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!
“Every country has exactly one “national” language.” - Switzerland meanwhile lol
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!
The last three I think are especially important - many people don’t really understand how political national flags can be and that they never really just represent a people/region/language in a completely unbiased way.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: come to think of it, this is less a programmer problem, and more of a UX problem. Obviously as programmers we need to take UX into consideration, but in all my products I’ve worked on, UX is specified already by a UX designer.
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.
I had assumed the author didn’t limit his statements to web browsers. If it’s an application on a user’s box, they should be using the language the OS provides.
In the case of less complex hardware, IoT or embedded devices with localization support, you would likely have another strategy if it doesn’t have a setup process. For something without internet or GPS, you can’t do this obviously. For something without a GUI, it’s unlikely to have localization support without direct design consideration for it’s destination.
- There is always only one correct way to spell anything.
“gray" and “grey” are both correct spellings of the color between black and white.
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.
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.
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.
Not sure about that one but the following one:
In each language, the words for yes and no never change, regardless of which question they are answering.
This happens in Danish actually. Example:
Kan du lide is? (Do you like ice cream?)
Ja
Kan du ikke lide is? (Do you not like ice cream?)
JoSo in Danish we have “ja” which means “yes” but “jo” is used instead when answering a negative question, so as to confirm what the negative question asked. This is kind of annoying in English cause if you ask “Do you not like ice cream?” then if you say “yes” does that mean “yes I like ice cream” or does it mean “yes I do not like ice cream”? That’s what “jo” disambiguates.
English used to have this! Yea/nay for positive, and yes/no for negative I believe. The former fell out of common use.
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!
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.
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.
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”?
I don’t know any Vietnamese, but I suspect it would be as awkward of an answer as “not no” in English.
I’m sure it would. But in many languages a double negative just reinforces the negative. Hence the question.
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).
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.
