Leading off with a word long naturalized from Hebrew suggests that perhaps the English language has all along been letting the planet take it over.
English is the Borg of languages.
Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
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Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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
The crazy thing about English is that some of the various crazy spellings were decided on a long time ago as a way to distinguish the linguistic origin of words (Greek vs. Latin vs. French, basically) for a reading audience that was highly educated, and in the 800 years since then nobody ever engaged in a systematic campaign of spelling reform.
In some ways, I think this reveals a lot about Anglosphere culture.
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#153English is the PHP of languages. Good enough to solve your problem, and easy to understand, but not really elegant (and not without its quirks). 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 ti…
> 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.
To be fair, they really don't have any effect on language as it's actually used. French people still say 'le week-end', despite how much the Académie raves about it. They still often drop the 'ne' in negative sentences as well, despite it being standard. Academies really only affect the written standards of a language, not how it's actually used daily.
> 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.
Except movable type printing was available in China from the 11th century onwards, and solely printed the Hanzi [1]. And, likewise, if the other technology had been designed in China, it's likely support would have first existed for the Hanzi over the Latinate Alphabet. It's not really an intrinsic advantage as much a matter of coincidence on where things were developed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing#Movable_ty...
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#154Thought 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…
There's no point to that, more than insulting the UK? And indirectly everyone else that already speaks a working english in the remaining EU.
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#155The 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…
tbh there are a lot of british accents that are hard to understand even for native english speakers.
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#156English 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…
Actually, the "franca" in "lingua franca" refers to the "Frankish" people, a term applied to a variety of Western Mediterraneans.
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#157English 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...
How many languages have these sub-languages "baked in"?
I don't know about all languages but Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin all have many formal and informal conjugations of words
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#158Thought 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…
If that happened, it would basically tell you that Brexiters made the right choice.
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#159This 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.
There are many coders like that all over the world though :-)
Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not plausible, they would still have 2 members where English plays an important role: Ireland (though not the 1st official language) and Malta
Most people in Ireland don’t speak Irish, English is just not the official language for political reasons
And you can be damn certain they wouldn't have picked Irish as their official language if the UK hadn't already selected English (same with Malta and Maltese). It was because they didn't have to choose between Irish and English that they were able to pick it at all.