Well, the thing is that if it's Sunday you can't know if it's the Sunday at the end of the week or the Sunday at the beginning of the week. Therefore, each Sunday is in two weeks and should be counted twice, 8 + 2 = 10 days in a week. Don't feel bad, a lot of people miss this.
One of my first jobs, a paid internship, was to migrate (a lot) of UML documents out of Rational Rose, for a company that used Domain-Driven Design (DDD) for a large product.
The work was supposed to be manual, copy-paste, but I ended up writing a parser for the Petal format. It was super easy to understand since it was plain text and represented a tree with something like S-expressions.
Agree. It does a good job at coming up with a plausible meaning of novel words like "multiarborality" → "the state of relating to many trees" but it doesn't indicate that this is a "fake" word even though I just made it up.
Doesn't look fake to me. English is not a closed-world language, as far as I know.
Between things like "verbing" and "nouning", and the cultural acceptance of doing them in casual speech, I'd say English is a great language because you get to "invent" new words on the fly, and your interlocutors know what you mean.
In this sense, even if no one before ever said or wrote "multiarborality", it's pretty clear what it means (as long as you don't misread it), and IMHO it's perfectly fine to derive its etymology by deconstructing it back to "common" words and pulling etymology on those, recursively.
1. English doesn’t really have an official regulation body, like French does.
2. The lack of cases and complex grammar. Any language with a case system is going to have more complexity when it comes to adding new words, because otherwise you end up with awkward looking constructions.
3. English itself is something of a hybrid between Latin and Germanic languages, which to my knowledge gives it a more diverse ancestry than the typical language. Ergo having a new word of dubious origins is more natural.
I won’t comment on the second reason, since that seems like something a linguist should address, but I don’t really buy the first and last reasons:
1. Doesn’t seem relevant, as we’re discussing making up a word in conversation and not putting it into dictionaries.
3. Especially in this globalised world, English loanwords are everywhere. No one bats an eye at it and plenty of languages distort those words to fit their own language. For example: when referring to an internet post you say you’re “posting”; another language would keep the “post” but replace the “ing” with the modifier appropriate for them.
1. Well I think perhaps then we could reverse it and just see the lack of a regulatory body as a symptom of a culture that cares less about following strict linguistic rules. Compared to French, which also has a ton of slang and experimentation, but notably the power structures underlying the language care enough about maintaining a standard.
3. Loanwords are everywhere but I think they are easier to incorporate into everyday speech in English than in some other languages, especially ones with case endings. A word like taco, for example, has become indistinguishable from other “native” English words. Taco in say, Polish, requires more thinking about how it fits into the case system and what endings should be used. It’s a more complicated process than in English.
It's not more complicated if you know the language.
Language is a tool. People will use their language for what they need it for. If there isn't a word they'll make one up or steal it. This is absolutely universal. I know you can dig up any number of texts that say English is special, but they're all wrong.
"Languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must express" as Roman Jakobson phrased it. (The "must express" refers to grammar - in some languages you need a subject, or to know the time something happened, or in which direction[0] it happened. Other languages don't care, but you can add that information if you need it.)
[0] E.g. Mam, spoken in Guatemala, marks all verbs for direction, even if they're abstract, then you add one based on convention or metaphor or maybe taste.
I still disagree but I think this would be too hard to discuss over asynchronous text. You have some arguments I’d like to explore and spend some back and forth trying to understand your point and explaining mine better, but unfortunately have stuff to still do today.
Still, I want to thank you for the polite and reasoned replies. I wish we were having this conversation in person, I’m confident it would’ve been interesting.
Loanwords are a different thing, IMHO - even those where some language would take the root and localize the verbing part. In loanwords, you're still actually lending a "real" word from English, one you'd find in an English dictionary. That's a distinct thing from ad-hoc inventing new words that are not in the dictionary and not intended to end up in one - words meant to exist for the duration of a conversation or some engagement, or within the scope of some work.
It is my impression that introducing such ad-hoc words in English is something people wouldn't bat an eye on, while in other languages/cultures I'm familiar with, it'd be something Serious that you probably shouldn't do unless absolutely necessary.
I bet you could, but in the other languages I know, I believe it would be frowned upon. The cultural acceptance of this feature is just as important as the feature itself.
Conversely, in the other languages I know I see it happening all the time. I don’t think frowning on it has to do with the language, but with the person. There are sticklers and SNOOTs¹ everywhere, even in English.
"An expansion of the 2020 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winning story. Arboreality is a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award and the winner of the 2023 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction."
"Flonkers: A made-up word, likely humorous". Aren't all words made up? Edit: This one, unlike my previous example, is actually in use - flonkers: an animal that looks fat but is actually just fluffy.
A few days ago Teams got insanely slow when I was writing a comment on a Planner task. I ran a profiler and it seems like it was running some kind of sanitizer for every key press and that each call took over a second. They also seemed to get slower the more of them were queued up. Typing a sentence (blindly) would freeze the whole app for about five minutes before doing the first draw.
They have a monopoly. The quality of their products has become irrelevant to the short-term well-being of their stock, which is all that matters in our hyper-financialized economy.
The whole software world is writing shit software now. Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon. Apple seems more immune but I don't use their products so I can't say for certain.
Despite arguably not having a monopoly, the competition is still just as bad so they get away with it. The entire society has forgotten how to make good software.
The industry managed to convince people that they are just bad at using computers, and when everything is slow and buggy then that’s what people expect.
And Apple is not immune but my impression is that they have more issues with intermittent bugs & annoyances and less with performance or overall stability.
Coding standards are down because companies wanted everyone to get in tech with bootcamps that would sidestep formal CS education. Excessive push for PMs also made everyone cut corners like crazy because other companies were also moving "fast" and breaking things slowly stretching what users can go through (which is way too much given there's often no real alternatives as you don't have a voice to migrate a big internal system)
I don't agree at all and have pretty extensive experience from writing different kinds of software professionally in different companies to back that up.
Most software out there has very little to do with algorithms, and the problems with it couldn't be solved algorithmically.
The problem at hand is a terrible algorithm, but you are going for the root problem of corner cutting everywhere thats leads to bad devs writing things hastily without thinking about the algorithms they write.
It's not about the algorithms, but about doing this properly, that's the root cause. Sometimes that will manifest as choosing the wrong algorithm, but that's a rare exception from my experience.
I'd place most of the blame at the feet of modern agile tbh (as practiced by the majority of actual software companies). it makes you pay the cost of agile (so much communication) and makes worse products than waterfall, because now nobody ever has the whole context when writing something. you have to focus on the tiny little ticket you've been given or face the wrath of the team and having to defend your decision to work on something else.
I started learning Swedish almost 40 years ago and I wish sometimes like this was available back then. As it was, I had to study quite hard for about 1-2 years by just listening to a lot of Swedish. Reading Swedish comfortably took almost six years to learn - I imagine it would have been faster with an app like this.
