
The Unsuitability of English (2015) - r721
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/11/23/the-unsuitability-of-english/
======
crazygringo
Yes, English has irregular spelling. And phrasal verbs, the whole "to/-ing"
thing[1], and "th" is hard for some people to pronounce.

On the other hand, it doesn't have nouns that need to be remembered as
masculine or feminine. Or a hundred+ unique regular verb conjugation endings.
There are no subjunctive tenses (with one tiny exception). There are no tones.
I could go on... Every language has its annoyances.

And honestly, the spelling's not that bad. Having spent years as an English
teacher abroad, spelling was just never an issue. It's easy to complain about,
but it's just not a big deal in practice.

[1] I.e. you must say "I detest fishing" instead of "I detest to fish", while
you must say "I want to fish" instead of "I want fishing" while and both "I
like fishing" and "I like to fish" are fine. And normal dictionaries won't
even tell you which verb takes which.

~~~
wirrbel
At school, kids would generally like English classes, and not like French
classes not so much (both foreign languages). I learned both and I think I can
draw from experience in what is easy and what is difficult with the both of
them (french nowadays with lesser success, but both languages of diplomacy and
striving to be world languages).

To us (germans) learning english was easier in the beginning. Not necessarily
because words were often alike (sometimes the same words have different
meanings, "false friends"). But of course in contrast to french, one does not
have to learn conjugations, gender of words, etc.

But after having reached an intermediate level of both english and french,
things started to change. Perfecting your English skills progressively gets
harder, whereas after ~3 years you had completed the whole french language.

As it turnes out, English is huge. The english dictionary is huge. It is
basically the size of the german dictionary and the french dictionary
combined, as it draws words from 3 main sources French, Old Saxon and
Scandinavic, and then was happy to incorporate words from all over the place.
So you have the word "hunger" (germanic root, compare german "Hunger") and
"famine" (romance root, compare french "faim" meaning hunger and "famine"
meaning famine). To this day, using english on a daily basis and reading many
english books, I see a lot of words I have not yet learned.

The next "advanced" difficulty is that of idioms and idiomatic usage, english
is full of idiomatic phrases. Something like "to get it over with", "to make
ends meet". Learning such idiomatic phrases is difficult but necessary to
reach an intermediate level of english.

At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to
the one, official pronunciation), catch up on a few corner cases of the
conjugation system and enjoy having mastered a language.

~~~
Juliate
> At the same level, learning French, one can perfect one's pronunciation (to
> the one, official pronunciation)

There's no "one, official pronunciation" in French. Far from it. There are
several ones, within France, and across French-speaking countries.

~~~
wirrbel
The parisian dialect is to my knowledge the reference dialect that you can
focus on, and it is the prestigious dialect. The situation is different in
English where the situation is not clear at all. That however was not the
point I was trying to make, rather, I wanted to point out that the volume of
the language is more compact, so you reach the point earlier where you
"polish" your skills.

~~~
logicrook
How and where do you learn this dialect? How does it differ from 'generic
French'?

~~~
wirrbel
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_phonology)

~~~
logicrook
'Parisian dialect' just sends to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_French](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_French).

------
HelloMcFly
Language is a tool to facilitate information exchange. It doesn't matter how
"superior" one language is to another for any given reason, if a language
provides limited opportunity to exchange information then it is not valuable.
The incentives to learn English exist because the value of exchanging
information in English is strong in the present-day sociopolitical context,
and the malleability of the language played a large role in making that so as
cultures and languages blended together in early day America. When translation
becomes effortless and/or integrated into society in a near seamless fashion,
the distinguishing value of information exchange in _the spoken word_ will be
diminished. I have no speculation on the long-term prospects of the written
word.

This is a good time to say that I'm not an expert, just a speculating Internet
guy who has read (and listened to) relevant information from time to time. If
anyone finds this kind of conversation interesting I _highly_ recommend
checking out The Great Courses "Language A to Z" audiobook / audio lecture
series. It's incredibly fascinating.

~~~
purpled_haze
So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the
emotional one:

I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also
bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're
picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure,
the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.

~~~
tosseraccount
Most similar language to English, except for Frisian, is Dutch. Here's an
admittedly imperfect graph showing this :
[https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lex...](https://alternativetransport.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/lexical-
distance-among-the-languages-of-europe-2-1-mid-size.png) . French, Spanish,
Italian , Portugese and Romanians can often understand each other to a limited
degree as all are modern mutations from Latin. English speakers might be a
little surprised that,if they listen very carefully, can understand a just a
little Dutch.

The Dutch not liking English is probably just a little neighborhood rivalry.
As I understand it, they don't like the Germans for some more recent
transgressions.

~~~
singold
I have some English knowledge as a non native speaker, and dutch was like
Chinese for me, until some said something similar to this.

Not that I can speak or write anything but sometimes some isolated words make
sense for me because of the English similarity

~~~
schoen
There are some somewhat systematic vowel correspondences -- easier for Dutch →
German than for Dutch → English but maybe still interesting to know about. For
example, as an English speaker who had studied German, written Dutch made a
lot more sense for me when I learned that Dutch ui corresponds to German au
(for example huis/Haus (Eng. house), uitgang/Ausgang (Eng. *outgoing)).
Although so does ouw (bouw/Bau, bouwen/bauen, vrouw/Frau).

