One Universal Language

Supermodel From Paris said:

English's grammar rules are actually really straightforward compared to a lot of languages.

English's weirdness is all in the spelling and pronunciation. Well, there are actually some things with tenses.

Click to expand...

SFP, I agree 100% with you that English is a great language, perhaps the greatest, but I think you're underestimating the difficulties some new speakers might have in pronunciation. There are so many exceptions in English that it can be a daunting task to learn to pronounce simple things. "Put" vs "cut," "been" vs "seen" vs "steer," "cooperate" vs "coop," "chimpanzee" vs "chemistry," just to name a handful. And then there are so many different ways to produce the same sound: "right" vs "spite" (the ite sound), "maim" vs "lame" (the ame sound), "phone" vs "fear" (the f sound), "catch" vs "such" (the ch sound), etc. There are hundreds and hundreds of examples of weird pronunciations and odd redudancies in English, and only now, after studying some foreign languages, do I see how hard it can be for someone learning it for the first time.

That said, I still believe English is the best language (though I want to learn Esperanto at some point, and maybe my opinion will change). Growing up, I spoke English and Urdu and am fluent in both. In high school I learned Spanish (and retained most of it, and am refreshing it now). Currently I'm teaching myself German, Russian, and French.

English most definitely has a number of advantages over those others.

Supermodel From Paris said:

English is ****ing easy. It's spoken slowly, it has amazing per-syllable value compared to other languages, regular verbs are conjugated once per tense, and there are only a few cases (my/mine, for example... most germanic languages have at least 4, some have more than a dozen). Because our "respectful" form of the pronoun "you" fell out of use more than a century ago, you use the same sentence to talk to anyone, from a small child, to your girlfriend's grandfather, to the president.

Click to expand...

Agree with this completely. The case system in English is borderline nonexistent, and even what little of a case system English does have is very simple. Plus the lack of a respectful "you" simplifies things greatly.

German has four cases. Definite/indefinite articles change depending on the part of speech and gender, as do adjective endings, some noun endings, demonstrative pronoun endings, possessive pronoun endings, and personal pronouns, and it's a really complicated system. Russian has six cases.

Another great thing about English: no noun genders! We have one definite article (the) and one indefinite article (a/an). I have never understood the purpose of noun genders, and there is no purpose to them except to needlessly complicate language. Spanish, Urdu, French and Portuguese all have two (masculine and feminine). German and Russian have three (masculine, feminine, and neuter). There is no need for them.

Browny said:

I've been of the belief for quite a while that eventually, english and chinese will be the only languages that matter.

Click to expand...

I'm certainly not disagreeing that Chinese is a huge language, simply because of the number of people that speak it.

But Chinese (in all its forms) is also probably one of the worst languages ever conceived, if not the worst. Unlike other languages, there is no standard alphabet, just thousands and thousands and thousands of characters. And while there are certainly similarities between related characters, it's still so unbelievably complicated (compared to the 20, 30, 40 letter alphabets of most Latin or Greek or Arabic or Hebrew derived languages) that, from what I hear, it can be extremely difficult to reliably read Chinese even after years of study. Not to mention the character doesn't give you any clue as to how to actually pronounce it. And let's not even touch Chinese dictionaries, because finding words is a challenge in itself.

Compare to, say, German, which after only 3-4 months of study I can pronounce anything I read and even get the gist of most German blogs/news articles. I've never studied Chinese, but I've known people who have, and have read a lot about it, and I can guarantee you that someone who's only studied Chinese for 3-4 months, or even a year (maybe two), will not be able to do the same.

Here's a good article that sums up my gripes with Chinese.

I'm not sure how much Japanese and Korean have in common with Chinese, so I won't comment on those.

German is nice because pronunciation is so easy, and it's easy to spell out a word if you hear it pronounced, and the infinitive form of all verbs ends with the suffix "-en" (eg, "essen," to eat). But German verbs suffer one of the same disadvantages as French, which is that there's no inherent distinction between present and present progressive tenses (among other things). For example, "ich esse" can mean both "I eat" and "I am eating." In French, "je mange" can mean both "I eat" and "I am eating," and you need context/other words in the sentence to specify which.

