Was getting a new roof and seriously considered getting solar panels also. Spoke to several experts, read forums on ideal panels and inverters and so on. Got like 8 quotes, resized the system several times for optimal production vs consumption ratio. In every single calculation, the monthly loan repayment on solar panels was more than what I pay for electricity today. Even if I considered increasing energy costs, it was still going to cost more on a per month basis. The payoff period ranged from 12-20 years. I should note I live in an almost "anti-solar" state, my energy provider does not have net-metering and only pays back half for what we produce. I was told that a big portion of the cost was installation and DIY would be cheaper but heck I am not the guy who would climb on the roof.
I could have surely done it for the good of mother earth but financially it made no sense.
Obviously I don't know your specific needs, or what quotes you got. But I'm willing to venture a guess that you got quotes from the standard solar companies - the ones that serve as all in one stops, project managements, permitting, purchasing, installing, etc. Those services are nuts!
I got a bunch of quotes from many of those types of companies for my own home a few years ago, and they all quoted me around $45k (+/- a few grand depending on the company). Realizing that was way to expensive, I put in a little elbow work and was able to come up with a quote for $18k to do the project management myself - I found a solar reseller (solarwholesale, no idea if they are still around) that quoted me $12k for the panels and installation hardware, plus they'd provide the architecture documents I'd need for permitting, the company that most recently installed my new roof quoted be <$2k to install the solar panels (just the hardware, no electrical connections), I spoke to a local electrician who quoted me ~$2k to do the electrical connections on the panels, the fuse box connections, and connection to the grid, and the remaining $2k was for miscellaneous things like permitting and other things I don't recall exactly.
It was work, but it was work well worth saving $27k compared to what the one-stop-shop solar installers want.
I'd be concerned about individual contractors ghosting before or mid-project, throwing the whole plan into jeopardy. I doubt many contractors would be willing to continue someone else's work. Also, storing the materials can be a hassle -- the panels alone would take up half of my garage, for an unknowable amount of time (it takes months to find contractors willing to bid on projects around here).
At least having an experienced general contractor overseeing the project reduces the chance that an individuals' ghosting could cause large delays.
I would bet the cost of the solar panels was only a fraction of the total costs. The fact of the matter is that individually owned and operated power generation doesn’t make sense for a variety of reasons, which is why we invented the power grid. It would be prohibitively expensive to run your own natural gas turbine at home as well, even though you have a pipe going straight to your house. So instead we build natural gas power plants that turn a profit.
You have the data in front of you. As someone else too mentioned, the B58 engine is considered pretty reliable by BMW mechanics and on various Reddit forums where car enthusiasts hangout.
I am not sure why people think of complexity as something bad or undesirable. Everything I can think is extremely complex and probably cannot be explained in simple terms without missing much of the context and beauty behind it. In my opinion, its not simplicity, its actually the complexity that adds beauty and meaning to everything.
When it comes to experiencing things, complexity is good. Good music, beautiful nature, complex story, that's all nice.
When it comes to getting things to work, to make things happen, to understanding things... our major bottleneck is the "size of human skull", your cognitive limits.
Descartes gives the example of visualizing a chain made up of many links... at any point, you can only look at say, maximum 4-5 links, you can never see all the links at the same time. That is, in fact, it is impossible for a human to "see a whole chain"! You are "making it up", even with such a simple operation as "see". Therefore, due to such horrendous limits to cognition, you are forced to implement some sort of simplification mechanism.
So the context of discussion is (2) not (1). The people interested in making things happen in the world, to obtain correct/useful/functional/practical viewpoints, tend to gravitate towards simplicity by necessity. There is no other option.
> I am not sure why people think of complexity as something bad or undesirable. Everything I can think is extremely complex and probably cannot be explained in simple terms without missing much of the context and beauty behind it.
Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English.
I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.)
English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day.
I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific.
English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origin, while words for food, laws, and various complex things have Romance origins. And then went on to become traders who borrow words from everywhere.
Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one.
But it could be worse. At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Old English had 5 genders, that generally didn't match what French had.
But still if you want a flavor of what English might have sounded like without being mangled by French, read Uncleftish Beholding: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh.... It explains basic atomic theory using only Germanic based words (eg Beholding) and made up words with Germanic roots. So, for example, atoms can't be split or cleft, and so are uncleft is an atom. And Ymir has a mythological role parallel to Uranus, so uranium became ymirstuff.
It is surprisingly readable, but sounds quite different than English usually does.
> Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one.
It's worth noting that's not unique to English: it's a phenomenon that's universally happens across all languages. It's how language diverge into new ones and how linguists can reconstruct old languages that have no written records.
Pronunciation drifts in all languages. But usually languages take some effort to have either a clear mapping from spelling to pronunciation (when you read it you can pronounce it) or from pronunciation to spelling (when you can pronounce it you can spell it); or some compromise that tries to achieve both. Hence when pronunciation drifts too far that eventually causes the word to be spelt differently too.
Meanwhile English seems to have spelling set mostly in stone hundreds of years ago, and any shifts in pronunciation since then are just ignored (barring minor reforms like the ou->o thing that part of the world adopted)
People are very resistant to spelling reform, and it doesn't help that english has enough accents/regions where it is spoken, that no unified spelling is going to be sensible for all english speakers.
The other thing is English speaking world hasn't had a government with enough authoritarian power to rationalize spelling and pronunciation. So pronunciation and spelling is all historical convention. Which it used to also be in most places until the government rationalized the language. This is the same reason people in the US still use English units. The government isn't willing to force the issue.
One advantage of the disconnect between spoken and written is old English literature since the great vowel shift is still readily accessible. Go back 500 years and the spoken language would be difficult but written would be easy.
> This is the same reason people in the US still use English units.
US customary units aren't English (or Imperial) units; even the ones that share names sometimes aren't the same, and not just because of the minor adjustments when the US customary system was redefined in metric terms.
How does mapping spelling to sound work in languages like English that have homophones?
"wear", "where", "were-" (as in werewolf), "weir" (in some regional dialects) can all be pronounced identically in modern English. If we map them all to a single spelling, is that an improvement to readability and understanding?
English has plenty of words that have different meanings but are are spelled and pronounced the same. An arm is either a limb or a weapon. A break is either a pause or a physical defect. A trunk can be a piece of clothing, a part of a tree, a cloth-covered chest, or the rear compartment of an automobile. A bat can be an animal or a stick. And while some of these words are related, some have completely different origins and just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same in contemporary English. The stick "bat" is from Old English batt, derived from Welsh and Celtic, the mammal from Middle English bakke, derived from Old Swedisch/Danish/Norse.
If you "cleaned up" English spelling, the same would happen with wear, where and were-. If the distinction were important for understanding, it would be equally important in spoken language and the pronunciations wouldn't have converged.
Look at the shifts going on right now in the great lakes area. Lots of vowels are changing around.
Charlie Berens is a comedian that focuses on great lakes and midwestern life. His accent, though suped up for views, is somewhat representative of the state of the vowel changes going on right now:
It's not but the Great Vowel Shift happened after spellings were standardized and was a pretty big change.
For me the worst part is that my last name, Clough, was originally spelled that way to indicate it used English's guttural sound before that sound got dropped from the language and all the words with that sound got their own new pronunciations. E.g., "Though through rough boughs I push my way."
The way I learned about it, in addition to masculine, neuter, and feminine, there was also a distinction between weak and strong. So a man would be strong masculine, a body weak masculine, a girl weak feminine, and a woman strong feminine. Add in neuter and you get 5 genders.
But reading https://oldenglish.info/wam2.html, there were also 2 weak neuter nouns, eage and eare. Which are now eye and ear. Not sure how that fits with what I was taught.
I never quite got used to the added layer of polite verb conjugation in French, but I hear Japanese is far worse.