------
dasil003
This immediately reminds me of the lamentations around "Worse is Better" and
how technically superior languages and standards tend not to win in the
marketplace.

Why hasn't Esperanto caught on? Because no one speaks it, and the ones who do
don't have the influence to push it into the mainstream. English overtook
French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of
learning it over a long period of time. A lot of westerners like to think
Chinese could never become the next lingua franca because it's so much harder
to learn, but that is little defense if the economic incentives to learn it
are there.

~~~
curun1r
> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more
> individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time.

Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the
"ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more
complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than
Portuguese too).

Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal
language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and
follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About
the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and
pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a
lot more successful than Esperanto has been.

~~~
teek
Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue
conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional
memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main
complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.

~~~
empath75
Gender is actually a useful layer of redundancy when listening to someone
speak. If you miss a syllable or two you can fill in the blanks sometime if
you caught the article.

~~~
Pxtl
Ditto conjugation. I actually like in Spanish how it's redundant if the
pronoun is included, and alternately you can drop the pronoun for brevity.

------
danieltillett
The thing English has going for it (other than it is my native language) is it
very easy to speak badly. With a minimal grasp of it you can get across what
you are trying to say.

I do agree about the insanity of English's spelling. Spelling reform is one of
my lost causes that I think could be fixed by technology [1].

1\. [http://www.cutspel.com](http://www.cutspel.com)

~~~
thinkpad20
I wonder if that's unique to English though. I'm sure there are some languages
which are worse in that regard. I imagine it would be very difficult to
understand poorly-pronounced Chinese for example. Japanese, which I speak
pretty well, tends to use a lot of idioms, which means saying something by
rote application of rules is less likely to produce a natural-sounding
sentence than in English (as I judge anyway). English also lacks a gender
system which might make it easier than some European languages.

That being said I'm sure there are languages which are better than English in
terms of being able to be spoken "incorrectly".

~~~
danieltillett
The thing that makes English so easy to speak badly is that it has very loose
grammar. In English we use different words to do what grammar does in other
languages. No other language has anywhere near as many words as English so I
doubt there is another language that is as loose as English.

~~~
bonoboTP
This is always brought up but I'd like to see some concrete study about this,
like taking a major English-language daily newspaper and a, say, Hungarian one
and compare them for number of words used. First you'd need a definition for
"word". Is "daily" the same as "day"? Should "newspaper" be counted as an
extra word on its own or is it just "news" and "paper"? Is "definition" the
same as "define"? Or will you just count the "roots"? It's not simple.

I think everyone thinks the same about their native language, that there is so
much nuance and variability expressible in it, compared to the more
monotonish, dry foreign languages. We have this myth in Hungary as well, that
our language has so many synonyms for stuff, while English is always neutral
and cold. This stuff gets shared around on Facebook a lot. Mostly by people
who only speak very rudimentary English.

So it's no wonder you think English has many words, if you're a native English
speaker.

~~~
douche
If you're going to take compound words built from multiple roots out of the
equation, then approximately 98% of German words would evaporate... \s

If English has more words than other languages, it's probably because we took
them from all those other languages, bastardized them, and grafted them into
our own.

------
rvense
This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without
an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just
how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't
tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have
accents.

And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of
politics. As someone whose native language is being replaced by it, I know
that English is a perfect example of this.

~~~
ApplaudPumice
In english words change meaning just by slightly changing accent.

Ship, sheep buy, by sheet, shit

see also [http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/homophones-
sam...](http://www.ecenglish.com/learnenglish/lessons/homophones-same-
pronunciation-different-meaning)

Also english doesn't (compared to italian) is filled with exceptions.

~~~
DanBC
Many people are going to pronounce "buy", "by", and "bye" exactly the same
way. The only way to tell the difference would be from how the word is used in
a sentence.

------
awaworht
>Japanese uses two different syllabaries (one symbol per syllable) plus a
selection of about a thousand Chinese characters sprinkled in amongst them

A bit of a nitpick, but this isn't really accurate. The Jouyou kanji[1]
contain 2,136 Chinese characters that all Japanese people must learn in
school. In addition, the Jinmeiyou kanji[2] (used for names) contains an
additional 843 Chinese characters. And it's not uncommon for speakers of
Japanese to know many more. There are more than 50,000 Chinese characters
listed in the daikanwajiten[3] with Japanese pronunciation (most are not used
in either Chinese or Japanese). In fact, the number of Chinese characters used
in Japanese has increased with the use of computer input[4].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jōyō_kanji)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jinmeiyō_kanji)
[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-
Wa_Jiten](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dai_Kan-Wa_Jiten) [4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_way...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia#Changing_ways_of_writing_Chinese_characters)

------
chaoky
The central axiom of linguistics is that no language is inherently more
expressive than another. Yes, that means that conjugation and declension is no
more complicated than strict word order. Grammatical gender provides
redundancy, and conjugation allows for subject pro-drop. Orthography has
nothing to do with the actual spoken language and things like "phonetic"
pronunciation are not really an intrinsic feature of any language. Any
language can be matched with a phonemic orthography; the only reason written
English hasn't been is due to historical inertia.

~~~
cbr
Let's say we pick a random person and make them learn a completely unrelated
language. Sometimes they will learn faster than others, like Spanish or
Swahili vs English or Mandarin. Why would we expect them all to be the same
difficulty?

