherent difficulty of a language? I agree that some languages are related and this eases learning (PT to ES, PL to CZ) but why can't we look at learning speed on completely unrelated languages? For example, get some monolingual Quechua speakers and some monolingual Tamil speakers, and have them each learn the other language. Which group learns faster? The group that learns faster is learning the easier language. I realize that this isn't practical to actually do as an experiment with all the world's language pairs, but I do think it demonstrates that inherent difficulty is a thing. One thing that sort of shows this, though it's kind of distorted by writing systems, would be charts like this from language learning companies: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang... For example, they think for an English speaker Swahili is easier than Nepali is easier than Finnish.
- aaron695 11y agoEnglish sucks as a language. Bit of a no brainer. It's here to stay, also a no brainer. At best Chinese might take over, which is a harder language, so the article is all a bit pointless.
- beat 11y agoAs my professor once said, "Modern English was invented in the year 1066 for Norman conquerors to pick up Saxon barmaids". Some history. Old English was a Germanic language (or a loose confederation of Germanic languages), best remembered today for Beowulf. It is a well and truly foreign language for English speakers, as different as modern German is from modern English. Then, in the year 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy, and quickly conquered most of it. A trade patois formed almost instantaneously to facilitate communication between the Germanic-speaking English and the French-speaking Normans. This was Middle English. Unlike Old English, this is cleary English to modern speakers. A reasonably well educated English speaker can learn to read Middle English in a couple of weeks. "Translations" of Canterbury Tales can be found with the Middle English on one page, and a modern English translation on the other. (As an aside, I highly recommend Canterbury Tales. It's one of the most hilarious things I've ever read!) Middle English was the big step toward the messy, hodge-podge grammar and spelling we all know and perhaps love today. The shift from Middle English to modern English took place during the reign of Henry VIII, famous for lopping off his wives' heads and establishing the Church of England (Henry VIII was the first monarch to reject Catholicism and embrace Protestantism, partly so he could get divorces and partly due to shifting power in Europe at this time due to technical innovations, but that's another story.). King Henry demanded that Oxford and Cambridge, the premier universities in England, start teaching in English rather than the Latin they had used for centuries. Professors were horrified. Give up the beauty and elegant perfection of Latin for that crappy trade patois the peasants use to sell fish and hurl insults? But they had no choice (Henry was, after all, fond of beheadings). So they did next best thing, which was to impose the beauty and consistency of Latin grammar on this crappy French-German trade patois. ("But didn't the Latin roots come from the Roman conquest of England?", some of you wonder out loud. No, it did not. Roman culture had little impact on England during their brief stay.) One of the key results of this admittedly messy and violent history is that English is an extraordinarily flexible language. It is easy to learn a little, although a challenge to master. For all its terrible spelling, pronunciation, and grammar, English is very tolerant of error. Another benefit is that English can and does absorb words from other languages, simply by mispronouncing them. Even grammar from other languages can be folded in. It still forms trade patois today - Creole, Chinglish, Spanglish, and other hybrids form whenever English encounters some less promiscuous language. Eventually, these work their way into the mainstream. It's fascinating. You see disaster? You're welcome to learn Esperanto, a language scientifically designed to facilitate clean communication, that is spoken by no one but nerdy hobbyists. As for me, I'll be celebrating this glorious hot mess of a trade patois, a language that celebrates the complicated and always evolving nature of human cultures in its very bones.
- shrewduser 11y agois this even an argument against english? i can't really find the point he harps on about chinese and japanese for a bit (both objectively worse at being a lingua franca in so many ways) and then talks about spelling and pronunciation which i think misses the point entirely as these can be easily fixed with a modified simple english. what language in widespread use is objectively better than english?
- kuschku 11y ago> what language in widespread use is objectively better than english? For example, a good language should use lots of composita — you’d only know a small number of words, and be able to easily explain more complex words – each word is a description of its meaning. You’d also want to have a way to use complex grammar, but be understandable. English has nothing like these.
- WalterBright 11y agoI'm not too impressed with the article. Any language that achieves worldwide domination is going to expropriate whatever words are convenient from other languages, and they'll never fit in properly with the rest of the language. English is one giant polyglot of other languages, including a hilarious mixture of old English with French (from when the French conquered Britain). English also has many dialects and accents, some of which are borderline incomprehensible to other native (whatever that means) English speakers.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago"including a hilarious mixture of old English with French" Also Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, Hindi/Urdu (more common in the U.K.), Spanish and Native American words (more common in the U.S.), German and Latin (more common in scientific and technical fields)...
- crazygringo 11y agoYes, 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.
- deciplex 11y agoAlso cf "I like washing the dishes right after dinner" vs "I like to wash the dishes right after dinner."
- apricot 11y agoAnd "I stopped smoking" vs. "I stopped to smoke".
- sdegutis 11y agoEnglish suffers from the same problem as UNIX: they're both good enough.
- beat 11y agoEnglish and Unix are both strong arguments that "good enough" is the best way to communicate, that being more rigid and formal and, well, consistent, is actually counterproductive.
- tomphoolery 11y agoRight, like there's a certain "peak" at which the value of consistency does not justify the learning curve required to maintain that consistency.
- vacri 11y agoWhile 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...
- smegel 11y agoI wonder what linguists would consider the "best" current language in widespread use (at least 1M first-language native speakers say in a single dialect) for international exchange, taking into account all relevant aspects of the language including writing system.
- zappo2938 11y agoEnglish sucks like javascript. But, it is everywhere!
