Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 October 15

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October 15

"English is a particularly good technical language"

I was reading the Humanities RD, and I came across this comment: "As I understand it, English is a particularly good technical language (the syntax in English, like German, is primed for constructing fine details in noun phrases), while romance languages like French are better at conveying nuances of emotion. Other languages have their own strengths and weaknesses: Chinese, for instance, is a lousy language for expressing conditionality or time (it has a weak tense system that relies on the context of the discussion), but is one of the more efficient languages in terms of conventional conversation." (source) I was wondering if any of you here could elaborate on this a bit, perhaps with some examples? At the very least, are there any online sources I could read which would explain this in a bit more detail? I am at least familiar with Spanish, so examples in that language would be most useful. I realize this is a somewhat vague question, but thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this! 68.54.4.162 (talk) 18:25, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

That statement by that user —who is most likely a monoglot— needs a huge tag. --Belchman (talk) 19:49, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. I would say that English is useful as a technical language primarily because it is already used as one, and so (a) lots of educated people around the world know English, and (b) English has several centuries-worth of experimentation and tradition built up to provide it with a number of conventions for technical writing, which a language that has no long history of being used for technical writing probably lacks. So, it's more a function of the history of English speaking societies than anything inherent in the English language (Latin could work fine as a technical language if you wanted to go back to using it--it was, after all, the language of academia for a long, long time. You'd just need to invent a few new words, maybe.). The stuff about Romance languages and emotion is really vague, to the point that I have no idea what it's supposed to really mean, but it looks like nonsense. I don't know enough about Chinese to confidently reply on that point, but I can say that essentially every language has ways of expressing just about every notion and nuance: the difference is that they use different strategies to do so, so some languages (like Latin) have a large number of morphologically-marked tenses, while others (like Chinese) resort to separate adverbial-type words to define the time of an occurrence. But the different strategies accomplish the same goal --Miskwito (talk) 20:40, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

I would say the statement about Chinese is believable.. when I first saw this question it reminded me of this great short (Japanese and very profane English with Czech subtitles) in which some Japanese people are discussing the lack of swear words in their language, and trying to explain the concept of swearing to each other and what it means (his explanation of what "god damn this fucking weather" means is "it means you do not like the weather, but saying it this way relieves you"). I'm not sure if it's entirely true that Japanese has no swear words, but I definitely would say some notions can be better, more creatively and more precisely conveyed in one language than another.. - filelakeshoe 21:22, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

English has at leastfour benefits I am aware of. It does not have a complicated declensional system. It has a large literature and is the language of the two major innovative countries of the last three centuries. It does not have a limited native phonological system requiring drastic reworkings of loanwords from western languages, as do Chinese and Japanese. And, often having native, French, Latin and Greek triplets or quadruplets in its lexicon, it has a larger working vocabulary than other languages--allowing subtler distinctions of meaning in many cases. [1]. μηδείς (talk) 20:05, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

This is all complete nonsense. All languages are equally good for technical instructions. The only time you would get a problem is if a concept was so new that a term did not yet exist, and then all it would imply is that the writer would have to use more words to spell out what it meant. I know. I have assembled flat-pack furniture. Sometimes the English is badly written or ambiguous, so I look at the French instructions. And they say exactly the same, but somehow it helps to see it explained again. Itsmejudith (talk) 21:17, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

If you have to use more words, or take longer to say something, then surely this is a problem? This is how I read the question; that English is "better" as a technical language means you can more precisely and more quickly convey something that would take many words or be ambiguous in another language. I'm not saying that's true with regards to English and French and it probably isn't, but if you were trying to assemble a computer from instructions written in a tribal language with 200 remaining speakers you might find yourself either confused or with a lot to read through. - filelakeshoe 21:31, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Before World War I, the cliche thinking was that German was the language for scientific and technical writing. English was deprecated as being more suitable for commerce. --Orange Mike | Talk 21:41, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think it is really a problem if you have to use some more words. English allows you to use nouns in apposition. So in instructions you are told to "place the tripod ring clasp nut into the flange groove wheel slot". Concise. In the French version there is a whole lot of "de" in there. I can't actually see that that makes the English better than the French. I don't know that much Chinese, but I think that it's like Vietnamese in that specifying tense is optional. So where the English instructions say "attach the flexible hose connection to the assembled master manifold", you would have to say "now attach the flexible hose connection to the master manifold that you already assembled". Which is clearer anyway. Itsmejudith (talk) 21:54, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