As a native speaker it might not be so bad. But as a second language it means that at some point you're taking a class that consists largely of learning to beg your betters for favors. Which I don't think is ever going to sit well with students of quasi-democratic nations. Doubly so for more stereotypically cantankerous ones.
Formality in discussion with others, seems to be very common in other languages, and is very hard for a native North American speaker to use correctly. The whole concept sounds like contrite begging for us. Please sir, sir I could I sir ask you sir, to possibly pass the cheese, sir.
So, of course we over correct and throw in more sirs(or ma'ams) willy nilly.
> Formality in discussion with others, seems to be very common in other languages, and is very hard for a native North American speaker to use correctly. The whole concept sounds like contrite begging for us.
Kind of ironic, in that English lost the ability to make formality distinctions because its speakers were so consistently formal to each other that the language lost its informal second person singular pronoun and associated conjugations.
Living proof of this is the that when translating from English to my local Slavic language Google Translate strips out all instances of "please". I felt like it sounded rude but it actually stops me from sounding overly pleading and a little pathetic.
My solution for good interaction, since I'm fluent, is to state to the person i'm talking to, is right up front and say;
I'm not a native, so forgive me if I sound informal.
Usually that's enough for the person to be forgiving, and possibly impressed, sometimes I just get a confused or rude look.
>I never quite got used to the added layer of polite verb conjugation in French, but I hear Japanese is far worse.
I've only passed the N4 exam so far (about the skill of a Japanese elementary school student), but I fear the polite speech rules I've already learned. It's easy to conjugate verbs a little politely (-masu at the end, or desu for "to be"). Being more polite is a beast. There are different verbs to tack on depending on the basic verb, your relation to the person you're speaking to or speaking about, and whether it's a request, offer, or statement.
Then there are polite pronouns, polite particles (those are like prepositions), and it's usually polite to refer to things obliquely.
All that, and I'm sure I'm missing or misunderstanding a huge portion of the style.
The rumor is that after the Revolutionary war, English nobility affected an accent change to distance themselves from those Americans, and that a historically accurate miniseries about the American Revolution should feature British Officers with something approaching a southern drawl, rather than the modern posh British accent.
Basically the American South did not get the memo about changing English accents.
I'll let you look at modern English spellings - Know, though, thought etc etc and decide for yourself whether that looks like a transcript of southern American english:)
I'd love for you to correct me on this, but I believe this is nonsense. The only places that discuss this are very dubious articles from infotainment-style blogs, and I can't find anything to back this up on Wikipedia, let alone anything more reputable.
IIRC, the element of truth that begets the lie here is that the Southern accent does have some elements in common with older British accents. But it's not clear whether those elements are retained from those old British accents, or whether they've simply been added into the accent later. And even then, we're talking about very specific features - I think the rhotic R is one of them? - and not the accent as a whole.
I asked GPT4 to re-insert latin word-components to Uncleftish Beholding to "remangle" it. The result is perfectly fine modern English. It does a pretty good job of "uncleftish-ifying" any other text if you enjoy that style.
On the topic of food; livestock, which were raised by peasants, kept their Germanic names. Meat was expensive though and usually went to nobility, or people catering to them (learn the language of the occupier if you want to get ahead).
So you get ham from a pig, beef from a cow, and mutton from a sheep.
> At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language.
Except for ships, which are always feminine in English. It feels very weird to me because gendered noun categories are unusual for English and ships are just about the only counterexample that remains.
Why is it sexist, surely it is linguistic gender and has nothing to do with biological sex?
Of course, you can use "it", your choice.
Mind you I find the forced overlaying of sex onto language absurd, my late mother was chairman of many committees and always complained when people started calling her "chair"; I agree.
As a native English speaker, it can be distracting to hear someone speaking Dutch in a movie. Your brain keeps trying to make it into accented English, because it sounds almost like it due to pacing and common syllables. The brain latches onto a handful of borrowed words and tries to interpolate the rest.
I've experienced this in real life, I was on a committee that rotated meetings between the US and The Netherlands.
During a policy session in Zaandam with some Dutch, UK, Spanish and US peers we had a moment when our Dutch hosts had an excited conversation in Dutch but since it was a tech conversation both myself and the UK member blurted out at the same time that our Dutch must be getting better because we understood most of what they just said and didn't need them to translate it for us.
Same. Dutch sounds like unintelligible English to me, which is useful for identifying it as Dutch (once I realize it is, in fact, actually unintelligible).
Same thing with many Slavic languages that aren't mutually intelligible, like Polish or Slovene and Croat. I wonder if there is a concept of Hamming distance for languages.
Latin was the first official language in the UK, back when Celtic and Brythonic language was widespread.
The Normans were in the UK, viking there way up our rivers and establishing the Danegeld before Normandy was Normandy and, well, before French was French.
Old French was Gallo-Romance and Middle French, AIUI, emerged with the Norse influence as the Scandinavians moved down past Britain and into Europe. Modern French, ie French, came long after the English court took on the language of the Normans (1066, and all that).
Out of this melange English was born, the next official language of England famously legislated as such by the Welsh-speaking Henry Tudor in the late C.15th.
There were non-Sapiens species on the islands. Later, after the last ice age, a neolithic culture apparently linked to Anatolia. Subsequently during the Bronze age, the Iberians ("Bell-Beaker people") arrived, preceding the Celts.
So any talk of "the original peoples" in the British Isles is just about as meaningless as it is anywhere outside of some parts of Africa.
Many, it's not even a lukewarm take I'm afraid. Different invaders for different times.
Also Jews were expelled for a few centuries, and made to wear particular clothing prior to that.
I'm sure you could find many other examples that we more readily associate to some other country (or in some other direction) today, and they may be different again in centuries to come.
As far as I'm aware, every language out there is dumb, and English isn't especially dumb. Yes, its particular wart is pronunciation, and then also phrasal verbs especially [1].
But what are the dumb things English doesn't have? Noun genders (why?). A hundred different suffixes for regular verb conjugations (ugh). Subjunctives all over the place (maddening). A character-based script that isn't phonetic at all (e.g. Chinese). Insanely complicated grammar. Word forms that change based on the social status of the speaker relative to the listener. And so forth.
Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there. And while learning pronunciation is annoying, it turns out it's actually not a big obstacle in practice at all. In terms of what students struggle with in ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms, it's basically bottom of the list. Students struggle way more with the present perfect, for example (when to use "I've eaten" instead of "I ate").
English also seems very amenable to loanwords from other languages -- you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words (though maybe that comes easily with practice); in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.
Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.
"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."
On one single occasion I said this at work without thinking about it. I'd been working exclusively with Indian devs for months and it just slipped out.
Funny enough, I’m from south GA. But when I speak on conference calls to customers, I try to speak without my natural accent especially since many non native speakers especially who aren’t in the US seem to struggle to understand my natural accent.
I was using my normal “consultant voice” with some clients in Tennessee and as I started talking to them, I naturally without thinking started being less careful and throwing some “y’all’s” and southern twang came out.
I heard second hand that they thought I was mocking them. I had to explain I was born and raised in South Georgia and that was my natural voice.
> you can usually just drop foreign words directly into English without any special twists. It seems much more fiddly in French, German, etc. In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words
I dunno what you mean by "have to" here, but English, like most languages, has both a limited set of phonemes and unique patterns of how they are combined and how stress is distributed, and, like most languages, loanwords will usually have their pronunciation changed to fit that phoneme inventory and construction patterns.
English, because any phonetic interpretation of its spelling is more what you'd call guidelines (or may be just jokes) than actual rules is probably less likely to change the spelling of loan words from other languages that use the same alphabet or one with a well-established transliteration, but the actual pronunciation is a different story.