- piyush_soni 11y agoOn a side note, I've always had this question (Excuse me for the ignorance, English is my third language). I think most here would agree that there's just no rule in English on how a particular word would be pronounced (yes, there's a general layout, but the number of exceptions greatly outweigh them). So when a new word is added to the language, who decides how would it be pronounced, what its singular/plural form would be called and so on (no rules there as well)? Is it the one who added it, or some panel of 'experts' sitting at some University etc.? If it's the one who added it, does he/she give the list of all these in writing to the Oxford people (lest they might come up with their own conclusions)? The inconsistency in English baffles me.
- cmrx64 11y agoThere is no "central authority" for the language. When a word is created, it spreads by word of mouth. The pronunciation is sometimes quite volatile before it becomes generally agreed upon (take GIF as a recent and annoyingly prominent example). The general thing to look around for on the web is "neologism".
- tim333 11y agoIt's kind of a shame Esparanto didn't take off. (Estas ia honto Esperanton ne despegar.)
- force_reboot 11y agoI 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. [0] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene_2.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_...
- yompers888 11y agoMy interesting language anecdote is that I find it much easier to hear syllables in Chinese than in English; I have very sensitive hearing, but I can't distinguish consonants very well. My first language is Enlish, and I'm a mediocre Chinese speaker, so it's not easier for me to understand whole sentences in Chinese, but I'm much less likely to lose a word. I've always assumed this is because more of the information is conveyed in long, tonal vowel sounds, rather than the comparatively short high-pass consonants, which is the reverse of English. Does anyone else have experience with this?
- trophycase 11y agoI seem to remember reading something about how English has one of the highest, if not the highest information to syllable ratio. I think that might give clues as to its ubiquity.
- rvense 11y agoYou may have read that, but it's wrong. Actually, I think it qualifies as both wrong and not even wrong: 1. No two linguists would be able to agree on a definition of 'the amount' of information in a sentence. 2. Even for some arbitrary measure of information, it would depend on what was being said. Are we talking about banter between two friends meeting in the street, or a university lecture? 3. The idea that English is special for linguistic reasons is just wrong. It's a language like any other. They all have their quirks.
- cbd1984 11y agoUtter nonsense.
- e2daipi 11y agoI believe that you are referring to this[0] study. It has since been published (2011), though it's not openly accessible. Page 8 of a presentation by the author[1] shows that out of 7 languages (Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, English, and Mandarin) English is the second most information dense language, Mandarin being the most. Spanish is characterised by a fast rate of low-density syllables. A Spanish to English comparison (eye-balling) would be that Spanish is spoken at a rate of 7.8 syllables per second vs 6.2 for English (≈ 22.9% faster). (Spanish compared as a lot of comments are referencing its simplicity) English, compared in the referenced study, achieves the highest information rate, is spoken at a moderate-slow speed with a high information density. [0] http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%20appear_language.pdf http://www.ddl.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri... [1] http://neukom.dartmouth.edu/docs/pellegrino-presentation-dartmouth2012.pdf http://neukom.dartmouth.edu/docs/pellegrino-presentation-dar...
- ommunist 11y agoEnglish is perfectly suitable, since most of the technical literature, describing how to build and maintain everything around you is in English. German and Spanish are also fine. There are fields, where German prevails (funny enough, one of them is oriental linguistics). English is lingua franca of science and technology and there is no alternative to that. This is cultural domination consequence everyone is facing.
- garyclarke27 11y agoWhat 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.
- panglott 11y agoNote that Geoffrey Pullum is a distinguished linguist, editor of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, and a frequent blogger at LanguageLog. The tone of this article should be taken as more light than many here are; this sort of thing is a frequent hobbyhorse for linguists and mostly just evinces love for and humility about English. But keep in mind that support for English is wide but shallow. There have been other international languages before and there will be again.
- timwaagh 11y agothe only reason an organisation located here would push against the use of English internationally, is the fact that the Netherlands is internationalizing at such a pace it's being increasingly used locally over here. In Amsterdam it's becoming less and less possible to order a coffee in Dutch. That's just fine though.
- malkia 11y agoI had a terrible boss (russian) long long time ago, and he made fun of me (in front of others) the way I was saying: three, free and tree - it all sounded the same (and still I have problems). I'm not a native speaker also (bulgarian). Nowadays I'm grateful to our son (~8 years old) who corrects us all the time, and it's kind of cool since this makes him feel good about it. I often would consult him when reading a book to him, how this and that is supposed to sound. He's even starting to correct my grammar, and learned early on about etymology (I had to geekimize him). Oh, that boss is long gone, he had another strange thing - correcting e-mails, people wrote to the point he wanted to correct one brit (and he was not the easy kind). I understand he also wanted to be helpful, but done privately would've been appreciated, done publicly - not so...
- tangled_zans 11y agoIf I had a dollar for every time I saw a native english speaker complain about how "hard" English is. . . I think those that were born speaking English and never had to learn a second language start to feel insecure around literally everyone else who speaks both their own language and English. So they make up this meme about how "English is the most irregular and complicated language in the world", and hey, now it's okay that they don't know any other language, they've gotten the hardest one down! Yay! It's the most pretentious linguistic meme I've seen.
- MattConfluence 11y ago> For many concepts there are four different roots: one Anglo-Saxon, one Norman French, one Latin, and one Greek. Funny how he left out Norse, since that is where English gets the word "root" from.
- conceit 11y agoMost of the Greek would come with the Latins. But are you sure Anglo-Saxon doesn't include the Norse already? The name Angeln comes from a region in Germany near the border of Denmark.
- kazinator 11y agoShrug. 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.