5 ms·

That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English to

by sridca 10y ago

That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).

guard-of-terra 10y ago
English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.
- Typhon 10y ago
  Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too. Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
  - theoh 10y ago
    Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.
    - rvense 10y ago
      But in most cases you don't have a pick of which extra language to learn. People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.
      - wolfgke 10y ago
        I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. For me it was English, Latin (hated it) and French (as third language I also could have chosen Russian (would also have interested me) or ancient Greek).
        thaumasiotes 10y ago
        >> People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). > I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.
        wolfgke 10y ago
        > You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".
        rvense 10y ago
        You don't think the fact that English was more useful to you had anything do with your liking it more? There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.
        wolfgke 10y ago
        I think teaching the grammar first makes sense in German since this is the difficult and ugly part. In my opinion if this does not become a second nature you will be uncomfortable to communicate in German since otherwise you will always think uncofortable seconds how to build the correct case etc. . In other words: You will have difficulties becoming fluent if you aren't confident in the grammar.
      - rtpg 10y ago
        At least in Japan, learning English lets you speak to all foreigners. The expectation is that everyone who can't speak the native language at least can speak English. This leads to most English being spoken in the country having no native participant. Having too idiomatic English will probably lead to harder communication.
    - GolDDranks 10y ago
      For computer parsing the language, this might matter. For humans learning the language, it accounts maybe one percent of the total effort to acquire it. We humans all have the same hardware processing language. If some spoken languages were _actually_ more complex or too complex for that hardware to process, they wouldn't be spoken.
      - hrktb 10y ago
        I think the point is not if something is out of reach of a basic human, but more that if it takes 10 years to reach basic proficiency, then it's not a language that will be fit to share with a huge amount of people from different backgrounds. Now, I personaly think that if French actually reached a point where it would be shared as common language by billions of people it would have been broken down to a more efficient form. Creoles and other dialects derived from french all seem to get rid of the redundant bits.
    - Typhon 10y ago
      Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free.
      - wolfgke 10y ago
        > Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free. Depends on what you consider as free. For example German (more inflected than English) has a rather free order of clauses (where the order tells about the emphasis the speaker wants to express) opposed to English. On the other hand, in English words are often used in a more flexible way than in German (even if you use a similar construction in both languages), because the stricter grammar makes this less comfortable in German than in English. For example: "iron" (en) is "Bügeleisen" (de). In English one can use the verb "to iron" for using the iron while in German there is an own verb "bügeln" for this. Just using the same word for an object and something you do with it is already interfered by the German grammar, in which verbs have to end in "en" or at least "n".
    - seeing 10y ago
      What do the terms inflected and irregular mean?
      - wolfgke 10y ago
        Inflected language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection "Irregular" means that a perticular word does not obey the usual rules for inflection (an example of such a rule verb (without to) + "ed" -> simple past, e.g. "jump" -> "jumped"). For example "go" -> "went", "sing" -> "sang". You will usually simply have to learn those.
  - seeing 10y ago
    Weirdness of a language is completely subjective This isn't true.
- fatihpense 10y ago
  English grammar is also easier or you can use simple subset of English. However that can not be said for Italian, German, French or Russian. They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. The hardest subject for English is "tenses" and you can also use small subset of them. I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.
  - wolfgke 10y ago
    > They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language. TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      The problem isn't the extra grammar rules, the problem is having to learn the gender of every single word in order to use the language correctly.
      - wolfgke 10y ago
        Usually you get a pretty good feeling for the rules that determine the gender for many nouns (at least for me in Spanish, French and Portuguese), so that for many nouns this will only be a problem at the beginning. For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter. Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).
- acjohnson55 10y ago
  English isn't very complex, but it is highly irregular and it has an absolutely massive vocabulary. It's easy to learn enough to be able to scrape by, but difficult to learn to speak fluently.
- pmontra 10y ago
  Italian is easier to pronounce (only 7 vowel sounds) and almost 1 to 1 to the written word (but 3 different signs for the k sound, still easy to read). However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?
backtoyoujim 10y ago
When has rational choice theory worked for anything other than a thesis defense?

by sridca 10y ago

guard-of-terra 10y ago

English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.