Curiously, we also anglicize, to a large degree, the pronunciation of words even when the intent is to approximate the native pronunciation as closely as possible, such as in popular phrase books for travelers - to the point that I often ask myself if the native speaker would be able to understand me if I speak like that (which I try not to). 'Pway-day ayoodar-may', anyone?
This was not the point they were making. The context is the previous post that said English just accepts foreign words without changing them. It does not, and loan words like karaoke are mangled in English just as in any other language. Hence you agree with the parent.
(Karaoke is not a gotcha or a complete fluke; it’s discussed all over the thread)
There are no special twists in that AFAIK there are no rules that specify for example that "Mathematics" needs to be transformed into "Matematika", but a lot of words do get some sort of alternate English pronunciation that is not the same as the original, even when the original is perfectly possible in English. Your example of "karaoke" (which most people pronounce in English as keriyoki) is one such example. Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).
And of course, not all sounds even exist, "Hummus" has a Het sound, not an 'h' and is pronounced as khoomoos, not haamas. Gaza is closer to being Raza than Gaza, etc.
> Israel should be pronounced with an "s" sound, not a "z" sound (well, and you use a different "r" sound).
Should it, really? The concept of Israel dates back millennia; which was the original prononciation? Should we all say it as it was in Aramaic back in the day? The h/g cases you mention are a good example: many languages just don’t have these soundsIn cases like bilingual countries, which of the prononciation is supposed to be canonical (bearing in mind that the linguistic borders shift significantly all the time)?
Arguing about the prononciation of proper nouns always seems foolish to me. There is no solution to these questions.
> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc.
Oh god no. I am Spanish guy living in Japan, our languages have very similar sounds, so much so that we can usually get the pronunciation right on the first try, much to the surprise of Japanese people. English speakers on the other hand tend to butcher the pronunciation so heavily that the words become really difficult to recognise.
But to be fair, the same happens the other way around. All languages adapt foreign words to their own phonology.
In languages which are truer to spelling in pronunciation than English, changing the spelling of loan-words is usually necessary. For example, the French word bureaucracy is used in English with the French spelling, whereas in Norwegian it is written 'byråkrati' which, pronounced according to Norwegian spelling rules, sounds roughly the same. One result is that Norwegians tend to pronounce any word they see as if it were Norwegian, resulting in a kind of 'Norwenglish' where words, after being loaned, seemed to take on a second life. In this way, I feel English spellings 'reference' their origins where possible and English speakers often learn to detect the roots of words and adjust pronunciation appropriately.
> In Japanese you always have to modify the pronunciation of English words
I can assure you that the way foreign words are pronounced in English is usually quite far from how they would sound in their original language. There is a simple reason for that: foreign words have sounds that do not exist in English and that English-speaking people don’t know how to pronounce without training, about which most people don’t bother. English words sound weird in Japanese, but the opposite is also true.
> in English you just go ahead and say "karaoke", "tsunami", etc
This is no different than many other languages. In fact, Karaoke and tsunami are used exactly the same way in French, German, Dutch and Spanish.
> Am I right in thinking English is unusual in that respect? I'm not expert enough in any other languages to know for sure.
It is not really. English is completely inconsistent because of its history as an amalgamation of very different languages, but apart from that it is not really remarkable in the way it treats loan words.
You often have to modify pronunciation when you translate a word to Japanese because most Japanese syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. So an English word that ends with a consonant will need a vowel added (unless the consonant is n, which is allowed to be a standalone sound in Japanese).
The word "consonant" would probably have to be pronounced "konsonantu" in Japanese.
Oh believe me, it's definitely taught in school -- it's a part of every standard ESL curriculum. Generally third or fourth year. (Although if you miss class that week you might never see it again.)
It's a weird one, but also pretty easy to internalize just through experience. It's not like anybody's usually stringing together five adjectives in regular speech. If you just learn a single prototype phrase like "ugly little green wool sweater", that will probably get you 99% of what you need in daily usage.
The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions.
The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible.
Like, you can transliterate spanish or french (or any number of languages) into english, and it will be perfectly understandable in most cases to a native speaker.
Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English. If you look at this Wikipedia article, the first entry for English when sorting by headwords is around 140k. German by example is around 100k for it's lowest entry. At the high end it's approaching 400k for German and 470k for English. I'm omitting the Wikipedia dictionaries for all languages.
I suppose that doesn't disqualify your point either.
For me, the greatest strength of "English" currently is that it's widespread adoption means that native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common. This goes to your point as well about transliteration.
By contrast, I am learning Dutch and it's a bit of a meme that Dutch people will switch to English if they detect a hint of an accent (excluding regional dialects of course). My theory is that they do not have an ear for it _because_ most Dutch nationals tend to also speak English at a B2+ level.
Contrast that to native English speakers, where the 3 major nations are home to a huge number of immigrants from all around the world, and it makes sense. If English speakers refused to talk with anyone that didn't have a perfect British/American/Australian accent, then nothing would ever get done.
In countries where the local population is tolerant of individual accents, I think the native language tends to thrive (Germany, China, Brazil, etc).
> native speakers are excellent at understanding accents when compared to other nations where non-standard accents are not as common
Interesting to read this; I had developed exactly the same hypothesis about French speakers: that they're less accustomed to a variety of accents (with the obvious caveat that it's even more risky to generalise from an anecdote than from data!).
I apologize. As a native English speaker now living among one of these cultures, it seems to follow. From the few limited interactions I've had and seen elsewhere online in a similar scenario, it seems to track.
Obviously it will differ per person as well, but as a whole, in my experience, this tends to be a trend amongst homogenous language countries. I suspect it could also be true for countries like Luxembourg and Belgium where it's normal for many people to speak 2-4 languages all within a very close proximity to each other. These people need to listen to competent speakers whose home language may differ from that used by their neighbors and business contacts on a daily basis.
At the end of the day, my hypothesis is that proximity breeds tolerance. Based on other social experiments and observations, I don't think I'm too far off, but thank you for (validly) checking my bullish assertions.
> Eh, the vocabulary thing I don't think is unique to English.
I suspect it depends upon the type of language; consider the difference between "I fell" and "I fall". There's a different word there for doing something in the past. (Obvious examples are run/ran, pay/paid).
In other languages you might use a suffix on the same root-word. So in English you need to learn more words. You can't have a simple rule to say "I read" vs "I read in the past". The word you use is .. different, and you have to know it if you want to be correct.
And then the continuous! “I have fallen/was falling.”
Irregular verbs are not unique to English, but I guess there probably are more of them in the common lexicon. This is probably true is lots of language with irregular verbs. The irregular ones are irregular because the sounds have been adapted to flow better in everyday parlance.
The nice part of most irregular verbs however is that they are also common. If you read regularly or consume lots of content in the language, they will come up over and over again.
Is this something that non native English speakers struggle with early on in the language or does it feel more like a constant battle even past B2?
In Dutch, I’ve largely just accepted that I’m going to screw up irregular verbs until I can start reading novels on my own. I assume at that point the exposure will help drill them into my brain like reading as a young child did in English.
> something like 1/3rd larger than other languages
This is basically an urban legend.
Comparing vocabulary sizes between languages is essentially impossible, as what counts as a word is measured differently. (Think those long compound words in German, for example.) And using things like "total dictionary size" is similarly unhelpful because most of the words are technical or archaic, and it mostly depends on how deep a dictionary wants to go into rare words.
It's true that English has two main historical roots for vocabulary, but that doesn't mean native speakers use more words in terms of everyday normal speech. There are a handful of classic examples ("cow" and "beef", "pig" and "pork"), but they're very much exceptions rather than the rule. (There aren't dual words for "head" or "feet", or "apple" or "orange", or "chair" or "table", and so forth.)
