Friday, November 28, 2008

Pythonic English

I'm learning English for decades and still haven't mastered it yet. What confuses me most are articles (a, an, the), tense, and pronunciation like "l", "r" difference. Instead of learning English, let's modify English referencing The Zen of Python.

Simple is better than complex.
In Japanese, there's no future tense nor
perfect form. When we talk about something in the future we use present tense, like "I do homework soon" and when we need to mean that it's not present, we use a word indicating time, e.g. "We go shopping next Sunday". The fact that there's a language without them means it's not necessary. Let's remove them from English. How about past tense? Do we need them? "I went to school yesterday" can be "I go to school yesterday". No problem, let's remove it as well.

Explicit is better than implicit
Articles are nightmares to me. What people knows from articles are,

the: if something is specific or not.
a, an: if the number is one or not.

Let's make them explicit by replacing "a" and "an" to "one", and "the" to "this" or "that". "I have an apple" can be "I have one apple", "The earth" can be "this earth" or "that earth". Good.

If the implementation is hard to explain, it's a bad idea.
Native people often have difficulty in explaining the difference between "l", "r" pronunciations. Let's remove "r" sound from English.

Isn't it a good idea? Let's make it world common. Now is better than never.

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