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Re:ECC matters by jacquesm on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:05PM (#25623026)
How is your Finnish?
Re:ECC matters by jankeymeulen on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:13PM (#25623088)
Or Swedish for that matter, as I believe Torvalds maternal language is Swedish
Re:ECC matters by jacquesm on Sunday January 03, 2021 @01:26PM (#25623719)
Finnish is stupendously hard. Far harder than Swedish, at least, by my estimation.
Re:ECC matters by dancek on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:44PM (#25624513)
Yes. Swedish is also easy compared to English and French, the other two languages I've learned after early childhood. The only thing that makes it hard is that you never really have use for it and you're forced to learn it nevertheless here in Finland.

I'm happy to see people here on HN respect the difficulty of learning languages. Most foreigners that speak Finnish do it very poorly at first and even after decades they still sound like foreigners. But it shows huge respect to our small country for someone to make the effort, and we really appreciate it. I'm hoping other people see learning their own mother tongue the same way. Sure, most of us need English, but learning it well is still a huge task.

Re:ECC matters by dehrmann on Sunday January 03, 2021 @01:56PM (#25624036)
It is. Swedish and English are both Germanic languages, so there are a lot of commonalities. Finnish is in a completely different language family. English and Swedish are more closely related to Persian and Hindi than to Finnish.
Re:ECC matters by young_unixer on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:31PM (#25623235)
Re:ECC matters by xxs on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:18PM (#25623124)
Linus must have English as his '1st' language now. For non-originally-native speaker mistakes like 'it's vs its', 'than vs then', etc. are pretty uncommon.
Re:ECC matters by jacquesm on Sunday January 03, 2021 @01:25PM (#25623709)
I've spent my whole life speaking multiple languages and this still trips me up every now and then, in fact quotes as such are a problem for me and I keep using them wrong, no idea why, it just won't register. So unless I slow down to 1/10th of my normal writing speed I will definitely make mistakes like that. Good we have proofreaders :)
Re:ECC matters by dehrmann on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:01PM (#25624072)
(guessing you mean apostrophes)

It's because they have two different uses (three if you count nested quotes, but those aren't common and are pretty easy to figure out), contractions and possession, and they seemingly collide on words like "its" where you'd think it could mean either.

Not sure if you've already learned this (or if it helps), but English used to be declined, and its pronouns still are, e.g. they/their/them. That's why "its" isn't contracted; the possessive marker is already in the word.

Re:ECC matters by mixmastamyk on Sunday January 03, 2021 @04:28PM (#25625411)
His, hers, its
Re:ECC matters by Tade0 on Sunday January 03, 2021 @12:45PM (#25623357)
I guess this is what happens when someone first learns to speak the language, learning how to write in it only later on - as it often is the case with children.

I spent my preschool years in a multicultural environment and English was our lingua franca(ironically the school-mandated language was French), so I didn't properly learn contractions until grade school - same with similarly sounding words like "than vs then" and "your vs you're".

Re:ECC matters by Igelau on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:05PM (#25624116)
It could use some Polish.
Re:ECC matters by jacquesm on Sunday January 03, 2021 @02:29PM (#25624367)
Dobrze ;)