11 October 2013

The astonishing primitiveness of English


Introduction added later for clarification:

From the fact that this article is written in English doesn't follow that it's directed at native English speakers. It most assuredly isn't. To try to convince a person that his native language is primitive is pointless, counterproductive and extremely impolite. I would never do it any more than I'd ever tell a man his wife is ugly.

Therefore, dear native English speakers, especially monolingual ones, you are advised not to read this article. If you do read it and feel offended, don't tell me I didn't warn you beforehand that the article was not meant for you.

I've written the article in English for the simple reason that English is the lingua franca in almost the entire world as well as undeservedly worshipped by countless people who, noticing the enormous achievements of the English civilization, make the completely unfounded conclusion that the English language is superior to the others.

This article is a call to non-native English speakers to stop holding the English language for something divine. Just because the USA have a much higher standard of living than your country doesn't mean that you should mold your use of your native language after the English language. English is a convenient tool for us to communicate across language barriers and nothing more.



When I heard an American gentleman in the Philippines say that the Tagalog language is difficult, I thought I had seen one of the world's greatest linguistic retards. But the article
"The Steep Learning Curve of the English Language", written by a gentleman from Panama, really left me gasping for air in utter astonishment. "If you’re in the process of learning English as a second language, you probably know by now that it takes a lot of patience and concentration to make it sink into your brain." Hello? Are you sure you mean English, the language originating from England? You mean, your brain can master all those complicated verb forms in Spanish and you call English difficult just because occasionally one word can have several meanings??
If so, English must be the ONLY foreign language which the author of that article has ever tried to learn. Now, regrettably I am fluent in only four foreign languages, but I have studied – to a greater or lesser extent – dozens of them, and I assure you that among those, English is the easiest to acquire. In fact, I have never studied English. It has just stuck to me by itself – over many years, I admit, but the reward-to-efford ratio, compared to any other language, is unbelievable.
(In case anyone wonders, the reason why I never studied English was that by the time I began to need English, I was already so good at it that it didn't make any sense to study – all I needed was practice.)

It is undeniable that among the European languages, English has the most primitive grammar by far. Since English shares a lot of vocabulary with languages like French and German, not to mention the huge common cultural heritage, it is easy to overlook that grammatically it is worlds apart from them and, indeed, only little steps away from the languages like Chinese and Malay.

English being an almost-isolating language, it is really curious that even the rudiments of grammar it has still retained seem too much for its native speakers. They are doing all they can to make their language even more isolating. Like, they embraced the Chinese phrase "long time no see," meaning "I haven't seen you for a long time," or "It's been long since the last time you and I met." Now, in Chinese you have to talk like that because those grammatical forms you would need to convey all those nuances of meaning don't exist. In English, they do exist, but the native English speakers seem to enjoy the pursuit of primitivity. They are too stupid to even write "fashist" instead of "fascist". A follower of communism is called a communist, but a follower of Sandino is called a sandinista. (But when a revolutionary is Cuban, is he then a communista?) It's friggin' unreal. They just take words from various languages and won't even change them so they'd fit suitably into their language's context.
Another phenomenon to the same effect is that when translating from English, one routinely sees sentences to which one has to add words like "if", "then", "but", "because" and such. The English have those words, too, but for some reason they choose not to use them unless it's absolutely inevitable. In any normal language, people say: "If you do that, then you'll get in trouble." You can say so in English as well, but many, if not most of them prefer to say "You do that, you'll get in trouble." They seem to have an obsession with making the language as short as possible. "Ever see it before?" instead of "Have you ever seen it before?", or this amazing example from a TV series: an Irish-American police officer saying to a traffic accident survivor (not exactly a Polynesian either): "You any pain?"

