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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 an

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] [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 ago
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.
- tankenmate 11y ago
  English still declines personal pronouns; I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.
  - GunboatDiplomat 11y ago
    Yeah, but you'll still be understood easily if you fail to do so.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    An example of one that's almost disappeared, other than in the most careful or formal speech: "who" and "whom".
- disordinary 11y ago
  The problem with English is you have to memorise the vocabulary multiple times, you have to memorise the word, often how it declines, and also do the above for written because they way it's spelled and spoken is usually not consistant. Not to mention the fact that there are tons of words which sound almost identical but have different meanings. You're deriding Russian for having issues, and yes it's complicated, but once you learn the rules you can largely speak it. Words sound as they are spelt for the most part, decline predictably based on rules, and you can often figure out a word based on what it is built from. So all you need to do is learn the rules and build up your vocabulary, the rules for declension are consistant as are the spelling.
  - ktRolster 11y ago
    Russian.....thy gender confoundeth beyond all declensions.
meric 11y ago
I agree. I have Chinese parents, studied in Hong Kong until I was 9, and had Chinese classes every weekend until I was 18, and I can say my English is vastly more fluent than my Chinese in terms of writing, and only much more fluent in terms of speaking and listening to Mandarin. I've retained by fluent ability to listen to Cantonese and fluent enough to speak it, but I'd still say my English is better because I find it hard to crack jokes in Cantonese. I have heaps of advantages in learning Chinese and it is very hard for me. It would be easier if I still lived there, of course.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jodrellblank 11y ago
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 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.
panglott 11y ago
That English in particular is a bad language to be the international standard is no argument that any other language in particular would be a good international language. It may just be that any particular language is bad to be the international language, for reasons that are peculiar to it. And these are the reasons that English is bad, from someone who loves it deeply.

ktRolster 11y ago

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.

tankenmate 11y ago
English still declines personal pronouns; I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.
- GunboatDiplomat 11y ago
  Yeah, but you'll still be understood easily if you fail to do so.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  An example of one that's almost disappeared, other than in the most careful or formal speech: "who" and "whom".
disordinary 11y ago
The problem with English is you have to memorise the vocabulary multiple times, you have to memorise the word, often how it declines, and also do the above for written because they way it's spelled and spoken is usually not consistant. Not to mention the fact that there are tons of words which sound almost identical but have different meanings. You're deriding Russian for having issues, and yes it's complicated, but once you learn the rules you can largely speak it. Words sound as they are spelt for the most part, decline predictably based on rules, and you can often figure out a word based on what it is built from. So all you need to do is learn the rules and build up your vocabulary, the rules for declension are consistant as are the spelling.
- ktRolster 11y ago
  Russian.....thy gender confoundeth beyond all declensions.

meric 11y ago

I agree. I have Chinese parents, studied in Hong Kong until I was 9, and had Chinese classes every weekend until I was 18, and I can say my English is vastly more fluent than my Chinese in terms of writing, and only much more fluent in terms of speaking and listening to Mandarin. I've retained by fluent ability to listen to Cantonese and fluent enough to speak it, but I'd still say my English is better because I find it hard to crack jokes in Cantonese. I have heaps of advantages in learning Chinese and it is very hard for me. It would be easier if I still lived there, of course.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jodrellblank 11y ago

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 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.

panglott 11y ago

That English in particular is a bad language to be the international standard is no argument that any other language in particular would be a good international language. It may just be that any particular language is bad to be the international language, for reasons that are peculiar to it. And these are the reasons that English is bad, from someone who loves it deeply.