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> Text is complicated So true! > and english is bad at expressing these nuances. I think English is a terrible shitpile of grammar and syntax. I'm very impre

by tomcam 10mo ago

> Text is complicated So true! > and english is bad at expressing these nuances. I think English is a terrible shitpile of grammar and syntax. I'm very impressed that anyone who speaks another language natively can get good at it. But I'm interested in the notion that it lacks nuance to describe the intricacies of text rendering. Can someone tell me where that would apply?

globalnode 10mo ago
As a native english speaker, i did try to learn german but eventually gave up. A language sprinkled with "learn by wrote" gender prefixes for every item is just not worth learning. I did have an issue with the numbers being back to front once you get to the unit value but then someone pointed out english does that too for the values 13-19... so there ya go.
- MangoToupe 10mo ago
  > A language sprinkled with "learn by wrote" gender prefixes for every item is just not worth learning. Bantu languages, which cover much of subsaharan Africa, have many noun classes ("genders")—sometimes as many as 20. You have to learn all sorts of prefixes for each noun class depending on their grammatical role in tying to the noun. However, it's really not so bad. Once you get the hang of the noun classes, it actually makes picking up the ear for it faster. Of course this is more true the more consistent the language in applying its internal rules.
- Angostura 10mo ago
  Learn by ‘rote’.
  - globalnode 10mo ago
    danke
tenacious_tuna 10mo ago
> the notion that it lacks nuance to describe the intricacies of text rendering I took this to mean that any non-domain-specific language may be bad at describing that domain, e.g. why physicists, mathematicians, chemists, etc. have a common symbology for the discipline, or why programming languages exist. i.e., not so much that English is uniquely bad among written human language for conveying these topics, but just that any non-specialized language may be. Though, I think the author did a fair job, but I lack the domain experience to guess at where the misconceptions might lie.
- tomcam 10mo ago
  I had much the same conclusions. The author did a perfectly good job of explaining the issues.
efilife 10mo ago
> I'm very impressed that anyone who speaks another language natively can get good at it. From my completely anecdotal observations, native speakers are the worst at English. They struggle with homophones, prepositions, tenses, confuse meanings of words, apostrophes and I could go on and on. English grammar is easier to learn by reading and writing than speaking, what most native speakers do. Its/it's, they/their/they're, who's/whose, prepositions like a lot, a while and confused words like definitely and defiantly are the first that come to mind. See if you are better than a foreigner.
- InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
  As an example of this, native German speakers are often better at knowing when to use "who" vs "whom" because German grammar rules are in some ways a superset of English grammar rules.
  - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
    You don't have to refer to German grammar since the English grammar in this case contains all necessary ingredients; there is inflection depending on the case: You don't say "You give I the apple.", but "You give me the apple." (similar for he, she, we, they), i.e. the pronoun is inflected depending on whether it is subject or object, so English speakers are perfectly aware on the difference between subject and object. When you refer to the subject, you use "who" and when you refer to the object, you use "whom".
  - marky1991 10mo ago
    Whom is on its way out anyway; I don't think I ever use it at all and certainly never hear anyone else use it.
RedShift1 10mo ago
> I think English is a terrible shitpile of grammar and syntax Spoken languages are like programming languages, there are the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.
- rhdunn 10mo ago
  And start with simpler regular rules and get more complex over time as words are imported and reimported, pronunciations shift, grammatical rules morph and evolve (often to simplify grammatical genders and cases) while leaving their mark, and spelling changes. For example, goose/geese is the result of the plural form and singular form undergoing different paths in the Great Vowel Shift resulting in the different vowels in the modern form. There's also evidence that Proto-Indo-European had laryngeal consonants that have disappeared in all modern languages derived from it [1], but have left their mark on the descendant languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory
  - cenamus 10mo ago
    Then there are also the lovely instances of deliberate misspellings / insertion of letters into words that never had them in English. Eg. receipt, which has the p only in Latin, but had long lost it by the time Old French brought it to Britain.
    - kibwen 10mo ago
      Don't get me started on colour, caused by the English aristocracy distorting the Latin/Old French color just to look fancy.
- lewisjoe 10mo ago
  This. A language that doesn't adapt (accumulate shitpile of baggage from other languages over changing times) will be a dead language eventually. English will always have my respect for being open/inclusive and adaptive. Interesting fact: If you are looking for a spoken language with the cleanest/composable grammar - it's Sanskrit. The panini grammar is actually like a programming language where sentences are just compositions of lower level similar units. But like I said it's practically dead (not used as a spoken language). But interestingly used as a proxy language for translation and other nlp tasks due to it's clean grammar :)

by tomcam 10mo ago

globalnode 10mo ago

As a native english speaker, i did try to learn german but eventually gave up. A language sprinkled with "learn by wrote" gender prefixes for every item is just not worth learning. I did have an issue with the numbers being back to front once you get to the unit value but then someone pointed out english does that too for the values 13-19... so there ya go.

