There are 400 million native English speakers, but over a billion people who speak English as a second language. … At any given instant on this planet, most people who are speaking English are not native speakers.
…
Perhaps we should take a good look at common forms of incorrect grammar and see if they actually make our language easier to learn. Maybe we should give a loose leash to those who are trying to make English more accessible.
I am going to try to use simple language and limited slang in my writing. When one considers the population of the world, it seems rather rude to address only the native English speakers.
September 26, 2008
Simple English
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Some people have trouble with fractions and floating point numbers, so from now on all I will only use rational numbers.
Comment by cwbowron — September 26, 2008 @ 2:31 pm
dammit, I meant whole numbers.
Comment by cwbowron — September 26, 2008 @ 2:31 pm
The set of real numbers is uncountably infinite. The set of whole numbers is countably infinite. This difference in “size” is just mind boggling. I’m not convinced that idiomatic and complex English differ that much in what they can express.
And there are many places where whole numbers are used instead of rational numbers. For example, 2-point and 3-point shots in basketball, not 1-point and-1.5 point shots. I think this does simplify tallying a score.
Comment by Vincent Gable — September 27, 2008 @ 2:31 pm
Vincent you bring up a good point. Specifically, the use of jargon is unnecessary. For example terms like “wiki” and RADAR are not needed, there are already words for these concepts. It seems “simple english” is being replaced with the less-useful simplistic english and many people do not understand the nuance.
Simple English also lack a clear definition.There are different challenges when address dangling modifiers in syntax, dangling modifiers in semantics – this concept is not currently recognized, and jargon. I have only seen overly broad, ambiguous solutions to addressing inaccessible english.
Comment by Chubb — September 3, 2010 @ 11:21 am
Yes, that’s a huge problem. Unfortunately I don’t see a great solution for it. All “good” writing is hard to specify, and produce. Writing entertaining fiction is hard. Writing artful poetry is hard. Writing clear technical manuals is hard. Writing anything as simply as possible is hard. Practice helps. But I don’t know of a program that can teach anyone to be an excellent writer.
The best way I can think of to make progress is to convince people that simplicity and accessibility are important. Unfortunately, many people think simple writing can only express simple thoughts, or that it’s patronizing. And I don’t know how to change that. But if simplicity was a value we all shared, I think we would all organically find little concrete ways of making things better.
Wow that’s all pretty ambiguous and broad isn’t it :-)
Comment by Vincent Gable — September 3, 2010 @ 4:45 pm