[a-l-c-o]

I'm in your exact situation.

And as a consequence (or cause) I am now seeing French as inadequate. It's such a verbose and slow language.

I don't deny its rare beauty when used ideally (think poetry, good writers, Francoise Hardy singing).

But in practice, what twisted collective mind could come up and stay with "Qu'est ce que c'est ?" (What is it ?) ? That monster literally translate to "What is this that it is ?".

In a fast and unifying world I am positive French is doomed.

When arguing this with people I always get rebutted with the likes of "French is very rich.. It is just different..but none the less valuable.." I don't think so. English is an efficient superset of french. You can express as much or more subtlety, feelings or facts in English. Take only the vocabulary : It's just larger in English ! (And in fact contains a good chunk of the French).

[johnchristopher]

> But in practice, what twisted collective mind could come up and stay with "Qu'est ce que c'est ?" (What is it ?) ? That monster literally translate to "What is this that it is ?".

The same one who came up with "Au jour d'aujourd'hui". And "sociétal" in place of "social". The usage of any given language is bound to evolve over time into such... monsters.

Sarcasm apart, french is indeed a difficult language to learn (as a native and as foreigner) according to my PhD linguist friend but the movie english, the book english and the internet english is a poor subset of english. It's a simple english like the basic english everyone speak around the world.

[a-l-c-o]

> The same one who came up with "Au jour d'aujourd'hui".

That one is indeed beyond stupid. And even "aujourd'hui" is long and strangely build. Its english counterpart "today" on the other hand couldn't be shorter.

> but the movie english, the book english and the internet english is a poor subset of english.

I'm confused by your statement. Especially on 'book english'. Where else would you find proper, complete English ? Maybe you meant that today's litterature is poor ? And even concerning 'internet english' I find that in places like HackerNews or Reddit one enjoys a high level (from my limited point of view) of language. And, returning to my point, I find that equivalent people (in this case middle-class higher-educated STEM) use a strinkingly broader lexicon on the english side compared to the french.

[johnchristopher]

>> The same one who came up with "Au jour d'aujourd'hui".

> That one is indeed beyond stupid. And even "aujourd'hui" is long and strangely build. Its english counterpart "today" on the other hand couldn't be shorter.

You might find this tidbit of information interesting regarding « Aujourd'hui » : http://french.stackexchange.com/questions/727/evolution-du-m... and https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/aujourd%E2%80%99hui

If you don't read French - pardon me if you do - it states that « aujourd'hui » is already a pleonasm where « hui » stands for « today », « this day ».

> I'm confused by your statement. Especially on 'book english'. Where else would you find proper, complete English ? Maybe you meant that today's litterature is poor ?

My mistake. I should have been more precise and stated that I was referring to the current state of popular YA literature. I read a Stross book and Ready Player One this summer and even as a non-native speaker I found some weird grammar (I confirmed it by asking a native later). But it's true I also find today's literature quite poor (at least the one making the headline).

> And even concerning 'internet english' I find that in places like HackerNews or Reddit one enjoys a high level (from my limited point of view) of language. And, returning to my point, I find that equivalent people (in this case middle-class higher-educated STEM) use a strinkingly broader lexicon on the english side compared to the french.

I believe it's a bias and we are (you, me and surely others) in a kind of bubble. I notice my English grammar is getting less and less good over time. So I believe I make a lot of mistakes that people won't correct - out of kindness or tolerance - and that I certainly don't catch them anymore [0]. For instance there are more and more sentences in posts I can't figure out because the punctuation makes no sense or a verb is clearly missing. HN being a polite place I don't correct the author or ask for a clarification (edit: and the author could be on mobile and correct it later). I can't be the only one who reacts that way though.

It surely has to do with the fact HN - and the Internet at large in the Western world - is an international crowd and non-natives end up using some kind of common English. Native English speakers sometimes can easily deduce what is a person's native language from (written) grammatical or vocabulary quirks but I couldn't (except for Indians, go figure).

I also believe the same thing happens with my native language: Internet is lowering its users' language capabilty.

