The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.
(Epistemic status: I don't actually know anything about Chinese literature, and I welcome correction on this point.)
Another good option is Romance of the Three Kingdoms which will cover a good portion of Chinese history (in a mythological way). A lot of the characters like Zhu Geliang [2] are still highly influential in modern Chinese culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Wukong#Influence [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuge_Liang
Oral traditions tend to be divergent and mutable.
Even such changes as the introduction of the printing press, and cheap paper, had profound impacts:
• Copies were now letter-for-letter identical.
• Reproduction costs fell by 2-6 orders of magnitude.
• Translation to the vernacular became viable. It was cheaper to bring the book to the reader (translation) than the reader to the book (learning Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, etc.).
• Literacy grew -- from 5-10% in 1500 or so to 95%+ by 1900.
Of course, the number of published works grew, as did the literary canon, to the point it's a largely meaningless term (or has been subsumed by pop culture).
I'm a native English speaker, and I've noticed that English writers got much better over time -- ineffable depth be damned. When I read people writing in early modern English, they tend to be... not pleasing to the reader, not near as much as recent authors. And it's not a matter of changing dialects, because I have no trouble fluently reading stuff from a few centuries ago. It just feels like progress has been made in writing techniques. How many other languages, I wonder, have had the chance to undergo this same evolution?
(I have no other languages to compare this to, so take this with many grains of salt.)
The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, thrillers).
The American cultural machine is also incredibly powerful so it can impose its themes everywhere around the world, which also leads to this optical effect, you end up using it as the yardstick to judge everybody else's cultural output.
Beyond that I find this entire thread discussing the potential superiority of English literature frankly odd and rather meaningless. Anybody who can take English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and, say, Chinese literature and pick a winner is frankly an idiot. How can you even begin to judge something like that? We're talking about centuries and centuries, thousands of notable writers, millions of pages, hundreds of genres, from poetry to plays to novels to biographies. Who wins, Jacques Prévert or Tolkien? Yukio Mishima or Isaac Assimov? Mikhail Bulgakov or John Grisham? Fernando Pessoa or JK Rowling?
My point was about breadth, which is factual to the best of my knowledge.
I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one which I read and left names unchanged.
I am just thinking how many experiences I am missing while I am not knowing many other languages. Now I live in The Netherlands and learn Dutch, I cannot properly enjoy literature even though I read books, but on my language level everything is bland and I see just words to be understood. So I don't get double meanings like I could already get while reading English.
You are right about translated literature, though that was not my primary point.
I literally cannot even conceive of a French or Arabic or Chinese or any other language community in the world feeling guilt that maybe their language is too popular and spoken by too many people.
... written by English or American authors, have
a very refined way of pleasing the reader.
How about other non-English language authors?
Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various languages.
English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is easy to write an uplifting motivation for any topic. However, I find English harder to use in a technical area. Some part of that may be gaps in my knowledge, but.. things have many names and names point at many things (what is 'gear', for example?), and I lack precise verbs. Just my impression..
According to which method of counting?
Wikipedia says [1] that "One most recent 2016 study shows that 20-year-old English native speakers recognize on average 42,000 lemmas, ranging from 27,100 for the lowest 5% of the population to 51,700 lemmas for the highest 5%." and "For native speakers of German average absolute vocabulary sizes range from 5,900 lemmas in first grade to 73,000 for adults."
In general, I'd expect all languages to have roughly similar vocabulary sizes, since they are mostly limited by the ability of native speakers to remember them.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocabulary#Vocabulary_size
The magnitude of that difference (250-300%!) should serve as a stark illustration of just how hazy these estimates are, even within a language.
Between languages, it gets even more difficult. It's very hard, possibly impossible, to come up with a single standard for what counts as a word that doesn't favor one language over another. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if you could engineer a comparison that says that English has more words, and also one that says that German does, simply by changing how you deal with agglutination. Or, if not that, then certainly agglutination and polysemy together.
Checking for myself my information seems to have been wrong. As we say here, I take everything back and claim the opposite.. That will teach me not to check my facts I hope.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...
What does this mean?
> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.
This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.
achtfach assoziativer Zwischenspeicher
This is of course cheating since these two languages are fairly close to each other (although Technical German tends to be more descriptive and somewhat more accurate than Technical English on average, at least that's my overall impression across a bunch of fields). Both also happen to have a full complement of technical and engineering terms for almost anything (including computers due to some parallel developments), though these are often not so related (esp. mechanical eng.)
As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.
Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficult (for humans, not so much).
I think this is one of the places where some public funds could make for good, useful research. Microsoft, Apple, and Google aren't interested in creating the perfect keyboard and autocorrect system for non-English languages, they will do the bare minimum and won't improve until someone shows them there's a better way (and it starts hurting sales).
- Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization - Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending - Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten" - Neugier = curiousity: "new" + "greed"
I do wonder if this "composibility" is actually the norm for languages and English is just the odd one out. Having a large vocabulary from other languages (e.g. Latin) obscures the meaning of some word roots (e.g. particula - pars + diminutive, just like in German) so you have to just memorize it as one chunk. So perhaps the benefit of other languages like German is just their purity/consistency.
Although, tangentially, even constructions that are just compounds of 2 English words or so slip past my notice. I can't think of any examples on the spot, but I've definitely gone decades without really parsing apart common English idioms or compound nouns until one day, when I finally notice "oh that's why we say that".
c. 1600, from French syntaxe (16c.) and directly from Late Latin syntaxis, from Greek syntaxis "a putting together or in order, arrangement, a grammatical construction," from stem of syntassein "put in order," from syn- "together" (see syn-) + tassein "arrange" (see tactics).
https://www.etymonline.com/word/syntax
(One of my favourite wwebsites.)
... meaning you can't understand many terms if you only know English, because they are actually french/latin/greek. "Cache" is actually an example of this.
This is what I meant about the meaning being obscured too much, so it has to be simply memorized as one chunk.
I haven't done a close evaluation, but itcompares favourably generally.
I also use dict (Debian), which is mostly Foldoc and 1913 Webster. As well as several dead-tree dictionaaries & etymological dictionaries. Those stand up surprisingly poorly to online references in several cases, though the OED still proves useful.
English is just more difficult to spell because there no simple rule for when a compound is written with or without space (or with a dash, as is sometimes the case). E.g. Christmas is Christ + mass, but is written in a single word.
There is some bit of composability that German has over English though. It's just easier to pick apart words that have been concatenated. Maybe it's because often the first word is in genitive (roughly means possessive) form?
In your example, "Weinachtsbaum", we have "Weinnacht" (itself a compound wine-night) meaning Christmas, and we have "Baum", tree. But the word gets and extra "s" in the middle which is serving roughly the same purpose as "'s" in English.
Winenight'stree. Tree of night of wine. I prefer the Germanic construction.
Weihnachten comes from weih/geweiht meaning hol{y,ied} night.
In many cases this may just be due to English's distance from it's root (i.e. Latin, French). As it was pointed out below, "syntax" is also a composition of two simpler words - they just aren't words we know. In German, there are also loan words from Latin and French, but I do have the impression it is not to the same extent, and the German language is quite consistent.
From grandparent: > In German, compound nouns are written without space, as a single word.
This is true, but the difficulty is to know when two or more nouns are considered a compound noun (Zusammensetzung) or just a group of words (Wortgruppe).
For example consider the following (real) street names:
- Schleißheimer Straße
- Hohenzollernstraße
- Leuchtenbergerstraße
Straße is simply street. Schleißheim is the name of a place. Schleißheimer Straße is written as two separate words because the rule [2] says that combinations with geographic names ending in -er that signify a place (and not the people living in that place, for example) are usually not considered compounds. A simple counterexample would be Hohenzollernstraße with Hohenzollern referring to the House of Hohenzollern.
Now consider a case like Leuchtenbergerstraße. Leuchtenberger can refer to the place called Leuchtenberg or the Duke of Leuchtenberg. It would be written Leuchtenberger Straße if it had to do anything with the city of Leuchtenberg, maybe leading to that place. If it is named in the honor of the Duke it would be written Leuchtenbergerstraße.
Another problem is that often nouns are not simply slapped together. Adding an additional s (Fugen-s[3]) between the words is very common.
For example: traffic is Verkehr, sign is Zeichen, traffic sign is not Verkehrzeichen but Verkehrszeichen. On the other hand: tax is Steuer and transfer tax is Verkehrsteuer, but not Verkehrsssteuer.
dog is Hund and leash is Leine. A dog leash is a Hundeleine, addding an additional e in this case. Sometimes nothing is added but something removed: crown is Krone, prince is Prinz and a crown prince is a Kronprinz, leaving out the final e in Krone.
Compounding in German is complicated and weird.
[1] The only rule i know is: "It's written as two words, except for a few well known exceptions." I suspect that there is more to it and I'd be happy for any enlightenment.
[2] https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/getrenn...
Interesting enough, Portuguese also does compounding to some extent (Bear in mind it's a romance language).
My favorite English feature is how you can pick a substantive and use it as a verb. Mostly makes sense, specially if there's evident connotation behind the substantive.
I have wondered how people came up with translations to computer terminology. In retrospect, borrow from the German language, of course - as the saying goes, they have a word for everything!
- Cache, as in processor cache: total access mediation, i.e. all operations go through the cache. Cache bypass might be possible but rare in practice.