What is absolutely incredible about the English language is its incapability to build new words. When they get a new concept, they can't just add a couple of suffixes to an existing word, unite a couple into a compound word or invent something completely new. Instead, they shorten a long description into an acronym (laser, radar - which, I admit, are very convenient except that the method has very limited uses), or just take anything from their environment which can be at least vaguely associated with the new concept – for instance, a person's name. A raincoat is called a macintosh, rubber boots are called wellingtons. A machine for lifting heavy objects is, would you believe, called a crane. A crane is a bird, for crying out loud! Curiously, I once read an article where the English speakers were sneering at the primitiveness of the Thai language. Like, one guy told how he pointed at a crane (the machine) and asked his girlfriend what it's called in Thai, and she said they don't have a word for it. I fail to see what the English found so funny, because they don't have a word for it either. The best they could come up with was to name it after a creature which roughly resembled its shape.
Or look at the computer peripheral device called "mouse". Sure enough, it is called "mouse" in every language I know, but that is only because they mindlessly ape English which is a prestige language for them. But imagine that the device would have been invented by the Germans or Russians or French. Imagine a meeting where the boss praises the inventors and says something like: "You're great guys! This is one of the most remarkable inventions in the history of computers. By the way, what do you propose we'll call it?" The chief inventor says: "Mouse." The boss: "I beg you pardon?" The inventor: "Mouse. We want to call this thing the mouse, because, you know, it's, like, white, and roughly of the size of a small animal." The boss frowns and tells him to come closer and breathe. Not smelling any alcohol, he'll be slightly confused, but still suggest that the chief inventor go home and take a couple of days off – he has really worked hard the last months and deserves some rest.
It is beyond ludicrous how the English language keeps using the existing words unchanged to name new concepts. They ride in their motor cars. They sail across the outer space in their spaceships. I read a science fiction novel where the smaller spacecraft were called cutters and sloops, and one of the officers on a SPACESHIP was called Sailing Master. (I swear I'm not making this up.) I wonder how the English ever came across the word "rifle". "Boom-stick" would have been more like them.
Added much later: I couldn't believe my eyes when I accidentally found out that "rifle" isn't even the word for the type of weapon. It refers to the way the inside of the barrel is processed. Meaning, I was even more right than I had thought.
Not yet has English reached the level of some South East Asian languages where you would have to say "island island" for "islands", and "I go theatre yesterday" because there is no past tense, and the question "have you meeting today?" would be ambiguous (it could mean "are you going to have" as well as "have you had"). But we can already see things like "France woman" written on the Internet – apparently the word "French" is too much mental effort for some.

Now, all that said, I have to stress that English has two big merits.

Firstly, it is perfectly suited for international communication because it's so easy to learn.

Secondly, writing in English is a very useful exercise which I totally recommend to everyone. That is because it forces you to express yourself as simply as possible. What would be merely a difficult sentence in German becomes absolutely unreadable in English, as even remotely complex concepts are likely to require at least half a dozen words. Therefore – as I have the tendency to stretch the expressiveness of my native language to its limits – I am grateful for having English to bring me down to Earth and practice expressing myself in short simple sentences. (They may not always be short and simple in English, but they are in my Estonian thoughts.)

Both of those have their downside.
Firstly, the speakers of non-English languages tend to look up to English as some sort of a noble, even divine form of communication. I keep seeing how the Estonians are reluctant to use the full extent of their language's possibilities, as they perceive it somehow unseemly to say things one couldn't say in English. Like, when there is an English word which can mean two completely different things, and the reader will always have to guess by the context which one is meant (and often a lengthy explanation is necessary), whereas there are two distinct words in Estonian, the Estonians nevertheless feel that they should use only one word like the English do. The indiscriminate awe for everything English is horrifyingly destroying the language instinct of the Estonians, confusing and primitivising our language.
Let me give you just one example (which is short enough to be comfortably explained in English). I remember I saw an article where a young woman suggested that we stop distinguishing between "number" and "digit" because the English language doesn't distinguish between them. Obviously she was mistaken. She simply didn't know the English word "digit", and thought there was none. But that's a minor problem. It is human to err. What really horrified me was the kind of mindset "if English doesn't have it, our language mustn't either". Imagine that I would write that Vietnamese doesn't have two separate words for "blue" and "green", so we should also give up that distinction and start using only one word which means both "blue" and "green". People would think I'm insane. But substitute "English" for "Vietnamese" and many people would nod and say: well, yes, if there is no distinction in English then there's no point having it in Estonian.
Secondly, it is not only your expressions the English languages forces you to simplify, it does the same to your thoughts. Since it is close to impossible to express very complex concepts in English, you'll eventually notice yourself simplifying your thoughts even before putting them into English words.