English doesn't have that problem, and that's what I love. Neither does Spanish (and I'm guessing Portuguese), but English also doesn't have to worry about loads of verb conjugations (like you pointed out, SFP).

English is the most specific, varied, expressive language. You can express very specific ideas in very specific ways if you want, and the number of different ideas (as well as how you can express them) is vast. Hence why, in my experience, it is the best language, even if it does have funny pronunciation rules and exceptions.

Just jumping in here. Hopefully this isn't all dead yet.

Supermodel From Paris said:

English is ****ing easy. It's spoken slowly, it has amazing per-syllable value compared to other languages,

Click to expand...

Part of the reason it's spoken slowly and has high information-per-syllable value is because the phonotactics behind syllable formation are less stringent than in many languages, which leads to more sounds per syllable and annoying consonant clusters. Even native English speakers tend not to enunciate all the frills and fineries in syllables like /fɪrsts/ or /streŋkθs/. All that makes it pretty pointless to compare it to other languages strictly by counting syllables.

That, and I'm not convinced it's all of the reason; I wonder if the fact that English has weak/reduced vowels in unstressed syllables might not impose some constraint on how fast you can speak while being understood. I imagine that where the vowel sounds are more distinct, it's easier for the ear to process the syllables, so it's not just schwa like half the time. (If anyone has any information on precisely how common schwa actually is in spoken English, I'd be very interested in hearing about it.)

GoldShadow said:

Agree with this completely. The case system in English is borderline nonexistent, and even what little of a case system English does have is very simple. Plus the lack of a respectful "you" simplifies things greatly.

German has four cases. --- Russian has six cases.

Click to expand...

Why do you consider cases to be such a decisive marker of difficulty? Is there something about how these two particular languages use cases that makes them harder to use than, say, prepositions? (I'm assuming you're contrasting cases with prepositions, which is what English usually uses to express the stuff some languages do with cases.) Are the declensional affixes of Russian and German irregular or something?

But German verbs suffer one of the same disadvantages as French, which is that there's no inherent distinction between present and present progressive tenses (among other things). For example, "ich esse" can mean both "I eat" and "I am eating." In French, "je mange" can mean both "I eat" and "I am eating," and you need context/other words in the sentence to specify which.

Click to expand...

I don't think it's fair to say that these other languages handle things worse just because they fail to distinguish the present and present progressive aspects in this way. Earlier in this thread English was getting credit for for being simple and not having complicated tenses, etc., but now it's getting credit for forcing a distinction that French and German are apparently doing just fine without? I smell a double standard.

English is the most specific, varied, expressive language. You can express very specific ideas in very specific ways if you want, and the number of different ideas (as well as how you can express them) is vast. Hence why, in my experience, it is the best language, even if it does have funny pronunciation rules and exceptions.

Click to expand...

Your whole post up to this was (reasonable enough) stuff about what makes English easy to learn or use. But how do you jump from that to "the number of different ideas is vast" or "you can express very specific ideas", claims that entail the implication that this is not the case for other languages?

The good thing about Chinese though (Mandarin specifically), is that it gives you a break with the grammar in several spots. You don't have to conjugate anything, learn genders, and they have no tenses; only aspect markers combined with time abverbs. On the other hand though, their way of expressing things is pretty alien, especially to English, so trying to do a semantic translation is pretty difficult. To say you're flying to America by plane, you'd say: "I sit plane go America."

The reading and writing is really hard though. You get used to it pretty quickly though, once you begin to recognize the radicals in the characters, you can recall them from memory much more easily.

The hardest language to actually speak that I've encountered so far though is Navajo. Navajo's silly for more reasons than I can count on both hands.

I think German should be the universal language on account of it sounding awesome.

Languages aren't just about communicating, they're a culmination of the culture that speaks it. For the same reason, countries still have their own currencies with their leaders/inspirational figures on them.

GoldShadow said:

I'm certainly not disagreeing that Chinese is a huge language, simply because of the number of people that speak it.

