[mantis369]

Despite English being my native language, I am sorry that it won. There is a lot of ambiguity in it, whether you are writing on technical matters or not.

And what is with this scourge of position:fixed headers lately? I like to scroll with the space bar or page-down button, and the header always slightly overlaps the top of the new page, preventing me from reading a couple of lines.

[adambard]

I am no linguist, but (I will forgive you if you stop reading right here) it seems to me that from its many linguistic influences, English has gained a relatively simple grammar (if a tragic orthography) in relation to other European languages.

It retains only a vestige of Latin's case system (i.e. she vs her) -- in Latin and some modern descendent languages all or most nouns are fair game for this treatment. Polish has 7 noun cases!

It has nearly no inflection in its conjugation, just a past and present tense for most verbs and an extra "s" in the singular third person: I/you/we/they swim/swam, he swims/swam. Contrast this with any of the Romance languages.

It has no grammatical gender, which makes it nearly unique among European languages.

The remaining strikes against it as I see them are:

* The continued presence of articles (a/an/the). The slavic languages get along just fine without them.

* Some irregular and/or inconsistent rules around punctuation, especially apostrophes and semicolons, and some remaining possessive forms (his/hers) -- these are mostly to get around contractions like he's and she's.

* The whole spelling situation is just a mess.

Edit: Bonus points for removing distinctions between (is, in essence) and (is, in a state) and (knows, information) and (knows, familiarity). In many related languages, these are 4 different verbs (In spanish ser, estar, saber, conocer).

[felxh]

I think you are correct that english grammar simplified because of the intermix with different languages. For example during the viking conquest, many viking words were very similar to english except or their grammatical endings, so people dropped them.

On the other hand, I think the irregular spelling has more to do with English never undergoing a mayor spelling reform: many times, the spelling reflects an old pronunciation. From what I know, England always had a relatively lax and pluralistic approach compared to other European countries when it came to managing its language. For example in France you have the Académie française, which essentially has authority over the French language. There is no comparable thing for English, which is probably why such reforms never took place.

Also, correct me if I am wrong, but you seem to incorrectly assume that English (or at least English grammar) stems from Latin.

[philh]

Are other human languages significantly less ambiguous than English? (Conlangs like lojban, sure, but anything used by more than a handful of people?) Genuine question, I haven't studied any other languages since I was sixteen.

Fully agree about position:fixed. For long articles I often remove them in the DOM editor. I wish browsers would change page-down distance when there's a fixed header, but I recognize that this is a tricky problem that would have horrible edge cases.

[scrollaway]

I speak seven languages. It's easy to see why English got so popular so fast. It is an extremely simple language compared to others and even though it is ambiguous in certain cases, most languages have ambiguity here and there.

Talented English speakers can at least get rid of most ambiguity by themselves, which is something a lot of other languages don't have.

My actual favourite language so far is Swedish. Is it much more raw than English, has less overall ambiguity and has a beautiful ring to it. It is also very easy for a skilled English speaker to pick up and I would recommend it if you are interested in languages. (It also gives you German for free)

[imartin2k]

Yep I agree, I love the Swedish language too. It is so much simpler than German actually, and I experience the Swedes being capable of a "simple" way of thinking (in a good sense) that I never witness with Germans.

[tormeh]

>(It also gives you German for free)

That's like saying that learning English gives you French for free. It really helps, but it hardly gives you the entire language for free, just a significant chunk of it.

[scrollaway]

English does not even sort of give you French for free. It does give you Spanish (and Italian, to an extent) for free though. And I speak of all this from experience.

[scrollaway]

Oops, I meant French gives you Spanish for free, of course.

[mantis369]

I've found the French I studied to have more consistent grammar and spelling, and less variation in idioms. Its achilles heel for technical stuff seems to be vocabulary, in that new nouns and verbs don't get created, and the Canadian and French maintainers seem averse to loanwords.

I too have gotten used to firing up the developer tools and removing position:fixed. The second-most common thing I have to do is set restricted column widths. I get linked to pages that use a print stylesheet, a lot of the time, and just as I restrict the line length in my text editor, I don't want to deal with that in the browser.

[adambard]

I've not experienced it personally, but I'm told that French grammar gets pretty gnarly after you get past the simpler stuff.

[mattgibson]

I'm told that Italian, for example, has such a regularity that pretty much every word is spelled phonetically, so guessing the spelling always works.

[adambard]

In my limited experience, this is mostly true of Spanish, and nearly for Polish as well (although the latter has a few sneaky digraphs and some regular exceptions).

I'm also told that this is true of German.

[gurkendoktor]

> I'm also told that this is true of German.

Not quite. We have a bunch of French loanwords that are confusing to spell, some sounds that blend into each other (eu/äu, e/ä, ch/g), we pronounce a 'd' like a 't' at the ent of a wort (so Germans are perpetually confused if it's spelled Standard or Standart), and our markers for whether a vowel is long or short are pretty inconsistent.

[CapitalistCartr]

All of the Romance languages are well structured, in stark contrast to English. There is no "GHOTI = FISH" nonsense in them.

[scrollaway]

Spoken ambiguity and written ambiguity are two very different things and English should not be judged on the merits of the British-English accent.

(You speak of the structure of Romance languages...)

[CSMastermind]

Korean is much better, mostly because the written language was created much later than most so the spelling is all phonetic.

[placeybordeaux]

Many natural languages have more reasonable spelling than English. Part of the problem with English is that the language takes a large amount of vocabulary and root words from different language groups.

[mattgibson]

Does anyone know any good fixes for the fixed-header overlap issue?

I noticed it with regard to clicking anchors with links too, and have been thinking about using some sort of separate span positioned X pixels higher than the real target to compensate.

[michael_h]

Ambiguity in a language opens up a whole class of humor, which probably shouldn't be underestimated in its ability to weasel its way into other countries.

[imartin2k]

I removed the fixed header. I like it more too, actually.

[Springtime]

Cheers. As for the fixed 'return to top' button though I find it actually one of the most subtle I've seen, and appreciate that it uses Javascript over a #top anchor which requires additional back navigation.

[austerity]

Sill, one "bad" language is better than many slightly better ones.

[imartin2k]

Thanks for the feedback. I might remove this if it turns out to be useless.