
Accents, English, Arrogance, Success - simonebrunozzi
http://www.brunozzi.com/2013/09/02/accents-english-arrogance-success/
======
lazyjones
> _if you have a strong accent (e.g. your English is not that great), you
> perform poorly as a startup. This isn’t a xenophobic statement, but just a
> statement of fact._

If that is supposed to be a statement of fact, it's wrong, for 2 reasons:

a) A few observations do not equal causality. Unless each and every startup
(founder?) was examined and found to match this statement, the statement is
wrong. Try a weaker statement ("...you _likely_ perform poorly as a
startup...")

b) I know several successful founders with strong accents in English. There's
a small, but not insignificant factor you've left out: the US market isn't
everything (and it's becoming less important every day). A startup neither has
to be successful in the US to be successful, nor does it even have to have
English speaking customers or users. Nit-picking? Sure. But I wasn't the one
who made overly broad statements that possibly offended startup founders all
over the world.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
lazyjones,

you are right. It's not a statement of fact. Let me rephrase by saying that
"if you have a strong accent, you are more likely to perform poorly as the CEO
of a startup that does business in the US".

------
gruseom
Both points can be true: startup CEOs need to be understandable in English,
and native speakers are insensitive to the difficulties of someone trying to
learn their language. The insensitivity is greater if the person hasn't tried
to learn a foreign language themselves, and no doubt also if they lack
empathy.

That has nothing to do with English, though. Any language student who's ever
sat around with a group of native speakers babbling away knows how impossible
it is to get them to slow down for you. And even when you're speaking one-on-
one with someone, you might be able to get them to slow down for 5 seconds _if
you 're lucky_ before they forget and just start speaking normally (i.e.
completely unintelligibly to you) again. It's obviously not arrogance. People
just aren't aware of how they speak their native language.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Hey Daniel,

good points. I agree that when there are MULTIPLE English speakers in the
group, it's almost impossible to slow them down. I also agree that it's
unlikely to be arrogance in that case.

Perhaps I was mostly referring to one-to-one communications. I think there's
something specific to English though, especially the pronunciation part.

As an example, I have heard multiple times from Japanese and Russians that
learning how to pronounce Italian is quite simple for them; I also was often
in situations where Italians were thought to be Russians because of the way
they would pronounce English.

This means that some languages are easier than others, and I still think that
English is not that great from this point of view.

~~~
WildUtah
Japanese, Italian, Spanish, and a few other languages have about five to nine
distinct vowels. They also have a severe limit on consonant blends and
combinations.

English has about 25 distinct vowels; it varies depending on your accent.
Consonants can be placed around vowels freely without strict rules.

There are about 250 distinct syllables in use in Japanese and two or three
times that many in Spanish or Italian. English has many thousands.

So English is harder, but people learn to speak it. Even babies.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
WildUtah, thanks for the details. Very useful and interesting.

So, I was right in thinking that pronouncing English is harder than, say,
Italian or Japanese.

Unfortunately, written Japanese is super hard IMHO, or most non-western
alphabets.

Simone

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pan69
I'm originally from the The Netherlands but I've been living in Australia for
the past 8 years. When I first arrived here my English was fine, so I thought.
I was in my early 30's and had used English for the most part of my life.

However, I soon discovered that there is a big difference in speaking another
language and expressing yourself in it. It's very different to ask for
directions than to communicate that funny thing that happened to you the other
day.

I can understand what Paul is referring to in that; to be a start up CEO you
need to be able to "communicate" an idea and vision. If you need to do that,
in this case, to a native English speaking crowd and no one can understand you
it's simply not going to work.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Hi there! Expressing deep thoughts or emotions in a foreign language can be
very hard, especially if there are cultural differences. (try mediterranean
cultures and Anglo-saxon ones, for instance).

However, we are referring to a business/technical discussion in this case.
There are similarities to other types of discussions, but I think there are
also specific rules that don't apply to, say, conversations between a Dutch
and an Australian couple :)

Simone

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jpmattia
> _Mediterranean Lingua Franca was a pidgin: “a simplified language that
> develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not
> have a language in common”.

English, instead, is a full-blown language._

Since modern English was the result of combining Old English and French, you
don't consider Germanic and Latin languages to be far enough apart to be
pidgin?

Things that got simplified:

1\. Gender of nouns (they are largely gone)

2\. Declensions.

3\. Verb conjugation.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
I don't understand your point.

I am not a linguist, but in my humble opinion, pidgin doesn't measure how far
two languages are; it rather is the semplification of a language (e.g. Latin,
or Italian) in order to make it easier to understand and speak by non natives.

Please tell me what your point was, as I don't know what to answer :)

~~~
jpmattia
Sorry for not being more clear.

