Comment by MudMan@fedia.io on Languages

I think this thread is meant to flatter programmers and make linguists and sociologists extremely angry.

How so? Except the first sentence which is obviously not serious, I would agree with all linguistic statements or at least not disagree with any.

I mean, French is vulgar Latin at best. And even if it wasn’t obviously spoken by all sorts of French people, elites or not, it’s also the official language of a bunch of other countries, from Monaco to Niger. “Elites and certain circles” is a very weird read, which I’m guessing is based on US stereotypes on the French? I don’t even think the British would commit to associating the French with elitism.

Russian speakers being “mostly autoritarian left” is also… kind of a lot to assume? I’m not even getting into that one further. I don’t know if the Esperanto one checks out, either. “Esperanto speaker” is the type of group, and this is true, whose wikipedia page doesn’t include statistics but instead just a list of names. Which is hilarious, but maybe not a great Python analogue. It may still be the best pairing there, because to my knowledge English speakers aren’t any worse at speaking English than the speakers of any other language. They are more monolingual, though.

It just all sounds extremely anglocentric to me, which is what it is, I suppose, but it really messes with the joke if you’re joking about languages specifically. One could do better with this concept, I think.

I think the elitism regards of French isn’t about French native speakers but about second language learners. French was the lingua franca in Europe for quite a while and using French loan words makes you sound more fancy and eloquent in many languages (compare “adult” with “grownup” which is a Latin loan word but I can’t think of a real example so I hope no one will notice).

The Russian bit I totally agree. Esperanto vs python is quite a leap, I agree. Showing a list (that’s probably not conclusive but still) is telling when compared to the go to beginners programming language. Still there are parallels in the design and intention. No comparison is ever perfect.

All in all it’s not perfect but as a joke, it works for me. Sure, it’s not unbiased but if not taken too seriously, I can laugh about it, and I can over analyze it for fun so win win for me.

Yeah, but that’s my point. The author clearly isn’t thinking about the hundreds of millions of native French speakers around the world, they’re an American thinking the word “mutton” sounds fancier than “sheep”… in English.

Which yeah, okay, that’s their cultural upbringing causing that, but then maybe don’t make a joke entirely predicated on making sharp observations about how languages work and aimed specifically at nerds. I can only ever go “it’s funny because it’s true” or be extremely judgmental of your incorrect assumptions about how languages work here.

your incorrect assumptions

Why make it about me? I was more or less playing devil’s advocate, saying if not taken seriously it’s funny.

I would be more likely to agree with you if you put “OP’s assumption”. Your phrasing makes me want to double down on my original position.

That’s just a general recommendation for discussions in general, online and offline. I learned a thing or two about my biases and perspectives here. Btw I’m German and that part resonated with me from my little experience with JAVA and my experience in learning about my native language and teaching it to others.

Oh, sorry, you misunderstood, I didn’t mean you specifically, I mean you as in “why would you ever do this”, as in “why would anybody ever do this”.

Languages, as we’ve established, are complicated.

It’s kinda funny, I’m Flemish and a lot of French loan words (ambriage, merci, nondedju = nom de dieu to name a few) are mainly used in dialect, and therefore don’t make you sounds sophisticated or worldly at all.

From what I know it’s similar in Swiss German (with words like merci and velo (bike)). I don’t know about Fleming but Swiss embraces their dialects so it isn’t stigmatized either

Heh, we use velo as well. And yeah, we don’t really stigmatise dialects that much either, though depending on how much dialect you use people might find it unprofessional.

About Esperanto, since it’s not a national language (intentionally so) it’s hard to do a census of speakers.

Also, to what level is considered “speaking Esperanto”? Taking the Duolingo course? Having it as a “mother tongue” where both parents speak it in a household in order to communicate? These are both probably countable, and produce wildly different numbers.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think that’s the reason. I also think those numbers may be different but they may both be indistinguishable from zero when plotted against natural languages. You’re right about it being hard to define what counts as a “Esperanto speaker”. I can’t decide if that makes the Python comparison better or worse, though.

Yeah, I do not think Python is a very good comparison.

