231–240 of 441 posts
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Yeah, I feel like people forget about that whole British Imperialism thing too easily. We all speak English because at one point the English practically owned the entire planet.
That's not universally true. In my country, German was the widely accepted and taught second language until WW2. Since then it's been English.
> This explains a peculiarity of traditional Quaker speech, which one often hears in films set in the early Americas. The Quakers opposed making any distinctions of rank, so they insisted on addressing everyone as thou, not as you. The irony is that today we perceive thou to be archaic and formal, while the original intent is to be more informal. In german, the distinction between formal and informal address is disap…
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Yeah, I feel like people forget about that whole British Imperialism thing too easily. We all speak English because at one point the English practically owned the entire planet.
Compare English with Esperanto, which, in spite of being much easier to learn than English, still hasn't become anywhere near as widespread (at least in terms of number of speakers). Ironically the one biggest thing which presents an ideological advantage for Esperanto is that it's native to no nation, so all the people who speak it are closer to being equals in that regard; yet it is the imperialism and a large numb…
Not saying that this is it's main problem, and other constructed languages like Lojban are probably even less relevant despite trying to be more "culturally neutral".
In my native Texan English, "y'all" can certainly act as a singular polite "you" (EDIT: though it is not terribly common). I often use "Howdy, how y'all doin?" as a polite greeting to people I don't know regardless of the number of people I am addressing, though switch to just "you" after making acquaintance. Funny enough, "howdy" is a contraction of the older "how do ye" and some people still consider it both a gree…
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Yes. But then the English language got a _lot_ of reps as the lingua franca of commerce and science.
English became the lingua franca of science because of the decline of German science following the world wars. English became the language of commerce due to the commercial dominance of first the British Empire and then the United States. So still not really due to some intrinsic merits of the language.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. But then the English language got a _lot_ of reps as the lingua franca of commerce and science.
English became the lingua franca of science because of the decline of German science following the world wars. English became the language of commerce due to the commercial dominance of first the British Empire and then the United States. So still not really due to some intrinsic merits of the language.
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Is speaking to someone formally considered ending up in an inferior position in all cultures? In Persian if someone expects to be spoken with formally, they have to speak formally themselves. So when you speak formally you're kinda bringing both parties up. You can even flirt by speaking formally.
In Spanish asymmetric conversations have always been a thing, e.g. student-teacher, patient-doctor or younger-older conversations where the former side uses V and the latter T. The V is gradually being dropped in Spain and in the last few decades the process seems to have accelerated, though, definitely it seems faster than in French (although I don't know that much about French). I don't think my 4-year-old son will…
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English became the dominant business language for reasons unrelated to the English language itself but because of the relative power of the people who spoke the language.
The english people became powerful because english is such a good language.
It's not coincidence, it's causal :D