[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 :].