~~~
umanwizard
An easy-to-learn writing system is a massive help when learning a language,
but the writing system isn't part of the "language" as linguists understand
the term. Just a representation of it.

So I totally believe that it's easier to learn English than Mandarin (and
maybe easier to learn Spanish than English) because the writing system gives
you more hints, but that doesn't have anything to do with the (spoken)
language, strictly speaking.

On another note, it's not clear to me that "as phonetic as possible" makes a
(written) language easier to read, since our brains process words/morphemes as
chunks, rather than sounding them out letter-by-letter (this is how reading
Chinese is even possible). So semantic vs. phonetic writing should be thought
of as a tradeoff. As an easy example: spaces between words are not
phonetically justifiable (there is no pause between words in natural speech),
but they sure help reading comprehension a lot.

~~~
cbr

        I totally believe that it's easier to learn English than
        Mandarin (and maybe easier to learn Spanish than English)
        because the writing system gives you more hints, but that
        doesn't have anything to do with the (spoken) language,
        strictly speaking.
    

Sorry, I wasn't actually trying to bring up the writing system at all! I put
both English and Mandarin in the "harder" category, even though English's
writing system is simpler (though still not as simple as many).

------
joolze
This is absurd.

First he complains about the fact that we use an alphabet. Does he even have
experience with heiroglyphic languages like Chinese? Basically the Chinese
dictionary is split into 200-something "families", so when you don't know what
a word means, you get a dictionary, and you flip to a family, then you
basically brute force your way through the family to find your word.

Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up
pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily
absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French actively
remove words from their language.

And the phonetics? Go try out fucking Czech. I've heard it's legitimately
impossible to become fluent in Czech. Or Austrian dialect, which has something
like 4 different "r"s.

"Hawaiian no consonant is ever followed by another consonant" ... yeah you
also frequently run into the german nightmare of neverending words like
"humahumanukanukaapuaa". You think that's a better way to deal with things? An
easy to pronounce marathon?

The large vocabulary is undesirable? The large vocabulary, with extreme
possible specificity, is what makes English so attractive for scientific
application.

And complaining about grammar? English has one of the easiest grammars to
learn and get started with, sure it will take a few decades to not make any
mistakes, but for just getting going, it is remarkably easy. No genders (some
languages have 5 or more genders for things, see czech), no conjugation.

Sorry for the rant, but if you're just gonna post some BS one sided oped I'm
gonna do the same. I personally don't think English is the best choice either.
But one sidedness is ultra-obnoxious.

~~~
kuschku
> Now he complains about the pronunciation. Sorry, but that fucked up
> pronunciation is one of the main _strengths_ of English. English readily
> absorbs needed words from other languages. Some languages like French
> actively remove words from their language.

That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain
about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is
several times worse.

> The large vocabulary is undesirable? The large vocabulary, with extreme
> possible specificity, is what makes English so attractive for scientific
> application.

Wrong. Having a word for every topic is what makes english useful – but that
doesn’t mean a large vocabulary.

If you build words piece by piece – say, "backyard-filled-with-children"
(kindergarten) or "spirit-of-the-time" (Zeitgeist) or "joy-of-someone-
else’s-pain" (Schadenfreude) they are easily understandable, people need a
tiny vocabulary to understand even the most complex words or legal terms, and
it’s easily writable, too.

> And complaining about grammar? English has one of the easiest grammars to
> learn and get started with, sure it will take a few decades to not make any
> mistakes, but for just getting going, it is remarkably easy. No genders
> (some languages have 5 or more genders for things, see czech), no
> conjugation.

LOL. Ever tried understanding all the different versions of time in English?
Simple past, past progressive, present progressive, simple present, etc and
your brain starts melting.

~~~
josinalvo
> That pronunciation makes it hard to learn. Seriously, people always complain
> about gender of words being complex – english pronunciation and spelling is
> several times worse.

Are they, though? Take a fixed set of rules for english pronunciation. Add a
list of exceptions. Is this list as big as the list of nouns of portuguese,
spanish, or french? (we can define as big in number of words, or try some
information theoretical construct, or even go to some psicological measure,
should one exist. I am still betting that the english pronunciation, evil as
it is, is not as bad as a gender to every noun)

(I am a native portuguese speaker, and only got mad about gender in nouns when
leaning french)

~~~
kuschku
That’s the thing, there are no real fixed rules.

Home vs. some, Foot vs. boot, versus vs. verses, they’re, their, there, etc.

Pronunciation vs. pronounce.

The only solution is to learn every word twice.

------
tokenadult
This article from 23 November 2015 was followed up by a 3 December 2015
article by the same author (professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum) titled
"English and Its Undeserved Good Luck," previously discussed on Hacker
News.[1] The author is a renowned and very influential scholar of the English
language, co-editor of the most authoritative grammar of the English language,
the _The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language_. Alas, although Pullum is
a very astute scholar of language (linguist), he is not a polyglot (learner of
other languages) to any particular degree, and many of his points about the
defects of English as a world language are unconvincing to any of us who know
many different human languages. I know a variety of languages from several
different language families (as disclosed in my Hacker News user profile), and
I think the key point is that English is easy enough to learn, useful enough
to learn, and geographically widespread enough to challenge the advantages
proposed for any other language as a world language, including Chinese (which
I speak well enough to have worked as a translator and interpreter and teacher
of Chinese).

