this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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There’s a few programming languages that aren’t based around English, but they’re pretty rare and I’m not sure many people use them. It’s kind of sad because it makes programming much less accessible if you’re not an English speaker… But it’s also sort of a blessing because it’s easier to understand code you might have to interact with because it’s probably written in an English-ish language with the Roman alphabet, and you’re not stuck trying to read Japanese or Arabic or something to understand a library. I have mixed feelings on it. It’s convenient for me as an English speaker, but it also seems kind of unfortunate. I’ve heard that computer science is a field which is having a pretty big impact on the spread of English in the world, but I haven’t found a citation for that and I’m not sure I believe it.
English is the language of science and trade on the whole, which I think can be a good thing for the aforementioned reasons in your comment. Makes it much more universal.
I was on a trip in Spain, where students from all over the world came to learn Spanish. There were Americans, Japanese, Germans, etc (others I may have forgotten since this was during highschool!), but the gist of it is that everyone spoke their mother tongue, but the only unifying language there was Spanish. It was incredibly interesting speaking to someone who only knew Japanese and Spanish, where I only knew English and Spanish. People would talk to their friends in their native language, then relay what they said in Spanish for everyone else. It was mindblowingly cool to have a universal language to an otherwise insurmountable language barrier.
This also happened, somewhat annoyingly, in other parts of Spain. You'd be eagerly trying to practice Spanish, and spanish people would hear your accent, and would automatically switch to English for you. Same thing happened all across the world whenever we traveled. I always marveled at just how many people would switch to English whether we were in Germany or Zimbabwe.
Honestly, the world lucked out with a minimal Latin alphabet become the standard. English even lost its weird special symbols because all the good printing-press typefaces were made in Germany. It's only twenty-six discrete characters (admittedly in two cases) and they're the most common throughout all the European languages that, uh, spread their influence.
Shame you all have to deal with our bullshit spelling.
I try and pretend the spelling oddities are a feature and not a bug. If you can recognize the language of origin of a given word, it helps you know how to pronounce it,and often the definition.
Needing etymology to guess at pronunciation is why it's bullshit.
People have tried to fix it. Their partial success just created more exceptions.
English is an official language of Zimbabwe, and German is in the same language family as English. Try to speak English to commoners in Egypt, Eastern Europe, Vietnam or even France, and it wouldn't be that easy.
I agree. I speak English very well now, but it is a weirdly hard requirement for a lot of jobs/hobbys in life.
You are interested in psychology? Awesome, go study psychology.
You are interested in physics? Here is a two year English course. You're bad at languages? Well, sucks for you.
I am wondering how much of an economic advantage it is for English speaking countries to have English as the base language of science. I bet at least 5% of students in other countries will not get as good as they could be because they are lacking the understanding of the language their study material is written in.