Ask HN: What features are missing from the English language? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What features are missing from the English language?

10 pointsfaitswulff24 comments

For instance, in Chinese, you can flip the sentence structure from Subject-Verb-Object to Subject-Object-Verb with 把 (ba3). So you can say "I scolded him" 《我骂他了》 or "I him scolded" 《我把他骂了》。 Either are valid.

I'm curious about the expressiveness of English versus other languages.

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The middle voice. You know active voice and passive voice. Ancient Greek has a middle voice, where the subject does the action in a way that affects or benefits themselves. (The exact meaning can vary for each verb.) In my opinion, this is a lot like the reflexive in French ("Je m'appelle"). I've also noticed that in English, we frequently use transitive verbs in an intransitive way to signify "middle voice": "I stop the car" is active and transitive, but "I stop" is intransitive with an implied "myself". In Greek that would be παύομαι. Once you know this pattern you see it everywhere. I wish someone would write a paper on it. :-)

The subjunctive would be nice too. We have it, but it's pretty much disappeared.

The future passive participle in Latin expresses need or wish, so donandum is "needing to be given". This is so useful I sometimes throw it into English sentences, like "We should highlight the bugs fixanda".

Greek and Latin have so many ways of creating if/then sentences that play with tense and reality, it's amazing.

Latin (I think Greek too?) has easy ways to signify whether you agree with or believe another speaker, when you're retelling what they said.

In Chinese measure words are pretty fun. But Chinese was a long time ago for me. Also the use of tones is amazing.

A gender neutral pronoun.

Saying "he/she" gets annoying after a while; using "he" (or "she") as the default pronoun carries unnecessary sexist connotations; using "they" as the pronoun when it already serves as the plural third-person pronoun just muddles the water.

This kind of language change can't really be accomplished by fiat, so it makes sense to look for the direction the language is heading in and push. More and more we see people using "they" as a singular pronoun. But a large proportion of people find this usage strongly ungrammatical, which is preventing it from becoming mainstream. Eventually it will win out though.

Composability. In Dutch (and German too), you can take 2 nouns and glue them together to form a new noun (the order determines the semantics). It's very powerful and allows you to create new words "at runtime", at the very moment you need them. As a side effect, the number of nouns in Dutch is infinite, and you can quite easily build infinite words; for example it's easy to suffix "plan" or "fabriek" or "verkopersassistente".

This feature does not fit google which seems to support only languages with finite dictionaries (I wonder how well google search performs for Finish or Hungarian)

(In case you were wondering; Yes, scrabble is really easy )

It's minor, but it would be nice to be able to drop the subject more often when it's unneeded, like being able to say "Raining" instead of "It's raining". Some latin languages have this, and would provide English with a bit of terseness. For example, in this comment, I used "it" three times before the first period, excluding the quote.

Also, I find verbs to be overused in English, whether for intent, desire, location, hypothetical situations or other stuff. Some extra adverbial suffixes would be a nice alternative.

Pronunciation. If you are not a native English speaker, the rules for pronunciation are really hard to learn. At least in Spanish, you can know how exactly to say a word just reading it, all the information is "there". This doesn't happen in English at all.

Oh yes, English is very frustrating in this sense. This poem really puts it your knowledge of English pronunciation to the test: http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...

The first verse:

    Dearest creature in creation,
    Study English pronunciation.
    I will teach you in my verse
    Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
    I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
    Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
    Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
    So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

I suggest the inverse of this - spelling. It is hard to know how to spell a word. How much time did we all waste in school endless drilling on spelling that could have been used in better ways? How much time do I waste now in spell check? Too much.

I think there are many cool features of English. My favourite is how you can change any noun into a verb.

A stone, to stone someone.

If the reader/listener has never encountered a novel transformation she will tend to not accept it, but it is within the bounds of the language to do it with any noun.

Locative case would be one of many examples. Dig around on Wikipedia articles on grammar and you discover how many cases (and other features) exist throughout language. I seem to recall Hungarian having eighteen cases, but I'm not seeing that in the article for them, so maybe I'm misremembering.

Does that mean you could specify an object's location by referring to it in the locative case?

Basically. "in", "on", "by", and the like are subsumed by conjugation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_case

Polymorphic verbs -> recursive clauses. Korean goes SOV as well, but---whoops! Just as you think the sentence is ending it turns out the verb is being conjugated as an adjective, describing the next noun, which is the real subject.

If I remember well, Japanese has a very neat implementation of the relative clause. Japanese relative clauses are formed by placing the modifying clause immediately in front of the noun it modifies, without any relative pronouns. You can even nest them!

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Grammatical differences between Chinese and English may be more a result of the differences in the abstractions in their respective alphabet encodings than anything else. If so, then these are more likely tradeoffs than features and bugs.

Speaking of alphabet encodings, I've had a (totally unscientific) pet theory that the development of the computer would have been much slower if computers were invented in the Chinese-speaking world, because they would need to invent 16-bit character encoding before text processing became practical.

Well, that was definitely one reason that the printing press wasn't as revolutionary a technology in China as it was in the West, despite its being invented there.

Perhaps I worded the question incorrectly, but I was curious about the tradeoffs and differences in what you can easily express between languages.

  Him, I scolded.

Is grammatically functional English.

  He. I scolded.

also works. Though neither would be preferred form outside of poetry or oratory.

Ok this may sound stupid but I think there are a lack of words you can satisfactorarily substitute in for swear words. I know this as I gave them up for lent.

Also many people (example A: PG) with good vocabs still choose to use them.

If there were a word that you regularly substituted in for a swear word, wouldn't it then become a swear word? Do you mean words like "heck" or "freakin"?

Phonetics would be nice. No more arguing about how you pronounce a word. E.g. Laugh = Larf or Laff?

The subject and object of a sentence are often ambiguous; if Tom put Bill's suitcase in his car, whose car is the suitcase in?

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