There is a whole website about why Esperanto never caught on as a world
language (focused mostly on its linguistic features) by a writer who has
considerably more acquaintance with formal linguistics and with a variety of
world languages than the inventor of Esperanto ever had.[2]

[1] original article:

[http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-a...](http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/12/03/english-
and-its-undeserved-good-luck/)

HN discussion thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702080)

[2] "Learn Not to Speak Esperanto" by Justin Rye

[http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/](http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/)

~~~
ktRolster
English is _easier_ than many languages: it doesn't have gendered nouns or
adjectives almost at all (thank goodness), it doesn't have noun declensions,
it doesn't have many verb conjugations (hello Russian!). It's biggest pain is
tricky spelling and a list of irregular verbs.

~~~
tankenmate
English still declines personal pronouns; I, me, mine; he, him, his; she, her,
hers; it, it, its; we, us, ours; they, them, theirs.

~~~
Turing_Machine
An example of one that's almost disappeared, other than in the most careful or
formal speech: "who" and "whom".

------
esaym
English is great. Sure it is probably one of the harder languages to learn for
the non native speaker. But one thing is for sure, it is taking over the
world. And that has a great advantage. Even to the point where the fundamental
Baptist will proclaim Genesis 11:1-9 can even apply to today in that the
"whole earth was of one language, and of one speech" and thus inviting God's
judgment upon us.

And for me? I like it. It's like Perl. You don't have to be skilled wizard
just to use it and hack something together that will work and get the meaning
through, even if it is dirty.

~~~
kbenson
And like Perl, mastery can result in beautiful, concise and clear expression.
I doubt this is a coincidence, as Larry Wall is a linguist.

------
BuckRogers
This article is around the lines of why I think Spanish is the best language
to rally around as the global language. It's phonetic, if you can speak it you
can (for the most part, especially compared to other languages) read or write
it by just knowing the basic rules of the written form. It's already in
widespread use. It's modern and not behind the times so there are terms for
everything, and it's Latin based so it has every root word that English does
to grow from. It just makes more sense than an artificial language that
doesn't have a 400+ million person headstart. For myself, I like the way it
sounds too. I particularly dislike the Scandinavian languages and only
slightly like German a bit more than those, and English a bit more than
German. But to my ear (having lived in Europe), the Latin varieties are just
as powerful sounding but also elegant (subjective of course). Latin languages
like Spanish also have the advantage of interlingual comprehension. A well-
educated native Spanish speaker (meaning college educated or similar), can
understand the Pope when he speaks in Italian. Or know much of what a
Portuguese speaker is saying much of the time. This doesn't apply as much to
folks who barely know their own language, which is where most people pull
their perceptions of groups like Spanish speakers from (desperate immigrants
with little to no education). It's spoken across all 5 continents.

Due to these reasons and more (encouraging friendship with neighbors both here
and on a national scale), I've fully embraced Spanish as a 2nd language as an
American. It's a good thing.

There's a reason there's no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Yes, though the gendered nouns and verb conjugations are a chore. No language
is perfect.

~~~
BuckRogers
Perfect is the enemy of better.

English has verb conjugations too. Grab, grabbed, grabbing etc. While we do
have a few gendered nouns such as blonde vs blond. I will grant you gendered
nouns on the whole, but you're still only standing on one leg (gendered nouns)
which is a relic but overshadowed by any number of facts in Spanish's favor.

Spanish is mostly phonetic, which for dyslexics makes them easier to learn.
This has been proven. The benefits to Spanish over alternatives are long-
reaching.

Such as that English is a linguistic island or that Spanish orthography is
objectively the best on Earth for natural, world-languages. It was also better
put together with the inclusion of the '¿' '¡' marks. It's a fantastic piece
of orthography. As far as being a chore, if I didn't speak English or Spanish,
I'd much rather be asked to learn Spanish between the two and would prefer to
not waste my time with English or similar nonsensical language.

Mastery in any language is a lifelong effort but Spanish has the linguistic
gold standard for its written form. While it's still another language and not
'easy', there are savings on effort and time overall to reach fluency. I speak
both daily. In programming terms, it would be just "the best tool for the
job".

~~~
mixmastamyk
English conjugation is much simpler, there are usually only one to two forms
per tense instead of six.

~~~
BuckRogers
Yes, but that has advantages of its own including you can speak more concisely
in Spanish. Thus even that isn't a complete negative and it's probably
Spanish's most difficult aspect to learn. English is going to lose to Spanish
in a linguistic head-to-head on almost all fronts other than the fact it's
more popular (a big deal in itself but that's not what we're discussing).

As someone who speaks both, and picked up Spanish later on in life (post-30),
the fact I appreciate Spanish more as a language is a testament to its great
design.

------
danjayh
As a native English speaker who has never learned another language beyond high
school Spanish, I often feel sympathy for the plight of those who are forced
to learn English later in life. I see many native English speakers with a
tenuous grasp on the language, and from that and anecdotal evidence I know
that it's a hard language. I remember how difficult Spanish, ostensibly an
'easy' language, was for me to learn. I'm glad I'm not in a position where I
need to learn English late in life, and I'm sorry for what we've done to you,
world :).

