181–190 of 392 posts
Though I suspect this might be thr impetus for changing that once France’s term expires.
Why not arabic? French is kind of obsolete.
French is also the official language in 29 countries, which puts it in second place behind English, and is the official procedural language for EU courts and one of the core main languages for the UN.
Not only this, but several reports are saying that by 2050 nearly 700M will be speaking French²
¹. https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/how-many-people-speak-fre...
² https://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/...
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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 s…
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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?
The European Parliament would love to pick up and leave Strasbourg, but it is legally bound to meet there several times a year for a full session despite the majority of its work being in Brussels.
I’d have thought they would have kept English as it’s effectively a neutral language at that point - it would be convenient to avoid accusations of German or French dominance should either push for their’s in English’s place
Bear in mind, this kind of French bloodymindedness is why we have "UTC" - because if they couldn't have "temps universel coordonné" (TUC) then we damn-sure weren't going to have "coordinated universal time" (CUT).
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Isn't it ironic that English is the Lingua Franca?
Thank you! I'm always saying "English is the Lingua Franca of the tech world"...and no one ever gets the joke.
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It is a typical French thing. Since they don't have a global influence anymore since WW2, all they can do is throw hissy fits.
I'm not sure it's quite that simple - they've held the Presidency multiple times in this period but as far as I know they've not performed an action like this. There's certainly something going on, but it's not just a hissy fit. As others have mentioned it's only for the duration of the French presidency, it'll probably get switched to English when the Czech presidency begins.
I used to be against the French protectionism of its language, or the fact that research papers in China was written in Chinese. 'Why not just all speak English?', I thought back then. But then I learned French. More importantly I learned that when you speak another language, at a certain level (close to fluent), you realise that language is not only about communication. Language is also about thinking. You realise t…
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"Easy-to-learn" is very subjective. There's a lot of different languages spoken in the EU and the accessibility of a language environment matters.
True. I struggled with Esperanto for 10 years, only to give up and try Ido.
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…
No primarily English-speaking nation is a part of the EU.
The skill gap will be resolved. Until then? Traslators are already a normal part of the working process.