Now, I know what some of you are saying – since I know my native language better than English, I merely have the illusion that the English language is less expressive. It's not actually the language's fault, you may say, it is my insufficient knowledge of its possibilities.
That would indeed be a very likely explanation, if we were to observe only English and my native language. However, you'll be proven wrong when we add German and Russian into the picture. My English is better than my German, and much better than my Russian. Nevertheless, I routinely find myself astonished at the expressiveness I am seeing in Russian-language books, compared to English-language books. And I am not reading anything like the 19th-century literature. I would hardly be able to understand that in Russian. I read, in both English and Russian, contemporary books written for the common people. And I'm telling you, the difference in the richness of nuances is amazing.
Another indication of the same phenomenon is that every now and then, when writing in English, I find myself in a situation where I feel that what I've written or am just about to write is not exactly what I want to express. It's almost right, but not quite. And I realise that if I were writing in German or Russian, I could just choose a different grammatical form of a word, or a relatively brief expression. Indeed, when I do write in German or Russian, I end up spending considerable time with dictionaries all right, but I do get to express exactly the meaning I want. In English, however, I am often frustrated to find out that the grammatical form or a brief expression doesn't exist. So I would have to write several sentences just to explain that different nuance to the reader. Usually I don't bother, settling instead for a concise word or expression which is not exactly what I want to say but close enough.
The same problem occurs when you are translating from English. The obvious ambiguity – like "crane" meaning either the bird or the machine – is no problem because you can pretty much always deduct from the context which one of the two is meant. The real problem is with what I call the subtle ambiguity. It's when one English word means two or three similar (but different) concepts. When you ask the author which one he meant, he'll be like "why, they're the same thing", and you can't explain to him that they aren't. What do you do with a blind person who won't believe that such a thing as eyesight exists?

And so the English monolinguals write books full of vague language, thinking it is quite normal and never realising what they are missing and how the concepts are blurred in their heads. Therefore I find it baffling that more than half of all the scientific literature in the world is written in English. I feel genuinely sorry for the people who have to do science in English. I can't imagine how it is possible to write anything scientific in such an ambiguos and grammarless language. It is thinkable that they achieve exactness by using slightly anglicised Latin words for everything they need to express clearly. I wouldn't know because I'm not that much involved in science. What I do read a lot, though, is legal texts, and I can assure you that the English legal language is a horror show – a striking contrast to the preciseness and clarity of the legal texts in German. (Yes, the Germans write theoretical works which are near-unreadably abstract, but in English you can easily get the same amount of confusion reading a mere contract.)

So, it's a kind of a love-hate thing. Strictly speaking, English is a joke of a language. On the other hand, it's a near-perfect tool for communicating one's (not-too-abstract) thoughts to the speakers of other languages. I mean, it's horrifying to imagine that we'd all have to learn Latin (or even German) in order to communicate with one another.

I wish I'd find out one day what it is that makes English so amazingly easy to learn. Ideas, anybody?







14 comments:

  1. Did you know that while you cannot conjugate verbs and decline in Chinese, you can place them in a certain order with particles indicating aspect and definiteness? Did you know that while English adjectives do not inflect, they can come post positive for restrictive meaning? Did you know the vast array of aspect indicators languages such as Thai and the AAVE dialect have? Do you know what the morphology cycle of all languages is?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Obviously OP doesn't know any of that. They just make shit up as they go along.

