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DavidCooper wrote:That leads on to other ambiguities, of course, with "red" and "reed", but they're different kinds of words which rarely lead to confusion: "the book was red" tells of its colour, while "the book has been read" is the construction used when discussing whether anyone has read it.

My screenreader always pronounces "read" as "reed", so it's up to me to determine the correct meaning from the context (furthermore, I never get it wrong).

I never thought about that, that's pretty funny.

DavidCooper: Crap, you're right and I'm an idiot. I have no idea how I didn't pick up on the fact that he was talking about greek conjugation while he was being that explicit about it.

I blame the morning on this one.

While we are on the subject of ethymology, it's a simple fact that languages, as they migrated with developing mankind, got "simpler". Less grammatic cases, less different sounds. That does not mean that those languages are "worse". (A common fallacy, simple or primitive just does not equal bad.) English, in this regard, is pretty much at the end of the scale, at least as far as the more common languages are concerned. This doesn't hurt its spread as "international" language, of course.

The other thing is, or rather was, the British Empire. With its global spread, English was a "smart" pick as a first foreign language in many places long before the telegraph.

Solar wrote:While we are on the subject of ethymology, it's a simple fact that languages, as they migrated with developing mankind, got "simpler". Less grammatic cases, less different sounds.

Not sure if that's a simple fact. From Wikipedia: R. M. W. Dixon (1998) theorizes that languages normally evolve in a cycle from fusional to analytic to agglutinative to fusional again.

And I also don't think that analytic languages (like English) are necessarily simpler than more synthetic languages. They may have less different inflectional forms, but they make up for that with things like paraphrases and stricter word order. As an example for such a paraphrasis in our native German, would you really consider the synthetic form "Martins Haus" (≈ "Martin's house") which uses the genitive case, less simple than the colloquial analytic form "dem Martin sein Haus" (≈ "to the Martin his house") which avoids the genitive case?

And this, boys and girls, is why free software is bad. Just look at the mess it causes.

ps. A language is bad if you cannot tell how to pronounce a letter without knowing the context.

Get off. C++ isn't context-free, and I love it. So don't you dare going around calling it "a bad language".

Call it a big, ugly beast if you must. But not "bad".

Besides, according to that definition, virtually ALL languages are bad...

glauxosdever wrote:Sure.

After the David Cooper's explanation it's hard to add something but I want to point out a simple thing - english is concise and rigorous and it's just the features every programming language should have. That's why attempts to invent new programming languages where my native language is used for keywords just look as a silly mess.

And by the way, Napoleon translates as a person from Naples (Napoli in Italian). So, may be now you can translate the word "Bonaparte"? Or now you are not so sure?

A language is good if it:
- adapts, evolve and survive
- Is efficient and precise.
- Gives power to ideas and facts.

Therefore, the most successful language is money.

Hi,


I like how this April Fools thread is still active after 20 days. And the topic discussed now has nothing in common with the original post.

But seriously, can we please end this discussion? The one how wanted me to wonder about the "assertion" that Greek is superior to English has never answered since, although you and I have suggested arguments that show the opposite, even if you don't agree exactly with the word "superior".

I don't intend to disrespect iansjack at all, he has much experience gained through his 70 years of life. His contributions here are also to be much respected. But I had to disagree both with his statement and with the fact that he didn't answer when proven wrong.


Regards,
glauxosdever

Bump for cheekiness

Solar wrote:Get off. C++ isn't context-free, and I love it. So don't you dare going around calling it "a bad language".

Call it a big, ugly beast if you must. But not "bad".

Besides, according to that definition, virtually ALL languages are bad...

He means spoken languages, not programming languages.

Is this a good point for me to be a pedantic jerk by pointing out that Buonoparte (the original family name) is actually not French but Corsican (which I understand bears the same relation to Italian that Provencal bears to modern Parisian French).

Schol-R-LEA wrote:Is this a good point for me to be a pedantic jerk by pointing out that Buonoparte (the original family name) is actually not French but Corsican (which I understand bears the same relation to Italian that Provencal bears to modern Parisian French).

Most probably it's kind of an italian dialect, as I understand. But actually I'm not expert in french or italian and can't extract the nuances, which are better suited for the corsican speech.

However, the Buonaparte means "a good part". Or simply "the best"?

Nice 1st April joke. But I often don't mind paying few dollars for good software.
Free software isn't bad. But free games are. Well, of course they're not free - it's all about freemium. Hate this practice. I prefer to pay once (up to 60$ for AAA-product) and play.