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.
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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.
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.
yup I too remember getting YouTube ads in Hungarian when I was there as a tourist - despite not understanding Hungarian at all and watching videos only in other languages, they really ought to know 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!
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”?
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!
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.
Do you know the etymology of these words? My understanding is that they aren’t exactly “Yes” but more “As you say” or something similar. But I am no arabicist.
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!
I think Latin doesn’t really have words for yes and no.
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.”
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).
- There is always only one correct way to spell anything.
“gray" and “grey” are both correct spellings of the color between black and white.
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.
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“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
Middelfart? :-D
It’s not too smelly, but it’s not completely benign either.
The great city of Middelfart ;) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelfart
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
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.
“splitting on end-of-sentence punctuation” would not split on 8.9 though!?
There are languages that don’t have the concept of “punctuation” at all.
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
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.