- Cache, as in application cache (e.g. redis/memcached/@lru_cache): thing were you put some result to recall later conditionally. Exactly the opposite of total access mediation: application needs to explicitly use cache.
The first one I'd call Zwischenspeicher. The second I'd call Ergebnisabrufspeicher.
"module réseau du noyau Linux ?" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/...
> 8-Way associative cache
"Cache 8-associatif" https://www.irif.fr/~carton/Enseignement/Architecture/Cours/...
Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean much it doesn't exist. If only, because we have to be able to teach it efficiently to people with no mastery of the english language.
1. There is always new terminology being invented in conferences or bleeding edge R&D. There is no official translation for most of these terms. You could translate them, but most people wouldn't be quite sure what you mean.
2. Anything I write in English is immediately accessible to 20x more people. Writing about tech in French means sacrificing most of my audience. English really is the lingua franca of tech.
It doesn't bother me at all, even though it's not my native language. The world needs a lingua franca (of tech and everything else), and English fits the bill quite well. It's much less overcomplicated than many other languages. I make many more grammar mistakes in French, because French grammar is full of arbitrary nonsensical rules. No thanks.
"There is no word for entrepreneur in french"
Seriously...
"collection of things," mid-15c., from Old French sette "sequence," variant of secte "religious community," from Medieval Latin secta "retinue," from Latin secta "a following"
But even if you want to quibble word choice, the fact remains that there's no severe linguistic contortion. Sure, French doesn't permit chaining nouns in the same way that English does. But the de chains are still permitted, and aren't much more wordy.
As others hinted.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise#A...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Hindi_Directorate
I suspect this is the case for my languages, especially those spoken in very few countries or by smallish population groups, especially when the language speaking group is not Geographically close to other populations of a grammatically closely related language.
I am busy studying Georgian because I am relocating to the eastern European country. However I remain doubtful that Georgian will be that useful for technical computer stuff, because it has only around 4 million speakers and is linguistically close to almost no other widely spoken language.
I will find out soon, as my language skills and experience with the place collide.
There are many other words much harder to translate than these ones, like "backslash", "hash map", "pipeline", "placeholder", ...
"Cache associativa (8-way)" or "Cache associativa por 8 vias"
See, not so difficult. :^) It's just that, for standardization's sake, it's best to just communicate in English.
case in point, every single "fancy" word in english cames from the roman dominion over the channel. it was fancy to talk like the emperor. and that is only one of the subtle aspects that rome knew how to play on the colonies cultural subjugation.
Do you mean how the Normans conquered and ruled England after the invasion of 1066? Lots of foreign words come into a language when your rulers speak another language. Often the conquered populations are completely converted to the ruling people language.
> In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own – to little avail, for the most part.
P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation looks completely different?
Here are the Translations for weekend for each Romance language and Latin:
French - fin de semaine
Spanish - fin de semana
Romanian - sfârșit de săptămână
Portuguese - final de semana
Italian - fine settimana
Latin - volutpat vestibulum
Notice how only Latin looks completely different. I wonder if google translate is broken.
Huh. I did not know it was such a young word. :)
Byte only represents a group of bits.
Probably because some French law mandates it.
I really like that word. I thought it was only used in IBM mainframe parlance.
languages like sanskrit and chinese which have built in word generators and preserved root meanings are much better and able to stand independently
not surprisingly indians and chinese have been better able to resist westernization
imo chinese is a very tech friendly language and has a good shot at becoming the lingua franca of tech in the near future
currently the chinese focus on science and innovation is fake and forced but could turn real in the next generation
(I'm entering this via soft-keyboard and stylus, painfully, with many typos. The fact that the interface could be trivially modified, but hasn't and isn't, and yet remains so deficient, doesn't speak well to prospects here.)
see my first submission a few days ago on zh android ime with devanagari
with zhuyin and alternatives chinese input is not a problem and this is going to even be less of a problem with voice input in future
in fact the input problem only tightened the link chinese have to tech via their phones
but pinyin needs to go away or chinese will lose their culture in the long term latinization is going to lead to christianization
How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?
Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to some very unfortunate contortions, as the Chinese language is much less suited to phonetic transcription as compared to syllabary-based languages like Korean or Japanese. There's no "one obvious way" to map a foreign name onto the Chinese sound-set, and even when you do, there's likewise no obvious way to choose the corresponding characters (and you must be cautious to avoid characters with unwanted meanings or connotations).
The written language is also typed to a certain degree. Almost all disease words use a common radical (e.g. 癌症 for cancer), for example. As a more extreme case, every chemical element name in Chinese incorporates a radical that reflects the chemical's basic state - liquid (water), gaseous (air), metallic (gold), or non-metallic (earth) - symbolically connecting the old elemental system with modern chemistry.
