19 ms·
English is weirdly different from other languages
- zingermc 9y agoI'm finding the writing style of this article very strange. Is the author pulling some trick that other linguists would find amusing?
- combatentropy 9y agoIn at least some of his sentences, he tries to mix in words from different origins. From the article: "To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old Norse, French and Latin." Also, this is not the first time I've heard someone on Hacker News say a literary article was hard to read. Even when they aren't trying to prove a point, people who swim in literature every day tend to sound like the literature that they read. They also sound like their colleagues, as they read a lot of their articles. They write differently than people who majored in one of the sciences, who in turn write differently than business majors --- naturally. English majors delight in words and are at play when they write --- naturally. They majored in it, didn't they? So their writing will have a wider variety of words, they will inject subtle poetic traits even in prose (metaphor, alliteration, etc.) and they will choose and arrange words based on how it sounds. They remember that even when reading silently, you still hear all the words in your head. So they will try to make it sing. Some do it subtly and well. You don't notice anything but that it was a nice read. Other writers are more heavy-handed and obnoxious about it. I was an English minor and feel at home reading this kind of stuff. I miss it, actually.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago> Also, this is not the first time I've heard someone on Hacker News say a literary article was hard to read. Switching between computer code and natural language is a major context switch. EDIT: I mean, look at the dumb sentence I just wrote. "Switch [...] switch." (sigh) Need to go back to the damn Vault config files.
- crazygringo 9y agoThe history described in this article is fascinating, but it does nothing to prove the article's thesis that English is uniquely "not normal". All it does is describe how it's different, principally, from continental languages in the German and Latin families. Which, you know, you might expect when it comes from a big island off the coast. Only English has spelling bees? In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of characters -- much, much more work. English has no genders and less present-tense conjugations? Again, Chinese has no genders and no conjugations. English uses a weird word "do"? Chinese has a weird word "le". I'm only using Chinese as an example because I took a few semesters of it in college... but the idea that English is somehow an "weird" outlier in the world of languages doesn't seem to have a shred of supporting evidence from this particular article.
- pc2g4d 9y agoThis article struck me as ignorant enough that I gave up before it got to the history, which may have been interesting. Every language has things unique about it, otherwise it wouldn't be considered a different language. Picking a couple from English (some of which are really arbitrary, others not even true) proves nothing. Yes, English has some unique features. But rather than every English speaker going around thinking their language is some massive exception, I'd like people to understand that English has been subject to essentially the same forces as every other language, and makes plenty of sense given the history of Britain. But I think many of us anglophones want to hold on to a sense of uniqueness rather than acknowledge our commonality with the rest of humanity.
- edko 9y agoIndeed. If there was a language that had nothing unique in it, then it would be unique for the mere fact of not having anything unique in it.
- erikbye 9y ago> In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of characters When I started learning Chinese I just memorized the 214 traditional radicals and from there I could pretty much infer the meaning of every character.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. …uh, French? English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language. Pronunciation is a different matter, however, that's true. > it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way. Might be weird from an Indo-European perspective. But consider this: firstly, it's not like other IE languages' grammatical gender isn't being simplified. Maybe it hasn't been eliminated yet, but English is not a complete oddball here. Second, lacking grammatical gender is hardly unusual once you go outside Indo-European! > There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. English has a small and not very expressive set of verb inflections, okay. It's not alone there. Yes, maybe other languages don't have inflections limited in that specific way, but that kind of specificity is far from unusual. > English started out as, essentially, a kind of German. Well… Germanic doesn't really mean German. Old English does look somewhat familiar to a German speaker, though. > In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm. Languages are not “easier” or “harder” in isolation. What matters is how similar a language is to those already know. The author does nothing to refute this and comes up with the bizarre concept that “English is ‘easier’ than other Germanic languages”… how so? I could make a convincing argument that English is significantly harder than other Germanic languages, for instance. > normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin? > the has no specifically masculine form to match man […] strangeness Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird? > English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages As opposed to other languages, which never import possibly duplicative vocabulary en masse? Japanese has a lot of Chinese vocabulary alongside native words, for an easy example. And this is hardly unique to Japan. > The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller. But the roots of a great many other languages are similarly interesting! ---- This tells you various interesting (and correct!) facts about English's history which a student of historical linguistics could tell you, and maybe that's good, it could get more people interested in the subject! It utterly fails at proving its thesis though. English is a bit of an outlier, but it's not a unique one. Of course, you could argue that no other language has the same combination of weirdnesses, but that's because they're different languages!
