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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

#101

Post by raverbashing »

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…

Not plausible, they would still have 2 members where English plays an important role: Ireland (though not the 1st official language) and Malta

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

#102

Post by dogprez »

craftyguy wrote: post #80
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/

'Lingua franca' is a Latin borrow phrase that literally mean "Frankish Tongue". It has a specific meaning and nuance in English, it doesn't mean Italian:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca

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

#103

Post by albertgoeswoof »

physicsguy wrote: post #73
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 wa…

I’m a British native that works almost entirely with people with English as their second language, mostly remotely. To be effective you need to adapt your language and accent to fit the global English style, and adapt to individual dialects on a country by country basis. It seems a little counter intuitive, but English is genuinely a global language and not owned by the English anymore, so it’s important to adapt to fit that if you want to be understood.

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

#104

Post by weberc2 »

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.

I’m guessing computers will get really good at translating between a at least a handful of prominent world languages. Think a fantastic Google translate with a flawless UI.

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

#105

Post by jcranmer »

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…

The EU leaning on English even more heavily after Brexit is already likely, since there's no longer a large country that would benefit from having the core language. Note that EU working English isn't exactly the same English as we're used to--there's a tendency to use some false cognates that are common across Romance (e.g., using "assist" where native English speakers would mean "attend").

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

#106

Post by Koshkin »

physicsguy wrote: post #73
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 wa…

I guess that does say something about English being a "good" international language. Native speakers, too, often have extremely hard time understanding foreign accents and even some "almost-native" accents; mutual understanding is an even more difficult problem for non-native speakers. This has to do with the unusual character of English vowels compared to the "continental" languages. For example, if you hear an English speaker read Latin, you would never guess it is Latin: the "say it right" guides tell one to pronounce 'e' as 'ay' etc.

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

#107

Post by WalterBright »

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…

I once visited a customer in Finland. In the office, they spoke english around me. Curious, I asked if they were just being polite by speaking english instead of Finnish when I was present.

They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.

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

#108

Post by NihilumExNil »

sudosteph wrote: post #79

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…

> ... the "status" of English by making it more latinized (things like, not ending sentences in prepositions).

very interesting, that's something I'd really need to learn more about it.

But how much of that is common sense, or French influence?

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

#109

Post by Koshkin »

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #103
physicsguy wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’m a British native that works almost entirely with people with English as their second language, mostly remotely. To be effective you need to adapt your language and accent to fit the global English style, and adapt to individual dialects on a country by country basis. It seems a little counter intuitive, but English is genuinely a global language and not owned by the English anymore, so it’s important to adapt to…

> global English style

I am afraid there's no such thing.

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

#110

Post by albertgoeswoof »

gabordemooij wrote: post #98

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 pe…

Death threats? Sorry to hear that. The project looks awesome!

European languages won’t die just because English is around, there are millions of people in Europe that don’t interact on a national or international scale, and are quite happy to continue with their language as it stands, that won’t change for a long time.

I think your project is a really great idea! Code often doesn’t translate well when variable and object names are poorly suggested due to translation issues, and there must be billions of lines of code that are limited to specific languages, which are locked out to non-speakers. Can I suggest you focus more on the language benefits on the home page? Did you think about applying this technique as a transpiler to an existing programming language instead of a new language?

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