~~~
beat
The one that baffles me is how Chinese speakers (and other tone-language
speakers) ever learn to speak and understand spoken English effectively. In
English, tones (changes in pitch) are used to imply emotional shadings like
sarcasm and surprise. In Chinese, tones are actually different words. It's
hard for an English speaker to learn to pronounce tonal langauges (I did one
year of Chinese, and my wife has a master's degree in it), but I'm amazed that
Chinese people ever wrap their heads around all the unspoken, untaught meaning
hidden in spoken English.

~~~
lstamour
If the anime I've been watching for almost a decade has taught me anything,
it's that for Japanese at least, the clues behind sarcasm there and in English
aren't quite that dissimilar. Tone of voice can still be used, you just have
to be a bit more careful about it. Sometimes it just comes down to accent or
word choice. After Googling, the consensus seems to be that sarcasm really
comes down to the shared context in the conversation. If it's obvious and you
both get the joke, the sarcasm worked. It's just as easy to miss sarcastic
comments in English -- as not everyone says it with the same verbal emphasis.
And of course, we can always understand sarcasm online. </sarcasm> (Okay, that
was a poor joke... moving on...)

~~~
beat
Japanese and Chinese are probably more different from each other than either
is from English. The big point is that Japanese isn't tonal

------
beloch
Perhaps the time has come to start using phonetic spellings (e.g. An English
specific subset of the International Phonetic Alphabet) in at least some
contexts, such as signage. Wales would be a good place to start. If someone
here has the patience to translate,
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch" into IPA phonetic
English I'd sure appreciate it.

On second thought, maybe we should leave the Welsh out of this. Yes... That
would be for the best.

Anyways, while it is certainly ambitious to start using phonetic spellings in
a limited way, it's far from unprecedented. In 1929 the Turks walked away from
the Ottoman alphabet entirely and adopted the modern Turkish Alphabet, which
is basically the Latin alphabet with some phonetic characters added. The
result is that modern Turkish sounds like it's written, and it's easy to pick
up pronunciation from spelling. The Turkish alphabet is relatively simple
compared to full IPA, which is part of its appeal.

~~~
stan_rogers
But then _whose_ phonology would we use? There isn't really _an_ English, even
if you restrict yourself to England itself. It's not just a matter of minor
and systematic variations in vowels, either; _laboratory_ (to pick an
arbitrary example) has a different number of syllables and completely
different vowels depending on who is saying it where.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
All languages have their problems. English is no better or worse than any
other. Worrying about this is a waste of time. You can't change the world's
lingua franca yourself. At best, you can perhaps try to get its orthography
reformed.

English, like any other language, can communicate ideas well. And that is all
it needs to do.

------
switch007
> Where Spanish has just five vowels (si, se, la, lo, tu), nicely spaced out
> through the acoustic spectrum, the English vowel system is a nightmare of
> more than 20 distinct vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs.

That almost reads as if the author does not believe Spanish has diphthongs...?
Anyone who thinks that should spend some more time in the "aula".

> Even before we get to grammar, then, and the roughly 200 irregular verbs of
> our misbegotten language...

Only 200!? That's amazing.

------
kazinator
Shrug. I came into the English-speaking world midway through fifth grade. By
the end of sixth, I was among the top performers in the area of spelling.

There is an intuition to some of the spelling which, combined with a decent
memory, makes it fairly easy.

I think the underlying key to it is that there aren't that many choices for
how a word, or part of a word, can be spelled. So even if you have to memorize
the spelling by rote, you're not memorizing the actual letter-for-letter
spelling; you're only memorizing which of the plausible ways of spelling that
word applies to it. That is a lot less information.

If you happen not to remember a spelling, then you can hypothesize the several
plausible ways in which it may be spelled. These possibilities reduce the
problem to a multiple-choice question, rather than cold recall, which is
easier since the choices jog your memory.

------
tomcam
For years the Western world dreamed about a universal tongue. It's here now,
and it's English. Every complaint in the article is correct, but ask yourself
this: if you had to choose between English and nothing, which would you
choose?

~~~
kuschku
Nothing.

Rather no universal language and having to translate than forcing every child
to learn this abomination of a language.

Maybe I’m biased as someone who had to learn english as second language, and
had to memorize every word multiple times - just for the different ways of
spellings, or composita (helpful vs. help and full, wtf?)...

People always complain about having to learn gender for the German words – but
that’s 2 bits of data plus the pronunciation – which is the same as the
spelling.

In English, you have the spelling, the spelling of various combinations, and
different variations of pronunciations.

It’s hard to speak properly, impossible to learn, and its only benefit is that
everyone speaks it.

It’s the PHP of languages.

~~~
majewsky
> but that's 2 bits of data

As if brains store bits.

~~~
kuschku
Smaller pieces of information are still easier to store in a brain than larger
pieces of information.