MangoToupe 10mo ago
> A language sprinkled with "learn by wrote" gender prefixes for every item is just not worth learning. Bantu languages, which cover much of subsaharan Africa, have many noun classes ("genders")—sometimes as many as 20. You have to learn all sorts of prefixes for each noun class depending on their grammatical role in tying to the noun. However, it's really not so bad. Once you get the hang of the noun classes, it actually makes picking up the ear for it faster. Of course this is more true the more consistent the language in applying its internal rules.
Angostura 10mo ago
Learn by ‘rote’.
- globalnode 10mo ago
  danke

tenacious_tuna 10mo ago

> the notion that it lacks nuance to describe the intricacies of text rendering I took this to mean that any non-domain-specific language may be bad at describing that domain, e.g. why physicists, mathematicians, chemists, etc. have a common symbology for the discipline, or why programming languages exist. i.e., not so much that English is uniquely bad among written human language for conveying these topics, but just that any non-specialized language may be. Though, I think the author did a fair job, but I lack the domain experience to guess at where the misconceptions might lie.

tomcam 10mo ago
I had much the same conclusions. The author did a perfectly good job of explaining the issues.

efilife 10mo ago

> I'm very impressed that anyone who speaks another language natively can get good at it. From my completely anecdotal observations, native speakers are the worst at English. They struggle with homophones, prepositions, tenses, confuse meanings of words, apostrophes and I could go on and on. English grammar is easier to learn by reading and writing than speaking, what most native speakers do. Its/it's, they/their/they're, who's/whose, prepositions like a lot, a while and confused words like definitely and defiantly are the first that come to mind. See if you are better than a foreigner.

InsideOutSanta 10mo ago
As an example of this, native German speakers are often better at knowing when to use "who" vs "whom" because German grammar rules are in some ways a superset of English grammar rules.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  You don't have to refer to German grammar since the English grammar in this case contains all necessary ingredients; there is inflection depending on the case: You don't say "You give I the apple.", but "You give me the apple." (similar for he, she, we, they), i.e. the pronoun is inflected depending on whether it is subject or object, so English speakers are perfectly aware on the difference between subject and object. When you refer to the subject, you use "who" and when you refer to the object, you use "whom".
- marky1991 10mo ago
  Whom is on its way out anyway; I don't think I ever use it at all and certainly never hear anyone else use it.

RedShift1 10mo ago

> I think English is a terrible shitpile of grammar and syntax Spoken languages are like programming languages, there are the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.

rhdunn 10mo ago
And start with simpler regular rules and get more complex over time as words are imported and reimported, pronunciations shift, grammatical rules morph and evolve (often to simplify grammatical genders and cases) while leaving their mark, and spelling changes. For example, goose/geese is the result of the plural form and singular form undergoing different paths in the Great Vowel Shift resulting in the different vowels in the modern form. There's also evidence that Proto-Indo-European had laryngeal consonants that have disappeared in all modern languages derived from it [1], but have left their mark on the descendant languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory
- cenamus 10mo ago
  Then there are also the lovely instances of deliberate misspellings / insertion of letters into words that never had them in English. Eg. receipt, which has the p only in Latin, but had long lost it by the time Old French brought it to Britain.
  - kibwen 10mo ago
    Don't get me started on colour, caused by the English aristocracy distorting the Latin/Old French color just to look fancy.
lewisjoe 10mo ago
This. A language that doesn't adapt (accumulate shitpile of baggage from other languages over changing times) will be a dead language eventually. English will always have my respect for being open/inclusive and adaptive. Interesting fact: If you are looking for a spoken language with the cleanest/composable grammar - it's Sanskrit. The panini grammar is actually like a programming language where sentences are just compositions of lower level similar units. But like I said it's practically dead (not used as a spoken language). But interestingly used as a proxy language for translation and other nlp tasks due to it's clean grammar :)