- kafkaesq 9y agoOverdrawn. Nearly every language has certain features (or annoyances) that very few other languages have (except for closely related ones). There's a "fat tail" of these weird-isms, basically, and English is just another dot on that fat tail. Yes it's a creole (and creoles are kind of weird), but it's not like it's unique that category either.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> it's a creole …is it? It's an example of heavy language contact in a few places, but “creole” seems hyperbolic at best.
- kbenson 9y agoWell, there's quite a bit of German and Latin together. Doesn't that qualify?
- Jtsummers 9y agoThe better case for modern English as a creole is through Middle English, when Old English met Norman French following the Norman conquest of England. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...
- aap_ 9y agoNo, it's still Germanic. It just got a lot of loan words.
- oh_sigh 9y agoThe author describes Hebrew as much easier to learn than Russian for a native English speaker. Can anyone comment on this? Is Hebrew particularly simple/rule-based with few exceptions, or is it just that Russian has a lot of complex/one-off rules?
- ender7 9y agoRussian is a famously difficult language to speak at a fluent level. You can make yourself understood fairly easily, but the nuances of both the pronunciation and grammar are quite hard to get 100% correct. In particular, its system of declension for nouns and adjectives (and some other noun-like things) tends to drive non-native speakers batty. Wikipedia gives a good overview: "Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, most numerals and other particles are declined for two grammatical numbers (singular and plural), three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and six grammatical cases (see below). This gives dozens of spelling combinations for most of the words, which is needed for grammatical agreement within and (often) outside the proposition. Also, there are several paradigms for each declension with numerous irregular forms."
- pavel_lishin 9y agoI was born in Russia, and moved to America when I was ten. After graduating college, I moved to another city, and took a Russian language 101-equivalent course to meet some people with common interests. I would not have passed that class if I hadn't already been mostly fluent in the language.
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoWell, that sounds weird to me. My native tongue is of the Romance family, and yet I've always thought that Russian is not particularly hard to learn. Perhaps that's because I've been exposed to a variety of Slavic languages when I grew up.
- pandaman 9y agoVerbs are no joke too. Many students of Russian seem to be bewildered by movement verbs in particular.
- bluGill 9y ago> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. You mean like English as spoken in the American South, vs Australia, vs England? They are each very different from the English I speak, I can mostly understand each, but it takes effort and sometimes misunderstandings happen.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y agoThere's also Scots (not to be confused with Scottish English or Scottish Gaelic) which, while mostly relegated to “dialect” status these days, was previously considered a separate language. Here's the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Scots: http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=sco http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=sco
- Houshalter 9y agoThey have their own wikipedia even! https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
- mhermher 9y agoIf Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are considered separate languages, or Serbian and Croatian, then I can't see how Scots is not a separate language from English. I guess a lot of it comes down to politics.
- JBReefer 9y ago"A language is a dialect with an army" is a pretty useful concept for distinguishing the recognized state
- CWuestefeld 9y agoPolitics it is. On the opposite side, consider the many "dialects" of Chinese: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Taiwanese, etc. Someone who only understands one of these will be pretty much entirely unable to understand the others. Yet we give the Chinese a nod and let them consider all these different languages to be just dialects.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- bitwize 9y agoWell, no shit. What we today call English is a creole that emerged out of trade pidgins used by Angles, Saxons, and Normans to communicate. It doesn't look like other languages for the same reason Garnet looks like neither Ruby nor Sapphire.
- Veratyr 9y agoIn case anyone is interested in the history of the English Language, Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue (https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/0380715430 https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-That/dp/038...) is a pretty easy and informative read. Actually had it set as required reading in high school English of all things.
- ThinkingGuy 9y agoAnother recommendation: the History of English Podcast, by Kevin Stroud. http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
- Balgair 9y agoI'll add another one: 'The Story of English' from a Canadian bloke here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoOh, God no. Bill Bryson is not a linguist and has no real grounding in the field, and "The Mother Tongue" has been criticized for decades for its abundance of factual errors, misunderstandings, and urban myths. There is a significant mistake on nearly every page of the book. Some of the reviews on the Amazon product listing that you link to discuss this in detail.
- Veratyr 9y agoI apologize, I wasn't aware of that. I read it in high school so didn't hear much about it elsewhere. Can you recommend a good, approachable alternative?
- rumcajz 9y agoWhen I started learning Chinese I was like: Huh, this is basically English with a different vocabulary. May it be that languages with a lot on non-native speakers (I assume Han was imposed on most of it speakers over the course of history, but I may be wrong) degrade to some kind of gramatically "neutral" pidgin?