There's zero evidence that vocabulary size is a difficulty for learning English.
(On the other hand, English does seem to overload words with multiple definitions more often than a lot of other languages -- so that definitely can be a minor difficulty for language comprehension, especially at the beginning.)
There aren't two words for "feet", but the medical specialism that deals with "feet" (germanic root) is "podiatry" and if you want your feet beautified then you get a "pedicure" (both latin root). In some cases both roots are commonly used.
We do have lots of overloaded words, I sometimes catching myself using like definition 5 of a word - which with some of my friends I can do that - I need to code switch to something simpler when I'm speaking with people in my work environment.
An Esperantist friend of mine who spoke ten languages said that English is the easiest language to learn to speak badly and the hardest language to learn to speak well.
Practicing seven languages here (and knowing some others a bit) and having the same feeling. However, I'll put French (one of my primary languages) as ex-aequo.
I learned how to read and write in my native language in 2 weeks at age 6, when I learned half of alphabet, because I figured out rest of alphabet on my own. I'm reading non-stop since then.
How much it takes to learn how to properly read, write, listen, and speak in English? It took me about 20 years in total, but I still cannot talk properly.
Much harder. I listen to my six year old boy read Finnish and English. Finnish is trivial, the pronunciation follows the spelling.
English? A word like "night" turns into "nig-hut" which kinda makes sense, but is also completely wrong. There are so many times when I have to say "No, actually you say XXX".
Speaking is fine, mostly. Though there were a few *years* where I had to say "Mommy is a woman, so you say 'she' not 'he'." as Finnish doesn't have gendered pronouns. "Your friend is a girl so you say 'her ball', not 'his ball'". That took a long time to sink in, even though he was fine when people spoke to him he'd almost always get it wrong when women/girls were involved - and even Finnish adults make those kind of mistakes quite often. ("I have a girlfriend, his name is Sally".)
But at age 6 you've already been immersed in the language for 6 years. The problem there is to link it to its written form.
When you learn a second language you have the baggage of the first language hindering you (talking about orthography here), and you normally don't start by speaking the language exclusively for 6 years before learning how to read. If you don't know what the language is supposed to sound like, of course it's hard to understand how to read in it.
Languages are more easily absorbed in childhood due to brain development. It's biologically harder to learn a language as an adult, because that part of your brain is more fully developed. Doable, just harder.
English has subjunctive mood, it is often used in counterfactuals like the first clause of "if I were taller, I could reach the ceiling". sometimes you can get away with saying "was" instead of "were" in these constructions, but your middle school english teacher would be disappointed.
This use has almost died out in everyday speech though. I listen to many podcasts in which different people across different age groups and backgrounds are always messing it up, e.g. "if I was good at this", which really clangs to my ears, but it's very common.
Yes, but barely -- it's literally just a single instance of using "were" instead of "was".
While Portuguese? Welcome to full sets of conjugations for past subjunctive, present subjunctive, and future subjunctive. And everybody uses them in regular speech, they're not like a formal writing thing or something.
English is also pretty forgiving when spoken. You don’t need to know all the rules to mostly make sense. In many other languages the threshold to be understood feels higher. Maybe that’s because everyone knows some English though
> English is a pretty dumb language… I am native Hindi speaker
Pretty much every one of your criticisms is true for every human language. Calling any of them “dumb” is more a reflection of yourself than of the language.
Eg Hindi has grammatical gender, which could be pretty wtf to say, Bengali speakers, or speakers of Hungarian, but that doesn’t make Hindi “dumb”.
> better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific
“Scientific” … sigh. Human languages are not scientific. All of them have quirks. All.
You want a “scientific” (ish) language, learn Lojban. Then you can speak with other Lojban speakers.
English isn’t “special” by any means, and history and politics — and also the history of technological progress — have played a role in what it is today. Arguably many other languages could have played this role: French, Mandarin, anything.
But what matters is that people can, and do learn it as a second language enough to make it useful as a de-facto link language.
If you’re actually interested in learning why English is the way it is, I recommend the “History of English” podcast. It starts with PIE so you may even learn something about Sanskrit and Hindi along the way.
> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking.
I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grating.
> I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...)
IMHO, the only dumb thing about English is the cultural tendency of its speakers to not modify spelling of foreign words as they are imported, even when those languages have completely different sound assignments (see Pinyin).
However, once a word has a standard spelling, it makes sense to keep it even as pronunciation changes.
> You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.)
> > (Write, Right, Rite.)
> There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing.
Most spelling reform proposals for English ignore this. Many would-be reformers try to cut directly to some particular phonetic spelling scheme, which throws away a key benefit of having homophones.
Disclaimer: like many English speakers, I too have my own spelling reform scheme, with the key difference that mine is better than all the others.
That's a really bad benefit. If it's worth distinguishing them, it's worth distinguishing them when pronounced. Change the pronunciation or write them the same.
It's not like English avoids words that have very separate meanings spelled and pronounced the same way.
Anecdotal, but I feel like I tend to do subconsciously alter my diction a bit when the word is ambiguous from the context. I may use a slightly different voice inflection or stress or pacing to help disambiguate.
Think of someone lingering on a punned word to emphasize the joke, for example.
Spelling reform is a continuum from do-nothing to full-phonetic. There's plenty of grey.
Consider tho that if English is nowadays a lingua franca, we submit its learners to a lot of mental torture, including vast amounts of rote memorization of both spelling and pronunciation. English may not be quite as obnoxious as its up-and-coming main competitor, Mandarin Chinese, but it's a difference of degree not of kind. My 0,02€; YMMV.
Start with common words that are one-offs that are assertively misleadingly spelled. Lose, gross, broad, height. There are many more.
I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.
I think OC made a poor word choice with "dumb". Whether they intended it or not, no human language is dumb, they're all valid and functioning. I've studied French for many years, and will never have an intuitive sense of noun genders, it's just something I have to memorize by rote. The same is true for how complex structures of pronouns and modifiers seem to collapse into a compressed string of apostrophes when used informally. But when I ask French people how they know the gender of a noun, they shrug and say "I just do". The same is true for English's infamously fussy collection of special cases for grammar and spelling, which (as a native speaker) I never remember having to consciously learn how to navigate in
speech or writing, though I must have. Your native language seems natural to you, including all the parts that outsiders may call dumb.
What I've learned about french is that the end of many words are a mash of keyboard letters including at least a few vowels with bonus points for the hardest consonants that exist (x, k, j, z, p, go wild!) which regardless of its contents is always pronounced as a vowel sound halfway between English "ew" and English "uh".
Seems to happen more frequently in last names and place names than anywhere else, as well.
As a very strict anti-nationalist - what is it about your country you are proud of?
Nb I travel a lot and ask the question a lot (when appropriate). When i think of 'my country', i see nothing to be proud of. I didn't do it. I believe George Carlin summmed it up best: be proud of things you did, not countries, and stuff (sorry, can'tfind link)?
Besides nationalistic propaganda, I would imagine the root cause is a form of tribalism — the same reason people tend to root for their home sports team. For that reason, I also think being proud of something you had no choice in is understandable, but irrational. There is no way to be proud of one’s immutable identity without making a value judgement of the out group. Maybe unsurprisingly, Germans tend to be allergic to nationalism since they’re intimately familiar with its natural outcome.
I think everyone should be proud of their country, despite its flaws. If you choose not to be, that's fine. I'm proud to be American, despite our internal strife and external belligerence. If I were born Chinese, I'd be proud of its incredible history, despite its current capture by the CCP and human rights abuses, etc. There's a difference between patriotism and nationalism.
On the other hand though, my (especially initial) experience as a native English speaker learning Hindi has been(/was) 'wow this is amazing, so logical, everything makes sense' and 'I can read it! I don't know what it means, but I can read it and say it, I can ask someone', etc.