And the short names of England, France, America, Germany, Korea, Thai, and China itself contain 国. This seems to suggest that there was a naming convention initially being followed.
Better examples than country names for illustrating this difference between Chinese and English include disease names (mentioned above), fish names, bird names, tree names, flower names, mountain names, river names …
Here's a terrific twitter thread about Chinese nicknames for NBA players: https://twitter.com/i/moments/993587263283048449?lang=en
An example from the thread[1]:
Stephon Marbury - 马政委 "Marburyist Political Commissar"
This is a pun on "Marxist Political Commissar," since in Chinese both "Marbury" and "Marx" are spelled with the same first character "ma" ("horse").
[1] https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/993571262327910400
Similarly, New Gold Mountain is Melbourne Australia near where the Australian gold rush started soon after.
One example is 'computer' -> 컴퓨터 in Hangul. It's still 'computer', just pronounced with the Korean pronunciation rules.
リニキス カーネル ネットワークイング サブシステム
It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.
The Japanese got around this by simplifying the script into a syllabary (every character represents roughly a syllable, or more often, a consonant-vowel pair). They did this twice: one of these syllabaries is hiragana, and the other is katakana. In modern usage, katakana is used largely for phonetic transcription, such as transliteration of foreign words and names, or onomatopoeia, whereas hiragana is used for writing out Japanese words.
As others have pointed out, Japanese has a rather constrained phonological system, so a word like strengths cannot be represented directly but rather more like "su-to-re-n-ge-tsu." Of course, this feature isn't limited to Japanese; it's how an island called "Christmas" gets transliterated to "Kiritimati", just like its parent "Kiribati" is the local pronunciation of "Gilbert." While people think it's annoying, it's largely because they haven't faced languages with challenging transciptions into Latin script. There's a reason why there's a plethora of transcriptions of "مُحمّد" after all.
There's a plethora of transcriptions into (more) phonetic alphabets because there are a plethora of regionalized pronunciations [1]. And there are a plethora of pronunciations because Arabic uses an impure abjad [2]. Since the vowels are not always, exactly or uniformly specified in writing, unspecified behavior leads to varying results in each compiler.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_(name)#Transliteratio... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad#Impure_abjads
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".
Caché asociativa de ocho vías.
The article misses emphasizing or properly mention English's success started not in conquering but overcoming conquerors.
It's hard to think of English as having a single source, as what remains of that gets very small as you go back in time. The language in England and thereabouts overcame several invasions. Roman, Viking, a couple of invasions you'd call French now, among others... they all left their mark, or more accurately the native population absorbed a sizable portion of the invaders' language and established and re-established the dominance of the English language in the area.
If you take a beginners' course in French you'll probably get the line that English is 60% French, badly pronounced and it's true! (more or less)
It would sure be hard to standardize something that has a habit of repeatedly bolting on large chunks of other languages, nevermind it's modern regional inconsistencies.
Could you give a couple of examples?
Also, I have to disagree with the statement that it is the language of great literature. I counter argue those would be French, German, Greek, Latin, Literary Chinese etc, depending on the period. I am not saying there is no great work in the English language, however your statement implies something different (the majority of great work in a period or style utilized that language).
Shakespeare, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Whitman
I believe that English has many problems, from crazy grammar rules to horrendously inconsistent spelling. But to say it is not expressive is absurd, and suggests that you haven’t read any great English literature. This is not to say that the cultures you mentioned and many other have not produce their own great literature, of course.
English grammar feels more flexible to me than German, and English seems to be more suited for colorful idioms.
I get the emotional attachment to ones own language but making it easy for the entire humanity to communicate is a much more important goal. It trumps culture and history. It trumps nationalism.
And why english ? Well i don't care. It could be anything really.
But the only thing that is used by most people than english is chinese, and it's only use way more locally or contextually as english, while being more complex.
English has very simple tenses, few symbols, not required accents and the industry and culture already use it massively all around the world.
It's full of useless complexity and artifacts like all language, but it's there.
Let's all add it to our toolbelt and be done with it.
It always feels constraining for me when I want to convey an emotion. For example, in English one would say "soft kitty" but in Russian you have at least 10 options: мягкая (simple "soft"), мягонькая (diminutive "soft") + кошечка, киса, кисонька, кисуля, кисулечка. Depending on the choice, you can sound tender or childish or like an old lady.
It's definitely not an exhaustive list of how you can call a cat, there are also funny augmentative options for male cats: кошак, котище, котяра, котофей. Spanish also feels amazing because of its extensive use of diminutives and augmentatives. But yes, English is the best language for technical or business purposes because it's so concise.
One language, of somewhat good literature.
What language do you think does?
Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.