Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 478 posts

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

#61

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

frockington wrote: post #55
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.

What is the proper use of curly versuss straight quotation marks? Do they serve a purpose other than style?

They provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many other features (take a look at e.g. Oxford University Press’s in-house style guide) – have been a feature of professional English-language typesetting. The public has grown used to them, and typesetting that fails to employ such things tends to look cheap and amateur (and therefore untrustworthy and not worth buying or citing) to a readership that publishers are trying to target.

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

#62

Post by nutjob2 »

The internet has given impetus to the global adoption of English becuase that is how most of the internet's functionality is exposed.

The internet supports many languages, but if you want the latest/best/coolest stuff tends to appear in English, especially for young people, but they are the ones who are most likely to adopt a new language.

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

#63

Post by wallflower »

In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1].

China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].

It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.

In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

[2] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

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

#64

Post by megaman22 »

ajross wrote: post #8
gaius wrote: post #4

English is the de facto lingua franca, and the fact I can use that phrase and you all know what it means proves there’s no “taking over”, English is uniquely welcoming to others

> English is the de facto lingua franca The fact that the idiom you picked there uses Latin to tell us that English is like French tells you everything you need to know about this status. It's ephemeral in the long term. I don't know what our grandkids' children will be speaking. It certainly could be English or Mandarin. But languages change, even on this scale. Certainly there's economic value in having a universal…

Mandarin is hamstrung by an impossible writing system, even in its various alphabetization schemes, so I do not see that as a reasonable winner. It simply requires too great an effort to reach functional levels of reading and writing proficiency, compared to competitors.

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

#65

Post by PoachedSausage »

opportune wrote: post #49
chillacy wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that like saying pressure waves are the universal spoken language, so it doesn’t matter if English wins, it’s all pressure waves at the end of the day.

Fundamental particles are the universal spoken language because all communication must be done through their interactions

Technically, and to quote the film Pi[0], "Mathematics is the language of nature".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(film)

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

#66

Post by jejones3141 »

The influence still goes both ways--I read that American movie studios cut out dialogue that they don't think foreign viewers will understand because of English-specific wordplay or culture-specific references. (See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-10/saving-ho...)

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

#67

Post by forkLding »

This English dominance is pretty strong in coding, most Chinese coders in China use English to code because programming languages are written in English (aka the if loops and more advanced and they occassionally sprinkle in Chinese characters as variables, comments can also be Chinese) and I've seen Latin American friends using English as well to code when they come over and can't speak English well even. It is pretty much the lingua franca in coding.

Its an expected but quite interesting phenomenon.

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

#68

Post by nerfhammer »

protomyth wrote: post #14
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

Also (unusually?) English retains some semblance of the original spelling of words borrowed from numerous other languages and dialects

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

_rpd wrote: post #40

The internet is mentioned in passing, but the reason that English is dominating is that the vast majority of science, engineering and academia in general is published in English, and then is quickly added to the English language Wikipedia. If you want to be at the cutting edge of global technology, it is just easier (and sometimes important) to be able to read English directly. Translations can be problematic, partic…

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by Sir_Cmpwn »

I think instead of chiding people who use English as a second language "poorly", we should look at their mistakes for what they are - the influence of another language - and see if we can't incorporate the ideas that caused them into English, if the ideas are good. Newspeak isn't fiction, languages really do shape how you think. We should continue evolving English to be suitable for expressing more modes of thought.
Post reply on HN