Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER [LWN.net]

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 14, 2017 12:11 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER by Wol
Parent article: Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Don't forget, native English speakers rarely realise that English is one of the HARDEST languages to learn as a second language.

I'm not convinced. Try German, Russian, or Arabic.

English will have four or five words, all subtly different! where other languages have just one. English has *three* present tenses whereas other languages have one.

So what? English doesn't really have grammatical gender or inflection – for verbs, tacking on an “s” to get third-person singular verb forms is about as difficult as it gets (you very sensibly got rid of “thou hast” and “he hath” in common usage a good while ago), while nouns have only one singular and one plural form and no declensions because all the cases are formed using prepositions. Irregular verbs and nouns are fairly rare. English also doesn't have tones like Chinese or the more outlandish phonemes of some African languages, and it uses a reasonably straightforward writing system (26 easily distinguished letters, rather than, say, thousands of little pictures).

The main practical problems with English are its comparatively large vocabulary (as you said), the fact that the correspondence between written words and their pronuncation is sometimes very loose, and the challenge of getting one's prepositions straight in many idiomatic expressions. Usually, not being able to handle these perfectly may out you as a foreigner but not render you unintelligible, while with most English native speakers trying to speak German, you won't need to listen for subtle grammatical oddities to suss them out because when they confuse der, die, and das, which they inevitably will unless they are really very good, it will hit you right in the face.

The main reason (apart from network effects) why so many people speak English as a second language these days is that, compared to most other contenders, it is actually fairly simple to learn unless you want to be Shakespeare or Joyce. If you want a language that is really simple to learn as a second language, check out Esperanto.

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Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 15, 2017 12:14 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not the amount of different types of declination etc. that makes a language hard to learn; it's the number of *quirks*, and English is a very quirky language.

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 15, 2017 13:39 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

What's the plural of "index"?

(Stands back and watches the flame war ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 15, 2017 19:35 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Pretty much every language has the same amount of quirks (except maybe for conlangs like Esperanto). It's just that inflected languages also have inflections in addition to quirks.

English is also easy to pick up, you can start with simple constructs and a couple hundred of words and you'll be able to write completely comprehensible texts. In an inflected language you'll have to master inflection first.

Personally, I attempted to learn Arabic and it was really slow going. Now I'm studying Mandarin and it's so much easier to master (module its writing system).

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 15, 2017 13:41 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> So what? English doesn't really have grammatical gender or inflection – for verbs, tacking on an “s” to get third-person singular verb forms is about as difficult as it gets

I am, thou art, he is, we/you/they are.

Note that it is all the *common* verbs that tend to have weird forms!

Cheers,
Wol

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 17, 2017 12:46 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, the common verbs tend to be the oddballs in many languages. Now this is just a hunch, but my suspicion is that they are irregular because there are pressures to makes these words as short as possible due to their frequency of use and they end up getting so short that the normal rules don't apply anymore. If it were only uncommon verbs that we're irregular, I feel like they'd be pressured over time to be more regular. Examples include words or terms originally borrowed from other languages and then forced into the native patterns and even pronunciation.

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 20, 2017 23:27 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The other possibility is that they are irregular because they are very commonly used and thus are invariably learned very early by every speaker, and used so often by all interlocutors of all early speakers that there is little room for misinterpretation: everyone converges on the same behaviour. The root of all language change is innovations, often rooted in misinterpretations, by language learners, and (with a few exceptions such as present-day English and various creoles and trade tongues) that mostly means young children. Parts of language that are highly used around children will tend to smooth away the childrens' errors (many of which are regularizations of irregular forms: oh look pronouns are highly irregular).

For an example, look at English pronouns. They're inflected, they're fairly bizarre in all sorts of ways, and they are almost unchangeable. People have been trying to introduce a third-person gender-neutral pronoun less contorted than singular they for centuries. It has never caught on, and it likely never will, because pronouns are nearly universal among the community of English speakers, so there is little dialectical diversity to exploit in generating new pronouns, and all early speakers learn the same things (and, at the least, correctly learn their dialect's variation).

Finding driver bugs with DR. CHECKER

Posted Sep 17, 2017 14:26 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

I am, thou art, he is, we/you/they are.

That's clutching at straws. In English, “to be” and “to have” are among the very few outliers, and nobody actually uses “thou art” anymore.

Compare that to German sein: ich bin, du bist, er/sie/es ist, wir sind, ihr seid, sie sind (present tense) and ich war, du warst, er/sie/es war, wir waren, ihr wart, sie waren (past tense). Oh, and there's a subjunctive mode, too: ich sei, du seist, er/sie/es sei, wir seien, ihr seiet, sie seien. Oops, actually there's two of them: ich wäre, du wärst, er/sie/es wäre, wir wären, ihr wäret, sie wären. And of course there are composite forms for present perfect, past perfect, and future I and II (although they work basically like the same forms in English – German and English are related, after all). But the past participle of sein that you need for these is the very obvious gewesen. Any questions?