Living in working in the Berlin tech world, English is already the official working language in most companies. Even as I german i have no problem with this, my only gripe is that it makes it very hard for my non-german colleagues to learn german.
EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
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Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
The majority of western media and communication is in English. This would be a humongous waste of time and resources.
And in other centuries they were in French (the language of diplomacy), Latin, and Greek. Things change, and now is not the best time for the US empire (and UK has lost its imperial reach decades ago) -- so the "common" language could change too in 50-100 years.
The cultural, scientific, and commercial works that have been created in English in the past 100 years dwarf anything created in French or Latin by a gigantic order of magnitude.
Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code... English will never lose its position because of the amount of value that has been created with it.
How could English ever possibly change (in the way that Latin morphed into the various European languages after the fall of the Roman Empire), when we have access to perfect digital copies of how it is spoken and written?
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#63Chinese would be even better
Just because it's spoken by more native speakers than any other language that doesn't automatically make Mandarin more relevant in a global context.
English is a global language due to its history (largely grounded in the British Empire's colonial history). Mandarin on the other hand in a global context as of today is still largely irrelevant because it's only spoken in one country, even as that country is as globally relevant as China.
That might change in the future but unless you specifically deal with China and Chinese businesses Mandarin is no more relevant on a global level than - say - Russian or German.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#64The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact. We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other. Everyone learning a…
For adults it is easy to move across the EU: you can work and socialise using in English. But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately? This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as…
Sounds like a dystopian future to me.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#65The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact. We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other. Everyone learning a…
For adults it is easy to move across the EU: you can work and socialise using in English. But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately? This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as…
Renato Constantino, Filipino historian, argues persuasively that children should be educated in their natal tongue. Largely a political essay, also discusses language issues like a child having to learn a language not spoken in the home before they can begin to learn.
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7735/865e2ea8fd8d9662f3916f...
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's get your facts straight: > Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. ...only for many Indo-European speakers.
Esperanto was designed to be easy to learn and to lack many of the special cases and "gotchas" present in every natural language. There are probably many cases where it would be easier for a native of some language to learn a specific similar language (i.e. for a Dutch speaker to learn German, or a Portuguese speaker to learn Spanish), but I would not be surprised if Esperanto minimizes the cost function for the net…
(While Zamenhof tried hard, unfortunately,) False.
- The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues. It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.
- Rhotic consonants are particularly hard to pronounce correctly even for many ESL learners, and yet Esperanto retains them.
- Esperanto by itself does not have a word order, but it does have a preferred word order of Subject-Verb-Object which is equally probable as Subject-Object-Verb but much more familiar to Indo-Europeans.
- I think Esperanto, in spite of its original premise, has picked idioms and phrases up as well, as common in every old enough language.
It is now widely accepted that the difference between the native tongue and the target language greatly impacts the learning curve. If Esperanto does succeed, it would not be due to the easiness, because the easiness would be highly subjective.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#67Pick a language, any language, but adopt it as official. It won't happen though. Germany, France, Spain, Italy and even Belgium are all way too proud. I am, for instance, a big fan of the Flemish language and the German language, but it is just not practical to keep them if you want to promote a united EU. But being Dutch I am for cooperation/trade; many people do not think like that and think their language and ways…
Fellow Dutch speaker here. Why in the world are you a big fan of our language? Just because it's your own? And German, just because it's so close? Both languages are horrible to learn compared to English.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#68Pick a language, any language, but adopt it as official. It won't happen though. Germany, France, Spain, Italy and even Belgium are all way too proud. I am, for instance, a big fan of the Flemish language and the German language, but it is just not practical to keep them if you want to promote a united EU. But being Dutch I am for cooperation/trade; many people do not think like that and think their language and ways…
咱们都应该说中文。
I do not disagree, but that will not happen :] Even English won't happen before I die, and that would not be a hard switch.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#69The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact. We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other. Everyone learning a…
English has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.
The fact that it has so lany dialects that are frequently explored in popular media too means its a language that can be spoken poorly and still be understood. The listener bears some of the cognitive load and many other languages arent as advanced in this regard.
Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
#70The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact. We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other. Everyone learning a…
> You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.
British empire was (almost) 1/4 - it was never close to 1/3 of the world.
Even at its peak, English language wasn't as widespread as now. The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin.
After WW2, US absolutely dominated the world coming off as the only victor in WW2 (that's my personal opinion) and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world (over time), undisputed. The end of the cold war cemented this even further.
We can argue that British imperialism helped somewhat, that I agree with.