4 ms·

The title made me worried someone had tried to weld an object system onto English. The language is enough of a shitshow as-is. It turns out just to be a book f

by Y_Y 6y ago

The title made me worried someone had tried to weld an object system onto English. The language is enough of a shitshow as-is. It turns out just to be a book for learning English, but written by Polish computer scientists. Sounds interesting. I'm glad I never had to learn English as a foreign language though.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> I'm glad I never had to learn English as a foreign language though. For reference, English is one of the standard examples supporting the theory that languages which are learned by a lot of adults become simpler and easier to learn over time. (The other standards being Latin, Mandarin Chinese, and Swahili.) The implication is that if you did need to learn a foreign language, English is one of the easiest ones.
- tom_mellior 6y ago
  Interesting, this is the first I heard of this. Do you have a source that you could point to that lays out the argument (for English specifically)?
  - posterboy 6y ago
    There's a common wisdom iI learned from english.stackexchange comments that English is one of the easiest languages to learn, but one of the toughest to master. Which strikes a fair ballance. It relates for example to the relatively strict word order. There are a number of (well sourced) posts on linguistics.stackexchange dealing with a different question, if language complexity varies, i.e. if a language could be simpler per se, which is chiefly denied. Any simplification in one part of the grammar will lead to an increase of complexity in another part. In other words, I believe the grandparent comment cited common wisdom with a bit of folk believe. There is just no way to measure this precisely, since it is of course subjective.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > In other words, I believe the grandparent comment cited common wisdom with a bit of folk believe. No, this is an active theory in linguistics.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    I found several papers discussing the theory, which seem to mostly trace back through https://sci-hub.se/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 https://sci-hub.se/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 . Laying out the argument for English specifically is of a little less interest, but you can find remarks like this: > The degree and specificity of morphological encoding can reach astounding levels. For example, Karok—a language of N.W. California—has morphological suffixes for forms of containment pa:θ-kirih ‘‘throw into fire’’, pa:θ-kurih ‘‘throw into water’’, pa:θ-ruprih ‘‘throw in through a solid’’ (the affixes are unrelated to the lexemes for water, fire, etc.) > Clearly, such elaboration does not arise from communicative necessity. Researchers have long been puzzled by the reasons why some languages abound in such overspecification, while others (sometimes closely related ones) eschew it. > For example, in comparing English and German we find that where the surface structures of English and German contrast, English is less specified, leaving more to context, thus, ‘‘...German speakers are forced to make certain semantic distinctions which can regularly be left unspecified in English’’, p. 28). For example, German obligatorily specifies the direction of motion in the place adverbs here/there/where. Compare: hier/her; dort/hin; wo/wohin. English can specify direction using to and from (‘‘where to’’ versus ‘‘where from’’), but such specification is optional and is generally omitted (Note that "where to" and "where from" were expressed in older varieties of English as the words whither and whence.) That paper does cite What Happened to English? ( https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/dia.19.2.02wha https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour... ), which is more directly on the topic of "English is simpler than any other Germanic language".
- andrepd 6y ago
  I don't understand what you mean, Latin and Mandarin are both very difficult to learn as a second language (don't know about Swahili). English is comparatively a walk in the park.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    Latin is a shorthand. "Latin" does not exhibit the trend towards simplicity that the others do. But its descendants, the Romance languages, do. An easy example is that classical Latin and Greek have roughly equivalent noun declension systems. A noun has 5 cases in Greek and 6 in Latin. Here in the modern day, Greek still has noun cases, but Latin doesn't. Why? > Latin and Mandarin are both very difficult to learn as a second language It is common (for example, it is the official opinion of the US government) to say that Mandarin is an extremely difficult language to learn. However, this claim almost always refers to the writing system, which is not part of the language at all. Learning to read and write Mandarin in the traditional style is difficult. Learning to speak Mandarin is, by this hypothesis, easy.
smoe 6y ago
This has changed a lot since the internet has become so widespread, but from my past experience: What I think has helped me a lot learning English, is just how ubiquitous it is and how easy it is to find resources that align with your other life interests to make it feel less like "learning". I probably learned half of my basic English as a kid, not trough school, but with Magic The Gathering cards (once I learned they are valued higher than the translated ones), MS-DOS, 80s/90s action movies and bit later Terry Pratchett books. Others learned trough reading English instruction manuals, watching NBA, music lyrics, etc. For other language it was much harder to find resources outside of traditional educational approaches. Which are useful and important as well, but they lack immersion.
posterboy 6y ago
> The title made me worried someone had tried to weld an object system onto English I am kind of disappointed that it isn't! // trying to develop some[] = style.point-free. using ( relative ( clauses [applicative] ) ) ; but with lazy-evaluation the self referentiality quickly leads to self-modifying code & do-monad ( some++ ) so I return to declaritive if-then-else for (;_;)
- posterboy 6y ago
  In English: I am trying to cultivate a point free style, which uses clauses, which are relative clauses, which take adaptive functions as callback parameters

by Y_Y 6y ago

thaumasiotes 6y ago

> I'm glad I never had to learn English as a foreign language though. For reference, English is one of the standard examples supporting the theory that languages which are learned by a lot of adults become simpler and easier to learn over time. (The other standards being Latin, Mandarin Chinese, and Swahili.) The implication is that if you did need to learn a foreign language, English is one of the easiest ones.

