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- Javascript vs * - English vs * Both awful languages in many ways. And yet, here we are. Also who the fuck wants to speak Esperanto? In some cases I don’t t

- Javascript vs * - English vs * Both awful languages in many ways. And yet, here we are. Also who the fuck wants to speak Esperanto? In some cases I don’t think it’s “worse is better”, much as “the flexible beats the over-designed ivory tower”. Another way of looking at it is “capabilities matter, vulnerabilities don’t”. Think of a river carving its way through a valley. It is terribly undesigned and messy but it flows exactly where it had to.

tgv 4y ago
English isn't a bad language; its spelling is highly inconsistent, but for the rest it's simpler than most other languages. The only advantage Esperanto has is that it doesn't give (much of) an advantage to pre-existing native speakers. For the rest, it's perhaps even harder to learn than English, and --when hypothetically adopted on a large scale-- will develop into regional dialects.
- iopq 4y ago
  Spanish spelling is better, pronunciation is easier (no th, only 5 vowels, etc.), native speakers almost as numerable, allows you to understand Portuguese, Italian, etc. It wasn't chosen, America just won
  - tgv 4y ago
    Spanish orthography is pretty regular, but then you have 42 inflections per verb for three different patterns, and the most important verbs are of course highly irregular. Not to mention the fact that the difference between ser and estar isn't easy to learn. And there are a few more things that are hard (limiting to pronunciation: the guttural j/g, and the rr; counting syllables is a recurring question in quizzes). > It wasn't chosen, America just won That doesn't make English a bad language. Perhaps America (I guess you're referring to the USA) won because of English is so easy. But cultural, financial and political influence obviously count.
    - samus 4y ago
      Before English, French was the international language of diplomacy, and it was very influental in science and humanities. Spoken French is as simple as Spanish at a glance. The writing system is peculiar, but still much more regular than the English one.
  - salmo 4y ago
    I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a lot of botched Spanish). That constant borrowing is partly why our spelling is insane. Oh and add to the insanity that we’ll borrow the same French word twice, frozen in each time. It’s fascinating to see the language evolve through eg India. It’s a secondary language that fills a gap to provide a commonly understood language in a region with massive linguistic diversity. But then it’s developed it’s own regionalisms that are bleeding back into regions where it is the primary language. It’s kind of like shell scripting to me. It started simple, got random useful things tacked on over time. You can’t formally define it, but it’s pragmatically powerful. And there aren’t real rules despite people trying so hard over the years, just conventions that shift and change. And often the “rule makers” just make things more complicated in the end with only some of it sticking. I highly recommend the English History Podcast for anyone interested.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      There's also the budding euro-English, which is kinda funny because it is to some extent the revenge of all the words we've stolen from other European languages and then slowly turned into false-friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary Anyway as an American I'm always in favor of just giving our language away to anyone to do whatever they want with it, really just go nuts, especially -- throw some z's in there, they really add some pizzazz to the language. (Just ignore the British, they will try to get you to change them back to s's... but you can see what that does to the pizzazz!).
      - salmo 4y ago
        Totally agree. I love that it’s the gumbo of languages. Throw whatever you want in there. I’m down. And as an American I reject the British pronunciation of “herb” and “lieutenant.”
  - hombre_fatal 4y ago
    Spanish has its own obstacles. Like all the conjugations and the subjunctive. Or how verbose it is. Meanwhile compare it to English tense grammar like I did run, I do run, I will run. I don’t think technical language comparisons are all that enlightening about which one is “best”.
    - iopq 4y ago
      I have been running, I had been running, I will have had run, I would have had been running English has a large amount of tenses as well, and if I were you I wouldn't discount the English subjunctive either
      - klodolph 4y ago
        "I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the other meaning of the word "have" (the non-auxiliary meaning), like "I had had steak, and James had had lasagna, but we both were still hungry." Subjunctive may be interesting to analyze, but it's not an additional form of the word. By my count, English has 12 tenses. You cannot just invent new ones, because people won't be able to understand you. They are fairly regular: present, past, and future, which can be modified by making them perfect, continuous, or both.
        iopq 4y ago
        "By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time "If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident. By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4 Past, present, future, future-in-the-past (would) x Simple, continuous, perfect, continuous-perfect (have been V-ing) Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated
  - samus 4y ago
    Spanish (at least some European variants) definitely has the "th-sounds" though. But similarly to English, it's not terribly important to get them right. The variants spoken in South America use sibilants instead.
    - iopq 4y ago
      Oh yeah, I studied Latin American Spanish so I did forget that Spaniards do have these sounds. But the vowel number is clearly smaller. The hardest sound is probably the "rr" rolling r In English it's probably distinguishing between a number of vowels like BAD/BED or PULL/POOL, and words like STRENGTH that really test the limits of Mandarin speakers
- rrwo 4y ago
  English has inconsistent spelling and pronunciation because it is a pigeon language, a mix of various Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, Dutch, and Norman French, then later with a lot of Latin and Greek words added. The grammar is simpler (no gender and fewer inflections), but it has more phonemes than most other Indo-European languages, and has one of the largest vocabularies.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    The word you're looking for is "pidgin" language, not "pigeon," but no, English is not a pidgin language. An example of a pidgin language is something like Tok Pisin. Pidgin languages essentially start out life as a not-quite-language, with such restricted vocabulary and grammar that there are concepts that can't be uttered, and such languages tend to grow back a grammar on top of that as they develop into a full, proper language. English is not a pidgin language because the grammar is very clearly identifiable as a Germanic language (albeit a clearly simplified form), but with substantial lexical borrowings from other languages. Grammatical simplification and lexical borrowing is not particularly unusual in language development--in fact, English may not even be the biggest offender in these departments (I believe Turkic languages borrowed more from Mongolian languages than English has from Romance languages).
    - radarsat1 4y ago
      I'm curious, given the proximity of England to the Celtic world, why did English not borrow more from Gaelic? Hopefully it's not a stupid question, I realize that the language probably largely developed in Saxony, but I don't know much about how it made its way to the British isles.
      - jcranmer 4y ago
        There is a lot that is not clear about the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. The obvious archaeological evidence suggests a very abrupt shock that sees Roman Britain almost completely replaced by Anglo-Saxon migration in maybe a generation or two. This has traditionally been interpreted as effectively a complete population replacement, although this has been challenged in more recent archaeology. Probably, I would say, the big reason for the lack of Celtic borrowings into English is the fact that, to whatever degree there was admixture between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon populations, English would have been the prestige language, and the prestige language tends to be little affected by borrowings compared to the non-prestige language. You see this with French borrowings: French was the prestige language of England for about 400 years or so, so English starts borrowing all sorts of things from French, but not vice versa. The existence of the Danelaw region--a part of England that was primarily Danish rather than English even when largely ruled by the English--provided a substantial contact region for Old English/Old Norse borrowing, which was helped by the very similar nature of the two languages.
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  The success of English is not the result of a “worse is better” situation. It’s the result of the fact that the English colonialists much of the world and then after colonialism ended and the world became more global through trade and communications, the biggest economy in the world with the biggest media industry in the history of the world spoke English.