------
garyclarke27
What a silly article, he should read some Wittgenstein, the purpose of a
language is to communicate - English has won the darwinian race to become the
global standard for this - stop moaning, accept it and get over it, there is
nothing you or anyone can do now. Many dimwits believe Mandarin will take on
this role - zero chance (unless by force) it's too late, Mandarin does not
have the geographic reach and is fatally handicapped by it's crazily difficult
to master, pictorial text representation system, which even natives struggle
with. All Human languages have faults and are difficult. The effort and time
to master a foreign language is huge for most of us, therefore the benefit
must be equally huge. English is the only langauge that provides enough
benefit and thus incentive to learn, for the vast majority. English also has
by far the largest vocabulary - therefore must be the best system we have,to
describe abstract ideas or to represent reality. The only factor I can think
of that might stop English being understood by nearly every human within a
couple of generations or so is real time translation, which would actually be
a shame I think.

~~~
panglott
Note that Geoffrey Pullum is a distinguished linguist, editor of the Cambridge
Grammar of the English Language, and a frequent blogger at LanguageLog.

The tone of this article should be taken as more light than many here are;
this sort of thing is a frequent hobbyhorse for linguists and mostly just
evinces love for and humility about English.

But keep in mind that support for English is wide but shallow. There have been
other international languages before and there will be again.

------
vacri
While I understand that the article is more about academic fun than
seriousness, it does annoy me that articles like this go "X is not ideal! Y is
better than X at foo, and Z is better than X at bar!". You never get a gestalt
comparison, just "English is a shit language, because Spanish is better at
this one item, and Hawaiian is better at this one item, and Swahili is better
at this one item".

You get similar articles in the vein of animal comparison: "The human is
physically feeble and weak, because our vision doesn't match that of an eagle,
our jaws don't match those of a jaguar, and we can't swim like a dolphin",
when in fact, we're physically just fine. Jaguars don't have eagle eyesight
either, nor can they swim like dolphins.

> _then went on to discuss how English managed to attain its astonishing (and
> increasing) global status despite its manifest unsuitability._

Not that mysterious: the global superpowers of the 19th (UK) and 20-21st
centuries (US) both spoke English, and both were significant exporters of
culture. If you wanted to be a have instead of a have-not, you were better off
speaking English than Spanish, Hawaiian, or Swahili...

------
force_reboot
I love the English language. Its quirks an inconsistencies reflect the
turbulent, chaotic history of the speakers of that language. From the original
ice age settlers, who left little or no trace of their language even though
the British are largely descended from them[0], to the Celtic invaders who
brought Celtic language and culture to the British Isles around, 2500 years
ago, to the Anglo-Saxons who came 1000 years later laying the base of the
English language, and finally the Norman invasion which brought its own words.
Apart from migrations and invasions of the homeland, there was direct
borrowing from French and Latin, as well as probably many non-European
influences from the colonial era.

But I can see how these things are just annoyances to people who are just
trying to learn English to communicate. In any case, we are stuck with
English, that's network effects for you.

[0]
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene_2.html)

------
jiiam
I just want to point out to all those who believe that "with minimal effort
you can get your point across in English" that it simply isn't true.

You think you can do it with just a few years of learning, but talking in
English to someone you share a language with is entirely different than
talking to someone of a very distant origin. I remember trying to do it with
my classmates in our very similar accents, with our common lexicon, as opposed
to talking to Asian people during visits abroad (I am European).

Even with fellow Europeans from a different country it's not easy to get the
message across, even between similar languages like Spanish and Italian, to
the point that if you're from Spain and need to get something in an Italian
shop, you're probably better off by speaking Spanish, statistically it will be
understood much easier than English.

To sum up, English is not easy at all. It's just a bit easier and surely worth
the effort given the great amount of resources already available in English,
including the giant pool of speakers.

~~~
music
English to me is like Scheme(Lisp). They share very simple(not a synonym of
easy) syntax, yet actually knowing(owning) either is very different from
simply knowing their grammar.

------
malkia
I had a terrible boss (russian) long long time ago, and he made fun of me (in
front of others) the way I was saying: three, free and tree - it all sounded
the same (and still I have problems). I'm not a native speaker also
(bulgarian). Nowadays I'm grateful to our son (~8 years old) who corrects us
all the time, and it's kind of cool since this makes him feel good about it. I
often would consult him when reading a book to him, how this and that is
supposed to sound. He's even starting to correct my grammar, and learned early
on about etymology (I had to geekimize him).

Oh, that boss is long gone, he had another strange thing - correcting e-mails,
people wrote to the point he wanted to correct one brit (and he was not the
easy kind). I understand he also wanted to be helpful, but done privately
would've been appreciated, done publicly - not so...

------
atemerev
English is bad, but not as bad as, say, French with its diphthongs and half
letters silent. Or Hungarian with its 18 cases (lucky English speakers don't
even know what a case is). Or Danish, which is totally and utterly
unpronounceable.

The best European language is, of course, Italian.

~~~
paride5745
As an Italian native speaker, I do not fully agree.

Italian is great, but often is too much rhetorical and "slow" to convey a
message, while English is quicker and allows you to "hack" the language in a
unique way.

I do not love English, but I think that it is good enough and the quicker
language to use out there (albeit one of the hardest to master properly).

Italian is excellent, especially compared to other (major) European languages
(hello French and German). But it is not the quicker language to learn at an
acceptable level IMHO.

~~~
atemerev
Perhaps, but this is not a language feature. The only reason that English
looks like an easy language to learn is that everyone is now adjusted to less-
than-perfect English of non-native speakers. And if you choose to speak
Italian (or, G-d forbid, French), you'd better do it well enough.