> it rather is the semplification of a language (e.g. Latin, or Italian) in
> order to make it easier to understand and speak by non natives.

This is exactly what happened to English; English used to have a great deal
more complexity, until the French conquered England. That started a great
simplification, so that the court (which was French) and the people (which
spoke a very Germanic English) could communicate.

Even things like whether a table is male or female (exists in Italian, no?)
were removed from English.

~~~
Farced
The problem is that you are assuming that is only a single form of complexity,
while yes the declensions and conjugations have since disappeared in English
(and most of the West European languages) the complexity of the word order
(syntax) has increased substantially.

Also, the reduction of the morphological complexity in English PRE-DATES the
Norman invasion. So, it had nothing to do with the French rulers. Not to say
that they didn't leave a mark on the language in other ways.

~~~
eru
> while yes the declensions and conjugations have since disappeared in English
> (and most of the West European languages)

Which languages are you talking about?

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westiseast
Nice article! I'm English and work in China, so for once an English person
struggling with language :) I've experienced the same things you've
experienced, but with Chinese native speakers.

But there's also benefits of being non-native which I think you overlook:

\- I can be 10x more blunt in Chinese than I can in English. The language
itself is blunt, but I also get much more leeway because I'm not expected to
have perfect language.

\- I can concentrate on what people are actually asking me to do, rather than
getting distracted by the subtleties of language or tone of voice. I get less
annoyed with people's personality, and more engaged with what they want.

\- Other people don't get distracted by _your_ accent, and give you more
credit than you're due. Think of a Russian speaking English - I might have
negative cultural perceptions (eg. because of movie bad guys) but I also think
of Dostoyevsky. You might be from the worst council estate in Russia, but I'll
think you're a philosopher because of the accent.

~~~
eru
> \- Other people don't get distracted by your accent, and give you more
> credit than you're due. Think of a Russian speaking English - I might have
> negative cultural perceptions (eg. because of movie bad guys) but I also
> think of Dostoyevsky. You might be from the worst council estate in Russia,
> but I'll think you're a philosopher because of the accent.

That's why I was told to keep my German accent when I was in Britain. Foreign
accents keep you out of the British class system.

------
solve
Wait, the pidgin dialects that I've known have always been the _more_ complex
merger of 2+ languages, plus additional invented slang. More complex, not
less. Edit: Apparently, linguists now want us to call the more advanced
pidgins "creole languages", although there is some debate about the
distinction:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language)

This idea, that learning English alone is simpler than the multiple languages
that some countries learn in school, hints at the core of the language
learning problem. A skilled employee in the US learns not 1, but 3 languages:

\- Conversational English, slang, unwritten idioms.

\- Then, he re-learns the extensive grammar rules and vocabulary, well beyond
what's normally used in conversation (i.e to a grammar nazi level.)

\- Then, again he completely relearns English in the context of the
connotations and phrases of professional business language. (Many non-native
English speakers are in complete disbelief that this variation even exists.)

All of this occurs over decades of schooling and on-the-job learning.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Hey solve, I think that pidgin are easier than English, and this is why: they
are intended to use in a very simple and effective way.

A full language, like English, has much more complex phrasing.

