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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

#71

Post by NeedMoreTea »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #25
opportune wrote: post #17

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…

Computers will translate in real time. Binary is the universal language of classic computers based on electromagnetic physics. Assuming quantum computing or some other unforeseen technology doesn’t replace other forms of computing then we will likely all be relying on binary in one way or another.

Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor.

One of the most enjoyable things I used to find about travel was experiencing and dipping into other cultures and trying out a little local language picked up from phrase books etc. These days people seem to prefer practising their English on me as I'm a native English speaker.

I miss those global differences more and more as everyone adopts English and global brands.

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

#73

Post by physicsguy »

opportune wrote: post #17

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…

I'm a native (British) English speaker, and I actually can find it quite hard to communicate with non-native speakers, because they don't understand my accent. It's not particularly strong as British accents go (nothing like Glaswegian or Geordie for example), but it really caused problems when I moved to a research group which was made up of primarily English-as-a-second-language speakers. The other thing I found was that while their speaking ability was good, their written grammar was generally poor; I'm the resident proof reader in each of the places I've worked.

Many of the people spoke what is apparently described as 'Euro-English' which has many borrowed phrases from other languages, or what native English speakers would see as mistakes but which are relatively easy to understand between non-native speakers.

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

#74

Post by Analemma_ »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #31
xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English pronunciation is extremely hard. There are virtually no rules, you have to memorize pronunciation of each word individually. It is neither simple nor logical.

But you're really talking about orthography.

No, English is pretty rough in both orthography and phonology: while it's nowhere near as bad as e.g. Chinese, English has a large number of vowel sounds compared to most languages, and several uncommon consonants that many people struggle with if not exposed from birth.Note how many non-native English speakers, no matter what their first language, struggle with dental fricatives ("th").

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

#76

Post by physicsguy »

forkLding wrote: post #67

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 prett…

It can be quite difficult though; we had a Chinese PhD student in our research group and while his coding ability was amazing and everything 'just worked', decoding what he actually meant in many cases was very difficult.

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

#77

Post by bluecalm »

opportune wrote: post #17

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…

Military and economic domination sounds fair to me. Certainly better than chosen by unelected committee for example.

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

#78

Post by koboll »

wallflower wrote: post #63

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 a…

This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures.

Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.

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

#79

Post by sudosteph »

I was surprised that such an in-depth article about linguistic dominance had so little to say about Latin. Historically, Latin in Europe seems to have filled a very similar role to that of English today, though not at the same scale perhaps. Even languages that weren't full-on adaptations of Latin have adapted Latin alphabets and words. The modern English we speak today has funny little relics of Latin grammar norms that had been adopted for no apparent reason other than to improve the "status" of English by making it more latinized (things like, not ending sentences in prepositions).

Also, it's interesting that the author proposed > What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools?

Because I recall actually reading an article about how some schools in France were just now allowing the local language "Occitan" to be taught in some schools again, but historically they were very harsh on not allowing it. The fear back then was that if schools were allowed to teach in languages besides French, that the students would never bother learning French and would not be able to function as citizens. I think they've eased up, but I've seen that China has many of the same concerns about Mandarin adoption, especially in the far west portion.

I'm all for learning weird languages for the heck of it though. It's not like most people can actually recall and use the Spanish or French they learned in high school, so might as well teach something interesting to examine linguistic principles in general. I'm a fan of Esperanto for this because it's so easy, but every language has interesting differences (often with cultural implications) that learners can enjoy. But again, this is coming from a perspective of living in a country with the privilege of having English as the most common native tongue.

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

#80

Post by craftyguy »

wallflower wrote: post #63

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 a…

It's mildly interesting how you (and the article) use 'Lingua franca' (Latin) and not it's English meaning of 'common language'.

Edit: s/Italian/Latin/

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