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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

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.

purpled_haze 11y ago
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.
- tosseraccount 11y ago
  Most 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.
  - singold 11y ago
    I have some English knowledge as a non native speaker, and dutch was like Chinese for me, until some said something similar to this. Not that I can speak or write anything but sometimes some isolated words make sense for me because of the English similarity
    - schoen 11y ago
      There are some somewhat systematic vowel correspondences -- easier for Dutch → German than for Dutch → English but maybe still interesting to know about. For example, as an English speaker who had studied German, written Dutch made a lot more sense for me when I learned that Dutch ui corresponds to German au (for example huis/Haus (Eng. house), uitgang/Ausgang (Eng. *outgoing)). Although so does ouw (bouw/Bau, bouwen/bauen, vrouw/Frau).
  - cmurf 11y ago
    I speak English, and some German. I find Nederlands to be totally confusing. Maybe my Dutch lightbulb just hasn't turned on yet.
  - fennecfoxen 11y ago
    > English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a little Dutch. Allow me to suggest some simple, easy-to-digest sample audio. Try listening to one of these five times. :P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRvPFK5Ss4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRvPFK5Ss4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPiGqzZRGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPiGqzZRGA
  - gjm11 11y ago
    I am a native anglophone and know a bit of German, but have never learned any Dutch. I find Dutch very strange because looking at it or listening to it it feels as if I ought to understand it, but in fact (usually) I mostly don't. I guess what triggers the ought-to-understand feeling is that things like letter/n-gram frequencies, word lengths, etc., match English fairly well. A bit like looking at the output of a Markov chain text generator or an RNN trained on English. (Spanish is, for me, more or less the opposite. Given a page of Spanish text I can generally decode it pretty well, albeit slowly, on the basis of other languages I know -- English native, French fairly well, schoolboy Latin -- but it doesn't trigger that feeling of recognition in the way Dutch does.)
- raarts 11y ago
  I did not get from TFA that the Dutch don't like English. Also I don't think that's true at all (source: I'm Dutch). According to an older HN submission (can't find it right now) the netherlands is, with the exception of the UK, the country with the highest percentage of people speaking English (96%), and I don't know of anyone not liking it.
  - purpled_haze 11y ago
    Good to know it is just this organization having the awful ideas. ;) Btw- I've worked with some great Dutch developers and am in awe of all of the talent there from the things I've seen over the years. The language isn't bad either. :) Just saying it's a mutt language like English, but mutts are good things. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness.
- beat 11y ago
  A friend of mine grew up in a family scattered across Holland, England, France, and Germany, with a grandmother matriarch in Holland. He was raised mostly in England, so English was his first language. The rule of his grandmother's house was that you could use words from Dutch, English, German, or French, but you had to use Dutch grammar. It was from him that I learned the formula "Dutch is just German with a fire sale on vowels."
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  > I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. You're calling out Dutch as a bastard? Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans. If anyone bastardized the Germanic language group, it was English.
  - gkya 11y ago
    Yes, one needs to know four languages in order to be able to coin a word in English.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    " Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans." Well, except for the Flemish dialect of Dutch. That has quite a lot of French in it.
curiousGambler 11y ago
"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.
- meric 11y ago
  There's a word for it in English starting with a B and is an analogy to an output of an animal, which I'm disinclined to repeat here.
  - reinhardt 11y ago
    Beef jerky?
  - HelloMcFly 11y ago
    Bullshitters don't tend to proactively preface their statements with caveats on their own credibility, but I take your point. I'm essentially parroting information obtained from others in my own words, likely imperfectly. I'm not spinning yarns on my own personal theories and opinion while presenting them as The Truth.
    - meric 11y ago
      Sorry, was replying to parent comment with a bit of humour rather than directing at you.
      - HelloMcFly 11y ago
        Fair enough, no worries even if you were!
- DanBC 11y ago
  Not a word but Stewart Lee's "Loch Ness" bit is my favourite take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlcuV_Dojwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlcuV_Dojwg
newman314 11y ago
My main beef is that English is, for lack of better words, imprecise. This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.
- gcb0 11y ago
  English is one of the few languages you can read a million books, known every single grammar rule, and still sound like a complete idiot when speaking a word to somebody else (even if you're right)
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!
  - newman314 11y ago
    One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know. Try saying that in Japanese or Chinese. Not the same effect.
    - flatline 11y ago
      Chinese is more full of double (or more) meanings than any other language I've studied. Chinese literature and poetry are famous for playing on multiple meanings of a single character or sound.
      - beat 11y ago
        Even in my one year of Chinese, I learned a great appreciation for the ridiculous puns that can be made in Chinese. It's also remarkably concise. I think most computer programmers, if exposed to Chinese, would really admire its clarity and simplicity. It's like the Lisp of natural languages.
        11y ago
alanwatts 11y ago
>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.

purpled_haze 11y ago

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.

