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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’

#291

Post by frabbit »

Bayart wrote: post #248
cinntaile wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this can be generalized? Language entitlement seems to be a thing among French speaking regions. Whether it's French Canada, French Belgium or France?

Funny to see so much drab posturing about our supposed « language entitlement » while almost calling for languages to be rolled over and wiped out by English. I'm quite certain the position of French-Canadians has little to do with « entitlement », and more with how trapped they feel. Not that Anglo-Canadians would give a rats ass about the actual motives of Québec's cultural policy, as long as it can get weaponized…

Speaking as an anglophone I think you are entirely correct. Quebec is majority Francophone and has a right to stay that way. In addition it is also fun and interesting. This thread is clearly pitched at people that get off on Freedom Fries.

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

#292

Post by holografix »

Yet another example of the EU and its institutions being a reflection of the career academics and politicians that dominate it.

Arrogant, privileged, disconnected from reality, risk averse and comfortably protected by the bureaucracy which they use to masquerade the gross in efficiency of the whole apparatus.

The UK leaving the EU should have been the loud wake up call it needed to shape up.

As it so often happens in arrogant filled relationships, the departing party is appointed the entirety of the blame.

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

#293

Post by wdb »

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…

Just as stupid as the plan to travel between Brussels and Strassbourg

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

#294

Post by mannerheim »

hulug wrote: post #274
mannerheim wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finnish has no grammatical gender. Is it easier to learn than Spanish?

That was just one example but you win I guess. What I had in my mind was for a Spanish speaker it's probably easier to learn a hypothetical Romance language that doesn't have grammatical gender than say French.

So first, I would say that the notion of ease of learning a language is a purely relative one, which is what GGP probably meant. It is easy for an Estonian speaker to learn Finnish, a Dane to learn Swedish, etc., but quite difficult for an English speaker to learn Finnish. As another example, Mandarin on its face should be an easy language to learn because the grammar is very simple - there are no tenses, no cases, no gender, no inflection whatsoever. There's tone, sure, but this isn't the difficult part of understanding Mandarin for a native English speaker. Regarding grammar specifically, despite Mandarin seeming to possess a nominally simpler grammar, speakers use patterns that would appear alien to most speakers of European languages. For example, from section on cleft sentences[0]:

他昨天买的是菜

Literally, this means 'He yesterday buy of is vegetable', but the meaning is 'What he bought yesterday is vegetables'. The way the grammar in this sentence corresponds to its meaning may seem unusual to you, but it is effortless and natural to a Mandarin speaker. And these sorts of invisible grammatical features exist in every language. Most European languages descend from a common ancestor, so it is not so noticeable, and instead we notice the grammatical features that are different between languages: cases, gender, tenses, etc. And Esperanto, being based in these languages, also inherits these unnoticed grammatical biases. A Mandarin speaker learning Esperanto would have the same difficulty as an English speaker learning some Mandarin-derived conlang that 'simplified' certain visible grammatical features. Esperantists tout success in speakers of Asian languages learning Esperanto, but there are many more cases of speakers of Asian languages learning English.

Anyway, I don't think things like gender matter so much when it comes to the practical aspect of learning a language, or even mistakes in semantic grammatical features like case or tense. A native speaker isn't going to be unable to understand you because you flub some of the grammar such as the gender of some noun. Consider when you hear non-native English speakers make mistakes - are you unable to understand sentences like 'I go to bank' or 'Yesterday I eat restaurant'?

So these are the two flaws of Esperanto:

1. Esperanto's grammar is still very much Romance + Germanic-like, so ease of learning it is relative to familiarity with languages in those families.

2. To the extent that Esperanto's grammar is simpler, it doesn't particularly matter from a language acquisition perspective.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_grammar

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

#295

Post by deburo »

frabbit wrote: post #290
jszymborski wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so in the case of Quebec which sees itself as an enclave surrounded by English-speaking nations.

Well, that is because it _is_ an enclave in which speaking French is the majority "normal" and surrounded by provinces in which speaking English is normal. If Quebec did not enforce language laws then English would end up driving out French except for decorative, heritage functions. The result of the language laws is that we have a part of North America strongly bound in to not just a significant part of the EU but a…

With the advent of the internet and the new generations of Quebecers being mostly online, as well as being generally more educated in english than their parents through standard school curriculum, I expect this to change in the next hundred years. I’m 28 years old now and I welcome this future, being isolated has a great price.

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

#296

Post by mannerheim »

leke wrote: post #133
kelnos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joking aside, it's a shame Esperanto didn't catch on. One of its features is that it's fairly easy to learn, unlike something like Latin.

Well it's a growing movement, so it's still catching on. Who knows, it could become popular enough one day.

Growing for a century and a half, still spoken by fewer people than minor dialects of minor languages.

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

#297

Post by junar »

frabbit wrote: post #290
jszymborski wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more so in the case of Quebec which sees itself as an enclave surrounded by English-speaking nations.

Well, that is because it _is_ an enclave in which speaking French is the majority "normal" and surrounded by provinces in which speaking English is normal. If Quebec did not enforce language laws then English would end up driving out French except for decorative, heritage functions. The result of the language laws is that we have a part of North America strongly bound in to not just a significant part of the EU but a…

It's mostly Africa. The presence in Vietnam and the rest of Asia has declined.

https://qz.com/africa/1428637/french-is-worlds-fifth-spoken-...

https://languagesinconflict.wordpress.com/2014/01/18/115/

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

#298

Post by monkeybutton »

deburo wrote: post #295
frabbit wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that is because it _is_ an enclave in which speaking French is the majority "normal" and surrounded by provinces in which speaking English is normal. If Quebec did not enforce language laws then English would end up driving out French except for decorative, heritage functions. The result of the language laws is that we have a part of North America strongly bound in to not just a significant part of the EU but a…

With the advent of the internet and the new generations of Quebecers being mostly online, as well as being generally more educated in english than their parents through standard school curriculum, I expect this to change in the next hundred years. I’m 28 years old now and I welcome this future, being isolated has a great price.

The current government is certainly intent on reversing that tide though. Especially now with who has or hasn't the right to education in English.

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

#299

Post by skissane »

SllX wrote: post #169
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. S…

> 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.

Please excuse my pedantry, but you've misspoken here: the European Council, the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe are three different things; and here you've accidentally said the third when you meant to speak of the second. The first two are EU institutions–the European Council is senior to the Council of the European Union, in the former EU member states are represented by heads of state or government, in the later they are represented by the ministers responsible for various policy areas (finance, agriculture, trade, transport, education, etc). The Council of Europe, by contrast, is a separate international organisation from the EU, with a much broader membership – it includes the vast majority of European countries; it is most famous for hosting the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), although it is active in other policy areas as well.

And all three have a presidency. The President of the European Council is an individual, currently former Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel. He doesn't take orders from the Belgian government, he is truly independent. By contrast, the presidencies of the Council of the European Union, and the Council of Europe, are held by governments not by individuals. The presidency of the Council of the European Union rotates every six months, it is currently held by Portugal, Slovenia is up next. Likewise, the presidency of the Council of Europe rotates every six months; currently it is held by Hungary.

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

#300

Post by mahkeiro »

posterboy wrote: post #121
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…

* France: 0% proper English, 99.9% French their English is terrîble

The ability of a native english speaker to speak any other language than their own is abysmal…
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