------
twelvechairs
One of the major reasons english has succeeded is because it adapts (ie it
doesnt have fixed rules). This means it is inclusive and future-proof. Imagine
if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks like it is
spelled incorrectly.

~~~
wolfgke
> Imagine if you couldnt name your website with a short term because it looks
> like it is spelled incorrectly.

This would prevent some domain scams, which I would consider as an advantage.

------
yompers888
My interesting language anecdote is that I find it much easier to hear
syllables in Chinese than in English; I have very sensitive hearing, but I
can't distinguish consonants very well. My first language is Enlish, and I'm a
mediocre Chinese speaker, so it's not easier for me to understand whole
sentences in Chinese, but I'm much less likely to lose a word. I've always
assumed this is because more of the information is conveyed in long, tonal
vowel sounds, rather than the comparatively short high-pass consonants, which
is the reverse of English.

Does anyone else have experience with this?

------
WalterBright
I'm not too impressed with the article. Any language that achieves worldwide
domination is going to expropriate whatever words are convenient from other
languages, and they'll never fit in properly with the rest of the language.

English is one giant polyglot of other languages, including a hilarious
mixture of old English with French (from when the French conquered Britain).

English also has many dialects and accents, some of which are borderline
incomprehensible to other native (whatever that means) English speakers.

~~~
Turing_Machine
"including a hilarious mixture of old English with French"

Also Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Cornish, Hindi/Urdu (more common in the U.K.),
Spanish and Native American words (more common in the U.S.), German and Latin
(more common in scientific and technical fields)...

------
piyush_soni
On a side note, I've always had this question (Excuse me for the ignorance,
English is my third language). I think most here would agree that there's just
no rule in English on how a particular word would be pronounced (yes, there's
a general layout, but the number of exceptions greatly outweigh them). So when
a new word is added to the language, who decides how would it be pronounced,
what its singular/plural form would be called and so on (no rules there as
well)? Is it the one who added it, or some panel of 'experts' sitting at some
University etc.? If it's the one who added it, does he/she give the list of
all these in writing to the Oxford people (lest they might come up with their
own conclusions)? The inconsistency in English baffles me.

~~~
cmrx64
There is no "central authority" for the language. When a word is created, it
spreads by word of mouth. The pronunciation is sometimes quite volatile before
it becomes generally agreed upon (take GIF as a recent and annoyingly
prominent example). The general thing to look around for on the web is
"neologism".

------
erdojo
Trolls will say anything these days to get attention.

If reality is up, someone will claim down is better. If something is cool,
someone will say it sucks.

I don't expect that English will become the global default language, but I do
expect it will/is be a common backup.

Why? Trade agreements over the last 40 years have dramatically increased
global business collaborations. American companies took the early initiative -
not just in one market but many.

Smart foreigners knew early on that learning English was a way to make money,
to work more easily with these companies who were investing mega bucks.
English's pervasiveness had nothing to do with its suitability or superiority
or any academic reasoning. It was a side effect.

------
qb45
Reminds me of certain quote attributed to Bjarne Stroustrup.

My personal pet peeve is when you concatenate two words to end up with
something sounding completely different, say _in_ _finite_ _infinite_. Just
doesn't make sense at all.

~~~
satori99
... or sometimes the exact the same meaning _flammable /inflammable_

------
tangled_zans
If I had a dollar for every time I saw a native english speaker complain about
how "hard" English is. . .

I think those that were born speaking English and never had to learn a second
language start to feel insecure around literally everyone else who speaks both
their own language and English.

So they make up this meme about how "English is the most irregular and
complicated language in the world", and hey, now it's okay that they don't
know any other language, they've gotten the hardest one down! Yay!

It's the most pretentious linguistic meme I've seen.

------
gardano
I cannot help but remember "The Ketchup Song (Aserejé) [0], whose lyrics are
more or less a bastardisation of "Rapper's Delight" in Spanish. [1] Such a
joyful embracing of purposeful misinterpretation of lyrics purportedly in
English!

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0PisGe66mY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0PisGe66mY)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ketchup_Song_(Aserejé)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ketchup_Song_\(Aserejé\))