Dumb is too vague a word. On the whole, English trades elegance for adaptability. You can compose elegantly in it, but as you note, it has many irregularities. So elegant phrases take effort and practice, where some other languages carry that elegance naturally in everyday speech. (Admittedly: as a writer, poet, singer, or orator, the challenge of making English truly pretty provides job security)
But the widespread irregularities of English are part of what gives it a knack for incorporating foreign words, phrases, and idioms. All kinds of weird alien things can be made to fit. Bizarre neologisms and imports can be deciphered relatively easily. Secondary to the accidents of history, this adaptability seems to be a part of why its been "chosen" as one of the main global commerce languages. When Hindi, Arabic, etc need to pick up chonky Germanic words or convey the tonal detail of Mandarin, it disturbs their elegance. But when English has to do it, it just adds the hodgepodge stew that we're used to.
English is the most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat.
However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Spelling Bees where children train like mad to get on stage and shake and sweat in a competition to demonstrate their mastery of this mess. The winner is always celebrated like they are a genius, when they've essentially accomplished the intellectual equivalent of knowing where more of the potholes are on the nation's highways than the other kid.
We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself.
It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).
Yep, I always think of schadenfreude in this context. A single word that we've stolen for something that would take multiple English words to express. Why come up with our own new English word, when there is a perfectly cromulent one right over there in German?
Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...
When the government owned a lot of businesses it was easier to enforce it. I wonder how well it’s working now that they’ve desocialized so many things.
It is what happens when a language freezes its orthography in time. English is spelled as it was 350 years ago. There's a great weight of history. How it was spelled in Greek, French or Latin has an impact.
Other languages do this. French spelling is heavily informed by etymology. Whether it is c or s depends how it was spelled for Latin. But more! The Latin word for finger is digitus. Today the French word for finger is pronounced something like /dwa/. But because Latin spelled it 'digitus', French spells this as "doigt". The g and t are both silent.
Japanese before the mid-20th century reforms, used kana spellings based on medieval Japanese pronunciation. So you would write the kana, which if read individually would have the value Tōkiyau - but you pronounced it Tōkyō.
The writing system for the Tibetan language is an abugida, another off-shoot of the Brahmi script, a sister I suppose of Devanagari. The spelling of Tibetan was fixed over a thousand years ago. Modern Tibetan has lost almost all its consonant clusters, yet written Tibetan includes clusters like བསྒྲུབས "bsgrubs" (i think pronounced just /tsup/ today?)
The Tibetan or French historical etymologies might be a bit more elegant than English, really. But same idea.
English is the c++ of languages. Wildly useful and used, has accrued eons of complexity, has original sins coming from its parents' and everybody uses it differently
Not really. Its biggest sin is melting-potting too many parents, resulting in an irredeemable mess.
And even totally unrelated to the parents: The languages around the globe largely agree on the five vocals. There may be one or two missing at times, but they are pretty much the same everywhere you go, European-descent or not, and then you got fucking English.
Where an "a" is more often than not an "e" (or even an "o" like in "ball").
Where an "e" is usually an "i".
Where an "i" is pronounced as if it had an "a" in front of it,
and where "u" for some fucked up reason has a "y" or "j" in front of it.
Granted, "o" is fine as long as you don't double it ("oo") and it becomes an "u".
And that's regular British English. American English makes things even worse.
The chaos that is English vowel spelling comes from the fact that vowels in English are relatively unimportant in differentiating words, and thus allow for a lot drift before becoming unintelligible. If you replace all the sounds in the previous sentence with a long 'a' as in "cane" you'll sound ridiculous, but pretty much intelligible. Even more so if you replace all the vowels with some sort of "shwa" vowel.
This creates a lot of English accents, which fundamentally disagree about the pronunciation of different vowels. Even if the accepted spelling accurately represents how the writer speaks, it could be absolutely different from how the reader speaks.
It also creates a tendency to let unemphasized vowels slip into a generic "au"-ish sound, which is where the "o" in "ball" comes from.
> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language.
I don't completely understand this. It's not a constructed language; it's a language that evolved and continues to evolve like other natural languages according to pressures exerted by a host of factors, practically none of which are consciously-decided. Exceedingly complex in some ways, vague and ambiguous in others; it's a stretch to classify English as "dumb" For natural languages, the idea of better and worse languages seems like asking whether a maple tree is better than an oak tree. Every natural language has its quirks. For English, pronunciation, as you point out is the most notable. But take Russian: its pronunciation is much more predictable, but the non-native speaker has to contend with declensions, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, etc. Chinese orthography is daunting. Trade offs abound...
I agree that English is pretty stupid, and the fact that it’s completely non-phonetic is one of my biggest objections to it. But Hindi has some massively frustrating (and mostly useless) complexity as well. Having to pluralise both the adjective and noun in a sentence, and having different plural forms for feminine and masculine words is incredibly tedious to learn.
Indonesian is the best language I’ve come across in this respect, it’s very simple and entirely phonetic. It’s so phonetic that the casual written form basically doesn’t even have the concept of “correct spelling”.
In spanish, for example, there's two ways to deal with foreign words: you either substitute for a new native one (balompié instead of football), or you localize its spelling (fútbol instead of football). Once this is done, football jumps from being an extranjerismo to a barbarismo, and its usage is shunned.
But it is quite easier to push this with a language governing authority, and even with one it does not always work, as they always come with standardization after usage is widespread (a particular one that I liked that failed was cederrón for CD-ROM).
As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
I really appreciate that French is much more consistent with pronunciation but it's very challenging in some other ways. There are numerous conjugations that sound the same but are spelled differently, meaning you have to infer from context where possible. This is quite challenging as a learner.
Il / elle parle ("he/she speaks")
Ils / elles parlent ("they speak")
Both of the above are pronounced exactly the same. It's not such a problem when reading, but when listening and especially when transcribing this is quite challenging. Also, I haven't taken any time to think about it but so far I have the impression that there are far more conjugations of a given verb in French than in English. I've questioned a little lately whether conjugation gives more than it takes. Context, with the occasional "clue" word, seems like a pretty adequate mechanism. In English for example, we don't differentiate between you (singular) and you (plural). But when it's not clear from context we'll say e.g. "you all". This seems to me easier and more sensible (and I'm correspondingly enamoured with the French gerondif), but I do wonder if it's tricky when coming from languages where there would be a difference between the singular and plural.
Which is all to say: I'm very sympathetic to, and I agree with your reservations about English. And I'm also glad that French isn't the language in its place.
Dutch (and I assume German?) has a similar verb story for various pronouns.
"She" is also "they" in both stressed/unstressed forms (ze/zij).
"His" is the exact same word as the infinitive form of "to be" (zijn).
The formal "u" can mean "you" or "you all" and it always has the same accompanying verb form, even for plurals.
The only way to tell them apart is context, like you said.
While English does have these examples as well, they tend to be with homophones and less with verb forms and pronouns.
Side note: before learning a second language, did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker? Personally, I never thought about it AT ALL until I started learning a second language as an adult.
I guess I don't know if it's similar in other languages, but at least in all of the Germanic flavors, these verbs are crucial and dictate literally every single aspect of the language. Now that I've seen this distinction, English has become more novel to me as I notice these constructions in the writing of others.
I think it says a lot about our culture that we place so much emphasis on these ideas of individualism and property that they are codified into our writing and speech so heavily. Moreover, I'm curious if there are other languages that do not emphasize these verbs and if that also plays a role in the general sentiments of people and their thoughts on collectivism and community?
I can't wait to start learning my 3rd language once I have Dutch fully under my belt! :)
> did you ever internalize the importance of the verbs "to be/is/am/are/been/were" and "to have/has/had" growing up as a native English speaker?