tgv 4y ago

English isn't a bad language; its spelling is highly inconsistent, but for the rest it's simpler than most other languages. The only advantage Esperanto has is that it doesn't give (much of) an advantage to pre-existing native speakers. For the rest, it's perhaps even harder to learn than English, and --when hypothetically adopted on a large scale-- will develop into regional dialects.

iopq 4y ago
Spanish spelling is better, pronunciation is easier (no th, only 5 vowels, etc.), native speakers almost as numerable, allows you to understand Portuguese, Italian, etc. It wasn't chosen, America just won
- tgv 4y ago
  Spanish orthography is pretty regular, but then you have 42 inflections per verb for three different patterns, and the most important verbs are of course highly irregular. Not to mention the fact that the difference between ser and estar isn't easy to learn. And there are a few more things that are hard (limiting to pronunciation: the guttural j/g, and the rr; counting syllables is a recurring question in quizzes). > It wasn't chosen, America just won That doesn't make English a bad language. Perhaps America (I guess you're referring to the USA) won because of English is so easy. But cultural, financial and political influence obviously count.
  - samus 4y ago
    Before English, French was the international language of diplomacy, and it was very influental in science and humanities. Spoken French is as simple as Spanish at a glance. The writing system is peculiar, but still much more regular than the English one.
- salmo 4y ago
  I think an appealing thing about English is the ridiculous vocabulary. When it doesn’t have a word, it just steals one from another language. We have a French-based word that’s a “fancy” way to say an English-based synonym from the court vs common language situation with the Normans. Then borrowed liberally from Greek and Latin during the enlightenment, and every other language when colonialism kicked in (including a lot of botched Spanish). That constant borrowing is partly why our spelling is insane. Oh and add to the insanity that we’ll borrow the same French word twice, frozen in each time. It’s fascinating to see the language evolve through eg India. It’s a secondary language that fills a gap to provide a commonly understood language in a region with massive linguistic diversity. But then it’s developed it’s own regionalisms that are bleeding back into regions where it is the primary language. It’s kind of like shell scripting to me. It started simple, got random useful things tacked on over time. You can’t formally define it, but it’s pragmatically powerful. And there aren’t real rules despite people trying so hard over the years, just conventions that shift and change. And often the “rule makers” just make things more complicated in the end with only some of it sticking. I highly recommend the English History Podcast for anyone interested.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    There's also the budding euro-English, which is kinda funny because it is to some extent the revenge of all the words we've stolen from other European languages and then slowly turned into false-friends. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English#Vocabulary Anyway as an American I'm always in favor of just giving our language away to anyone to do whatever they want with it, really just go nuts, especially -- throw some z's in there, they really add some pizzazz to the language. (Just ignore the British, they will try to get you to change them back to s's... but you can see what that does to the pizzazz!).
    - salmo 4y ago
      Totally agree. I love that it’s the gumbo of languages. Throw whatever you want in there. I’m down. And as an American I reject the British pronunciation of “herb” and “lieutenant.”
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Spanish has its own obstacles. Like all the conjugations and the subjunctive. Or how verbose it is. Meanwhile compare it to English tense grammar like I did run, I do run, I will run. I don’t think technical language comparisons are all that enlightening about which one is “best”.
  - iopq 4y ago
    I have been running, I had been running, I will have had run, I would have had been running English has a large amount of tenses as well, and if I were you I wouldn't discount the English subjunctive either
    - klodolph 4y ago
      "I will have had run" and "I would have had been running" are not sensible. Perfect tenses indicate completion. If you try to "stack" two copies the auxiliary verb "have" to make some kind of double-perfect tense, it doesn't make any sense--it makes no more sense than saying "I wented to the store" or "I ated the food." There are reasons you can have utterances like "had had" in English, but it typically involves the other meaning of the word "have" (the non-auxiliary meaning), like "I had had steak, and James had had lasagna, but we both were still hungry." Subjunctive may be interesting to analyze, but it's not an additional form of the word. By my count, English has 12 tenses. You cannot just invent new ones, because people won't be able to understand you. They are fairly regular: present, past, and future, which can be modified by making them perfect, continuous, or both.
