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French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

independent.co.uk

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Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#161

Post by mywittyname »

chrisbennet wrote: post #76
silicon2401 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally I can confirm those stats for Sweden. Some of the things I was blown away by in Sweden are: 1) Everyone's beautiful 2) Everyone's super tall. I'm 184cm and saw multiple women every day that were taller than me, let alone men. In the US it's quite rare for me to see women taller than me. 3) Everyone's rather slim. It's nice to see a population at healthier weights than what I'm used to in the US 4) Not onc…

184cm = 6ft

Okay, so this makes me wonder something.

So 6 foot tall (72in) is like a magic number for American men. That's like the threshold for manliness in popular culture. If you were to plot the self-reported heights men in America, you'd absolutely see a dip at 70 and 71 inches, then a big spike at 72in.

What's this magic number in various metric countries? 185cm seems like a sound choice, but I could see it being 190 in some places.

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#162

Post by adventured »

gumby wrote: post #35
throw737858 wrote: post #16

Why not arabic? French is kind of obsolete.

Mandarin would open the EU to the largest number of speakers. Spanish would be a good second, if English is politically untenable, but of course it's already an official EU language so choosing it might annoy the other states. Romansh is an European language not used in the EU; choosing it would level the playing field (and would not be so politically complex as another such like Basque).

> Mandarin would open the EU to the largest number of speakers

More people speak English than Mandarin and that language base represents a dramatically larger economy than Mandarin does.

The long-term trends favor English over Mandarin, not least of which is due to the difficulty of learning Mandarin vs English. The demographics underpinning Mandarin use are exceptionally bad in terms of direction, whereas the demographics underpinning English use globally are exceptionally good. The past 20 years has more than demonstrated the very low interest globally in Mandarin, despite the huge increase in China's importance and economy there has been no corresponding boom in the pick-up of Mandarin outside of China. In the next 20 years Mandarin will become a contracting language, while English will continue to expand globally. Over the time that China has been rapidly rising (since ~1990), English has only become more important globally, not less. Eventually, across this century, nearly as many people in China will speak English as Mandarin (they're very hard at work on achieving that; it'll be to their benefit and they full well know it).

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#163

Post by varajelle »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #90
dariusj18 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brussels being an phrase often used to mean EU governmental officials and diplomats.

Most of them live in Brussels and speak at least casual French.

You can live in Brussels just fine without speaking French

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#165

Post by anticensor »

throwawayay02 wrote: post #157
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you give Dutch politicians the choice of speaking French or Dutch with translators in an international meeting they will use English. But I don't think the French really care about how other cultures work. It's all nationalist nonsense and living in the glorious past for them. See Strasbourg.

Honest question, what about Strasbourg?

Did you mean Straßburg?

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#166

Post by dang »

Hamuko wrote: post #93
dang wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned on HN. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't see it as a "nationalistic flamewar" as much as "calling spade a spade".

I totally get that, but the thing is: what determines whether you're making a high-quality/substantive or low-quality/flamewar contribution has not only do with your perspective, but also that of the reader—or rather the distribution of reader perspectives that your comment is landing with.

The key thing to understand is that the value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

If you want an in-depth explanation of this, the best one I know of is this lengthy interaction I had a few weeks ago with a commenter in a similar situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161365. The in-depth portion starts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386.

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#167

Post by Apocryphon »

mannerheim wrote: post #56
Apocryphon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shame there's no real-world interest in the powers that be to officialize Esperanto.

What would be the point? Might as well make Klingon an official language.

It would be a cool sci-fi reference, yep.

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#169

Post by SllX »

heinrichhartman wrote: post #19

The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground! According to Wikipedia we have: * Germany: 56% English speakers, 14.5% French speakers * Italy: 34% English vs. 19.43% French * Spain: 22% English vs. 11.73% French * Sweden: 89% English vs. 8% French I can't get over how bad this decision is. How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies? [1] htt…

The EU has a 6-month rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

So this is the President of France postulating that when his country takes the Presidency next year, he will use that to push French to be the next working language. I don’t know what the President of the Council of Europe does besides Chair meetings, but apparently it includes setting the language for which the meetings will be held in.

So this isn’t something the EU as a whole has determined will be policy going forward, more like the first guy to drop his pants in a newly opened frontier for dick-waving. If this was something the President of the Council of the European Union could do unilaterally anyway, then my read is that Emmanuel Macron would have pulled this stunt, Brexit or no Brexit, and Brexit is just convenient political cover.

More likely this won’t last more than the 6 months that France has the Presidency, and it will be amusing to see if say, Hungary the next time they have the Presidency insists on high level communications in Hungarian.

Re: French set to replace English as EU’s ‘working language’

#170

Post by amilios »

d0mine wrote: post #54
MomoXenosaga wrote: post #10

I'm currently reading a book about the Congress of Vienna and it's amazing that the Russian Tsar argued with the English ambassador in French. Here were all the rich and powerful men of Europe dividing up the continent and there wasn't a single translator needed.

Russian tsars are likely not even native Russian speakers. I listened to a recording recently -- the accent is obvious. Same family https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/king-george-tsar-nicholas-1...

Interesting -- what kind of accent is it? Would it be most similar to the accent a German native speaker would have speaking Russian today?
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