4 ms·

> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, techni

by rvense 7y ago

> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. I don't think this would be accepted by very many linguists. Complexity and precision is a function of vocabulary, and vocabularies are easily transferred, as your own example shows. English often proves itself deficient when it is taken over by new peoples. Especially for describing the social realities of the non-English speaking world - but of course, non-native speakers will patch up these deficiencies. Finally, I am very sure that no linguist would agree that English is taking over the world because of this or that aspect of its vocabulary or the (supposed) simplicity its grammar. It is doing so because it is useful and has a high status due to social and political factors.

mikorym 7y ago
English is deficient in context, absolutely. But the advantages of English is in a "modern" society, whatever that may be. There are deficiencies in these languages even that are not just about vocabulary. Things like "I have never" or "I would never" are a strange example. In the dialect where I come from, you say in Sotho: "Ga ke tsebe ka ya kua." This means: "I don't know about going there." But contextually it means that you have never been there. I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. At the present state of things, esssentially, you can't write scientific papers. By the way, Afrikaans was wittingly and deliberately developed into a scientific language. It did have a significant head start though, having been mostly derived from Dutch. An example of superiority of Sotho is in idiomatic language. There are running metaphors that don't even come close in English. It kind of makes sense, because if you think about it, precision of meaning trades off idiomatic richness. There was a funny meme that essentially illustrated how different Sotho grammar can be, and how your figurative use of language can essentially hide meaning through ambiguity. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4. Explanation: She is actually just saying that she stole her mom's money that should have been used to make pots with for people that had paid. Literally: "I did the thing that made that the pots couldn't be made."
- yorwba 7y ago
  > I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. The way to make a language fit for writing a scientific paper in it is to write a scientific paper in it, and whenever you're at a loss for words, either make them up as you go along or take them from another language. The latter option is usually chosen by people already fluent in that language, which is how English scientific vocabulary got its multiple layers of Arabic, Greek and Latin loan words. However, loanwords can render the underlying logic incomprehensible. For example, I recently watched the Japanese series アンナチュラル annachuraru (Unnatural [Death]) on a Chinese streaming platform (because that one didn't have region locking blocking European IP addresses). When the word エチレングリコール echirengurikōru (ethylene glycol/ethane diol) came up, obviously someone had to ask to repeat it, because it's such a long and complicated foreign word. The Chinese commenters reading the subtitles were very amused by that, because the Chinese translation is 乙二醇 yĭ èr chún and has a systematic composition: 乙 yĭ is used like the Roman numeral Ⅱ or the Latin letter B in enumerations and indicates here an organic molecule with two carbon atoms. 二 èr is the number two. 醇 chún indicates alcohol. Essentially a mirror image of "ethane diol" that even someone without much knowledge about chemistry can understand.
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    The Chinese do have to suffer through the other kind of "translation" too. I had a friend complain to me about the unreasonably long country name 圣文森特和格林纳丁斯. They're not wrong about that being an objectively unreasonable name in the linguistic context! For the curious: sheng-wen-sen-te-he-ge-lin-na-ding-si. 圣 sheng is a fully conventionalized loan-translation of the Christian word "saint". 文森特 wen-sen-te is a sound transcription of Vincent. 和 he is an ordinary Chinese word meaning "and". 格林纳丁斯 ge-lin-na-ding-si is another sound transcription, for "Grenadines".
  - mikorym 7y ago
    Some people do this. I've heard of school teachers teaching science in Sotho or Zulu that explain scientific terms in the local language. A car for example (though this is standard) is "sefatanaga" which literally refers to its action along the ground, whereas a motorcycle (again standard terminology) is "sethuthuthu" which is onomatopoeia. An attentive school teacher can extend this to things like a chemical reaction or perhaps a physical force. The only other point I would like to add is the actual internal variation that would complicate a scientific article. The dialect that is typical of my home area and the dialect that is taught at school have incompatible spelling due to pronunciation, but is verbally compatible with some amount of deliberation. An example would be "Ke tla go bona." (I'll see you [later]; correct spelling) That's actually pronounced "Ge dao bona" in the variation. There are not enough people interested to find a way to get around the standardisation issue and, in fact, whichever dialect becomes standard is inherently a form of discrimination. This is what has happened to the Sepedi dialect of Northern Sotho. It has become the politically correct term. I've heard many people introduce themselves as a Mopedi (a Pedi person) while I would later point out to them that they are from a different dialect, which they would immediately concede: they meant it as umbrella term. In their defense, there is a difference between linguists and between actual users of a language. I guess you could say Sepedi is colonising the other dialects, though without any violence as the term might insinuate. One reason might be that "Sesotho sa Leboa", which is the correct term for the language, Northern Sotho, is almost never used in verbal conversation. The term was almost certainly invented by linguists. The most common term would be "Sotho", but due to the confusion with Southern Sotho (a separate language) the default then instead becomes "Sepedi". It is reminiscent of "Castellano" vs. "Español".

