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Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

theguardian.com

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Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#11

Post by gaius »

devoply wrote: post #5

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#12

Post by KozmoNau7 »

gaius wrote: post #11
devoply wrote: post #5

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.

Think of the wars over which language should win out.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#13

Post by blt »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #9

Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion…

Sure, that might be one factor, but the global imperialism of the British and United States is another huge factor.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#14

Post by protomyth »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #9

Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion…

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#15

Post by louprado »

One complaint about English is that double negatives are not grammatically correct. The word "not" is so important it should be re-enforced in someway. Spanish supports double negatives. The French add redundancy with "ne" and "pas".

It's worth noting that American gangsters often talk with double negatives and the U.S. military use the phrase "repeat NOT" since their discussions are often mission critical. But I am certain their are countless examples of harm because someone in a hurry, omitted the word 'not' in a discussion or email.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#16

Post by colanderman »

devoply wrote: post #5

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

This is the idea behind Esperanto, the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second, to avoid privileging native speakers and promulgating hegemony. (Granted, Esperanto vocabulary and orthography is quite Euro-centric.)

Learning a second language is difficult, especially one very unlike your native tongue. Native speakers of the de facto lingua franca always have a first-order advantage.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#17

Post by opportune »

The best point that the article touches on is that English is a good "neutral" language for countries like Sudan and entities like the EU with many different languages spoken. There is a bit of a snowball effect where any language having the advantage of being spoken as a cross-cultural communication language further incentivizes learning that language for people wishing to communicate in that manner. I think such a universal language existing is good for the world, it's just somewhat unfair how such a language gets chosen. English is an adaptable language, but I think much more importantly, English has been native language of one superpower or another for the past 200 years

I completely understand how someone would feel attacked by the fact that their children or grandchildren may not fluently speak the same language due to the influence of English. But at the same time, though the author somewhat dismisses it, this seems pretty nationalistic - though we shouldn't ignore that promoting English due to chauvinistic nationalism is just as silly.

I do think in the end, people will glad if in X*100 years the vast majority of the world will be able to communicate with each other in one language. The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#18

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #9

Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion…

> Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc

The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names.

> Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process

There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England (though there are of course lots of English-based pidgins/creoles). There does, interestingly, seem to be some truth in there being an increased 'simplification' as languages gain more speakers, but mainly at the level of morphology, and not necessarily in syntax/semantics or phonology. (For instance, English still retains /θ/ and /ð/, which are really rare sounds crosslinguistically, especially having both of them.)

Hindi is actually not so dissimilar to English in having been impacted by lots of different languages. Just as English is at its core a Western Germanic language (closely related to the Germanic languages of the low countries and neighbours), Hindi is at its core a northern Indo-Aryan language. But just as English was impacted by other Germanic languages (e.g. Norse) and then Norman French (itself a Romance variety acquired by Germanic speakers), and so forth, modern Hindi reflects the influence of a number of languages around the area of Delhi, including Punjabi, as well as heavy Persian influence (where Persian itself was already impacted by Arabic), and even retains some Turkic words carried into India by the Persianised Mughals, and then later on Portuguese and English.

English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#19

Post by bluGill »

BerislavLopac wrote: post #9

Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion…

In previous centuries French and Spanish were dominate. English emerged in the last century for political reasons, not because it was easy to speak/learn.

I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#20

Post by weberc2 »

blt wrote: post #13
BerislavLopac wrote: post #9

Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion…

Sure, that might be one factor, but the global imperialism of the British and United States is another huge factor.

Or even just the cultural exports due to British and US media (BBC, Hollywood, etc) or the desire to do business in wealthier markets.
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