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

Katakana [1] is one of the two syllabary writing systems in Japanese, with Hiragana [2] being the other. IIRC katakana is the one where every syllable starts with a consonant and ends with a vowel, so transliterated loan words with consecutive consonants end up growing vowels in the middle. They also have kanji (characters), and various romanization systems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese). It's really amazingly inefficient.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

GP referred to the Norman (French) invasion of England.

> It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.

The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer.

I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.

The article is incorrect in its description of South Korean children increasingly having their tongues snipped in order to pronounce English words better.

That procedure was only done rarely, as far as I can tell from about 2002 to 2004. Immediately attracting heavy news attention there was even a government-sponsored video to scare people away from the procedure, which is virtually non-existent today. Fret not, there are still plenty of other opportunities for plastic surgeons in South Korea...

One thing to notice, however, is that Korean people would even consider that their tongues aren't naturally suited for speaking English, that's to say that their tongues could be different from other tongues. The idea of minjok (민족, 民族), meaning ethnicity or race -- the word itself a loan from fascist Japan during the Japanese Empire when Korea was annexed, though most Koreans are unaware of this --, is so strong in South Korea that indeed it might not seem strange for Koreans to believe foreign pronunciation naturally unsuited to Korean tongues. Similarly I recently saw Korean packaging that portrayed Korean digestive tracts as longer and more complex than those of "foreigners". In the South this "race"-based consciousness is fading away, in part surely because of English, the language that allows South Koreans to connect to the world. In North Korea it is far far stronger. There, along with the cult of the leader, the minjok really is the national religion, adapted from fascist Japan, which itself learned it from the German military (which trained the Japanese Army, which occupied and ruled Korea) and more generally the racist West of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Not that they didn't have their own home-grown prejudices in the region. Far from it, sadly.

Edit: All this said, it's both hopeful and ironic that even in North Korea the kids study English.

>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].

Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.

Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?