I was thinking more like Clojure:

Enthusiastic and friendly geeks trying to push their language on the world trying to make it a better place. They are both definitely not a little cultish!
Language intended to be simple to learn with a limited and regular vocabulary, but can handle complicated work with ease.
They both say that learning their language will make your mind better able to do other languages.
A bridge between languages. Vanilla Clojure runs on the JVM and can invoke Java commands. But it has also been built on other platforms like JavaScript (ClojureScript), .NET (CLR), Python (Basilisp), BASH (Babashka), and others I think.
The parts of both languages can be broken up, mixed, and matched, and used for other parts. In Esperanto, the fundamental elements can be broken down and made into other words. In Clojure, you’ve got functions and lists - and higher order functions that work on functions and lists, and lists of functions, and functions of lists.
Did I mention: Friendly & welcoming geeks that lo-o-o-ove newbies! Seriously, both Clojure nerds and Esperanto nerds are unnaturally nice and would like to welcome you to the club. They’ve got tons of free resources for you to learn it.

Honestly, I think both are right. Both are simple languages that expand your way of thinking, and are probably both worth learning, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I think the first sentence is probably enough to make anyone not afflicted with a eurocentric brain want to palm some face.

I think excusing it as a “not serious” statement is dangerous, as a lot of people even on Lemmy won’t second guess it.

The belief that the west is the origin of all science and culture is surprisingly pervasive, especially in the tech industry.

“The root of all modern languages” is a heck of a thing to say about Latin, and I’m pretty sure several billion people haven’t quite gotten that memo. Calling a chunk of Europe and a thin slice of Africa “the entire Universe” is also a spicy take. Come for the programmer humor, recoil in disgust for the rampant ethnocentrism, I guess.

I don’t disagree but I would still give the benefit of a doubt that “the whole universe” is such an exaggeration that it makes the overstatement obvious. But it would also be read as a praise. Overall, I wouldn’t take it all to seriously. Made me laugh but I also see the eurocentrism and it’s good to be aware of it.

For one, Latin has more fancy rules than French. I guess the subjunctive is probably something English speakers might consider fancy, but Latin has that too. Latin has more times that are conjugations of the core verb (rather than needing auxiliary verbs), has grammatical cases (like German, but two more if you include vocative) and, idk, also just feels fancier in general.

I’ll admit it’s been years since I actually read any Latin and that I only have a surface level understanding of all languages mentioned except for French, but this post reads like it’s about the stereotypes of the countries rather than being about the languages themselves.

First, I wouldn’t count the vocative but let’s not get into this debate. Counting cases, Russian wins until you include other balto slavic languages or even Uralic ones.

Fancy is a very subjective term. Auxiliary verbs are fancy in their own way. From an orthographical viewpoint, French is quite fancy with all the silent letters, the way vocals are pronounced and stuff. French had like one spelling “reform” and it was like let’s make it more obvious we decent from Latin. Grammar wise it’s just like the other romance languages from what I know. They once got rid of the silent <s> and put a “gravestone” on the letter before (^) that has no other meaning than here was a silent s. Wouldn’t you call that fancy? Who would call it fancy? ~~Mwa~~ Moi!

Haha I decline your proposal not to get into that debate: the vocative is a grammatical case. Maybe not every noun can be put in the vocative, but it’s definitely one of the cases. Even the locative is a case, even though only a couple of nouns use it.

To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).

In Latin tho, it’s more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn’t say Latin has the locative.

I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it’s not.

The Ohio State University seems to think these are both cases: https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/latin-case .

Meh, as a native Dutch speaker auxiliary verbs feel really utilitarian to me, and not particularly fancy - like you said, that’s highly subjective.

As for cases, I didn’t say Latin or German had the most, but just that I think they’re fancy and that Latin has them while French doesn’t.

So you speak a V2 language like me? I’m German btw. Let me give you an outside perspective on auxiliary verbs in continental western Germanic languages:

The verb comes in second position (hence V2). Using an auxiliary verb moves the content verb to the very end of the sentence. It totally messes with the syntax.

But that’s besides my point. My point wasn’t that French auxiliary verbs are fancy but that fancy can me many things, in French it’s the spelling and pronunciation. Cases aren’t fancy, at least not the German or Latin ones. The slavic cases are a different story, in my objective opinion.

Latin has more rules, but they’re more utilitarian than fancy. Latin rules are there to make sure you understand exactly what is being said. French rules are there to make everything elegant and confusing, like high fashion.

IDK, comparing Javascript to English while Java to German seems to either overblow the value of javascript or diminish the value of English.

Yeah German isn’t nearly as bad as Java either. Also what is asm? Phoenetic script?

As someone with a background in linguistics, my jimmies are indeed rustled.

Does Russian have stricter grammar syntax than German? I was a bit puzzled by the comparison made above

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