    ReplyDelete
  3. 我不知道我不说“法国的女人”。现在,我说“france woman"。谢谢,老师。

    ReplyDelete
  4. Your musings would be a lot more useful to people outside your brain if you gave examples. You said "what I call the subtle ambiguity. It's when one English word means two or three similar (but different) concepts..." You're clearly thinking of a specific example, but for some reason you didn't want to give us any actual information. You instead thought it best to give a vague overarching pronouncement that English is good for non-subtle ideas, yet spent no time proving this. We just have to take your word for it that English is an inferior language. I would argue further about this, but you didn't give me enough information to do so.

    And your clearly intentionally patronising idea that English is perfect for 'not-too-abstract' thoughts is ridiculous. Especially when you admitted that you don't know anything about science (the epicenter of abstract thought). Quantum electrodynamic theory is probably the most complicated, abstract idea ever concieved my man. And it is almost always described and debated in English (although we might be teaching it to five-year-olds if we had the nuance of Russian, I suppose).

    And I think English is easy to learn because native speakers are used to interacting with people who speak it poorly, otherwise we would be shunning a fifth of the human population.

    ReplyDelete
  5. This is the definition of "not even wrong".

    Please tell me this is satire. Not even linguistics first-years tend to be this misguided.

    ReplyDelete
  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I can understand your hurt and rage. I will also understand it, should you in your next comment fiercely deny of having felt hurt or enraged. :-)

    The thing is, I am not trying to make any native English speakers think that their language is inadequate. Why, the most of them have managed their lives perfectly well without speaking any language but English, and they are very likely to continue to do so. No, my article was meant as a wake-up call for the people of other ethnic groups to stop uncritically worshipping everything English, and to realise that there is no reason for them to think that their languages are somehow inferior.

    To put it in simpler words, I don't expect the emperor to realise, much less admit, that he's naked. My only goal is to make the people realise the emperor is naked.

    Nevertheless, I appreciate your contribution for what it's worth. I will address your individual comments in due time.

    ReplyDelete
  8. > Did you know that while you cannot conjugate verbs and decline in Chinese, you can place
    > them in a certain order with particles indicating aspect and definiteness?

    Yes, I know it, but I don't think they can comfortably achieve anything near the same level of expressiveness with them as English or German can comfortably achieve with their three past tenses. They use those particles only when it's necessary to avoid confusion. In English, "long time no see" is a pidgin expression approved in the literary language as an exception. In Chinese, "long time no see" is perfectly grammatical, perfectly usual way of saying "we haven't met for a long time" or "haven't seen you for a long time".

    On the other hand, of course, the obligation to use the correct past tense every time (which English is, as I pointed out, moving away from) is often an overkill. A language like Chinese can frequently achieve fascinating compactness without essential loss of meaning. The downside is that other times the exact meaning can take a lot of explaining.

    In fact, this "place them in a certain order with particles indicating..." thing is exactly what makes me laugh at English – instead of choosing from a variety of morphemes, you have to use half a dozen one-syllable words just to convey a different nuance. You might ask what is the difference of using one five-syllable words vs. five one-syllable words. The difference is that in a long English sentence it can easily become too hard to recognise which words belong together to form one phrase – just as when reading a language like Tibetan or Thai, some effort is unnecessarily wasted on figuring out where one word begins and another one ends. That is what I meant by saying that merely complicated German sentences get unreadable when translated as such to English (but, mind you, not the other way around).



    And essentially the same should apply to:

    > the vast array of aspect indicators [in] languages such as Thai

    Of course a language needs something to make things at least resonably clear, and of course isolating languages have means for circumventing the lack of morphology. I am merely suggesting that "nearsightedness" is much more convenient to use in sentences than "property no can see normal far". How do you express the difference between "трахать", "потрахаться" and "перетрахать" in English? (Just the first thing that springs into my mind.) I mean, the English language has, of course, the means of explaining those differences, but it would take a number of sentences. I can't think of a way to say it compactly. And I could bring you many such examples if I would read a couple of Russian books and write down all those little things which just aren't translatable to English. I mean, not idiomatic expressions but little differences in saying common things which an English speaker could easily argue are meaningless (because he is not used to differentiating between them) but in fact add so much feeling.



