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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)

#241

Post by born2discover »

yorwba wrote: post #143
born2discover wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Unfortunately it was from the top of my head, and I should have checked beforehand. Thanks for correcting me!

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

#242

Post by BlueTemplar »

sgift wrote: post #114
BlueTemplar wrote: post #100

And make official the EU being just an USA colony (see IT companies), just as the American Empire itself is waning. Such a wise move ! Meanwhile, Macron's proposal is impressively hypocritical(/real-political?), considering how much he has done to pump up English and diminish French...

Using a common language in the EU makes the EU a US colony ..? Because we share the same language as the US then?

No, it's not just about that, I mention it too (and the FA too, in a roundabout way). Why exaggerating what I said ?

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

#243

Post by anoncake »

jacquesm wrote: post #239
anoncake wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The English text is used as the reference by the various countries that have now implemented it, Is it? All EU laws are published in the official languages of all members. Legally, there are no translations but 22 texts that have equal status and the same meaning. Don't ask me what happens if the meanings turn out not to match exactly in a relevant way.

Has there been a case before the EU high court yet where there was a meaningful discrepancy between a local version and another that was deemed to be leading?

I've found an interesting text by the legal service of the European Commission that answers that question.

TLDR: That's why the EUCJ primarily relies on the intent of a law.

http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/agjacobs_summ... ("How to interpret legislation which is equally authentic in twenty languages")

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

#244

Post by anoncake »

liopleurodon wrote: post #177
achamayou wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French here, I absolutely agree. Specifically, American English would be preferable because it is what’s spoken widely outside Europe, and its spelling is somewhat more regular (as well as historically accurate!). I wonder to what extent coming up with a new name for it would help adoption.

Upvoted for American English The English tend to speak English better and have better grammar than Americans in my experience, but I do prefer American spelling (disclaimer: I'm American)

No. Like everyone else, Americans by definition speak their native language perfectly. There may very well be stylistic differences and you can aesthetically prefer a dialect, but native speakers do not commit grammatical errors.

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

#245

Post by NotPaidToPost »

jobigoud wrote: post #235
NotPaidToPost wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the wording is rather clear that it was about English. Note that the author stealthily added a precision to his comment (which originally ended at "why regress?") since then to make clear it was about having a common language. But he has not removed the offending part.

Adopting another language as our lingua franca when English is already filling that role would be a regression. It's not saying other languages are inferior per se, they might be superior. But using any other would be an inferior choice now. It doesn't mean we can't add local flavors to it. I am a French native speaker and I also think we should just use English and move on as a species. Interpersonnal communication…

'move on as a species'? How arrogant and offensive is that? Basically a cultural genocide.

A language carries with it a whole culture and history. Diversity enriches everyone.

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

#246

Post by jacquesm »

anoncake wrote: post #243
jacquesm wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been a case before the EU high court yet where there was a meaningful discrepancy between a local version and another that was deemed to be leading?

I've found an interesting text by the legal service of the European Commission that answers that question. TLDR: That's why the EUCJ primarily relies on the intent of a law. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/agjacobs_summ... ("How to interpret legislation which is equally authentic in twenty languages")

Thank you for digging that up! This also explains a couple of other things that I was wondering about.

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

#247

Post by akvadrako »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #231
akvadrako wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc... > I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. Do you mean esperanto doesn't have those features (regular, small vocab, phonetic) or that those features don't make a language easier to learn? Because either claim sounds farfetched.

Yes, both sound farfetched because "easier to learn" does not imply "easy to learn". Those characteristics do make the language easier to learn, but its Indo-European lineage (that I have detailed in the sibling comments) makes it much harder to learn for non-Indo-European speakers.

The point is it's easier than all other human languages, not that it's easy in some objective sense - I don't even know what that would be.

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

#248

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

s_dev wrote: post #124
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fine opinion to have but I happen to have the opposite opinion. A thought has the same meaning in any language. And we actually waste energy in translation and slow humanities' progress with language barriers. I really do wish we all spoke the same language. I feel like I gain nothing by not being able to communicate effectively with some subset of people. This is obviously not a very popular opinion of mine…

>I really do wish we all spoke the same language. Just contemplate how if someone suggested all computer languges should be just become C because things would be easier. It's even more important that we have diversity for natual languages imo -- after all onece you've a Turing Complete language one is the same as the next but we know how silly and inconvenient that would really be.

I'll bite.

Computer languages are more about building a machine than communicating a human idea. Human languages are more about human things. We're all human and therefore should speak the same language.

Computer languages are sometimes so similar and help you build a similar type of machine. Think of ruby, JS, python, etc. All work very similar internally. I really wish we could pick one language (in a particular domain, say scripting) and have a monoculture. It saddens me when libraries need to be rewritten N times. I don't think there's anything silly about it. Web browsers could have picked python instead of JS, Rails could have picked python, and we would have been better off for it.

It's just a silly accident of history that we have what we have today.

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

#249

Post by flurdy »

isolli wrote: post #57
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 has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.

To quote Paul Lewis [1]:

"English is the JavaScript of natural languages: easy to begin with, entirely bonkers, but used so widely you can't really avoid it."

[1] https://twitter.com/aerotwist/status/1129820477667586051

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

#250

Post by anoncake »

Uberphallus wrote: post #142
0815test wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

No, they demonstrated the official language of the future Indo-European Union.

("Do the needful" is Indian English)

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