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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the author's love of language, and I also enjoy his examples, he's being a bit disingenuous when he acts mystified and offended about why dictionaries these days aren't written like those a hundred years ago.

It's obvious. Dictionaries these days are used to help literate people learning a new language (of which there are many more than 150 years ago) rather than aspiring playwrights. Comparing a "flash" with "eyes suffused with tears, or flowers wet with dew" is fanciful, not what an immigrant trying to decode an instruction manual needs.

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Not true. I'm an immigrant. I'm still learning English. If I need to decode an instruction manual, I can just use an English-to-My-Native-Language dictionary or even a translator. However, the real challenge is to intuitively understand the subtleties of English, to enjoy reading English writings, and to know what right words to use when writing or speaking. To use the word that I just learned in the article, an English learner needs to get the pathos of English writings. I have no problem using a dictionary to look up words in a poem, yet I have very little idea why a poem in English is beautiful. Ironically, if the poem is translated into my native language, I can often appreciate it, even though so much is lost in translation.

If you're trying to decipher a poem, well that's a different purpose than just trying to find the meaning of something. That doesn't mean that the post you are replying to is wrong. Most people using a dictionary are not trying to interpret the deeper meaning of poetry.

Poetry is just an example. What really matters is to "feel" in a different language, be it reading poems, enjoying novels, laughing at jokes, watching movies, having an interesting conversation, interpreting other people's emotion...

I figured someone who speaks X and wants to begin learning English would use an X-English / English-X dictionary.

English has a vast vocabulary full of similar words, each having subtle differences and nuances. How is one to decide which word to use in a particular context? For example, check out:

http://thesaurus.com/browse/pleasant

> I figured someone who speaks X and wants to begin learning English would use an X-English / English-X dictionary.

At first. You should switch to X-X dictionary as soon as you can, far before it becomes natural and easy to use X-X dictionary. X-English/English-X dictionaries encourage people to continue "thinking" in their language, while successfully learning a new language would absolutely require embracing new ways of forming phrases, building sentences, etc.

Source: English is my 3rd language, I'm on my 5th now.

Two things have improved my English more than anything: deciding to read out loud whenever I'm alone reading an English text, and discovering that I can immediately look up any English word with a three finger tap on OS X.

If the dictionary had been English–Swedish, I think I would have been more prone to see English as an obstacle, as something that I need to translate to Swedish in order to comprehend the text. Instead, I constantly find myself thinking in English whenever I read or write English, which I never did before.

Are you really trying to claim that there are many more new languages than 150 years ago? Or are you saying that there are many more literate people trying to learn a new language than 150 years ago?

The first claim is clearly absurd; only a handful of new languages have arisen or been invented in the last 150 years.

The second claim is best described by the wikipedian "citation needed". Whether it's true probably depends on what part of the world you're restricting yourself to. The US? The West? The world?

Yeah, I'm restricting myself to North America, which is presumably what the article's also about (since he talks about the history of the American dictionary).

No, I don't have any citations or anything, but I take it as self-evident that there's more people in North America for whom English is a second or third language than there were 150 years ago.

http://www.census.gov/how/infographics/foreign_born.html shows that the foreign-born population of the US oscillated around 13-14% through the 2nd half of the 19th century, dipped below 5% in 1970, and had not quite made it back up to 13% by the 2010 census. I actually hadn't realized how close we were to matching the earlier peak, until I looked it up.

Foreign-born is one thing, but I have an intuitive sense that immigrants to the US came from European countries during the world-war era, and now they're mainly coming from India, China, and South America, whose native languages are much more different from English than Spanish, British English, French, Italian, or German.

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