by rvense 7y ago

mikorym 7y ago

English is deficient in context, absolutely. But the advantages of English is in a "modern" society, whatever that may be. There are deficiencies in these languages even that are not just about vocabulary. Things like "I have never" or "I would never" are a strange example. In the dialect where I come from, you say in Sotho: "Ga ke tsebe ka ya kua." This means: "I don't know about going there." But contextually it means that you have never been there. I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. At the present state of things, esssentially, you can't write scientific papers. By the way, Afrikaans was wittingly and deliberately developed into a scientific language. It did have a significant head start though, having been mostly derived from Dutch. An example of superiority of Sotho is in idiomatic language. There are running metaphors that don't even come close in English. It kind of makes sense, because if you think about it, precision of meaning trades off idiomatic richness. There was a funny meme that essentially illustrated how different Sotho grammar can be, and how your figurative use of language can essentially hide meaning through ambiguity. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4. Explanation: She is actually just saying that she stole her mom's money that should have been used to make pots with for people that had paid. Literally: "I did the thing that made that the pots couldn't be made."

yorwba 7y ago
> I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. The way to make a language fit for writing a scientific paper in it is to write a scientific paper in it, and whenever you're at a loss for words, either make them up as you go along or take them from another language. The latter option is usually chosen by people already fluent in that language, which is how English scientific vocabulary got its multiple layers of Arabic, Greek and Latin loan words. However, loanwords can render the underlying logic incomprehensible. For example, I recently watched the Japanese series アンナチュラル annachuraru (Unnatural [Death]) on a Chinese streaming platform (because that one didn't have region locking blocking European IP addresses). When the word エチレングリコール echirengurikōru (ethylene glycol/ethane diol) came up, obviously someone had to ask to repeat it, because it's such a long and complicated foreign word. The Chinese commenters reading the subtitles were very amused by that, because the Chinese translation is 乙二醇 yĭ èr chún and has a systematic composition: 乙 yĭ is used like the Roman numeral Ⅱ or the Latin letter B in enumerations and indicates here an organic molecule with two carbon atoms. 二 èr is the number two. 醇 chún indicates alcohol. Essentially a mirror image of "ethane diol" that even someone without much knowledge about chemistry can understand.
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  The Chinese do have to suffer through the other kind of "translation" too. I had a friend complain to me about the unreasonably long country name 圣文森特和格林纳丁斯. They're not wrong about that being an objectively unreasonable name in the linguistic context! For the curious: sheng-wen-sen-te-he-ge-lin-na-ding-si. 圣 sheng is a fully conventionalized loan-translation of the Christian word "saint". 文森特 wen-sen-te is a sound transcription of Vincent. 和 he is an ordinary Chinese word meaning "and". 格林纳丁斯 ge-lin-na-ding-si is another sound transcription, for "Grenadines".
- mikorym 7y ago
  Some people do this. I've heard of school teachers teaching science in Sotho or Zulu that explain scientific terms in the local language. A car for example (though this is standard) is "sefatanaga" which literally refers to its action along the ground, whereas a motorcycle (again standard terminology) is "sethuthuthu" which is onomatopoeia. An attentive school teacher can extend this to things like a chemical reaction or perhaps a physical force. The only other point I would like to add is the actual internal variation that would complicate a scientific article. The dialect that is typical of my home area and the dialect that is taught at school have incompatible spelling due to pronunciation, but is verbally compatible with some amount of deliberation. An example would be "Ke tla go bona." (I'll see you [later]; correct spelling) That's actually pronounced "Ge dao bona" in the variation. There are not enough people interested to find a way to get around the standardisation issue and, in fact, whichever dialect becomes standard is inherently a form of discrimination. This is what has happened to the Sepedi dialect of Northern Sotho. It has become the politically correct term. I've heard many people introduce themselves as a Mopedi (a Pedi person) while I would later point out to them that they are from a different dialect, which they would immediately concede: they meant it as umbrella term. In their defense, there is a difference between linguists and between actual users of a language. I guess you could say Sepedi is colonising the other dialects, though without any violence as the term might insinuate. One reason might be that "Sesotho sa Leboa", which is the correct term for the language, Northern Sotho, is almost never used in verbal conversation. The term was almost certainly invented by linguists. The most common term would be "Sotho", but due to the confusion with Southern Sotho (a separate language) the default then instead becomes "Sepedi". It is reminiscent of "Castellano" vs. "Español".