- jdmichal 9y agoIn that case it's because they are both relatively analytic languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language
- rumcajz 9y agoThat's the obvious part of it. One would except laguage spoken by non-native speakers to lose most of the complexity in inflection. But what about, for instance, how the same word can be used as distinct lexical categories. The extreme case of the phenomenon is to use proper name as a verb: Houdini yourself out of a situation. In Chinese I've seen a text describing how killers of king Wu were going to "wu" his minister.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoThis really is why being a stickler for English is really pointless, and maybe even counter-productive to the evolution of the language. I also don't like it when people write "u" instead of "you", etc, but it's how languages move. If you're going to cling to the past, you may as well write in Ye Olde English -- because eventually that's what you'll sound like.
- kafkaesq 9y agoI get your drift, but it depends on the context. If you're communicating with Prince fans (or you are Prince), substitutions like U, 4, 2, etc might be appropriate. If you're applying for a job (even as Prince's sound engineer), maybe not so much.
- 21 9y agoAs a non-native, I find "u" closer to the actual pronunciation than "you".
- jdmichal 9y agoThe pronunciation is /ju/, so I would think that "you" is a closer rendition. The only reason "u" works is because we happen to pronounce the name of that letter exactly the same: /ju/. So it's being used as a non-traditional digraph. It's the same pattern as using "8" in examples like "g8 b8 m8 I r8 it 8/8". Here "8" is serving as a non-traditional trigraph /eɪt/.
- jdmichal 9y ago"Ye Olde English" is a funny example, because the use of "y" here is actually a replacement for thorn (Þ) that was introduced with the printing press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y#Confusion_in_writing_with_the_letter_thorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y#Confusion_in_writing_with_th...
- kaffeemitsahne 9y agoSo here we have someone with English as their mother tongue speaking about how weird English is. I'd bet native speakers of just about any other language could write a similar article about theirs, too.
- Mithaldu 9y agoAs a german: No. German is a little oddly rigid due to being more tied to legislation and has a few weird corners like "ei". However in the big picture and on the scale of fucked-up-ness it's not even in the same order of magnitude as english. You have a german username so i guess you're german too. Try to point out what's as weird in german as having to wonder in english how to even write a word just from the sounds.
- kaffeemitsahne 9y agoGood guess, but I'm Dutch :) Let's see what weirdness I can come up with. A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string words together without spaces (kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan). In Dutch we have the "g" or "sch" sound that almost noone else can pronounce. As you can see, "g" and "ch" are sometimes pronounced the same. In Dutch it's quite a problem for some people to determine if the perfect tense of a verb should end with "d" or "t". A common mistake (do mistakes count?) is to use the possessive "hun" (their) in places where you should say "hen" or "ze" (they). Some articles online remark on the large number of consonants that can be grouped together in a single word (e.g. "angstschreeuw"). There are no clear rules on whether nouns should be preceded by "de" or "het" (the or it), for example you say "het huis" (it house) but "de fiets" (the bike). Confusing these is a hallmark of beginner speech. Whether a word goes with "de" or "het" also determines how you should spell adjectives ("deze fiets" but "dit huis"). Another article (1) noted that the two parts of a separable verb can be very far apart in a sentence: “I _want to go_ to the park tomorrow” becomes “Ik _wil_ morgen naar het park _gaan_“ Although I'm not quite sure how strange this is. (1) https://novemberfive.co/blog/learning-dutch/ https://novemberfive.co/blog/learning-dutch/
- 9y ago
- awinter-py 9y agoyeah, spelling is way harder than learning ten thousand pictograms in CJK languages
- vorg 9y agoI disagree. I think learning 10,000 pictograms is much harder than learning English spelling. Even just learning the 2000 needed for reading Japanese or 3000 to 4000 needed for Chinese is harder. Of course most Han pictograms are composed of a few hundred "letters" (e.g. 能 is made up of a 厶, a 月, and two 匕s) but the correspondence between a "spelt" pictogram to the spoken word or meaning in Chinese or Japanese is far more variable than between the spelling of an English word and its pronunciation.
- faragon 9y agoEnglish has many great things: - Easy to learn so you can speak like Tarzan and being understood. Pronouns, articles, and verbs, for a basic grammar, is quite easy. - Articles have no gender (e.g. "the moon" has an article that is not masculine nor feminine, which is a pain for learning Latin and German languages). - Is the most universal language in the world. And some drawbacks, too: - To master English is very difficult, like mastering most advanced languages. - Pronunciation vs writing is not 1:1 (e.g. Spanish and German are easier in that regard)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]