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!
There are perfect guidelines on preparing translatable strings in the GNU gettext documentation.
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
Arabic doesn’t have a word for “yes”.
(Yes) in Arabic is نعم pronounced as (Na’am) or ( Na ع m) & this is the word which most people use in all Arab countries . The Arabic dialect word for (Yes) is ايوة or ايوا pronounced as (Aywa)and also used by all Arabs.
@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?
@TrickDacy @rimu guess I should have mentioned Latin as well, which is a bit interesting. Latin didn’t have yes/no, but a lot of modern romance languages does, where things like “si” and “oui” derive from Latin words that had other meanings.
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.”
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.
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.
It’s not even that, there are multiple languages spoken in the same region. Webpages should just use the language the browser tells it to use.
It’s infuriating when an app or a site throws a shitty translation of itself in my native language at me. Most of the time they must not even check it’s quality, it’s notorious. Just let me use English by default.
Now there you have one more pet peeve of mine, language preference settings that pretend that all language versions are equal, that shitty translations aren’t abundant. If the original text is in a language that I can read then I want the original, not some shitty translation. It shouldn’t be that hard!
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.
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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).
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.
Persian is a perfectly neutral language. Some westerners apparently struggle with understanding how we speak out language. We also don’t have an equivalent to “The”
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.
Oh of course, I didn’t think about punctuation occurring in the middle of a sentence. Duh, thanks.
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.
Technically, 0 is false and anything else is true. !0 is 1, though, IIRC
As far as C goes, 1 is true and 0 is false.
In terms of POSIX exit codes, 0 is success and 1 is error.
I think more specifically for C, 0 is false and anything nonzero is true. Idk about NaN/inf.
True is anything other than zero in C.
Confidently incorrect.
Until you use exit codes, which flips the logic.
Jesus. I mistyped that horrendously to make a point about !0
I read my comment just now waking up and went wtf
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.
