[brozaman]

I know you're being sarcastic, but as a Spanish native speaker I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty.

I also hate with passion that it's not written as it sounds (I think everyone who comes from a language with very regular pronunciation will tell you this) but I don't think this is a real issue on a daily basis.

On the other hand Spanish handles other things better. I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.

[franciscop]

As a Spaniard, I find it funny how in English some times they use both the latin/french and germanic/anglosaxon roots of the same word, but at some point in time they arbitrarily adopted the translation to mean something different and more specific, like: "poison" vs "venom", "tea" vs "ocha/chai", "comic" vs "manga", "teacher" vs "professor", "connoisseur" vs "expert", "memento" vs "souvenir/keepsake", etc.

Then I started to see we are doing the same in Spanish with business/internet to make things sound cooler.

[anthk]

Heh. In English, the fancy/cultured/technical words are Romance origin. In Spanish, the cool/modern/techie words are English/Germanic origin.

[Symmetry]

Too bad the Romans only used five vowel sounds and left us with an alphabet that has trouble expressing the however many sounds English has.

[int_19h]

Not a problem with diacritics. But I wish languages used them consistently, so that e.g. o/ö or e/ę relate in the same or at least in a similar way in all languages that use them.

For phonemic spelling systems, it wouldn't even be hard. Start with the baseline of aeiou for the basic vowel triangle. Then let's say that umlaut changes the vowel's "default" backness without changing roundness, ogonek lowers the vowel, tilde makes it nasal, and breve makes it a glide. This gives us aąäãăeęëẽĕiįïĩĭoǫöõŏuųüũŭ, plus all combinations of these diacritics when needed (which should be very rare). Add doubling to indicate vowel length, and I can't think of any European language that cannot be consistently expressed this way; American English should only need aąäeëiįouų.

[the_af]

Yet Spanish is a very expressive language, and it has no trouble expressing whatever you want using fewer vowels (note there are more than just five vowel sounds even in Spanish, it's just that variations don't have different meaning).

There's a lot of sound variation in regional dialects of Spanish, from country to country and even regions within a country. People pronounce vowels and consonants differently, and even the "accent" varies a lot (some people can seem as if they were "singing" instead of speaking, to speakers of other countries/regions).

[bernawil]

what's cool is that regional dialects have different vowel/consonant pronunciation but the differences are almost completely consistent internally and between the dialects. Like, Peruvians pronounce anything with "y" or "ll" like an English "j" and Argentines like "sh", always. Everything maps 1 to 1.

[the_af]

> Argentines like "sh", always

Porteños do. Not everyone does in Argentina!

[bernawil]

Rioplatenses, then :-)

[brozaman]

Spanish isn't particularly rich in sounds but other languages use combination of vowels or accents. French or Portuguese have much more than 5 sounds and the same vowels.

[anthk]

Portuguese has more vowels than Spanish. And Latin itself had 7 I think.

[brozaman]

I meant the same characters not the same sounds.

Portuguese has the same basic characters except for ç, in the case of vowels it's resolved with combinations of letters or by adding accents. For instance e and é have different sounds and ou isn't the same sound as o followed by u.

[ickoonite]

> I'd say Spanish is a much better language than English to express feelings, specially anger.

Everyone says this about their mother tongue. True mastery of a language is comfortably being able to call someone a c**t in it in the heat of the moment.

[brozaman]

Well I'm far from a native speaker, but my English is certainly much much better than my French (I cannot speak French fluently) and I find French so much better for this purpose.

I have lived in Ireland for more than a year and I haven't heard anyone arguing in a really expressive way although I've seen a couple actual fights starting a couple times. I don't know, anger in English always feels like diet coke to me.

[bernawil]

> I'd say English precisely excels on how well it handles ambiguity and certainty.

I'm curious about this. I mean, English doesn't even have different words for singular/plural "you".

[kazinator]

English has a singular first person pronoun, thou. It has fallen out of use except in religious texts and ironic writing which seeks a religious tone.

It's a cognate of the German du, Latin and French tu, Slovak and Czech ty and others.

Some languages do fine without plurals at all.

The ambiguity in you isn't just between plural and singular, but between a rhetorical you and actual.

You should eat your vegetables. Who, me in particular? Or everyone?

[blep_]

English has that too ("one should eat one's vegetables") but it has similar problems to "thou" in that nobody uses it in everyday speech.

[brozaman]

I know this is a paradox, but the fact that verb tenses in English are so simple and give so little context compared to Spanish makes them very easy and global. Pick this sentence:

Joe flew yesterday to Paris, he had never flown before, so he was nervous.

Pretty much every speaker no matter where from will use the same tenses here, past simple for recent past and perfect for older past. We have similar rules in Spanish and I'm pretty sure that another person from my region would use the same tenses as I would. But I'm not quite sure if someone from, say Costa Rica or El Salvador would pick the same tenses. In fact, I don't know if someone 500km south or west would use the same tenses. This is usually not a problem because usually you don't need that much correctness, but in engineering it can be a problem.

Because English verb tenses are so simple they are used in a way more consistent way and from Australia will use the verbs in a very similar way as a Brit, and even non native speakers can use them in a pretty correct way.

Another problem is that in Spanish verbs give you a lot more context and people rely on them, but again they are used differently across regions. In Englosh because they give so little context means that you're forced to add a lot more context in the rest of the sentence in a much more explicit way.

Yet another problem is that verbs in Spanish are super complex for non natives, and because we rely on the verb so much they may end up saying something that they don't mean. Also this is usually not a problem in casual conversations but in technical conversations it may be an issue.

Finally, English handles certainty well. It's very easy to tell how certain you are, if something is mandatory or not, how likely is something, etc. I can't explain why, maybe it's because I've read countless RFCs and not many specifications in Spanish, but this is a general feeling that I have even though I cannot give you an exact reason but I think it would be easier to translate a specification from Spanish to English than the other way around. Even if I find more often things that translate poorly from Spanish to English than the other way around.

[actionfromafar]

I think you have to go to English vernacular, "as she is spoke" to express especially anger. An angry Dubliner or someone from the midlands for example :-)

[ickoonite]

The Glaswegians would like a word…