Definitely not to the extent that I'm having to for French! At the moment I don't have a lot of spare time to think (eek) and reflect on this, but regarding those verbs, French definitely has some different usage of them when compared to English including sometimes using "have" where we'd use "be", and vice versa, which is a little jarring at first.
It is the same in Dutch. "To be" and "to have" are modal verbs that can be combined with other verbs to convey a mixture of past, present, and future tenses.
For example, in some forms of the past tense, you must start the sentence with 1. subject, 2. modal verb, rest of the sentence, and then the verb infinitive.
Ik _ben_ naar de supermarkt gegaan.
"I _am_ to the supermarket gone." - is the literal translation. The correct translation would be "I went to the supermarket."
But for a different verb, say, "Zitten" (to sit), you have to create the past tense with the verb "to have"
Ik _heb_ op de bank gezeten.
I _have_ on the couch sat. You get the idea.
There is a rule for when to use "be/have" and it relates to what I've been told is "a sense of movement or change". This could be literal, like a change of location, starting/stopping, or it could even be a _change of mind_. In those scenarios, you use "to be", which I think makes logical sense! You are literally changing yourself, changing your state of being, by literally moving or thinking about something in a different way.
In all other scenarios, you use "to have". It makes less logical sense on it's own, but is fine when you contrast it with "to be."
It is by far the hardest part of grok-ing a vital part of the grammar, but I am thankful that it at least follows some sort of logical rules when I compare it to English. Being native speakers, we take a lot of those things for granted.
One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.
I am not native speaker but I find English a superior language. And if other languages are better for business, why do the Angelsax countries outperform the world?
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough?
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, lough and through?
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird,
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead -
For goodness sake don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother,
And here is not a match for there
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear,
And then there's dose and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose,
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword,
And do and go and thwart and cart -
Come, come, I've hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Man alive!
I'd mastered it when I was five!
You’re right that English is a total mess. It’s partly the result of mashing up two totally separate language families (Romance and Germanic).
But that also makes the language extremely flexible, forgiving, and adaptable. English contains a vast number of (mostly) mutually-intelligible dialects, each with its own rich history, beauty, and shibboleths.
You’ve got to take the bad with the good, I guess.
One's own language is never dumb. It is always the other's. Same applies to tech. My stack is great, but what you're using is dumb. Also JS is stupid and now watch me write a CSS-in-RuSt compile to WASM monstrosity. I smell a pattern here.
I wish people would stop calling what is unknown dumb. It stinks.
> at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.)
Slavic languages are generally like this. Almost 100% phoenetic. If you can say the alphabet, you can read anything out aloud and everyone will understand what you’re saying.
Unsure if there’s even such a thing as a Russian or Serbian spelling bee.
Family that has moved from there to North America generally have atrocious spelling in English.
And when I read/speak (bad) French, people think I must be Russian because I default to over pronunciation of everything.
Number one on that list is covered by the word "one". That usage has mostly fallen by the wayside, and I think that's an indication that we didn't really need to make that distinction. There are also other ways to word it to make the meaning clear.
I mean, "one" can also mean "Myself" (which is in my mind more immediate than "one" as a general group). So it doesn't exactly solve and possibly makes it worse.
My feeling is that the use of "one" refer specifically to oneself rather than "anyone" is actually an attempt to gain status through generalization. That is, "one" used instead of "myself" is an indication of social climbing, not synonymity between the terms.
I believe this is because/relates to English being a 'stress-timed' language; others (such as Hindi) have 'emphatic particles' that emphasise the word they're attached to, and make more use of words like 'too' in 'I too would like some water' for this effect.
> I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific.
Majority of the global decisions today are made through political, and by extension, military dominance. If we resorted to scientific debate in making grand decisions, imagine what kind of a place our world would be!
I assume you're asking if the orthography is a completely accurate representation of the phonetic utterances? If so, then no language is 100% "phonetic". Spoken languages inherently adopt phonemes - which represent single perceived "sounds", which are actually represented in speech by several different sounds. The specific sounds will be different allophones of a single phoneme. These will vary for each speaker depending upon language, dialect, and other factors. A language might possibly have an orthography that is 100% accurate to the phonemic inventory, but only for a single dialect. As soon as the dialect changes or another dialect emerges, the orthography will have to change to be 100% accurate.
For example, when I say "butter" with my North American English accent, I typically say the -tt- part with an voiced alveolar tap. It's represented by "ɾ" in IPA. This sounds close to a "d" sound, but faster. However, if you ask me to slow down and repeat "butter", I'll likely respond with a full on [voiceless alveolar plosive], represented by a "t" in IPA. (Look familiar?) Both [ɾ] and [t] are allophones of the /t/ morpheme in NA English. They're specific sounds that are perceived of as a "t".
Now, I am not an expert on Hindi at all, so I cannot make any specific claims myself regarding particular sounds, but if Wikipedia is reliable here, an example of similar allophony is [w] and [v].
* Side note, I'm condensing a bunch of things in here, so it leaves out some complexity, but it should hopefully express the point that no language will have all of its sounds represented perfectly in orthography.
The comment you replied to links to a Reddit comment giving examples of schwa deletion in Hindi that is not represented orthographically. Nothing to do with allophony, just "if you were to read this word as written, you'd pronounce a vowel here, but you shouldn't". To give an English example, it's like writing "should not" even though you don't pronounce the "o" in "not".
Yes schwa deletion is a counter example, although it's a solid rule so you could easily say 'well that's just one thing to learn on top of the script, that it's written but not pronounced in that placement'.
A better case for 'no not 100%' IMO is the behaviour of the 'h' sound, which converts 'aha' ('a's around it) it to sound something more like 'ehe'. बहन for example means sister, if you transliterated according to IAST it would be bahan, but most would write behen, and that's how it's pronounced (or something between e and ai anyway).
Are the counterexamples in Spanish for native words, not just recent loanwords? If so could you tell me what they are? This is something I've looked into a bit before but I couldn't find any concrete counterexamples in Spanish.
x has the most different sounds (as an example for going from writing to sound)
Going from sounds to writing, I'll focus on one writing difference (but there are more in the above link): For the /k/ sound, it's "qu" before e or i but "c" in other words. (ignoring the letter "k" in borrowed words)
> English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day.
Not true at all. There is a general tendency for languages to trade grammatical complexity in their morphology for complexity in their syntax. English is morphologically simple, but syntactically very complex.
Syntactic complexity isn't as easy to notice at first glance as morphology, especially if you're a native speaker. This leads to the common misconception that analytic languages like English are necessarily simpler overall.
>I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific.
It is precisely because English is the language of business that it is such a mess of rules and exceptions. The complexity of English is due to all the loanwords and influence it gets from other languages, when native speakers of those languages start using English and put their own spin on it.
If the world had chosen some other language instead of English, that language would be equally confusing and English would be much simpler than it is today.
The language is not dumb. The writing system that people chose is...not that great (and you can call it dumb if you like). There was a choice between respecting phonetics or maximizing some other objective (respecting etymology or being consistent with older pronunciation or whatever). Being based on a latin script maybe wasn't ideal, but languages like swedish or german did a better job and invented letter when needed.
If you take the distribution of writing systems, I'm not sure English is particularly bad (the modern version has spaces and punctuation! Not bad, right?). It's not great either.
English is the PHP of human languages: Random vaguely-useful-looking bits from other languages copied & duct-taped together with no sense of consistency in either the syntax or the standard library...
A lot of this complexity is historical. English has a number of languages with wildly different roots in it (Germanic and Latin).