With that said HN is the only place I know of where comments are both interesting, well thought out and well written. I am pretty sure most of us come here for the comments.

[0] Which means that as time goes by I restrain myself from making complex sentences. Which kind of bothers me because I love making them in french :].

[jordigh]

> But in practice, what twisted collective mind could come up and stay with "Qu'est ce que c'est ?" (What is it ?) ? That monster literally translate to "What is this that it is ?".

But it's only three syllables, like "what is it?" It's also kind of atomic. My French isn't native, but I don't think you can say "qui est ce qui ça est?", if you want to ask "who is it?", i.e. the initial two syllables "qu'est ce que" seem indivisible.

Comparisons about one language being more verbose/complex/harder than another never seem to really hold up under scrutiny. Usually when comparing two languages, one exhibits simplicity in one area where the other exhibits simplicity in another and it all roughly balances out. Humans seem to demand approximately a constant level of complexity from their languages. English for example has pretty complicated consonant clusters (e.g. hurdle, or angsts) to make up for fewer syllables. I'm not even sure English tends to have fewer syllables than French, as their common Celtic roots seem to prefer fewer syllables.

[a-l-c-o]

> Comparisons about one language being more verbose/complex/harder than another never seem to really hold up under scrutiny.

I've been 'scrutinizing' both for quite long (not bilingual though) and the more I do the more I am convinced of my point. French is definitely more 'verbose/complex/hard'. And unnecessarily so.

> Usually when comparing two languages, one exhibits simplicity in one area where the other exhibits simplicity in another and it all roughly balances out.

Sorry jordigh, but in what area ? English appears to me simpler in maybe all areas. - le soleil, la lune / the sun, the moon. Things should have a gender ? What for ? - so-leil : 2 Syl. Sun : 1 - lune : mute 'e' - ...

> I'm not even sure English tends to have fewer syllables than French, as their common Celtic roots seem to prefer fewer syllables.

On global conciseness (whole text-wise) English is a clear winner. Do the test in Google Translate. I comment all my code in English despite not being a native speaker because it's just shorter. Words like 'get/set' are unbeatable.

[jordigh]

> Sorry jordigh, but in what area?

You are focussing just on gender. There are many other parts that make up a language.

I gave an example which you ignored. English has pretty complicated consonant clusters, such as in "angsts". It has two liquids, r and l, which many other languages do not distinguish. Depending on the dialect, it has 12 to 14 vowels, not counting diphthongs (okay, fine French has 16 vowels).

That's just phonology. Let's discuss some syntax. Here is something I hear French speakers mess up all the time in English: number agreement. Why does the verb "run" have to have an "s" in some cases but not in others? While French also has conjugations, large parts of them are only written, not pronounced. Thus, French speakers have trouble with number agreement in "the cats run" and the "the cat runs".

English has a pretty complicated phrasal verb system. For example, knock up, knock out, and knock over all mean completely different things and are unrelated to the meaning of ordinary "knock". English has a completely foreign usage of the verb "do", which is used for affirmation in a way that no other language does, for example "I do mean this".

I can keep on going. If I am allowed to compare English with Russian (for example, English has a complicated system of articles, which Russian very simply lacks), with Japanese (Japanese only has 5 vowels), or with Chinese (English has complicated inflexions for nouns and conjugations for verbs, which Chinese lacks), I can find lots of other relative complexities with other languages.

And all of this without talking about the weird spelling systems (there are more than 2) that English has cobbled together from all of the languages it has borrowed spellings from over the centuries.

[grondilu]

> "Qu'est ce que c'est ?"

To be fair in French you rarely say that. You'd say "c'est quoi ça?". I know, it's not the same register but it just shows that people naturally shape their language to its most efficient form.

[vmarsy]

English seems more appropriate than French in some domains, but when it comes to social communication, I prefer French.

The lack of masculine/feminine, and the "you" that either represent one or multiple persons[1] makes communication, especially texting, more ambiguous than in French.

When you want to avoid all ambiguity your message will be longer than the French one, and you will also probably look awkward.

[1]Some regional languages have a fix for this such as "y'all" but not everywhere.