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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

#231

Post by WalterBright »

dorchadas wrote: post #153
raverbashing wrote: post #90

English 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 stand…

"Although the Chinese were using woodblock printing many centuries earlier, with a complete printed book, made in 868, found in a cave in north-west China, movable type printing never became very popular in the East due to the importance of calligraphy, the complexity of hand-written Chinese and the large number of characters. Gutenberg’s press, however, was well suited to the European writing system, and its development was heavily influenced by the area from which it came."

http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180507-how-a-german-city-c...

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

#232

Post by VierScar »

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/

English is combination and splice of several languages. A few hundred years ago, writers found it much more extravegent to borrow French words, and Latin words, to say the same phrases. Usually, English is the most 'plain', then the French equivalent/derived, and then Latin is the most eloquent descriptor.

For example: Kingly (English), Royal (French), Regal (Latin)

We will borrow words from other languages with no problem - it just needs to become common enough. We have no "English Acedemy" that dictates the language - although you could argue that is a problem, given how it's been changed in America and abused by everyone, and has complex exceptions with no real decent rules (Although as an English native speaker, I'm not sure if that's just because I havent learnt those rules recently)

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

#233

Post by blattimwind »

tbrock wrote: post #116
geff82 wrote: post #99

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…

It’s also the lingua franca of tech. There isn’t any way to say “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” or “8-Way associative cache” in French or any other language without severe lingual contortions.

Netzwerksubsystem des Linux-Systemkerns

achtfach assoziativer Zwischenspeicher

This is of course cheating since these two languages are fairly close to each other (although Technical German tends to be more descriptive and somewhat more accurate than Technical English on average, at least that's my overall impression across a bunch of fields). Both also happen to have a full complement of technical and engineering terms for almost anything (including computers due to some parallel developments), though these are often not so related (esp. mechanical eng.)

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

#234

Post by adventured »

ochoseis wrote: post #38

The article glosses over the fact that the US (and to a lesser extent UK) is a great exporter of its culture and language through movies, TV, and music. This is aided by the fact that the US has a values-based society where you don't need to be of a particular race or ethnicity to identify with it. I can't tell you how many people I've met traveling abroad who learned English by watching American shows and films.

> I can't tell you how many people I've met traveling abroad who learned English by watching American shows and films.

That essentially encompasses everyone that learns English well. It's the exception that doesn't aggressively use English media to accelerate their learning of the language. On a basis of living in the language to learn it, consuming US & British culture through media is the single best and easiest way to do it (if you aren't able to constantly be around other English speakers). Plus, it's a lot more fun than doing it solely the rote way.

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

#235

Post by WalterBright »

jcranmer wrote: post #89
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…

Double negatives are grammatically correct English. Consider the sentence, "I do not think that course of action would be unwise."--that is a double negative, and I know of no one who thinks there's even a hint of problem with that sentence. 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 jamai…

A double negative in English often is used for emphasis, not to create a positive:

"Not no-how, not no-way!"

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

#236

Post by 628C6l0 »

nneonneo wrote: post #179
acchow wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Linux Kernel Networking Subsystem” How do they say this in Japanese? In Chinese (Mandarin/Cantonese)?

In Chinese, "Linux内核网络系统", literally "Linux Kernel Network System". Unlike Japanese and Korean, the Chinese language generally uses full meaning-to-meaning translations of technical terms as much as possible, and only occasionally uses phonetic nouns (e.g. 安卓 "Anzhuo" for Android) or English words (e.g. "Linux"). Chinese does, however, use phonetic transcriptions for proper names of people and places. This leads to s…

Chinese in many respects is a more explicit language. Variables are generally required to "wear their types on their names". All the disease names contain the word disease (imagine if we must speak of "rabies disease" and "AIDS disease" as opposed to "rabies" and "AIDS"). Country names in general contain the word country, so you can tell from the name that France (lawful country) is a country whereas Chicago is not - something left implicit in English. (There are exceptions of course)

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

#237

Post by chrisseaton »

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.

> They simply cancel each other out

They don't! "I ain't got no bread" means "I haven't got any bread". If they cancelled out it would mean "I have bread".

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

#238

Post by rectangletangle »

jgh wrote: post #155
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…

tbh there are a lot of british accents that are hard to understand even for native english speakers.

The opposite extreme happens too, many English/Australians have trouble distinguishing Canadian and American accents (especially North-eastern US). Conversely Americans may have trouble distinguishing New Zealand and Australian accents.

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

#239

Post by pedrocr »

koboll wrote: post #87
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…

"The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination" 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 re…

>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.

How was that different north of the border?

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

#240

Post by nneonneo »

snowpanda wrote: post #209
reustle wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like リニキス カーネル ネットワークイング サブシステム It's basically English pumped though a lossy algo. I hate katakana and hope it dies soon.

What is katakana?

Japanese uses three distinct character sets in writing: Hiragana (a syllabary), Katakana (another syllabary) and Kanji (Chinese characters). Hiragana and Kanji are usually used together to write native Japanese words, whereas Katakana is used almost exclusively for loanwords.

Katakana syllables are either bare vowels, or consonant+vowel (with few exceptions), meaning that transliterated words must be contorted to fit the syllabary (the "lossy algo" referred to by the parent comment). So, something like "kernel" in English becomes kaa-ne-ru, and "subsystem" becomes "sa-bu-shi-su-te-mu".

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