~~~
solve
Yes, this is the dictionary definition. In this case, I believe that pidgin
has turned into a bit of a contronym. I could be misinformed though.

~~~
stan_rogers
The difference is that a pidgin is a temporary, makeshift language to
facilitate communication between peoples who speak different languages
natively, whereas a creole is a language that people actually live in. The
word "pidgin", though, often gets attached to a temporary patois and remains
attached even after the language progresses to a creole. Sometimes a pidgin
will hang around even after the conditions that created it have gone away. The
South Seas English pidgin hung around as a regional _lingua franca_ for a long
time, partly because it was handy even when not dealing with English speakers,
and partly because it was a mark of distinction among the people that the
English in Australia had exploited. Eventually, though, it did creolize -- Tok
Pisin came from that pidgin, but it is not a pidgin any longer.

Hawaaiian Creole English (the academic name for the language) is still
generally referred to by its speakers as "Pidgin", even though the progression
from pidgin to creole was documented almost as soon as the first plantation
immigrants had kids old enough to talk. (Many African creoles are similarly
still called "Pidgin" by their speakers, even though the language is not a
pidgin _per se_.) The parents of those children spoke a pidgin; the words were
mostly English (with the odd word drawn from Japanese or one of the Philippine
languages by concensus), but the grammar was extremely simplified and the
structure (head-first, head-final, etc.) tended to reflect the speaker's
native tongue.

You can trade and get work done in a pidgin, but you can't communicate with
much subtlety, and the kids needed something they could _chat_ in. The kids
(all young children are linguistic geniuses compared to us older folk) quickly
developed grammar that was consistent and had rules. You could speak the
language well, or speak it badly.

It's difficult to make a grammatical error in a pidgin; errors are mostly
about vocabulary. A creole, on the other hand, is a _real_ language. You can
get all of the words right, but still make mistakes -- mistakes of the sort
that _the yellow big ball_ would be in English. _Dey bin stay buy_ in
Hawaaiian Creole is "they were buying" ("bin" puts it into the past tense and
"stay" makes it continuous/progressive); _dey stay bin buy_ is gibberish (it
would mean something like "they are still finished buying").

------
ArekDymalski
I think that Paul Graham was referring to quite different case than Simone in
this post. When you're non-native English speaker working for already
established company, you can count on the fact that the customer has some
incentive in communicating with you. But when you are a CEO of a startup
nobody knows or trusts, people won't care and it's not that big surprise.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Exactly. I am making a more general point, while Paul Graham was just
specifically talking about startup CEOs.

By the way, this is probably why some people found his post xenophobic: they
thought he was expressing a judgement on people with accents; he just wanted
to say something to help startup CEOs with strong accents.

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BerislavLopac
Actually, (modern) English _is_ a pidgin, with two main constituents (Anglo-
Saxon and Norman French) and many additional ones.

~~~
stan_rogers
Not from a linguistics perspective it isn't. You could make a convincing
argument that it is (or was) a creole of sorts, but one of the distinguishing
features of a pidgin is that it's an _incomplete_ language in which
circumlocution is always (not just occasionally) required to convey complex
ideas. And if English were once (or twice or so) a creole (the Vikings did as
much violence to Anglo-Saxon as the Normns did), it can hardly be called one
anymore since it has become crufted and overgrown with unnecessary complexity.

~~~
Germanicus
>an incomplete language in which circumlocution is always (not just
occasionally) required to convey complex ideas . . . crufted and overgrown . .
.

Not disagreeing, but incompleteness comes from the overgrowth sometimes.
Interestingly, we now have to use all sorts of circumlocutions every time we
need the now-lost thou/ye distinction, and routinely miss its significance
when reading Early Modern English texts like Shakespeare or the King James
Bible. So even people who are aware of the old distinctions need to use the
modern circumlocutions to communicate clearly. Similarly, native speakers will
need to conform to World English norms.

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nraynaud
I remember this great debate in Brussels where it was decided against using
english as the common political language in the European Union, and use this
mess of translators, to avoid giving an unfair advantage to the UK/EIRE who
would argue in their native language on political matters. In the end it
turned out probably right since the UK grew to hate Europe, they would
probably have used any extra power to weaken it from inside.

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JoeAltmaier
The phone is a miserable way to communicate. Its 8KHz, 8bit noise. Use
anything else to communicate, it helps immensely.

I work at Sococo so suggest our product, which is 16-bit 16KHz and sounds
wonderful. Or use something else, but for heavens sake stop using the phone.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
Can you tell us a bit more about Sococo? And/or any other good alternative?

Would it be practical to use them?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sococo is free trial right now, no credit card. www.sococo.com

Voice, share screens, chat group and p2p.

Office metaphor - extremely high level of presence info (who's talking/sharing
with whom in your work group)

