Falsehoods programmers believe about languages
Falsehoods programmers believe about languages
This is what we have to put up with in the software localisation industry.
I can’t believe nobody has done this list yet. I mean, there is one about names, one about time and many others on other topics, but not one about languages yet (except one honorable mention that comes close). So, here’s my attempt to list all the misconceptions and prejudices I’ve come across in the course of my long and illustrious career in software localisation and language technology. Enjoy – and send me your own ones!
Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.
Now that's a pet peeve of mine, a bizarre belief surprisingly often held by people, who must be oblivious to the existence of tourism.
This. When I was in Mexico on my honeymoon, Google kept redirecting me to their .mx version of Google; despite my inability to read Spanish.
And I always want the english version instead of the german version, despite me being german. Literally only google fucks that up. Every other site, even the small local german Uni website or the canteens meal site, respects my browsers setting. Google does not, and serves me german.
It would be a useful way to predict it possibly, but presumably the author meant if you have support for localization, you also provide an obvious and easy means of changing the language.
More importantly, you should be using the language an existing user has already used in the past.
Edit: come to think of it, this is less a programmer problem, and more of a UX problem. Obviously as programmers we need to take UX into consideration, but in all my products I've worked on, UX is specified already by a UX designer.
I hate when apps use my number formatting setting to determine display language - despite Windows having a display language as well. Even Qt does (did?) that.
Icons that are based on English puns and wordplay are easily understood by speakers of other languages.
This reminded me of one of those Top Gear "drive across a foreign country in weird vehicles" specials where Jeremy Clarkson needed to borrow a cable to jump-start his car, and laboriously mimed out jumping for "jump", and walking a dog for "lead", to a perplexed local. Richard Hammond was cracking up but finally managed to point out what a fool Clarkson was being.
Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.
And as an addendum to this, in 2025 nobody should be using Windows' "Non-latin/-unicode character set" setting to guess the user's preferred language. That's a pre-WinXP kludge. I'm specifically looking at you, Intel integrated graphics software writers, but you have plenty of company, don't worry.
Geolocation is an accurate way to predict the user’s language.
This makes me so angry. It really really really really really does.
Despite setting everything to English I still get my receipts in French. And all because my IP is CG-NAT to the capital which is marked as french speaking.
What is so hard about letting me decide. The absolute fucking arrogance thinking you as a company know better than me in which language I would like to be served.
Eat a dick Microsoft.
For real. I've seen the fingerprinting info, I know your website can see what language I've set, so display your website in that language!
- There is always only one correct way to spell anything.
“gray" and "grey" are both correct spellings of the color between black and white.
Falsehoods US programmers believe about languages
The US-centric, anglo-saxon centric worldview strikes again 😮💨 For those us that speak multiple languages, many of these are revelations...
Also, if they are, it's best to add examples, otherwise these are just random claims without any sources to back them up.
Ironically, many languages that violate these rules are spoken in the US natively. People in the US just like to forget that there are other natively spoken languages (spoken since before English was introduced to the continent even).
Most of these just seem like basic educational issues except this one imo:
Every language has words for yes and no.
I want to see more than like 1 or 2 counterexamples. I'm pretty interested in linguistics on an amateur level. Don't believe I've heard of that one before now.
edit: in retrospect I do think I remember hearing this about Irish and Latin and some older languages. Interesting to know there are so many. I know the theory that language is related to thought patterns is semi-debunked, but I can't help but think that things like this indicate something about the cultures associated with a language.
My wife is Vietnamese, so I have a basic grasp of it, but they don't really have a word for yes.
The verb itself is used to answer the question.
Want something to drink? Drink. Want to go to the park? Go.They have a word for no, but as you can probably ascertain, it's only for the negative.
Can they answer “not no”?
Not sure about that one but the following one:
In each language, the words for yes and no never change, regardless of which question they are answering.
This happens in Danish actually. Example:
Kan du lide is? (Do you like ice cream?)
Ja
Kan du ikke lide is? (Do you not like ice cream?)
JoSo in Danish we have "ja" which means "yes" but "jo" is used instead when answering a negative question, so as to confirm what the negative question asked. This is kind of annoying in English cause if you ask "Do you not like ice cream?" then if you say "yes" does that mean "yes I like ice cream" or does it mean "yes I do not like ice cream"? That's what "jo" disambiguates.
English used to have this! Yea/nay for positive, and yes/no for negative I believe. The former fell out of common use.
I believe French does this as well. To answer in the affirmative to a negative question, you use "si" instead of "oui"
"Si" is also the word for "if", which has probably confused people.
(top search hit, not sure if good, but on a quick glance it looks correct https://www.commeunefrancaise.com/blog/si-in-french )
Scottish Gaelic doesn't have 'yes' or 'no' - you answer with the positive or negative form of the verb used in the question.
http://www.gaidhliggachlatha.com/blog-mios-na-gaidhlig/how-to-say-yes-and-no-in-scottish-gaelic
Interesting. Maybe it's partially a Gaelic thing, since Irish Gaelic is like that too.