One example: why do we call the animal a pig, but the meat pork? Because when William the conqueror was French. When he conquered England a little after 1000AD, the aristocracy required their English cooks to use French words for food. The farmers however kept using the original English word. A thousand years later, and now we have a weird language rule that was created due to millennia old politics
The variability in pronunciation is a blessing in disguise. How else would one distinguish between 'a row' and 'a row', or tell 'a sow' from 'to sow'?
The American English is an infinite source of pride for me, because of how different it is from other related languages. Where everyone else is using 'ss' to stress the need for the sound 's', we proudly say 'z' when we see 'ss'. Scissors: 'sizerz'! I even hear 'azum' (assume) once in a while.
English orthography being terrible is basically the standard opinion, even among native English speakers. You’re not likely to find many English teachers who disagree, certainly.
I think people value their language being up-to-date enough to describe their own slice of human history MORE than how confusing it is for a new learner.
Loan words/all new words/complex grammar rules brought into languages aren’t done for fun, it’s because there’s a concept that they need to describe. (Or a class divide they need to define)
No commonly spoken language has ease-of-learning its priority. Just not as important as building on the language you have now.
Is there any language that is not "dumb" in some way? Maybe Esperanto, but that's a constructed language.
And Esperanto would probably be a better choice for an universal language, but no one really "chose" to use English. The US being the big winners of WW2 combined with the UK being a major colonial power at the time international trade developed probably helped.
As a native Kannada speaker, I agree. With most Indian languages, spelling bees are a laughable concept. They generally have about 35 alphabets, each associated with a specific sound and organized by type of sound. So there's no ambiguity with spelling, and pretty much any verbal sounds can be expressed in written form.
You and I know that, but it's not important or useful to a non-French speaker learning English. To those people, those are merely English words. And indeed, they are English, even if they're French imports. I think even a lot of English speakers don't realise the depth of this: "cul de sac" is a fun example that a lot of people I ask don't realise comes from French (or another language, for that matter).
I've seen both, with an apparent fairly-consistent consistent semantic distinction: a “cul-de-sac” has a rounded turnaround at the end which is convenient for reversing direction without entering any driveway off the road, a “dead end” has a straight end which doesn't provide that affordance.
meekness
banknote
... there's a lot of “kn” words where the “k” is pronounced.
Most are compounds where the “k” and “n” come from separate component words, or cases where the “k” is from the root word and the “n” from a suffix, or cases where the “k” is part of a “ck”...
While I agree English can be inconsistent and weird (esp. pronouncuation), I doubt any other language could be more expressive or “scientific”, whatever that means. Unless by “scientific” you mean regular.
Among European languages, English is maybe the language with the less consistency, when it comes to writing, but it is far from being the only one. French is another one, and English borrowed not only a lot of French words, but a lot of them were borrowed with their old French spelling.
To understand why English and many other European languages have such weird spelling rules, you have to start with the initial reason: religion. Most Western European countries used to be Catholics, and the main language of the Church was Latin. The Latin alphabet was designed to write down... Latin. The Romans modified and adapted the Etruscan alphabet, which was borrowed from the Greek, who borrowed it from the Phoenicians , etc. to their own language. However, when European languages developed as national languages, they faced a real issue, which was to adapt the Latin alphabet, which was ubiquitous in Western Europe, to their own languages. If you compare the spelling system of Hindi to Latin, you immediately see the problem.
The Latin alphabet is very poor and is composed of only 26 letters. And many sounds in Germanic languages do not have their counterpart in Latin. People started to use combinations of letters to represent their own specific sounds, which were pretty unique to each country. For instance, you cannot read Dutch if you apply English rules to it.
In the case of English, the problem is even more complicated. For one, the official language of England up to the 15th century was French, which explained why 40% of a text in English is composed of French words. Second, when people started writing in English, there was no government body to enforce a common spelling. So, printer shops all over England came up with their own ways to spell out words, and the result is this hogwash of spelling that is English today.
The last problem, which is a problem that many international languages, such as Spanish, German, French and Portuguese are faced with, is that every decision to change the spelling of your language should be the result of international comities. And since, there are so many different accents today, it has become quite difficult to come up with a regular pronunciation, and hence, a regular spelling for any of these languages. I can tell you that as a Frenchman, speaking Parisian French, I would have a hard time convincing Belgian or Quebecers that my accent is the right one... :-)
Now, a language usually becomes an international language when the country who speak it reaches some kind of dominance, it has nothing to do with any qualities this language might have. In Europe, this was the case for Greek, Latin, then Italian, French, German and now English. Machine translation might change this situation, but I doubt it, since English is so much ingrained into science and technology now. And the US, and most English speaking countries, have little interests to see their language loosing their prominence. We French speakers went this route after the Second World War... So we know the drill... Economically, this is a real bonanza, you can attract the best students, the best researchers, the best journals etc... You can impose your movies, your literature and of course your values... Why do you think Paris was the capital of arts and literature during the XIXth century? Language... Now it is New York or London... Language again.
>The Romans modified and adapted the Etruscan alphabet, which was borrowed from the Greek, who borrowed it from the Phoenicians , etc. to their own language.
Also as I recall those are each unrelated languages so the letter/sound congruity dropped markedly at each transition.
(I'm not sure if that's the correct way to put it. Also I tried to sound really smart in writing it.)
I guess he mean that written form is often thought as coming from a few érudits through an intensely conscious endeavor, while oral language is evolving mostly in the wild and result mostly from internalized unconscious conventions.
I mean, these views can be debated, but are probably what was referred to here.
Looking at some of the security issues Azure has had in the recent past[1], I am not convinced that Microsoft is at top of their game when it comes to security. Now with Open AI's primary infrastructure being on Azure, I am seeing all these tenancy breaks in a new light. Earlier, if you did not have an Azure presence then these critical issues did not affect you but now if you have enterprise Open AI (which most tech companies probably already do by now) then they have a ton of your data and one of these tenancy breaks could be used to get your data. Open AI is probably not very mature in their security posture and them hosted on Azure is a double whammy if you truly care about your data.
Note that this probably does not affect US govt because from what I understand MS has a totally isolated dedicate Azure environment for US Govt entities.
> I have literally never heard of national politicians in India being anti-science.
Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body[1] and then claiming presence of test tube babies in ancient times[3]
On the other hand, Union Health minister Dr Harsh Vardhan claimed that Vedas had knowledge beyond Theory of Relativity[3]
BJP, the ruling party has tried to indoctrinate a bunch of nonsense like Wright brothers did not invent the airplane, it was infact ancient Indians[4].
India actually has a well-funded ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy) and its influence has massively grown over the past decade. It is as anti-science as you get.
> Not anti-science per se but Indian politicians are quite famous for pseudo-scientific nonsensical statements like Mr Modi claiming that advanced surgery existed thousands of years ago when doctors sewed an Elephant's head to a God's body
There is evidence for plastic surgery being known in Ancient India through works of Sushruta/Charaka. Leaving apart the sewing of an elephant’s head on a human body, which was probably added for religious/mythological effect I don’t quite see what’s nonsensical here?
This is a very strange comment for a Hindu nationalist to make. I thought it was well established that Shiva installed the elephant head on Ganesh's body after he rashly beheaded him before realizing he was his son. It seems very bizarre to imagine a god using a plastic surgeon to sew the head on.
Not how I read it. OP seems to completely dismiss the possibility that some surgical techniques may have been known in Ancient India because of what I’m sure is prejudice against one or more of religion/Hinduism/speaker(Modi in this case). Like I said the story about the elephant’s head is likely mythological/religious but that doesn’t take away from the other basic facts.
OP quotes saying that Indian politicians from the current party are being anti-science, but the first link where modi talks about religious texts is trying to link it to science.
If you read further in the link he talks about Aryabhata and space science and how we need to regain those.
This is anything but anti-science
Seems pretty funny to me, the reference added to say that this Indian politician is anti science is actually trying to encourage ppl to become good at science. May be he using religious based texts, but that speech in the article isn’t really anti science though.
