81–90 of 478 posts
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Sure, that might be one factor, but the global imperialism of the British and United States is another huge factor.
During the peak of British colonialism, French was the...lingua franca... of the diplomatic and academic world.
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English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the…
I agree, it is very hard to master the special cases of English. A paper might communicate ideas with perfect clarity and still be filled with subtle mistakes. After entering STEM academia, I have been exposed to more English writing by non-native speakers. It made me appreciate the difficulty of mastering English. It also made me sympathetic to some deeper criticisms of English beyond the inconsistent spelling rules…
What if a EU directive was then issued, mandating Esperanto as a de jure national language in each of the member states, in addition to the existing national languages. Schools all over the EU start to offer it as the first choice for a second language to learn. Cultural works in Esperanto are subsidized.
Having established a big base of speakers and being constructed to be very easy to learn, the language then spreads virally and becomes the new global lingua franca.
Plausible?
English is also nice in that there is no "baked in" formal or informal use of the language. I think it breaks down barriers in conversations with a superior or a random stranger. I wonder if this has any larger scale effects...
English is also nice in that there is no "baked in" formal or informal use of the language. I think it breaks down barriers in conversations with a superior or a random stranger. I wonder if this has any larger scale effects...
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 wa…
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…
These things choose language, geography, and culture for virtually everyone on the globe. The entirety of the Americas south of the US border speak the languages they do because of the rape and genocide of their ancestors on a colossal scale.
Hell, English itself was borne out of repeated conquests, first the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, then the Normans.
Trying to disentangle yourself from the brutality of history is a losing battle.
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> 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.
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…
One facet of double negatives is that the English sense of negative + negative = positive isn't universal. In French, double negatives remain negative; consider "Je ne sais jamais rien." The literal translation is "I never know nothing," but the correct translation into English is "I never know anything."
And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve.
And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers. (Japanese systems had support for Katakana later, Cyrilic wouldn't be so complicated and Arabic probably would have been harder, Korean would be hard and Kanji would just be plainly impossible in 8-bit systems)