      - iopq 4y ago
        "By next month I will have had run 50 km" - is there a BETTER way to say this sentence? It refers to the past from the prism of next month, but also RELATES it to that point in time "If I had continued boxing professionally, I would have been running 50 km a week" Here's it's a conditional, I think I stuck an extra had in there by accident. By my English textbook there's 16 tenses, 4x4 Past, present, future, future-in-the-past (would) x Simple, continuous, perfect, continuous-perfect (have been V-ing) Point being, English grammar is far from simple, as this conversation clearly demonstrated
- samus 4y ago
  Spanish (at least some European variants) definitely has the "th-sounds" though. But similarly to English, it's not terribly important to get them right. The variants spoken in South America use sibilants instead.
  - iopq 4y ago
    Oh yeah, I studied Latin American Spanish so I did forget that Spaniards do have these sounds. But the vowel number is clearly smaller. The hardest sound is probably the "rr" rolling r In English it's probably distinguishing between a number of vowels like BAD/BED or PULL/POOL, and words like STRENGTH that really test the limits of Mandarin speakers
rrwo 4y ago
English has inconsistent spelling and pronunciation because it is a pigeon language, a mix of various Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, Dutch, and Norman French, then later with a lot of Latin and Greek words added. The grammar is simpler (no gender and fewer inflections), but it has more phonemes than most other Indo-European languages, and has one of the largest vocabularies.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  The word you're looking for is "pidgin" language, not "pigeon," but no, English is not a pidgin language. An example of a pidgin language is something like Tok Pisin. Pidgin languages essentially start out life as a not-quite-language, with such restricted vocabulary and grammar that there are concepts that can't be uttered, and such languages tend to grow back a grammar on top of that as they develop into a full, proper language. English is not a pidgin language because the grammar is very clearly identifiable as a Germanic language (albeit a clearly simplified form), but with substantial lexical borrowings from other languages. Grammatical simplification and lexical borrowing is not particularly unusual in language development--in fact, English may not even be the biggest offender in these departments (I believe Turkic languages borrowed more from Mongolian languages than English has from Romance languages).
  - radarsat1 4y ago
    I'm curious, given the proximity of England to the Celtic world, why did English not borrow more from Gaelic? Hopefully it's not a stupid question, I realize that the language probably largely developed in Saxony, but I don't know much about how it made its way to the British isles.
    - jcranmer 4y ago
      There is a lot that is not clear about the Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain. The obvious archaeological evidence suggests a very abrupt shock that sees Roman Britain almost completely replaced by Anglo-Saxon migration in maybe a generation or two. This has traditionally been interpreted as effectively a complete population replacement, although this has been challenged in more recent archaeology. Probably, I would say, the big reason for the lack of Celtic borrowings into English is the fact that, to whatever degree there was admixture between Celtic and Anglo-Saxon populations, English would have been the prestige language, and the prestige language tends to be little affected by borrowings compared to the non-prestige language. You see this with French borrowings: French was the prestige language of England for about 400 years or so, so English starts borrowing all sorts of things from French, but not vice versa. The existence of the Danelaw region--a part of England that was primarily Danish rather than English even when largely ruled by the English--provided a substantial contact region for Old English/Old Norse borrowing, which was helped by the very similar nature of the two languages.
rhaway84773 4y ago
The success of English is not the result of a “worse is better” situation. It’s the result of the fact that the English colonialists much of the world and then after colonialism ended and the world became more global through trade and communications, the biggest economy in the world with the biggest media industry in the history of the world spoke English.