A key reason English became the preeminent language of scientific and technical communication, and thus the source of keywords in programming languages, is because German (the other candidate) fell out of favour due to the two world wars. So, were it not for Prussian militarism, our programming languages may have instead been based on German (along with most scientific literature being in German).
Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.
No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than “add an s for third person singular”, somewhat permissive grammar…
It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.
Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I’m thankful it’s become the technical Lingua Franca.
Had the world settled on German, someone might be making a similar argument that the world dodged a bullet by choosing a language with phonetic orthography and words composed of logical building blocks rather than a mess like English
A key reason English became the preeminent language of scientific and technical communication, and thus the source of keywords in programming languages, is because German (the other candidate) fell out of favour due to the two world wars. So, were it not for Prussian militarism, our programming languages may have instead been based on German (along with most scientific literature being in German).
Also because, as a person who has studied multiple languages, German is hard and English is Easy with capital E.
No genders for nouns (German has three), no declinations, no conjugations other than “add an s for third person singular”, somewhat permissive grammar…
It has its quirks, and pronunciation is the biggest one, but nowhere near German (or Russian!) declinations, Japanese kanjis, etc.
Out of the wannabe-esperanto languages, English is in my opinion the easiest one, so I’m thankful it’s become the technical Lingua Franca.
Had the world settled on German, someone might be making a similar argument that the world dodged a bullet by choosing a language with phonetic orthography and words composed of logical building blocks rather than a mess like English
Making fun of people has more “stank” in English (not a hard fact, just my opinion).
* Yiddish has entered the conversation
Is Yiddish basically Hebrew + Street/Slang German? I guess I could look it up, but I thought I’d just ask.