51–60 of 75 posts
Hell, the max estimate there (~500M) is probably closer to a reasonable minimum.
Fig. 3 lowest estimate for # of English speakers is Current population of the Anglosphere (Australia / Canada / New Zealand / United Kingdom / United States) = 435M; I'll eat my hat if What the hell was that estimator smoking? Hell, the max estimate there (~500M) is probably closer to a reasonable minimum.
These ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing. Although Spanish and Portuguese are now two separate unintelligible languages, they were virtually the same 800 years ago. Someone literate in one can easily learn the other; it's probably the same with fluency. Machine translation between them is probably very accurate because of t…
- Portugal
- Brazil
- Angola
- Mozambique
- Green Cape
- Saint Thomas and Prince
- Guine-Bissau
- East-Timor
Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well.
Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castile region. In 1516 Ferdinand II declared it as the official language of Spain, hence Spanish.
But you're right about the language similarities.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.) Well, not only that. English usage will also drop because of long term economic and cultural effects. English had commerce, hollywood and popular music going for it. But billions of people in emerging middle cla…
> ... get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce). And the way they do that is by including English. For example see the second paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood or consider the recent Korean pop success "Gangnam Style".
"It should be a sobering thought, however, to any triumphalist impulse that in 100 AD Latin looked set to dominate its slice of the world forever." The winner of the "Top Language of 100 AD" should go to Chinese circa 100 A.D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic The following languages are heavily influenced by written chinese: Korean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use wha…
There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.
An alternative, phonemic alphabet for foreigners might have more hope, though even then the use case is narrow.
What? The USA doesn't have an official language (like in one recognized by government)? That's news for me, and it's interesting to think on the implications. I'll point that next time an american complains to me on the web to "speak english".
There have been various attempts to make English the national language of the United States, but they have all failed, due in part to being perceived as vaguely racist or xenophobic. This is especially strange considering that virtually every other country does have an official language (or languages). That said, you (and your potential interlocutors) will likely benefit from using the lingua franca , which is curren…
My assumption for why it isn't strange is that most countries had an official language (whether at one point it was decreed, or if it just happened naturally) before a huge amount of immigration happened in the way that it has in America, i.e. that now there are huge numbers of Spanish speakers in a number of states.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.
There have been lots of attempts to reform English. There is also Simple English Wikipedia which just simplifies structure not pronounciation https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
These ranking ignore the fact Spanish and Portuguese are much closer to each other than any other two languages in this top ten listing. Although Spanish and Portuguese are now two separate unintelligible languages, they were virtually the same 800 years ago. Someone literate in one can easily learn the other; it's probably the same with fluency. Machine translation between them is probably very accurate because of t…
Yes, as Portuguese I also have an issue with his bias for Brazilian Portuguese, as there are many more countries speaking the language. - Portugal - Brazil - Angola - Mozambique - Green Cape - Saint Thomas and Prince - Guine-Bissau - East-Timor Probably a few others might still use some dialect of the language as well. Actually Portuguese was the same as Galician not Spanish. Spanish is actually Castilian from Castil…
> many more countries speaking the language.
maybe more, but not with 200 million people
Indonesia itself has 237 million people, of which almost 100% speak Indonesian/Malay.
The Indonesian/Malay language is a huge gaping hole in George Weber's research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...