On 8/4/2013 10:28 AM, Shmuel Metz (Seymour J.) wrote:
Admittedly the phonetic spelling isn't, and there are a lot of near synonyms, but "basket" case seems to be overstatin the case? How is English worse than, e.g., Frisian, German, Romance languages, Semitic languages, Slavic languages?
The worst problem with English is that words are overloaded (according to one estimate I saw, there are 13 meanings per word on average).
English has more homonyms than other languages I know, and it is imprecise; it could be improved by introducing gender specific articles (e.g., you cannot translate "the child" into Spanish without knowing the child's gender, and you lose that information translating from Spanish).
Some languages capitalize nouns and some pronouns, thus reducing ambiguity (the well known "time flies like an arrow" can be interpreted three ways), but not English.
Dutch and German also strike me as being capable of terser expression, in contrast to French and Spanish, with English being middling. Phonetic spelling is easier in most other languages, with the exception of English and colloquial Quebecois French.
And I've seen attempts to write CoBOL-like languages for other languages, and those weren't much better than our version.
Gerhard Postpischil Bradford, Vermont ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