    > the AAVE dialect

    Wow, yet another name for BEV? I had missed that one. That I must give you – the English language seems unsurpassable when it comes to making up new and excessively clumsy names for the same concepts, in a Sisyphean quest of trying to finally come up with one which no one could ever possibly perceive as offending.



    > Do you know what the morphology cycle of all languages is?

    I don't doubt your ability to look impressive by dropping a number of linguistic terms which are unfamiliar to me (and which I could easily look up), but I assure you that from my perspective, English has hardly anything worth calling morphology in the first place. I mean, ostriches do have wings, but an albatross would find them laughable.

    ReplyDelete
  9. > Your musings would be a lot more useful to people outside your brain if you gave
    > examples.

    You are so right. I regret that I have been too lazy to write down all those examples of the English-language's primitiveness I have encountered in those translations I have done during the last couple decades.

    However:

    > You said "what I call the subtle ambiguity. It's when one English word means two or three
    > similar (but different) concepts..." You're clearly thinking of a specific example, but for
    > some reason you didn't want to give us any actual information. You instead thought it best
    > to give a vague overarching pronouncement that English is good for non-subtle ideas, yet
    > spent no time proving this. We just have to take your word for it that English is an inferior
    > language.

    You undoubtedly read the rest of my article as well, and you must have noticed that I did bring lots of examples. In fact, I took good care to support all my major points with examples. What I couldn't find a good example for, I left out of the article. This "subtle ambiguity" thing was a minor point, and I actually had a number of occasions in mind which had come up translating as well as in conversations, none of which unfortunately provides a good clear example. So one could say I got carried away a little bit. You can strike that part from the argument if it pleases you. It is not essential for my case.

    Anyway, it was never my intention to write a scholarly paper on the comparative primitiveness of languages. My article is quite long as it is, and it is my unfortunate experience that people don't like to read long articles. So I had to draw a line somewhere.


    > you admitted that you don't know anything about science

    Not only are you misquoting me (I never said I didn't know anything about science, and surely you don't believe seriously that I don't know absolutely anything about science), you are using here a widespread dishonest discussion tactic.

    What I meant by saying "I'm not that much involved in science" was that I hasn't read enough scientific literature in English to consider myself an authority on it, and thus don't wish to dwell any further on that particulat subject. However, I didn't wish to explain it at such length and thus settled for the phrase "I'm not that much involved in science".

    But the actual point is that you tried to make it look like this one admission of my imperfection invalidated everything I had written. That is a trick frequently used by people who run out of arguments that are relevant to the topic. Won't work with me. :-)

    ReplyDelete
  10. > Quantum electrodynamic theory is probably the most
    > complicated, abstract idea ever concieved [b]y
    > man. And it is almost always described and debated
    > in English

    I did not use the word "abstract" much in my article, did I? I was referring more to nuances which, from the scientific point of view, would be the same thing, but which add, well, expressiveness. What the Russian language can express with their verb prefixes is just amazing, but you would rarely need any of that in a scientific text. A proton moving at such-and-such speed hitting a screen of such-and-such a material with such-and-such a thickness and causing such-and-such a particle to emerge is pretty straightforward, as is a photon displaying certain attributes of a wave under certain conditions and certain attributes of a particle under certain other conditions. You don't need much of a language to describe that. In fact, much of it is commonly described with language-independent mathematical symbols.

    Anyway, disagreeing with the quantum theory being the most abstract thing conceived by man (try some German philosophy), I did mention one thing characteristical to the English scientific texts – the scientific terms tend to be not derived from the common language the people speak (apparently because of your language's limited ability to build derived words) but taken over as such from foreign languages, often Latin. I mean, it starts with the pig becoming pork, the ox becoming beef, and so on. When you talk scientifically about things related to the Sun and the Moon, they become solar and lunar. When you talk scientifically about things related to the cats and dogs, they become feline and canine. And so on. I ran across this amazing sentence earlier today: "Extant taxon [is a] taxon which is not extinct, such as an extant species." A text on quantum physics would contain barely a word a regular person could understand, which may be one factor attributing to many people's awe for it.

