Hacker News Reader

Comment by friendly_chap | Hacker News Reader

I do believe that is the case and I have my pet layman unscientific theories too about languages. For example I believe English not being phonetic and often times pronounciation not making any sense trains people to accept things "as is", make them get over illogical things way easier. I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure.

Just a toy hunch I like to think about from time to time. I wish I could see English with its original alphabet before being forced into the confines of the latin one. Apparently many sounds are misrepresented due to that.

View on HN

> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK.

Whether the British are prone to respect authority because of their language is debatable. It's less debatable whether those in a larger Anglophone nation are prone to respect authority! Just look at some of the behaviours we've seen over the last 18 months.

> I believe this makes a someone more prone to respect authority, which was confirmed by my years in the UK. Of course life is messy and you can never be sure.

I doubt that as the largest country by English as a first language is the US and I wouldn't say that those folks on the whole respect authority in the same way that we do.

I think the way authority is respected in the UK has more to do with our endemic class system (which still exists) and the fact that unlike most European countries we never had a revolution in the last couple of centuries (came close at points and of course there was Cromwell but that was a different kind of revolution and much earlier).

I've observed the British respect other people, society and hierarchy. Not authority per se. That's the Germans heh.

Lots of languages have orthographic depth. I doubt you'll find a correlation if you look at more than one or two languages/cultures. Heck, the French only pronounce half their letters, and they killed their monarchs.

Hungarian pretty much only does that to ease pronounciation, ie. when two consonants can't be pronounced after each other eg. "utca" (means street) etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com