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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

#261

Post by jopsen »

WalterBright wrote: post #211

The article laments the loss of oral languages as if this was a modern phenomenon. Oral languages were always being lost, for the simple reason that they drift. It's doubtful an oral language would be intelligible to its descendants after only a century or two. Writing slows this down a lot, but what really slowed it down was the advent of the printing press. It's still drifting. New words like "sexting" appear, and…

That's very true. Languages have always been drifting.

With the internet it's just that we're drifting more and more towards English.

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

#262

Post by oneweekwonder »

PoachedSausage wrote: post #65
opportune wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fundamental particles are the universal spoken language because all communication must be done through their interactions

Technically, and to quote the film Pi[0], "Mathematics is the language of nature". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_(film)

I always thought of math more as a abstraction layer.

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

#263

Post by xxpor »

dorchadas wrote: post #193
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. One of the most enjoyable things I used to find about travel was experiencing and dipping into other cultures and trying out a little local language picked up from phrase books etc. These days people seem to prefer practising their English on me as I'm a native English spea…

> Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor. Not even all Indo-European ones. It's absolutely awful at trying to translate to and from Irish, for instance.

Probably because it doesn't have full official status at the EU. Google has a ton of data for EU languages because documents have to be translated between them all.

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

#264

Post by weberc2 »

blt wrote: post #81
oh_sigh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

During the peak of British colonialism, French was the...lingua franca... of the diplomatic and academic world.

yes, I agree British colonialism is not a sufficient condition for making English the dominant language. that does not invalidate my original statement.

I can’t imagine imperialism was a significant factor. Relatively few people need to interface with the imperialist power; but the new wealthy market imperialism makes available to you incentivizes you to learn the language of that market.

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

#265

Post by gpvos »

pedrocr wrote: post #239
koboll wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Not. But koboll was extending this from English to other languages.

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

#266

Post by jopsen »

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…

I don't know about French, but when I learned Danish in school we were definitely impacted by the standards body on the Danish language.

Sure, it doesn't change things overnight, but generation by generation these standard bodies can slowly but steadily push how grammar is taught in school and what language the is used in the media.

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

#267

Post by nneonneo »

matz1 wrote: post #249
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…

>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 m…

In China, everyone takes compulsory English courses from a fairly young age. Due to the importance of it as a school subject, preschool children are regularly placed into English classes to help them get an early leg up on the language.

In the US of A and most other English speaking countries, nobody bothers learning anything but English; the minority of people who do learn a second language tend to go for something relatively easy like French or Spanish.

While this says nothing about the inherent difficulty of learning these languages, it does speak to the differing language learning priorities at a national level.

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

#268

Post by geff82 »

Pissompons wrote: post #242
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 is the language of great literature The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.

I agree of course that there are many languages in which great literature is produced. I just happen to find that books, be it fiction or non-fiction, written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader.

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

#269

Post by [deleted] »

weberc2 wrote: post #257
jcranmer wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hollywood has in the past made films that were pretty explicitly propaganda. Look at all of the propaganda films of World War II, and those weren't forced production by the US government. Granted, at that point, the propaganda was for domestic consumption, not foreign consumption. Furthermore, other countries definitely use films and film exports for propaganda--China really comes to mind here.

I’m not familiar with such films. Are you positing that propagandist films are the norm or the exception?

[deleted]

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

#270

Post by zerb »

blattimwind wrote: post #233
tbrock wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 te…

"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding.

As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.

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