Arabic doesn't have a word for "yes". I don't think most semitic languages do either [Classical Hebrew does not, but Modern Hebrew does, however, the word they use in modern Hebrew is the word for "Thusly", that is now a particle]. In fact you can see that proto-indo European didn't have a word for yes: Greek is ναι, but the romance languages are si (I am pretty sure French oui is actually derived from the same root as Spanish and Italian. Could be wrong) and if my memories is correct (and it may not be) classical Latin didn't have a word for yes. And the Germanic words yes/ja have a similar origin. I can't speak to the other IE languages unfortunately.
I know there are also language families that don't have a single word for no, but use a negation mood on the verb. I unfortunately can't give you an example of this. But it should be fun to look up!
Oui and si are derived from different roots. Oui is from Latin hoc ille, while si is from Latin sic.
There is actually a si in French that also means yes and comes from the same root as the Spanish and Italian si. However, its usage is much more limited. It's only used to express disagreement. For example, if I said "Potato chips don't taste good." and you wanted to say "Yes, they do!", then you could use si.
Huh, interesting. I learned a little hebrew (modern) and a few words of arabic. I know I learned "yes" in hebrew and thought I also did in arabic. However, as I understand it, arabic is more like many separate languages bound by some commonalities, so maybe that factor is what I am confused by.
As far as "oui" in french, that one I learned about and it's theorized (from memory, I may be a bit off) that it came from a contraction of two latin words meaning something like "it is so". The contraction originally started with a hard consonant but it fell off over time, leaving "oui". It is also an interesting read to look up!
@TrickDacy @rimu but use them much more restrictively. As an example in Thai, "yes" is "chai", but is used only in a few situations, like if a question is ended with "chai mai" (yes followed by word forming polar question).
In interfaces you can't usually put this as yes/no buttons, but rather usually one is a verb like "khao" ("come/go in") and the other is the same word prefixed with mai ("not", different tone from the other "mai" i mentioned).
Chinese is similar but I don't know it as well.
@TrickDacy @rimu another example is Irish, which I've heard claim as an explanation for Irish English also contains more of "it is/isn't" and such constructs in favour of yes no.
Another European example is Finnish which has yes but not no. You want me to go on?
Well, I only know of two off the top of my head, but I really doubt they're the only examples: Irish and Mandarin Chinese.
I think some Irish don't even habitually use them when speaking English. If you ask them "Are you ok?" they'd answer "I am" or "I am not."
Another couple missing:
- every language uses gendered nouns/verbs/adjectives/pronouns/etc
- no language uses gendered nouns/verbs/adjectives/pronouns/etc
- pronouns referring to people are always gendered
- pronouns are always singular (1) or plural (2+)
A fun language to learn regarding these is Hawaiian, where the language uses a-class and o-class rather than masculine and feminine, and which you use is largely based on how much control you have over it.
"All languages (that use the Latin alphabet) have the same alphabetical sorting order." oh this one is very unexpected to me. Does someone know an example? I'm curious
In Denmark we have the digraph "aa" that is the same as "å". Since "å" is the last letter in the Danish alphabet, "aa" must be sorted likewise. Hence the ordering Aalborg -> Allerup -> Middelfart is incorrect and the correct ordering is Allerup -> Middelfart -> Aalborg.
The exception is if two a's are pronounced as separate vowels e.g. due to compounding words: "ekstra" + "arbejde" gives "ekstraarbejde" but here it is not pronounced as "å" so ekstraarbejde -> ekstrabetaling is correct ordering as well
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danish_and_Norwegian_alphabet
Many examples are listed on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabetical_order#Language-specific_conventions
For French, the last accent in a given word determines the order.[14] For example, in French, the following four words would be sorted this way: cote < côte < coté < côté. The letter e is ordered as e é è ê ë (œ considered as oe), same thing for o as ô ö.
In German Ä comes after A, in Swedish Ä comes after Z
"Every country has exactly one “national” language." - Switzerland meanwhile lol
Segmenting a text into sentences is as easy as splitting on end-of-sentence punctuation.
Is there a language this actually isn't true for? It seems oddly specific like a lot of the others and I don't think I know of one that does this. Except maybe some wack ass conlangs of course.
Even in english this isn't true, for example dots can appear inside a sentence for multiple reasons (a decimal number, an abbreviation, a quotation, three dots, etc, etc), which would make you split it into more than one piece.
English. I can go to the store and buy a sandwich for $8.99 all in one sentence, but splitting it on periods gives you two sentences.
There are perfect guidelines on preparing translatable strings in the GNU gettext documentation.
Every language has words for yes and no.
Assuming yes and no means true and false, c has numbers (1, 0) for yes and no and c++ can use those numbers for yes and no because it is a superset of c.
Technically, it's 0 and non-0 but I always use 1. They are integers rather than keywords.
The article is not about programming languages 🫠
Technically, 0 is false and anything else is true. !0 is 1, though, IIRC
That's what I meant so I've edited my comment to hopefully make that a bit clearer.Having actually tested it, because in C++ I use true/false, it is 0 that equals false and anything else is true. You'll have to forgive my lack of clarity. It's 03:02 and I've had about 2 hours sleep tonight and won't be getting any more. Time for a coffee.