But Chinese (in all its forms) is also probably one of the worst languages ever conceived, if not the worst. Unlike other languages, there is no standard alphabet, just thousands and thousands and thousands of characters. And while there are certainly similarities between related characters, it's still so unbelievably complicated (compared to the 20, 30, 40 letter alphabets of most Latin or Greek or Arabic or Hebrew derived languages) that, from what I hear, it can be extremely difficult to reliably read Chinese even after years of study. Not to mention the character doesn't give you any clue as to how to actually pronounce it. And let's not even touch Chinese dictionaries, because finding words is a challenge in itself.

Compare to, say, German, which after only 3-4 months of study I can pronounce anything I read and even get the gist of most German blogs/news articles. I've never studied Chinese, but I've known people who have, and have read a lot about it, and I can guarantee you that someone who's only studied Chinese for 3-4 months, or even a year (maybe two), will not be able to do the same.


German is nice because pronunciation is so easy, and it's easy to spell out a word if you hear it pronounced, and the infinitive form of all verbs ends with the suffix "-en" (eg, "essen," to eat).


English is the most specific, varied, expressive language. You can express very specific ideas in very specific ways if you want, and the number of different ideas (as well as how you can express them) is vast. Hence why, in my experience, it is the best language, even if it does have funny pronunciation rules and exceptions.

Click to expand...

I agreed with a lot of things you were saying, but then you stumped me a bit. Chinese is one of the worst languages ever conceived? I was a bit surprised there. Actually, their writing system, though complex and unintelligible to Westerners, is actually smart in that it is mutually intelligible between all 1.4 billion plus speakers of Chinese languages. Some of the dialects of Chinese have more native speakers than most other languages, so this is pretty impressive considering the size and extreme differences of speech in regional China.

You can study and understand German after 3-4 months because your mother language is similar. You have an unfair bias in a lot of your statements here. German pronunciation is not easy to an Asian person, nor is English. Your last paragraph also leads me to question what makes you think other languages cannot do the same. Of course English is the best and easy for us because we speak it as a mother language. Europeans who speak it as a second language are at a major advantage based on root language similarities as well as the opportunities to speak with native speakers and practice on a daily basis. The same things don't exist, especially in my experience in Japan, as well as other parts of Asia. After learning an Asian language, I don't think it's any more "hard" than any other.

In Supermodel's defense, he never once said English's spelling makes sense, just that the pronunciations are easy. That isn't an issue of "Put vs cut" because both are easy to pronounce. That's an issue in spelling, not pronunciation.

"A" in "apple" is a terrible sound though that should never exist.

Browny said:

Lol... 'smash debater', comes up with that response.

classy

Click to expand...

I don't know how to respond to this without calling you ****ing stupid.

Vermanubis said:

Nah.

Too many different languages exist for too many different reasons. As silly as it may sound, things like intonation, inflection and general sound affect how a word's perceived. From a technical viewpoint, yeah, only one language is needed, <technically>. In fact, one was created for just such a purpose: Esperanto. It's a synthetic language that's 100% grammatically and phonetically consistent, with no irregular verb forms, etc. So it's essentially meant to be a medium between languages.

However, from a more human standpoint of verbal connotation, one language just won't do it. Each language just has too much to offer in terms of expression and other humanistic considerations. For example, sprightly and animated mean the same thing, but have distinctly different connotations and invoke very distinct illustrations.

So yeah, I think as far as a technical language goes, sure--after all, English is the predominant technical language. Chinese isn't a technical language, primarily because the fabrication of a new word involves an almost primitive copulation of two separate concepts like "fire" and "arrow" for "rocket."

Click to expand...

I kind of want to quote both this and the post above it... Browny has capitalized on the downfalls of globalization and Verm raises a point I don't hear often, though the more I think about it and apply it to past experiences, I can see this.

Globalization might in the end remove all sense of cultural identity but I believe surely if I can see this then there are others that will see it too and make moves to stop that. There are cultures I have come up with that think, their very brains are structured differently from our own... things like how we prioritize time over place, these cultures definitely have place as no. 1. We went in the way of technological greatness and materialism while these people developed deep emotional connections: Indeed, saying no to someone out there could mean an affront to your relationship.

