HACKER Q&A
📣 eimrine

Is your mother language any better than English?


Please give some examples of those features, because I use to know only malfeatures of non-English languages.


  👤 marttt Accepted Answer ✓

👤 billconan
Native Mandarin speaker. I think it is better in some way. For example, there are no verb tenses. Time is conveyed by explicit timestamps.

For example, I watched a movie yesterday is "I watch a movie yesterday" in Chinese. The past-tense and the timestamp are redundant.

There is no concept of countable and uncountable nouns. Because countability doesn't make sense, as everything is made of atoms and uncountable, countability doesn't convey any meaningful message as part of a sentence and only makes a language more complex.

Verbs in Chinese don't need to change their forms according to the subject.

I is

She is

We is


👤 logicalmonster
2 random languages from an English perspective.

> This is pretty subjective and not exactly a language feature, but one interesting thing to me about Greek is that the different words for love provide a lot more nuance and a depth of meaning. Greek songs about all kinds of relationships express passion in a way that I don't really feel in English songs.

> Georgian has many interesting language feature, but one fact that's interesting to me is that each one of the 33 letters are always pronounced the same regardless of the context. There's no tricky situations like in English where you have 2 words such as pour and sour and pronounce similar letter combinations differently just because. If you can read Georgian, you can pronounce any word, no matter how long and complex it is. The tricky part is that the letters themselves represent some consonant combinations that are nigh' impossible for native English speakers to pronounce.

By the way, despite some of the tricky gotchas and inconsistencies of English, just like PHP, for whatever reason it seems to work and is widely used.


👤 bitxbitxbitcoin
Better is subjective but in Mandarin, verb tenses are different than in most European languages. There are no conjugations, simply words you add before or after a verb to add your desired tense.

👤 mkranjec
Distinction between singular, dual and plural. Only few spoken languages nowadays share that same trait.

👤 bjourne
What do you mean? My mother tongue is better for the sole reason that it is my mother tongue!