For major languages, where the differences are likely to be down to different grammatical features, I agree. The exception comes for languages that don't have a concise way of saying "manifold" and instead have to go for a complicated circumlocution (now attach the flexible connection of the water-bearing-tube to the most important thing-that-joins-many-water-bearing-tubes-into-one-water-bearing-tube that you already put together). I can see this being particularly awkward in a language such as Pirahã, which doesn't clearly distinguish between numbers. Pfainuk talk 22:11, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

μηδείς, I'm not sure that the lack of a declentional system is always a drawback. My language is unique among Slavic languages for having lost its declentional system, and uses prepositional phrases where other Slavic languages would express the concept with their case systems (especially the genitive, instrumental, dative and locative cases). Usually it cannot, either, syntactically construct noun phrases like English, German and other Germanic languages do. Words are usually longer than they're in English, and often inflect, including for definiteness (nominal phrases). That makes some technical instructions stay and look rather clumsy and far less succinct and concise than their English equivalents would be; and the Bulgarian lexicon is somewhat less pliable than the English one, so newly-created technical terms sometimes look and sound too "artificial", and their meanings could be unobvious, vague or ambiguous - unless English terms enter directly, as it's been happening more and more often nowadays, but in that case they just seem "out of place" and may not make any sense to those who don't know any English (not that there are many of them). Based on my personal experience, I can’t help feeling that English is a better "technical language" than Bulgarian is. --Theurgist (talk) 22:47, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

Bulgarian? My point about the lack of declension , Theurgist, is that in English new coinages take -ed -ing and -s to become fully integrated roots.

You mean, English builds participles, verbal nouns, gerunds and plurals? --Theurgist (talk) 12:03, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

I think he meant more that English only uses three endings in morphology. For example, adopt the word "facebook" into Czech and it comes with: facebooku, facebookem and 6 more case endings if it can be used in the plural, the adjective facebookový (which declines for case and gender), the verb facebookovat (which conjugates for person and in 2 tenses), and from that the gerund facebookování (which declines), the adjective facebookující (which declines)... a lot more complicated. But thankfully Facebook is a suitable word to be adopted straight into Czech, words which end in silent vowels (like "google") or unfamiliar digraphs (like "whiskey") pose problems with the morphology - filelakeshoe 10:17, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Complete nonsense, ItsmeJudith? (I think perhaps "complete" does not mean what you think it means.) Yes, I am aware of the linguistic relativism hypothesis. But it is an undeniable fact that some languages already do have a larger vocabulary, and that English has the largest. I am familiar enough with Aleut and Navajo to know the difficulties they entail. It is an undeniable fact that some languages like English have very little difficulty dealing with loans, while others find them hard to integrate phonetically or morphologically. I also have yet to come across a multi-language instruction manual where the English instructions are anywhere close to the wordiest. Yes, you can make yourself understood, with enough effort, in any language. I do ride NYC taxis and gypsy cabs. But I for one would not want to have to deal with Arabic verbs or Zulu nouns or with consonant mutation and the lack of relevant vocabulary in the Nivkh language. The fact is that the factors I mentioned above are reasonably attributed advantages of English. And they are not unique with me. This is not chauvinism. Whatever the advantages of English, I find songs such as this and dramatic scenes such as this more effective in their native languages. μηδείς (talk) 01:03, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

