[HN Gopher] 'Highly Irregular' Review: An Eloquent Confusion
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       'Highly Irregular' Review: An Eloquent Confusion
        
       Author : pepys
       Score  : 35 points
       Date   : 2021-07-04 04:31 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
        
       | kogus wrote:
       | For those interested in the actual reasons behind the myriad
       | eccentricities of English vocabulary, grammar, and spelling,
       | there is an excellent podcast on that subject called simply "The
       | History of English Podcast" [1].
       | 
       | The short short version is that English began as a Germanic
       | language, which bumped into Greek-influenced Latin at regular
       | intervals. Then the Norman French conquered England in 1066, and
       | ruled it for a few hundred years, which brought in a huge French
       | (and, because French is a Romance language, Latin) influence.
       | Then the UK conquered much of the earth, and absorbed thousands
       | of words from many world cultures. As a result, English today is
       | like a German christmas tree decorated with so many ornaments
       | that you can hardly make sense of it when you see it. That's my
       | summary, the podcast is better :)
       | 
       | https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
        
       | chihuahua wrote:
       | "In spelling, pronunciation, syntax and idioms, the English
       | language can be perplexingly strange--or charmingly eccentric."
       | 
       | https://archive.vn/IJ5gt
        
       | tbrownaw wrote:
       | So maybe German[1] isn't so bad.
       | 
       | [1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html
        
       | justshowpost wrote:
       | _The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
       | expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the
       | devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought
       | impossible.
       | 
       | The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
       | Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak._
        
         | SketchySeaBeast wrote:
         | Unless there's something in the article I was missing (I didn't
         | subscribe to get past the paywall), a millennia of unstructured
         | linguistic evolution doesn't really match the deliberate desire
         | to trim the language and change how people think.
        
           | ctdonath wrote:
           | Point is language does limit possible thought. There are
           | concepts which are hard/awkward/impossible to express because
           | one's language lacks constructs to do so.
        
             | BurningFrog wrote:
             | This can be true if language is constantly policed to make
             | certain words and thought dangerous to say, as in the 1984
             | plot.
             | 
             | In unpoliced discourse, I don't believe this happens. There
             | are always some rough edges in languages as they aimlessly
             | evolve, but nothing that hard.
        
               | [deleted]
        
             | WJW wrote:
             | This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [0], and it is
             | generally believed not to be true by linguists. As it turns
             | out, natural languages are flexible enough to describe any
             | phenomenon even if there are no dedicated words or
             | constructs directly available. If a thought cannot be
             | expressed by the currently available features of the
             | language, people will invent new words "on the spot"
             | instead of not thinking the thought in the first place.
             | 
             | [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
        
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