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English is usually shorter than other latin-based languages. It's longer than ideogram based ones but you don't have to learn 100000 symbols to express yourself
by BiteCode_dev 7y ago
English is usually shorter than other latin-based languages. It's longer than ideogram based ones but you don't have to learn 100000 symbols to express yourself in it.
It also has a very simple grammar compared to most languages. Take this sentence:
"I would like not to go to school today"
The french equivalent would be:
"Je voudrais ne pas aller à l'école aujourd'hui."
"would like" is a simple combination of two words, but in french you need to know the precise conjugation of it.
"not" is actually expressed as 2 words with "ne pas", which can be positioned in several ways.
Infinitive, like with "to go", is simple in english: just add "to". In french, each verb is different, like "aller".
Then you got "the" in any circumstances in english, but the "l'", could also be "le, la, or les" depending of the word after it. A;so remember that each word is either feminine or masculine in french, even a stone or the sun.
Then "à" and "école" got an accent. French has many of them, you need to know the right one, where to place it, how to pronunciation it and type it on the keyboard.
Finally, "today" vs "aujourd'hui". I know which one is easier to type in a bug report.
Not to say English doesn't have weird traps, but it's very, very relaxing compared to the rest. And much more efficient.
Also describing a view of the country side with it feels a bit limiting. But I'm not Shakespear :)
- alcover 7y agoI painfully agree with you, as a French. So much so that I comment my code in English for brevity. Regarding "aujourd'hui", this monstrosity litterally means : "to the day of today".. Our dear language needs a reform, lest it will survive only as a roman dialect.
- zozbot234 7y agoWhat French really needs is a comprehensive spelling/grammar reform. In Haitian Creole, "ne pas aller à l'école aujourd'hui" is written simply "pa ale lekòl jodi"! And one can just write "mwen" instead of having to differentiate "je" and "moi". (There's also a marker word "ta" that's entirely isomorphic to the English "would" in that it introduces a conditional modality.) Not coincidentally, English is basically a creole language as well. That's why it's so incredibly simple.
- andrewzah 7y agoAnd then you have Korean. 오늘 학교에 가기 싫다 (I don’t want to go to school today) Hangeul is a syllabary so anyone can read it, just like Latin. It was specifically designed in response to peasants not being able to read Chinese hanzi. Things like the subject and topic can be and is omitted when it’s superfluous. (The above sentence omits the subject and subject particle. There is no topic here). English almost always needs to specify the subject, asides from very casual speech/slang. Korean, like english, doesn’t need to specify gender of nouns, and it also doesn’t need “a” or “the” markers. The location particle above could be dropped too. However Korean does have complex honorifics and formality conjugations, which typically get longer the more formal/polite it is. Above we have the plain or dictionary form, which is usually the shortest form as well.
- BiteCode_dev 7y agoHow would you express "would like"? "I don’t want to go" and "I would like not to go" express different things. One is expressing opposition right now, the other one is expressing desire or even a request, potentially while the action is already engaged. The first one is definitive, the second one is wishful thinking or negotiation.
- andrewzah 7y agoI don’t see any practical difference other than using more polite, indirect language. The effect of “would like not to” is the same in the end with opposition. I don’t think there’s a 1:1 translation of “would like not to”. I’d probably say something like “it’d be good if I did / didn’t do X”. Which is less direct than the equivalent “I do / don’t want to do X”.
- andrewzah 7y agoActually 가기(가) is the topic here unless I’m mistaken. I wrote this too fast last night.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoIn colloquial Japanese that would be three words: Kyou gakkou ikitakunai. The first word is "today" (unconjugated), second is "school" (unconjugated), and the third is the negative "wish" (volitional?) form of "to go" (iku > ikitai > ikitakunai). Subject (the speaker) is implied and neither the time nor the the topic/object needs to be explicitly tagged.
- ajuc 7y agoEnglish has like 17 tenses, many languages only have 3 without any loss in expressivity. When learning English you need to learn each word twice (once to write, once to speak) - that's not the case with many phonetic languages. English isn't inherently better as a world's language than anything else, it's just there, so it benefits from the network effect (it's more beneficial to learn language that has the most users, so it gets even more users).