You make several interesting points. Do I understand what "complete" means? Yes, and my comment was tetchy, sorry about that. Next, English does have a large vocabulary, but is that such an important advantage in technical, rather than literary writing? We have the synonyms "begin", "start" and "commence", but the writer just chooses one. I am trying to understand what you mean by languages being good or bad at "dealing with loans". All languages have loan words, as far as I know. If the original language is phonologically different, then the loan word is adapted. Examples are often cited of words in Japanese that are borrowed from English but so altered phonetically and semantically that English speakers don't recognise them. That isn't a problem, though, is it? I wouldn't want to deal with Arabic verbs either, but that's because I didn't grow up speaking Arabic, and it gets harder to learn new languages in later life. Arabic is like English in having many varieties, thus allowing nuance of register and connotation through choice of vocabulary. English verbs are a real nuisance to French speakers (drink up? drink down?). I suppose I think that languages are very flexible and capable of adaptation ... but not overnight. So I accept Pfaniuk's point, and to Theurgist, perhaps this will settle as more technical writing is done in Bulgarian. Itsmejudith (talk) 17:09, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Well, the big issue would seem to be good technical second language. In that case, I think its obvious that English is dominant just by default of number of speakers, size of vocabulary, and that it is the language of the two greatest industrial societies. English speakers would have to consider do they want a large easily accessible market? Learn Spanish. Do they want up and coming markets? Learn Hindi and Chinese. Do they want access to the old literature? learn German, French, Russian, Greek and Latin.

If we are talking inherent internal linguistic factors alone, English still has huge advantages over many languages. Languages like Persian, Afrikaans, English and Japanese are fairly simple and regular without a lot of grammatical complications like complex cases and conjugations and arbitrary categories. While Spanish nouns are not too bad, with only two genders, and few cases where mixing up gender causes fatal errors, there are languages like the Zulu language with 14 noun classes. In Zulu, the verb and adjective must agree with one of the 14 genders, some of which are as simple as the Spanish a/o endings, but many of which are as irregular and obscure due to sound changes as guessing the gender and plural form of a German noun. In Spanish the wrong gender usually doesn't matter, but using the wrong gender prefix on a Zulu word like -thi may change it from meaning poison to tree or stick to medicine.

Other languages have other problems. Native Arabic verbs are based on sets of three consonants like KTB which means to write. They are conjugated by adding in vowels, prefixes, and even infixes (like fasci-ma-nating if that had a novel non-joke meaning in English) and forms like to be written or to cause to write are part of the conjugational system. It is very hard to import just any old verb into Arabic. You might end up getting work-arounds like "to do google" rather than "to google" (I am making that up as an example, I don't know if it is the case). But in English the forms are "(to) google" "googles" "googled" and "googling" with no especial limit on the shape of the verb (barf, prestidigitate). The verbs of the Georgian language and other languages, of, say, the Caucasus or North America are even worse. Chinese obviously avoids a lot of these problems. But it doesn't like multisyllable words, is burdened with its writing system, and that's not even to mention such things as the Grass Mud Horse.

Notoriously English has such problems as "hold up" which can mean delay or support, frustrsting learners. But in those cases we simply use delay or support if we want to be clear.μηδείς (talk) 18:20, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

John McWhorter's What Language Is goes into some detail about why certain languages are more difficult than others. I can't recommend the book wholeheartedly, because he rambles, skips around as if he had never heard of editors or editing, and often introduces a technical linguistic concept such as productivity (linguistics) giving a two page explanation ending with the condescending remark that he's not going to burden the reader with the technical term, when all he needed to do was say "linguists call this phenomenon productivity" or whatever. But the book is in many libraries, is full of nice trivia, and does get down to explaining why Navajo (of Indian code-talker fame) is harder than English. μηδείς (talk) 18:39, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