tosseraccount 11y ago
Most 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.
- singold 11y ago
  I have some English knowledge as a non native speaker, and dutch was like Chinese for me, until some said something similar to this. Not that I can speak or write anything but sometimes some isolated words make sense for me because of the English similarity
  - schoen 11y ago
    There are some somewhat systematic vowel correspondences -- easier for Dutch → German than for Dutch → English but maybe still interesting to know about. For example, as an English speaker who had studied German, written Dutch made a lot more sense for me when I learned that Dutch ui corresponds to German au (for example huis/Haus (Eng. house), uitgang/Ausgang (Eng. *outgoing)). Although so does ouw (bouw/Bau, bouwen/bauen, vrouw/Frau).
- cmurf 11y ago
  I speak English, and some German. I find Nederlands to be totally confusing. Maybe my Dutch lightbulb just hasn't turned on yet.
- fennecfoxen 11y ago
  > English speakers might be a little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a little Dutch. Allow me to suggest some simple, easy-to-digest sample audio. Try listening to one of these five times. :P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOueN0sV2SY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRvPFK5Ss4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkRvPFK5Ss4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPiGqzZRGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQPiGqzZRGA
- gjm11 11y ago
  I am a native anglophone and know a bit of German, but have never learned any Dutch. I find Dutch very strange because looking at it or listening to it it feels as if I ought to understand it, but in fact (usually) I mostly don't. I guess what triggers the ought-to-understand feeling is that things like letter/n-gram frequencies, word lengths, etc., match English fairly well. A bit like looking at the output of a Markov chain text generator or an RNN trained on English. (Spanish is, for me, more or less the opposite. Given a page of Spanish text I can generally decode it pretty well, albeit slowly, on the basis of other languages I know -- English native, French fairly well, schoolboy Latin -- but it doesn't trigger that feeling of recognition in the way Dutch does.)
raarts 11y ago
I did not get from TFA that the Dutch don't like English. Also I don't think that's true at all (source: I'm Dutch). According to an older HN submission (can't find it right now) the netherlands is, with the exception of the UK, the country with the highest percentage of people speaking English (96%), and I don't know of anyone not liking it.
- purpled_haze 11y ago
  Good to know it is just this organization having the awful ideas. ;) Btw- I've worked with some great Dutch developers and am in awe of all of the talent there from the things I've seen over the years. The language isn't bad either. :) Just saying it's a mutt language like English, but mutts are good things. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness.
beat 11y ago
A friend of mine grew up in a family scattered across Holland, England, France, and Germany, with a grandmother matriarch in Holland. He was raised mostly in England, so English was his first language. The rule of his grandmother's house was that you could use words from Dutch, English, German, or French, but you had to use Dutch grammar. It was from him that I learned the formula "Dutch is just German with a fire sale on vowels."
fennecfoxen 11y ago
> I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. You're calling out Dutch as a bastard? Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans. If anyone bastardized the Germanic language group, it was English.
- gkya 11y ago
  Yes, one needs to know four languages in order to be able to coin a word in English.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  " Seems a little backwards, seeing how it's basically English without the French-ification from the Normans." Well, except for the Flemish dialect of Dutch. That has quite a lot of French in it.

curiousGambler 11y ago

"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.

meric 11y ago
There's a word for it in English starting with a B and is an analogy to an output of an animal, which I'm disinclined to repeat here.
- reinhardt 11y ago
  Beef jerky?
- HelloMcFly 11y ago
  Bullshitters don't tend to proactively preface their statements with caveats on their own credibility, but I take your point. I'm essentially parroting information obtained from others in my own words, likely imperfectly. I'm not spinning yarns on my own personal theories and opinion while presenting them as The Truth.
  - meric 11y ago
    Sorry, was replying to parent comment with a bit of humour rather than directing at you.
    - HelloMcFly 11y ago
      Fair enough, no worries even if you were!
DanBC 11y ago
Not a word but Stewart Lee's "Loch Ness" bit is my favourite take on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlcuV_Dojwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlcuV_Dojwg

newman314 11y ago

My main beef is that English is, for lack of better words, imprecise. This leads to many examples of miscommunication that take so longer to unravel.

gcb0 11y ago
English is one of the few languages you can read a million books, known every single grammar rule, and still sound like a complete idiot when speaking a word to somebody else (even if you're right)
wodenokoto 11y ago
no it isn't and no it doesn't. All natural languages carry a large portion of ambiguity, to the extend that Steven Pinker even count ambiguity as a defining factor of natural language!
- newman314 11y ago
  One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know. Try saying that in Japanese or Chinese. Not the same effect.
  - flatline 11y ago
    Chinese is more full of double (or more) meanings than any other language I've studied. Chinese literature and poetry are famous for playing on multiple meanings of a single character or sound.
    - beat 11y ago
      Even in my one year of Chinese, I learned a great appreciation for the ridiculous puns that can be made in Chinese. It's also remarkably concise. I think most computer programmers, if exposed to Chinese, would really admire its clarity and simplicity. It's like the Lisp of natural languages.
      - 11y ago

alanwatts 11y ago

>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.