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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

#91

Post by NihilumExNil »

nutjob2 wrote: post #62

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.

not only that but it comes with access to learning material built in. Still though, English is probably not the majority spoken language, much less absolute majority, even on the net, especially if proficiency is a factor.

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

#92

Post by lloda »

RightMillennial wrote: post #43
louprado wrote: post #15

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…

English does have double negatives, and they're grammatically correct when used properly. They simply cancel each other out which differs from Spanish where they add emphasis.

Spanish double negatives aren't emphatic, they're 'grammatical'. If you need one ('Nadie lo sabe') you cannot add another one for emphasis, and if you need two ('No lo sabe nadie') you cannot remove one for less emphasis.

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

#93

Post by drexlspivey »

bluGill wrote: post #19
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.

> 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.

It is a fact. From wiki:

"During the time of the Hellenistic civilization and Roman Empire, the lingua francas were Koine Greek and Latin. During the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Greek in the parts of Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa where the Byzantine Empire held hegemony, and Latin was primarily used in the rest of Europe. Latin, for a significant portion of the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church, was the universal language of prayer and worship"

Also the new testament was written in greek.

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

#94

Post by sudosteph »

wcoenen wrote: post #83

Thought experiment, or maybe just a crazy thought: what if the European Union would prefer to stop using English after a hard Brexit and starts looking for an alternative lingua franca . 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 fo…

I say not plausible at all, and I'm a fan of Esperanto. If Esperanto is going to get adopted anywhere, it would have to start in the far east (China mostly). The fact that Esperanto has phonetic pronunciation that matches the spelling of words, strongly regular grammar, and latin roots that make learning French or English easier makes it more plausible that it would mostly appeal to a nation which needs to improve literacy and communication quickly for economic reasons, and doesn't want the cultural baggage of another nation's language would choose it. Also, Esperanto has some socialist roots to it that could appeal to China.

Europe had a chance to embrace esperanto back in the day, gave it a heck no. And without English, the default lingua franca, would definitely be French.

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

#95

Post by Symmetry »

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…

Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese.

That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.

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

#96

Post by ProfessorLayton »

jotm wrote: post #34
louprado wrote: post #15

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…

I meant, it's pretty well reinforced with capitalization or accentuation when speaking ("do NOT! do this"). You're saying in Spanish you can accentuate it like this: "do not, NOT do this"?

That translates to:

Verbatim: "No hagas, NO hagas esto" (Do not, do NOT do this)

or

"No, no hagas esto" (No, don't do this)

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

#97

Post by jcranmer »

opportune wrote: post #48
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is 'English grammar'? (Hopefully you don't mean spelling.) And what are examples of such exceptions? (English doesn't strike me as having any more exceptions in morphology or syntax than any other language, and has a simpler morphology than many languages.)

A lot of English's exceptions are things we hardly notice as native speakers. For example, we have a lot of irregular verbs. Of course other languages also have these, but oftentimes they fit into more neat patterns or small verb classes as in Spanish. Using verbs together is more complex than in other language (when do you add the word to?). We have a lot of nouns that you treat specially, like glasses/pants/deer. E…

Verb irregularity is often overstated as a complexity in English. For example, my French-English gives 120-ish different classes of verb conjugation, but most people would say that it has ~4-ish classes, plus some simple modifications on top of that, plus random exceptions here and there. If you tried to group English verbs into similar conjugation classes, you'd arrive at probably a smaller number. It's just that, because English has so little conjugation left, it's easier to list out all of the exceptions as a single list.

English's problems generally stem from the Great Vowel Shift destroying our spelling (and ruining the remnants of the Germanic ablaut system for conjugation), and, most importantly, our proclivity for borrowing foreign words with foreign spellings and foreign conjugations. Doubly so when we can't even conjugate the foreign words properly (it's supposed to be octopodes by that rule, not octopi; octopuses is perfectly functional reasonable).

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

#98

Post by gabordemooij »

Citrine (https://citrine-lang.org/ I am the author) tried to change this with respect to coding (it is a programming language that allows everyone to code in their own language and translate between parties). However, it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats). So it has failed and I realize that (I continue to finish it until 0.9 though, because I cant stop in the middle - I am a very neurotic person). It's hard for me. I feel hatred but I realize it just wasnt meant to be (but for some reason if something like this happens and you read an article like this the hate burns...). There is probably not even a way to save European languages anyway. So I just wanted to share this comment to let you know I was working on a technology that at least for coding tried to counter the influence of the English language and allows people to write code in their own language. However I also wrote this comment because I am very emotional because of the failure of this project. When I read an article like this - it's just ...unspeakable. Maybe I was too arrogant. Maybe the problem is too difficult. Maybe I interefered with some globalist agenda, maybe it's just Don Quixottish. Who knows? Anyway I had to share this train of thought. Maybe people just deserve to have their language (and culture) taken from them. Maybe it's just the way it is.

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

#99

Post by geff82 »

I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks English, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if English has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized Island in the Northern Sea.

Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.

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

#100

Post by jcranmer »

Analemma_ wrote: post #74
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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").

English is only roughly middling in terms of phonemic inventory (about 40). Romance languages tend to be on the phonemically sparse side of things, but Germanic languages have broader phonemic inventories. And while the thorn/eth are difficult to pronounce, I'll take those over Arabic's pharyngeals, thank you very much.
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