‘Highly Irregular’ Review: An Eloquent Confusion | Hacker News Reader

‘Highly Irregular’ Review: An Eloquent Confusion

wsj.com

37 pointspepys8 comments

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/

So maybe German[1] isn't so bad.

[1] https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

"In spelling, pronunciation, syntax and idioms, the English language can be perplexingly strange—or charmingly eccentric."

https://archive.vn/IJ5gt

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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