(ec):::It seems that there are simultaneous tendencies to simplification and complexification in natural languages. Toddlers acquire linguistic features that second language learners sweat blood over. Zulu 14 noun classes - I reckon it depends how you learn about it. In Vietnamese there are umpteen "classifiers" for nouns. If you tell a learner they must memorise them all, then they might become discouraged. But if you say that they will encounter them in reading and soon start to use them correctly, problem solved. In Chinese, most words are two syllables, some three. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:00, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, but these tendencies do not necessarily progress at the same rate, leading to easier and harder, simpler and more arbitrarily complex languages. Georgian, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_verb_paradigm for example, has four entirely different types of conjugations, with prefexies and suffixes and infixed objects so that from the fourth conjugation verb q'var, "love", you get gv-e-q'var-eb-od-a "we would love" while the third conjugation "we would play (tamash)" v-i-tamash-eb-d-i-t is entirley different, and these verbs don't even have objects yet. Georgian phonology is so complex (six separate consonant sounds are possible in a cluster: gvprckvni ("You peel us") and mc'vrtneli ("trainer").) that while most four year olds can pronounce all the sounds of English, it is not (I have read) unheard of for Georgians not to master their language's pronunciation until age 12.

Wow, I didn't expect this off-hand comment to go ballistic. I'm not a monoglot (I speak at least two other languages, albeit badly, unless you also count computer languages). This is not my field, I was just commenting based on things I'd heard from fellow academics, in particular that English - like German - allows for easy noun conjunction which works well for conceptual structuring. for instance, a phrase like 'radiometric dating' would be a longer and more descriptive phrase in a language like French, where it's not conventional to crunch words together to make new words. it's not that it couldn't be done in French, obviously, but the more complex the idea being conveyed, the more that minor structural efficiency starts to tell. But as I said; not my field. I bow to any linguists in the crowd. --Ludwigs2 04:11, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

Are you implying, Ludwigs2, that you are the same as 68.54.4.162? If so, I will concur with you that Spanish is better than English at concisely indicating one's belief in a statement, given that one can specify the subjunctive versus the indicative verb more broadly and usually with the difference of only the alteration of one vowel. The subtlety this allows in the songs of, say, La Lupe, is something quite admirable. There is a huge difference, for example, between si no te creo and si no te crea which is of the same length in Spanish, but requires a full additional word in English, without achieving the same subtlety. Other qualities of Romance, such as the fact that it uses de to indicate not only possession, but also from and of, when English makes a three way distinction at the least, make Germanic languages more efficient at expressing certain relations between nouns than are Romance languages.

I always though that Enlgish (and, for that matter, most Latin/Greek based European languages) are useless in terms of coming up with new words. A simple example would be that a person who knows what 'pig' and 'meat' means will have no idea what 'pork' means, whereas in other languages (such as Chinese), the word for pork is just 'pigmeat'. In terms of more technical words, look at the word 'photosynthesis'. Now, it's made up of 'photo' and 'synthesis', Greek for 'light' and 'putting together', which pretty much sums up what the noun means. But for people who don't know Greek, it means nothing. (Well, you might be able to have a vague guess since synthesis is still a word used in English today). In Chinese, however, it is literally 'light' 'together' 'effect', which, when put in context (say, plants get energy from photosynthesis) pretty much defines the term. (Then again, when it comes to Chinese, it's not exactly easy to write...)Zlqq2144 (Talk Contribs) 02:11, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

buddhi

I see the definition of "buddhi" in Wiktionary. Can you give me a sentence or two with this usage of A transpersonal faculty of mind higher than the rational mind that might be translated as ‘intuitive intelligence’ or simply ‘higher mind’?--Doug Coldwell ^talk 22:17, 15 October 2011 (UTC)

That's more of a Humanities question since it deals with religious meaning not the peculiarities of English. μηδείς (talk) 02:09, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

How about "My buddhi was directing me away from excessive alcohol consumption and towards healthy living"? --TammyMoet (talk) 11:17, 16 October 2011 (UTC)

What you might call working on the buddhi system. Angr (talk) 06:34, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, I resubmitted question at Humanities Desk. Thanks TammyMoet, sounds correct to me. Good answer.--Doug Coldwell ^talk 11:42, 16 October 2011 (UTC)