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Comment by Baeocystin | Hacker News Reader

English in terms of number of speakers has already reached the point where the number of ESL speakers outstrips the number of native ones by a good margin. The simple alphabet is a plus. I wish the spelling wasn't so godawful.

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Yeah but I don't know any language used by hundred of millions of people that doesn't have many gotchas.

Could be worse. The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D

> The future language could become a mix of emoji and markup language :) ;) :D

You're saying this like it isn't already happening.

:: insert flail/panic emoji here ::

😱

To fair English has big pieces of French and Latin vocabulary.

One of my favorite aspects of the English language is that not only is it shameless about stealing other languages' words, but it seems to take it as a point of pride. It's a good feature to have if you want something global- it means that useful words will accumulate without regard to origin, which benefits everyone.

"We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll

Noted reviewer of science fiction and fantasy.

and also by extension, Greek (directly in many cases -- almost every english word that starts with 'ph' was a greek word -- but also a large portion of medical and mathematical terminology)

That's because in latin 'ph' was used in words from greek, but spanish uses 'f' AFAIK.

Fun fact: russian language had no 'f' sound prior to cyrillic alphabet which has a letter for it.

I suspect english words starting with 'ph' come from french, french words with 'ph' used 'ph' instead of 'f' (same sound) to emphase the fact the word borrow greek root (but who care the word come from greek, does it make it easier to learn? one more shitty rule of french).

Granted I don't have hard data on the "ph" fact, the source is pretty credible in my opinion. The fact appeared in an article written for the British Council, co-authored by Martha Peraki, a Linguistics PhD recipient from American University.

Heuristically, the "rule" passes the eyeball test: philosophy, physical, photo, phrase, philanthropy, phobia, phage, phalange, phalanx, phallic, phase, pharmacy, phantom, phenomenon, phone, photons, photosynthesis, physician, physique, phytoplankton, so on and so forth

The overwhelming majority of these words are greek transliterations https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-start-with-ph

(in fact I am having a hard time finding even one word that isn't -- i think "phreak" is the only one I can find)

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