    Which reminds me of the English expression "It's not exactly rocket science" which is ridiculous because it assumes that rocket science is among the most complicated things one can conceive. (Not to mention the small matter that aerospace engineering is hardly a separate scientific discipline, any more than chicken soup is a nutrient.)

    But I'm digressing. What it all sums up to is that I am not interested in convincing native English speakers of anything. I'm writing this replu to you as an intellectual exercise because I happen to have nothing better to do at this moment. I doubt that one is able to notice the limitations of one's native language unless he is fluent in at least one foreign language which is more expressive than his own in some respects – fluent to the extent of being able to enjoy it. One's native language is the context in which one grew up and which permeats one's thinking – so whichever number of examples of another language's greater expressiveness are brough to a monofluent's attention, he can easily say "So what?", just as it would be easy for a Finnish speaker to argue that the articles "a" and "the" are completely superfluous and only make things unnecessarily complicated.
    (Yes, I know there is no such word as "monofluent". I mean a person who is fluent in only one language.)

    This discussion is unfairly uneven, as I have the answers to your arguments pretty much up my sleeve (even though I may run into difficulties in conveying them to you through the medium of the English language), but you are unable to truly see what is outside of your box unless you climb out of it, and that would require learning a lot more of the foreign languages than can be done by reading theory and examples from linguistics books, and taking a few basic or mildly advanced language courses.

    ReplyDelete
  11. > I think English is easy to learn because native speakers are
    > used to interacting with people who speak it poorly

    Not really. SPEAKING to the native English speakers is a real pain in the ass, as they speak a variety of local dialects and expect the foreigners to understand them all. You think the Scottish would show consideration for the other person's poor English by switching to some kind of a standard? In your dreams.

    It is true, though, that the native English speakers are admirably tolerant of the foreigners' poor language skills, and that is great help which I appreciate.



    > Not even linguistics first-years tend to be this misguided.

    Isn't it rather that your students are strictly forbidden to even think in terms of one language being more primitive than another? Doesn't your language even use the same word "wrong" for "in contradiction to the reality" as well as "morally unacceptable", which actually are two entirely different concepts?

    ReplyDelete
  12. Hey man, I came upon this, the question you posted is something I'm asking too!
    The thing that doesn't make sense to me is that English got that way from pidginization from Viking and stuff, but stuff like Vietnamese was always that way. I did uncover an endangered Vietnamese relative called Semai that has tenses using infixes, conjugation prefixes, vowel changes for lexical aspect like Russian, and tons of derivational morphology and such but its nearly extinct. I just can't figure out why these Asian languages became so, the word order too! No V2. stuff, no wh fronting, no question inversion, etc. I would expect syntax to be more complicated with more morphology, but no!

    Do you have a clue? I would think all languages left along would develop some elaborations somehow but that is not the case! Is there an explanation?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Less morphology I meant. The syntax would be stricter with less morphology but there is no clitic placement rules or anything like that while there are tons of word order restrictions and placement rules in something like German. I am not a sapir whorf follower, but I think maybe some cultures just treat language as something economical and don't take pride in extra elaboration.... or its chance.

    ReplyDelete
  14. To add, I think the phonology of Asian languages like Thai, Vietnamese, and Chinese are unusually simple. All they have going is 4-6 tones! No vowel reduction, palatization, assimilation, vowel harmony, gradation, iotation, closed vs open syllable restrictions, mutations, elision, liaison, mandatory contractions etc. A few of them have complicated and irregular tonal sandhi, but those are the exceptions.
    One is just spouting words without any processes that have to be taken into account.

    ReplyDelete