------
trophycase
I seem to remember reading something about how English has one of the highest,
if not the highest information to syllable ratio. I think that might give
clues as to its ubiquity.

~~~
e2daipi
I believe that you are referring to this[0] study. It has since been published
(2011), though it's not openly accessible.

Page 8 of a presentation by the author[1] shows that out of 7 languages
(Japanese, Italian, Spanish, French, German, English, and Mandarin) English is
the second most information dense language, Mandarin being the most. Spanish
is characterised by a fast rate of low-density syllables.

A Spanish to English comparison (eye-balling) would be that Spanish is spoken
at a rate of 7.8 syllables per second vs 6.2 for English (≈ 22.9% faster).
(Spanish compared as a lot of comments are referencing its simplicity)

English, compared in the referenced study, achieves the highest information
rate, is spoken at a moderate-slow speed with a high information density.

[0] [http://www.ddl.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegri...](http://www.ddl.ish-
lyon.cnrs.fr/fulltext/pellegrino/pellegrino_to%20appear_language.pdf) [1]
[http://neukom.dartmouth.edu/docs/pellegrino-presentation-
dar...](http://neukom.dartmouth.edu/docs/pellegrino-presentation-
dartmouth2012.pdf)

------
prostoalex
Ithkuil is a fairly interesting language to explore for efficient
communications [http://www.ithkuil.net/](http://www.ithkuil.net/) with a great
back story [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-
beg...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/12/24/utopian-for-beginners)

------
ommunist
English is perfectly suitable, since most of the technical literature,
describing how to build and maintain everything around you is in English.
German and Spanish are also fine. There are fields, where German prevails
(funny enough, one of them is oriental linguistics). English is lingua franca
of science and technology and there is no alternative to that. This is
cultural domination consequence everyone is facing.

------
timwaagh
the only reason an organisation located here would push against the use of
English internationally, is the fact that the Netherlands is
internationalizing at such a pace it's being increasingly used locally over
here. In Amsterdam it's becoming less and less possible to order a coffee in
Dutch. That's just fine though.

------
smegel
I wonder what linguists would consider the "best" current language in
widespread use (at least 1M first-language native speakers say in a single
dialect) for international exchange, taking into account all relevant aspects
of the language including writing system.

------
beat
As my professor once said, "Modern English was invented in the year 1066 for
Norman conquerors to pick up Saxon barmaids".

Some history. Old English was a Germanic language (or a loose confederation of
Germanic languages), best remembered today for _Beowulf_. It is a well and
truly _foreign language_ for English speakers, as different as modern German
is from modern English.

Then, in the year 1066, William the Conqueror invaded England from Normandy,
and quickly conquered most of it. A trade patois formed almost instantaneously
to facilitate communication between the Germanic-speaking English and the
French-speaking Normans. This was Middle English. Unlike Old English, this is
cleary _English_ to modern speakers. A reasonably well educated English
speaker can learn to read Middle English in a couple of weeks. "Translations"
of _Canterbury Tales_ can be found with the Middle English on one page, and a
modern English translation on the other. (As an aside, I highly recommend
_Canterbury Tales_. It's one of the most hilarious things I've ever read!)
Middle English was the big step toward the messy, hodge-podge grammar and
spelling we all know and perhaps love today.

The shift from Middle English to modern English took place during the reign of
Henry VIII, famous for lopping off his wives' heads and establishing the
Church of England (Henry VIII was the first monarch to reject Catholicism and
embrace Protestantism, partly so he could get divorces and partly due to
shifting power in Europe at this time due to technical innovations, but that's
another story.). King Henry demanded that Oxford and Cambridge, the premier
universities in England, start teaching in English rather than the Latin they
had used for centuries. Professors were horrified. Give up the beauty and
elegant perfection of Latin for that crappy trade patois the peasants use to
sell fish and hurl insults? But they had no choice (Henry was, after all, fond
of beheadings). So they did next best thing, which was to impose the beauty
and consistency of _Latin_ grammar on this crappy French-German trade patois.

("But didn't the Latin roots come from the Roman conquest of England?", some
of you wonder out loud. No, it did not. Roman culture had little impact on
England during their brief stay.)

One of the key results of this admittedly messy and violent history is that
English is an extraordinarily flexible language. It is easy to learn a little,
although a challenge to master. For all its terrible spelling, pronunciation,
and grammar, English is very tolerant of error.

Another benefit is that English can and does absorb words from other
languages, simply by mispronouncing them. Even grammar from other languages
can be folded in. It still forms trade patois today - Creole, Chinglish,
Spanglish, and other hybrids form whenever English encounters some less
promiscuous language. Eventually, these work their way into the mainstream.

It's fascinating. You see disaster? You're welcome to learn Esperanto, a
language scientifically designed to facilitate clean communication, that is
spoken by no one but nerdy hobbyists. As for me, I'll be celebrating this
glorious hot mess of a trade patois, a language that celebrates the
complicated and always evolving nature of human cultures in its very bones.

------
stevebmark
English is indeed a terrible language, with British / European versions being
objectively worse. The improvements to English came from Noah Webster (of
Merriam-Webster fame) who was the sole driving force in re-spelling words,
"colour" to "color," etc. He helped remove the arbitrary rules as best as he
could. This is a clear improvement, but some of his more aggressive changes
didn't catch on. English needs another reformation, since it's unrealistic the
language will disappear anytime soon.

It's always been reforming subtly, where we see useful abbreviations form
colloquially, like goodbye is a contraction of "God be with you." You could
even argue the use of "u" instead of "you" in text messages is a version of
this.

------
MattConfluence
> For many concepts there are four different roots: one Anglo-Saxon, one
> Norman French, one Latin, and one Greek.

Funny how he left out Norse, since that is where English gets the word "root"
from.

~~~
conceit
Most of the Greek would come with the Latins. But are you sure Anglo-Saxon
doesn't include the Norse already? The name Angeln comes from a region in
Germany near the border of Denmark.

------
shrewduser
is this even an argument against english? i can't really find the point he
harps on about chinese and japanese for a bit (both objectively worse at being
a lingua franca in so many ways) and then talks about spelling and
pronunciation which i think misses the point entirely as these can be easily
fixed with a modified simple english.

what language in widespread use is objectively better than english?

~~~
kuschku
> what language in widespread use is objectively better than english?

For example, a good language should use lots of composita — you’d only know a
small number of words, and be able to easily explain more complex words – each
word is a description of its meaning.

You’d also want to have a way to use complex grammar, but be understandable.

English has nothing like these.

------
aminok
English, the PHP of natural languages.

------
tim333
It's kind of a shame Esparanto didn't take off.

(Estas ia honto Esperanton ne despegar.)

------
Randgalt
Yes, of course nothing of worth has been created with English. What bollocks.

------
zappo2938
English sucks like javascript. But, it is everywhere!

------
aaron695
English sucks as a language. Bit of a no brainer.

It's here to stay, also a no brainer.

At best Chinese might take over, which is a harder language, so the article is
all a bit pointless.