What i'm saying is, the fundamentals of each culture, even taking religion and culture out of the equation is too great to change one generation. In our society today we forbid things like the stolen generation to happen again and therefore we likely may not change an aborigine's way of thinking for many years yet.

At the same time, there is too much room for sameness to happen to discard it. I would say that optimistically that won't happen but it's best to consider the possibility and it has been done many times before.

I think the biggest question now is, will our society step back far enough to allow individuals to retain their sense of cultural identity? We condone cultures for rituals they do that seem un-necessary to us but do we really have the high moral ground on that stance? Who are we to say that putting rings around your neck at birth to lengthen your neck at the cost of pain is wrong? It seems so abhorrent to us but if the culture thinks it is best maybe there are grounds for it. Spartans killed babies they didn't think were strong enough, Japanese has a word for 'randomly testing the sharpness of your blade on a stranger's head' and we're not bloodless either: Our whole medieval hierarchical structure was rife with contempt and violence.

Even if you say these things are wrong (which may be but i'm not going to judge), what do they lead on to? As humans we have a nasty habit of pushing things when we get a break for them. Councils in my area now get police to check your rubbish bins to make sure you are putting the correct type of rubbish in each bin. Is this the same thing? Will we force Jews to stop circumcision or Christians to stop Baptizing because of our new post-modernism age-thinking?

As an optimistic person, I think... no, I hope it will never come to that.

And sorry for making this all about culture and religion rather than language. In terms of language, it'd be nice to have a universal language, because goodness knows how annoyed one might get when they meet an intellectual being they cannot communicate with... then again, as human beings we will always find a way to communicate... and I guess that's the essence of it. Even without a universal language, we will find a way to make one. Through the gestures, the faces and the sounds we make, we get through somehow and that's what makes us special... we pull through. Still, that 'universal' language might be something that would contribute to the problem I mentioned above. Doubt it though, on reflection. As people, we'll always find ways to be different because, at least for now... if nothing else, we can't handle having no sense of cultural identity.

And thank goodness for that! :D

Sizzle said:

I agreed with a lot of things you were saying, but then you stumped me a bit. Chinese is one of the worst languages ever conceived? I was a bit surprised there. Actually, their writing system, though complex and unintelligible to Westerners, is actually smart in that it is mutually intelligible between all 1.4 billion plus speakers of Chinese languages. Some of the dialects of Chinese have more native speakers than most other languages, so this is pretty impressive considering the size and extreme differences of speech in regional China.

You can study and understand German after 3-4 months because your mother language is similar. You have an unfair bias in a lot of your statements here. German pronunciation is not easy to an Asian person, nor is English. Your last paragraph also leads me to question what makes you think other languages cannot do the same. Of course English is the best and easy for us because we speak it as a mother language. Europeans who speak it as a second language are at a major advantage based on root language similarities as well as the opportunities to speak with native speakers and practice on a daily basis. The same things don't exist, especially in my experience in Japan, as well as other parts of Asia. After learning an Asian language, I don't think it's any more "hard" than any other.

Click to expand...

This holds a very good amount of truth.

Another factor is how early in your life you enter in contact with a certain language. for example, I learned English easily because I already played games in English since I was 7.

to note, there are cases of marriage between two people from different countries, who speak different language natively, in which, their children eventually learn to speak two different languages natively because both parents speak to them in two different languages.

of course, like the quoted post defends, languages with similar roots are easier to learn once you learn one of them: as a native Portuguese speaker, I can understand Spanish and Italian with ease (as both are Latin based languages), even if I don't know how to speak these languages fluently. that said, whenever I go to Spain, I can easily read some warnings or signposts and understand most (if not all) of what's written. likewise, a German person will likely have the same experience when dealing with languages like English, Dutch or Danish.

when I read or hear something in, say, German, I won't understand whatever it might be saying. not to mention other languages like Greek, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic or Chinese, which use entirely different writing systems.