Falsehoods programmers believe about languages

[rimu@piefed.social]

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!

[mynameisrichard@lemmy.ml]

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.

[hddsx@lemmy.ca]

Technically, 0 is true and 1 is false. !0 is 1, though, IIRC

[mynameisrichard@lemmy.ml]

That's what I meant so I've edited my comment to hopefully make that a bit clearer. 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.

[Guest]

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.

[darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

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.

[Guest]

Or the existence of Switzerland.

[dohpaz42@lemmy.world]

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.

[2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de]

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.

[tehpers@beehaw.org]

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.

[onlinepersona@programming.dev]

Falsehoods US programmers believe about languages

For those us that speak multiple languages, pretty much none 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.

[tehpers@beehaw.org]

English. I can go to the store and buy a sandwich for $8.99 all in once sentence, but splitting it on periods gives you two sentences.

[2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de]

Oh of course, I didn't think about punctuation occurring in the middle of a sentence. Duh, thanks.

[tehpers@beehaw.org]

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).

[spacenoodle@lemmy.world]

Confidently incorrect.

[atzanteol@sh.itjust.works]

True is anything other than zero in C.

[duckythescientist@sh.itjust.works]

I think more specifically for C, 0 is false and anything nonzero is true. Idk about NaN/inf.

[trickdacy@lemmy.world]

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.

[halfapage@lemmy.world]

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.

[Guest]

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!