Not sure about negative comments here. You dont like it, dont use the feature! Its not like Google is forcing you to use this. I bet people will celebrate this feature when Apple rolls around implementing it two years from now. I for one, look forward to using this feature on my Pixel as I live in a city where drivers are very aggressive and in general have a disregard for following the rules. I have been in an accident where the other driver outright refused to accept their mistake and made up a completely false story and a dashcam would have proved their fault without a doubt. I did mount a dashcam in my car since then but using the phone would be a much better proposition.
No need to wait for another two years, I already made an exact app you're talking about. it's not only a dash cam, but it's integrated with turn by turn navigation as well.
Hmmm.. Id say thats a cost of doing business on the app store? App stores should be doing a better job of making sure everything doesn’t require rework ever so often, but I don’t see why end customers have to pick up that tab. On a continued basis like in a subscription.
It is unfortunately because of API cost from Mapbox. In Google's use case, they can obviously do it for free (for being Google and not integrated with navigation within the app). The 1 week tier is aimed for rental car users, for normal users, I'd recommend 1 month.
Subscriptions for apps are like paying the service fee to a skilled mechanic for your car's maintenance and upgrades. The developer acts as the mechanic, using the subscription revenue to continually improve the app's performance, security, and features. Just as the mechanic ensures your car runs smoothly and can add better features (tinted windows, reverse camera etc), the developer can deliver regular updates, replace outdated components, and introduce innovative features. Subscriptions support ongoing app maintenance and enhancement, providing users with a reliable and up-to-date experience, similar to how a mechanic's services keep your car in optimal condition.
the biggest cost for me is the navigation, mapbox charges quite a lot...on a per trip basis, but you guys can use the promo code HACKERNEWS for 1 month free trial
Apple would never put iPhones up to something this low-brow.
This is the company that put a charging port under a mouse so you wouldn't leave it hooked up all day: they're not going to encourage you to stick your phone in a creaky phone mount in hot sunlight all day so you can do a bad dashcam impression.
> HN has a large enough number of users for both to happen and it not being hypocrisy.
Why would that matter in this hypothetical scenario? Releasing a feature two years after someone else has would not be revolutionary regardless of which phone someone uses.
Yeah, those comments calling on the hypocrisies of a crowd are really getting boring. Same thing on reddit where people call on an entire subreddit for having been wrong or having a different opinion in a different thread.
We are talking of hundreds of thousands of user, is that really surprising that we see different opinions in different threads? I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that a comment thread about Google and Android might attract an entirely different crowd than an Apple thread.
If it's your word against the other driver's, the insurance company can find you each at fault.
I've gotten in the habit of recording my rides since then. Was using Droid Dashcam, but it make my Pixel feel slow/hot/buggy. Very keen to see a built-in version of the same functionality.
After watching dashcam crash videos for 5 years, I finally got around to getting a dashcam for myself (not that I intend to star in any of those videos, mind you).
From those crash videos, I've learned to never turn left in Russia. You'll get t-boned almost every time.
Survivor bias is a specific case of selection bias, and the issue here is also selection bias: there's a selection effect on which dashcam videos you end up seeing.
I was gonna say this. I've thought of this idea years and year ago. This is an old ass idea, and the only reason phones didn't do it before, is because Google and Apple wouldn't let us do it. It should be embarassing that it's taken them this long to come up with it.
Could you pass on the results of your research? I don't think I found a dashcam at that price range, and I was actually looking to use an old smartphone as my dashcam, but it didn't seem like a good solution as 1. I would have to start the app manually whenever the phone powers up, and 2. I wouldn't want to leave the phone in a holder in the car all the time as it could invite thieves.
Google is in no way interested in traffic safety and that's the reason I despise them for playing around in this field. For example, they encourage active use of the phone while driving by asking you to report and confirm/deny reports of "speed traps". It's similar to Tesla tinkering with self driving and using everyone around us as beta testers.
Wait, explain to me how a cop on the side of the road with a radar gun "endangers drivers"? If someone ahead of you slowing down before they get to a cop causes you danger, you were following unjustifiably close.
There are lots of things that can happen on a highway to take a car from 80mph to 0mph in just a few feet (very heavy things to run into) without warning, and if you don't have enough distance to react to that and stop, you are following too close.
Have you never seen how people hit their brakes, swerve into open lanes, and back up traffic for miles just because of a cop or some shit on the side of the road?
> There are very real speed traps on roads, and they endanger drivers in exchange for generating ticket revenue.
Not if you drive the speed limit or less. Google endangers drivers (especially other drivers) by implicitly encouraging rapid deceleration at one of these "traps".
Actual speed traps cause rapid deceleration on purpose. There will suddenly be a speed limit sign that is very abrupt or very low or both.
A cop with a radar gun in a normal stretch of road with a reasonable speed limit is not a speed trap.
Though even for """speed traps""" that are just enforcement, if there is a big difference between the average speed and the speed limit then there's probably something wrong with the road design.
If someone slowing ahead of you puts you in danger, you were following too close. The parent was talking about encouraging users to use their phone to report the speed traps is a cause of distracted driving, which it is, which is dangerous.
And you know what. Cops NEVER go after people for following too close. You see them always out there just knocking out speeders. Going 70 in a 60 is not dangerous. Following someone 6 feet off their bumper at 55 in a 60 is far more dangerous, but that requires doing actual work, not sitting on the shoulder knocking out ticket after ticket.
One, it's insane to ask drivers to input data while driving.
Two, these are not "speed traps", they are simply officers on the side of the road. These officers are doing a public service looking for cell phone users, and for aggressive speeders.
I personally have seen them staring through regular binoculars lately more often than a radar gun. I assume they are looking for people holding cell phones. This is in Northern California.
Also, being seen on the freeway at all helps the crazies in their dodge chargers slow donw a little. If they know the cops are out, they'll keep it to 95 instead of 105.
Not all SaaS companies have security postures equivalent to Amazon/Google/Github/MS. Most SaaS have a fraction of a budget as compared tech giants to deal with security and privacy regulations.
Pretty much this. I cant seem to find it now but I read a study late last year that data breaches/hacks have almost no impact to the share price, no impact on customer base and consequently no impact to the leadership of a company. Thus, leadership is less likely to invest in security and privacy of their users.
There was a "Show HN" post on here that was planning on using this type of AI to help doctors, basically letting them pipe their patients' medical data into an online AI chat.
The way basic privacy and secrecy is ignored in this space is staggering.
The whole space is built around it. The reason is simple. These machine learning systems need massive amounts of data to calibrate for accuracy. They are not intelligent to somehow learn on their own. So machine learning companies have figured they can do an aggressive marketing campaign to make people think these are intelligent and uncontrollable to mask their never ending hunger for our data, hoping everyone is ignorant enough not to catch on.
What remains to be seen is whether we come back to our senses soon enough.
A lot of “experts” working in ai are warning about dangers but what they omit telling is that it’s the humans who own ai that are dangerous.
That’s just plain wrong. Any AI expert worth their salt will tell that the humans who own, control and operate the AI is the primary danger, at least the way it works today.
There’s a ~3000 word prompt limit so while it’s bad whole user datasets are unlikely to have been uploaded… the issue will come when ChatGPT work out how to do live training from prompts and other user interactions, I suppose it will be filtered but nothing is 100%.
Doesn't necessarily apply to data being processed with plugins. The "Code Interpreter" plugin lets you upload files up to 100 MB for use by AI-generated Python scripts; see https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/it-is-starting-to-get-stran... for examples (including useful output from vague prompts like "please characterize this dataset", at least if you get lucky).
I could have surely done it for the good of mother earth but financially it made no sense.