Typhon 10y ago
Weirdness of a language is completely subjective, and easyness too. Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
- theoh 10y ago
  Inflected and irregular languages are more complex than uninflected and regular. That's one kind of weirdness that it's difficult to dismiss.
  - rvense 10y ago
    But in most cases you don't have a pick of which extra language to learn. People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. For me it was English, Latin (hated it) and French (as third language I also could have chosen Russian (would also have interested me) or ancient Greek).
      - thaumasiotes 10y ago
        >> People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). > I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.
        wolfgke 10y ago
        > You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".
      - rvense 10y ago
        You don't think the fact that English was more useful to you had anything do with your liking it more? There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.
        wolfgke 10y ago
        I think teaching the grammar first makes sense in German since this is the difficult and ugly part. In my opinion if this does not become a second nature you will be uncomfortable to communicate in German since otherwise you will always think uncofortable seconds how to build the correct case etc. . In other words: You will have difficulties becoming fluent if you aren't confident in the grammar.
    - rtpg 10y ago
      At least in Japan, learning English lets you speak to all foreigners. The expectation is that everyone who can't speak the native language at least can speak English. This leads to most English being spoken in the country having no native participant. Having too idiomatic English will probably lead to harder communication.
  - GolDDranks 10y ago
    For computer parsing the language, this might matter. For humans learning the language, it accounts maybe one percent of the total effort to acquire it. We humans all have the same hardware processing language. If some spoken languages were _actually_ more complex or too complex for that hardware to process, they wouldn't be spoken.
    - hrktb 10y ago
      I think the point is not if something is out of reach of a basic human, but more that if it takes 10 years to reach basic proficiency, then it's not a language that will be fit to share with a huge amount of people from different backgrounds. Now, I personaly think that if French actually reached a point where it would be shared as common language by billions of people it would have been broken down to a more efficient form. Creoles and other dialects derived from french all seem to get rid of the redundant bits.
  - Typhon 10y ago
    Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      > Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free. Depends on what you consider as free. For example German (more inflected than English) has a rather free order of clauses (where the order tells about the emphasis the speaker wants to express) opposed to English. On the other hand, in English words are often used in a more flexible way than in German (even if you use a similar construction in both languages), because the stricter grammar makes this less comfortable in German than in English. For example: "iron" (en) is "Bügeleisen" (de). In English one can use the verb "to iron" for using the iron while in German there is an own verb "bügeln" for this. Just using the same word for an object and something you do with it is already interfered by the German grammar, in which verbs have to end in "en" or at least "n".
  - seeing 10y ago
    What do the terms inflected and irregular mean?
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      Inflected language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection "Irregular" means that a perticular word does not obey the usual rules for inflection (an example of such a rule verb (without to) + "ed" -> simple past, e.g. "jump" -> "jumped"). For example "go" -> "went", "sing" -> "sang". You will usually simply have to learn those.
- seeing 10y ago
  Weirdness of a language is completely subjective This isn't true.
fatihpense 10y ago
English grammar is also easier or you can use simple subset of English. However that can not be said for Italian, German, French or Russian. They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. The hardest subject for English is "tenses" and you can also use small subset of them. I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.
- wolfgke 10y ago
  > They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language. TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    The problem isn't the extra grammar rules, the problem is having to learn the gender of every single word in order to use the language correctly.
    - wolfgke 10y ago
      Usually you get a pretty good feeling for the rules that determine the gender for many nouns (at least for me in Spanish, French and Portuguese), so that for many nouns this will only be a problem at the beginning. For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter. Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).
acjohnson55 10y ago
English isn't very complex, but it is highly irregular and it has an absolutely massive vocabulary. It's easy to learn enough to be able to scrape by, but difficult to learn to speak fluently.
pmontra 10y ago
Italian is easier to pronounce (only 7 vowel sounds) and almost 1 to 1 to the written word (but 3 different signs for the k sound, still easy to read). However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?

backtoyoujim 10y ago

When has rational choice theory worked for anything other than a thesis defense?