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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)

#141

Post by mekoka »

Looking into the history of American English hints at why it's so powerful. It was designed for pragmatism over elitism, to favor a broad adoption of a writing system for a population of then recent immigrants, many of whom were not native English speakers or had had little access to education. Its original purpose is practicality. It only gradually became considered a viable intellectual alternative to British English with the output of American literature, from writers who were educated with it.

Most of that revolution is attributed to Noah Webster. To give some example of how it just made sense, he favored "or" over the British "our" in words such as "color" and "odor", "ter" over "tre" in "theater" and "center", "z" over "s" in "civilization" and "analyze", "e" vs "ae" in "archeology" (Brits write it "archaeology") and "paleontology" ("Palaeontology"). And many more.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#142

Post by Uberphallus »

0815test wrote: post #90
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #47

I don't think English will stop being EU's lingua franca any time soon. Agreeing on a replacement would be politically impossible (the Germans wouldn't accept French, the French wouldn't accept German, the Spanish would have good arguments to make in any of both cases); and having several languages in equal status would just be not practical (you cannot realistically expect every EU citizen to know their native langu…

> Personally, I'm from Spain and I'm not annoyed or upset about English being the lingua franca. I think we should abandon the idea of English "belonging" to its native speakers. When I talk to people from Germany, from China, or from Vietnam, for example our common language is almost always English, even if neither of us are natives. Agreed. The EU should do the needful.

Have you passed out your English classes?

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#143

Post by yorwba »

born2discover wrote: post #128
rofo1 wrote: post #29

The 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…

While English might be the language of "our time", I wonder for how long? With China's expansion and their almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin, I am wondering whether in the next 20 years we'd see a shift towards people learning Mandarin instead of English. "We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is i…

> almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin

Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers.

[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#144

Post by Oreb »

lucb1e wrote: post #67
tluyben2 wrote: post #8

Pick 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.

I've never tried to learn Dutch, but I found German _much_ easier to learn than English. The German grammar and spelling are so regular, consistent and simple compared to English.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#145

Post by jonathanstrange »

kowdermeister wrote: post #43
rofo1 wrote: post #29

The 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…

> The language of our time is English. And tomorrows language is mandarin. Let's not write off that 1.1B speakers. With the rate China is expanding its influence in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years not speaking mandarin wouldn't look a bit odd.

There are many reasons why Mandarin will not become the next lingua franca, most importantly the writing system which unifies China but is even hard for Chinese to learn. As it looks now, it seems more likely that more and more Chinese will become fluent in English and that some English - possibly including a lot of Chinese loannwords - will be the most widespread language in the 100 years from now.

But I think you were downvoted for the wrong reasons, since otherwise the argument is fairly sound. Chinese influence is continually increasing world-wide. It's mainly the writing system that prevents a wider spreading of Mandarin, and the Chinese cannot give it up because it unifies their nation. Another possible scenario is that other languages of China die out even more quickly than they already do now, thus paving the way to full mutual comprehensibility via Mandarin, which would then allow a drastic reform of the writing system. However, this seems unlikely to occur within the next 100 years.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#147

Post by anoncake »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #58
rofo1 wrote: post #29

The 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 is only the smallest common denominator really, and it hurts to hear Germans speak English imprecisely, stereotypically, or plain incorrectly. I'm far from being a language nationalist or something, but I think the EU (parliament, comission) should take the opportunity to move away from English, and begin to speak and publish in the "Common Tongue" (German, French, etc.) instead.

But is hearing Frenchpeople speak German really much of an improvement? At least everyone's English is about equally broken.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#148

Post by anoncake »

Xylakant wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same held for all the other countries. Except for the UK of course.

Well, I have no objection on english being the de-facto lingua franca. But my position on english being the only official language is certainly not as simple. And the same is true for german, french or any of the other official languages of the EU - neither of them are or should be the only official language in such a multilingual construct as the EU. So I share the ambassadors rejection of the notion to only use eng…

English is an official language of Ireland and Malta.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#149

Post by jddj »

Chris2048 wrote: post #119
sgift wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The British position was special for at least three reasons: - British state doctrine has always been: We are the empire, the natural rulers of the world. We only live by chance near the rest of Europe, so we have to interact with the continent at bit more - Britain was a net payer. We may strive for that to not be relevant, but if you pay you have influence - Britain got many exceptions to the usual rules that allow…

> Britain got many exceptions to the usual rules that allowed them to further their position Can you explain what you mean?

I'm not GP, but the UK has negotiated four opt-outs (you could also include Cameron's pre-referendum requests). This is more than any other EU country.

The economic and monetary union (the euro), Schengen, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and "the area of freedom, security and justice".

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