Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

european-views.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–267 of 267 posts

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

#261

Post by afiori »

anoncake wrote: post #244
liopleurodon wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking.

There is a well recognized concept of mastering a language, you can claim (and I would agree) that dialects are respectable languages and AAVE is a proper English. Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.

Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals and that some language are inherently "better" than others. Both are positions I would not like were they to become mainstream.

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

#262

Post by afiori »

kstenerud wrote: post #151
born2discover wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and having several languages in equal status would just be not practical - Sorry but I have to disagree here. Look at UN, they have Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish as official languages. Why is there an absolute must to only have one official language? Why not chose several most widely spoken ones, including English, and let each speaker chose the one that suits them best? I live in a country wh…

Because having multiple official languages adds more layers of bureaucracy to everything and amounts to a colossal waste of time and money. We have this in Canada, and outside of Quebec, nobody cares about the French language. In fact, many manufacturers specifically avoid Canada in some cases due to the requirement to put both English and French on the packaging. All government communication has to be written twice.…

In benelux it is even more extreme, there must be German/Luxembourgish French and Flemish/Dutch. often there is no longer space for English :)

Anyway globalization need to be respectful of local identities. It is one of the tenets of a multicultural society. By insisting that population leave behind their local languages you are either fragmenting countries or cooking up a dangerous backlash.

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

#263

Post by afiori »

kstenerud wrote: post #193
born2discover wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Switzerland where everything you've mentioned has to be done thrice (3 official languages: French, German, Italian), yet I am firm in my belief that it should be maintained. It's not about whether anybody cares about a specific language anywhere outside of a province. It's about maintaining a language as one of the elements of the culture and country's identity. If only criterion to keep or strike a languag…

I do agree that multiple languages are a good thing in general. I speak English, French, and Japanese fluently, and am now learning German. However, I also believe that bureaucracy should be minimized, especially at the federal level. And when it actively impedes the flow of goods and services (as it does in Canada because it's such a small market), you're throwing away far more than you gain.

EDIT: apparently I misunderstood the problem with Canada. This comment make less sense for this particular context. I still endorse the general point.

having labels in a language people can understand is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy would be having to compile every document in both languages.

A problem with multiple national languages (I have small experience of this living on the border between Germany and France and medium-short permanence in Benelux) is that if you have to write everything in two/three languages there is no space left for English to accommodate tourists.

On the other hand, if there is already an translation infrastructure it can maybe be adapted to one more language more easily....

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

#264

Post by afiori »

jacquesm wrote: post #116
Majestic121 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the same issue in Paris, I know some coworkers who have been living in France for more than 8 years, and still can't speak a reasonable French : barely able to order at a restaurant for exemple, definitely not able to hold a conversation. I'm not sure it is actually an issue, it just feels weird as a French person to discover that French is not even required in your own country.

> it just feels weird as a French person to discover that French is not even required in your own country. And why should it be? In big cities people tend to be more adaptive towards this than outside. If you go outside to the country side the situation will rapidly change. But in every major European capital it is most likely possible to get around on just English. I always make an effort when in France, Germany and…

Because if you live in a country for 8 years you are bound to encounter limits in where English can support you. Police, hospitals, local doctors, local elections, bureaucracy, food label and shops, information notice and warnings, verbose street sign for road works and many more.

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

#265

Post by harperlee »

tluyben2 wrote: post #12
peteretep wrote: post #7

> It will rid the French or the Germans of the temptation try to make their language the dominant one in the post-Brexit EU It really won't, especially the French.

Spain will fight tooth and nail as well. And Germany too. So no it really won't.

I’m from Spain, and it is surprising to hear someone say we will do that.

We have a huge inferiority complex, and our own cainistic version of the black legend, that makes us revere anything foreign as better than the local version. We have petty fights re. official languages about whether traffic signs should read “A coruña” or “La coruña”; or whether the national news anchor should say “Gerona” or “Girona” when speaking in spanish. We have regional governments that push spanish out of their regions. We as a nation obsess over english; we dream of speaking it better, we make it sound cool in the ads. We mock our leaders for not speaking it properly.

No one seriously pushes in a coordinated manner for spanish being used in the EU as seriously as the french or german do. At most, we aspire to be the proxy for latin america relationships.

As soon as anyone proposes to use english, we will see it as the opportunity to not have half of europe speak in french.

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

#266

Post by anoncake »

afiori wrote: post #261
anoncake wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking. There is a well recognized concept of mastering a language, you can claim (and I would agree) that dialects are respectable languages and AAVE is a proper English. Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information. Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone sp…

> This is silly. It is like saying that native bipedal humans do not stumble when walking.

In linguistics, there is a difference between errors and mistakes. Making an ungrammatical utterance is only an error if it's because the speaker's model of the language is wrong, i.e. because it differs from the one of a native speaker. This cannot happen to an adult speaker, except maybe in pathological cases or to children. Mistakes, however, happen all the time and to everyone.

> Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.

That is true. I thought it was clear that I was referring to native speakers' grammar when I replied to GP's claim that Americans have worse grammar.

Not being able to understand certain sentences isn't something that only applies to "some" native speakers either:

> A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves.

Of course, a sentence like this is unacceptable[1] despite being grammatical.

> Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals

I'm sorry to disappoint but that is the mainstream view. The language spoken by an individual is called an idiolect.

> and that some language are inherently "better" than others.

I can't follow. Why does the existence of idiolects imply that?

[1] That's the technical term for an utterance humans can't parse (except of course "manually" by analyzing it). This example demonstrates center embeddings. The brain probably fails to parse it because its stack overflows.

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

#267

Post by jacquesm »

afiori wrote: post #264
jacquesm wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it just feels weird as a French person to discover that French is not even required in your own country. And why should it be? In big cities people tend to be more adaptive towards this than outside. If you go outside to the country side the situation will rapidly change. But in every major European capital it is most likely possible to get around on just English. I always make an effort when in France, Germany and…

Because if you live in a country for 8 years you are bound to encounter limits in where English can support you. Police, hospitals, local doctors, local elections, bureaucracy, food label and shops, information notice and warnings, verbose street sign for road works and many more.

Doctors police and just about everybody else here speaks English, street signs are unified across the EU, road works you might get stumped but many navigators will deal with that just fine.

A friend of mine has lived in NL for 3 decades now and still does not speak Dutch, I'm sure he's an exception but he does not seem in any way hindered by this particular inability.

Post reply on HN