tom_mellior 6y ago
Interesting, this is the first I heard of this. Do you have a source that you could point to that lays out the argument (for English specifically)?
- posterboy 6y ago
  There's a common wisdom iI learned from english.stackexchange comments that English is one of the easiest languages to learn, but one of the toughest to master. Which strikes a fair ballance. It relates for example to the relatively strict word order. There are a number of (well sourced) posts on linguistics.stackexchange dealing with a different question, if language complexity varies, i.e. if a language could be simpler per se, which is chiefly denied. Any simplification in one part of the grammar will lead to an increase of complexity in another part. In other words, I believe the grandparent comment cited common wisdom with a bit of folk believe. There is just no way to measure this precisely, since it is of course subjective.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > In other words, I believe the grandparent comment cited common wisdom with a bit of folk believe. No, this is an active theory in linguistics.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  I found several papers discussing the theory, which seem to mostly trace back through https://sci-hub.se/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 https://sci-hub.se/10.1371/journal.pone.0008559 . Laying out the argument for English specifically is of a little less interest, but you can find remarks like this: > The degree and specificity of morphological encoding can reach astounding levels. For example, Karok—a language of N.W. California—has morphological suffixes for forms of containment pa:θ-kirih ‘‘throw into fire’’, pa:θ-kurih ‘‘throw into water’’, pa:θ-ruprih ‘‘throw in through a solid’’ (the affixes are unrelated to the lexemes for water, fire, etc.) > Clearly, such elaboration does not arise from communicative necessity. Researchers have long been puzzled by the reasons why some languages abound in such overspecification, while others (sometimes closely related ones) eschew it. > For example, in comparing English and German we find that where the surface structures of English and German contrast, English is less specified, leaving more to context, thus, ‘‘...German speakers are forced to make certain semantic distinctions which can regularly be left unspecified in English’’, p. 28). For example, German obligatorily specifies the direction of motion in the place adverbs here/there/where. Compare: hier/her; dort/hin; wo/wohin. English can specify direction using to and from (‘‘where to’’ versus ‘‘where from’’), but such specification is optional and is generally omitted (Note that "where to" and "where from" were expressed in older varieties of English as the words whither and whence.) That paper does cite What Happened to English? ( https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/journals/10.1075/dia.19.2.02wha https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour... ), which is more directly on the topic of "English is simpler than any other Germanic language".
andrepd 6y ago
I don't understand what you mean, Latin and Mandarin are both very difficult to learn as a second language (don't know about Swahili). English is comparatively a walk in the park.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  Latin is a shorthand. "Latin" does not exhibit the trend towards simplicity that the others do. But its descendants, the Romance languages, do. An easy example is that classical Latin and Greek have roughly equivalent noun declension systems. A noun has 5 cases in Greek and 6 in Latin. Here in the modern day, Greek still has noun cases, but Latin doesn't. Why? > Latin and Mandarin are both very difficult to learn as a second language It is common (for example, it is the official opinion of the US government) to say that Mandarin is an extremely difficult language to learn. However, this claim almost always refers to the writing system, which is not part of the language at all. Learning to read and write Mandarin in the traditional style is difficult. Learning to speak Mandarin is, by this hypothesis, easy.

smoe 6y ago

This has changed a lot since the internet has become so widespread, but from my past experience: What I think has helped me a lot learning English, is just how ubiquitous it is and how easy it is to find resources that align with your other life interests to make it feel less like "learning". I probably learned half of my basic English as a kid, not trough school, but with Magic The Gathering cards (once I learned they are valued higher than the translated ones), MS-DOS, 80s/90s action movies and bit later Terry Pratchett books. Others learned trough reading English instruction manuals, watching NBA, music lyrics, etc. For other language it was much harder to find resources outside of traditional educational approaches. Which are useful and important as well, but they lack immersion.

posterboy 6y ago

> The title made me worried someone had tried to weld an object system onto English I am kind of disappointed that it isn't! // trying to develop some[] = style.point-free. using ( relative ( clauses [applicative] ) ) ; but with lazy-evaluation the self referentiality quickly leads to self-modifying code & do-monad ( some++ ) so I return to declaritive if-then-else for (;_;)

posterboy 6y ago
In English: I am trying to cultivate a point free style, which uses clauses, which are relative clauses, which take adaptive functions as callback parameters