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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

#351

Post by lgessler »

brendyn wrote: post #332
Pissompons wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There are some 7000 languages i the world, and maybe half of those even have a writing system at all, let alone libraries full of literature.

Does a work need to be written to have literary merit?

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

#352

Post by dmh2000 »

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…

as Americans, my wife and I laugh when we watch British TV shows because we can't understand half of what they are saying. Fortunately we have a DVR so we can repeat things 4 or 5 times to figure it out.

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

#353

Post by snowpanda »

jcranmer wrote: post #330
snowpanda wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is katakana?

The Japanese first adapted writing from Chinese; this adapted system is called kanji and is highly similar to, and often homographic with, Chinese hanzi. However, Japanese and Chinese have very different phonological structure: Chinese is mostly comprised of monosyllabic words, whereas Japanese has lots of polysyllabic words. This makes it more difficult to do phonetic transcription in Japanese kanji than in Chinese…

Thank you for explaining this to me! (And thank you to everyone else's comments too of course). This is fascinating.

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

#354

Post by raverbashing »

dorchadas wrote: post #253
WalterBright wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 develop…

It's more an issue of culture than anything. They preferred calligraphy, so not many things were done with moveable type (which did exist in China before Europe; it wasn't just woodblock printing). That said, there were still plenty of reports, up to the 19th century, of how widely things were printed and how cheaply they were available in China. The bigger issue is what the culture valued more than anything.

There is no cultural issue when one is between 10x and 100x harder than the other

Metallurgy probably evolved as well between the Chinese and Gutenberg systems

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

#355

Post by rmason »

It is all America fault. I think this British newspaper protests a bit too much.

Who was it that spread colonies around the world? Colonies where all schoolchildren were taught English?

America may get most of the credit or blame but the English did their part in spreading the language.

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

#356

Post by cageface »

The trend towards English isn’t universal. In Vietnam universities have just scrapped English as a requirement and replaced it with Chinese. And in tourist areas all over the country people are scrambling to learn Chinese in order to serve the deluge of Chinese tourists. I imagine this is going on in many other parts of Asia too, accelerated by China’s “Belt and Road” policy.

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

#358

Post by briandear »

moolcool wrote: post #140
chrisper wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then explain to me why the French are using Go, To etc. instead of TB and GB like everyone else?

They actively avoid loan words from English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_française#Anglicisms

The Academy encourages the avoidance of loan words, but very few people in France actually listen to the Academy. Spend ten minutes in any French tech company and the Academy goes out the window.

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

#359

Post by Pmop »

matt-snider wrote: post #315
zerb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

German just has a real knack for clarity and simplicity because of this composibility. Some examples I like: - Satzbau = Syntax: I always found it hard to remember what syntax meant. The German word, being the combination of "sentence" and "construction" requires no memorization - Teilchen = Particle: In German, "part" + domunitive ending - Jahrhundert, Jahrzehnt = century, decade: literally "year" + "hundred"/"ten"…

Laptop and notebook comes to mind. Maybe English does have this mechanism but to a less extent?

Interesting enough, Portuguese also does compounding to some extent (Bear in mind it's a romance language).

My favorite English feature is how you can pick a substantive and use it as a verb. Mostly makes sense, specially if there's evident connotation behind the substantive.

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

#360

Post by briandear »

mc32 wrote: post #346
felipemnoa wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages. P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation…

Isn't it vacancelle in French? Never heard fin de semaine... although most just say le weekend.

I have never heard vacancelle in France. But le week-end all the time. Even my kid’s school teachers used it. “Bon week-end!” Never heard fin de semaine even among my old country neighbors in Provence. My anecdote doesn’t make it fact of course. Most French people I know don’t pay any attention to the Academie Française.
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