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EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

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Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#221

Post by Thimothy »

Oreb wrote: post #144
lucb1e wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fellow Dutch speaker here. Why in the world are you a big fan of our language? Just because it's your own? And German, just because it's so close? Both languages are horrible to learn compared to English.

I've never tried to learn Dutch, but I found German _much_ easier to learn than English. The German grammar and spelling are so regular, consistent and simple compared to English.

The genres, though... And saying that the German grammar is simpler is quite a stretch. English barely conjugates verbs!

Would trade putting genres into english if I could also get the German consistency in spelling any day, though.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#222

Post by schuke »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #47

I don't think English will stop being EU's lingua franca any time soon. Agreeing on a replacement would be politically impossible (the Germans wouldn't accept French, the French wouldn't accept German, the Spanish would have good arguments to make in any of both cases); and having several languages in equal status would just be not practical (you cannot realistically expect every EU citizen to know their native langu…

With Brexit English has become even more neutral!

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#223

Post by kayoone »

7952 wrote: post #169
kayoone wrote: post #61

Living in working in the Berlin tech world, English is already the official working language in most companies. Even as I german i have no problem with this, my only gripe is that it makes it very hard for my non-german colleagues to learn german.

Why exactly is this? Are there really that many non Germans speakers that you need to use English? And would you use English to have a chat at the water cooler, or down the pub (or locally relevant alternative).

In my company and many others, germans are actually in the minority, at least in product and tech. Talent shortage lets companies bring a lot of people from all over the world and English is the lowest common denominator. We have many more people from South America, India, Africa and other parts of Europe than germans in a team of 100+ people. Many restaurants/cafes/bars have non-german staff so in many areas it does not really feel like being in Germany. Personally I love the diversity though.

Watercooler talk is usually english unless I am around a group of people where I know that they all speak good german, but that rarely happens tbh. It's more likely to hear another group talking portuguese, spanish or arabic :)

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#224

Post by nnq »

Thimothy wrote: post #219
nnq wrote: post #71

This is brilliant! Finally there's the opportunity to adopt an equalizing language that will also help free us from national culture isolationism : - a language that is nobody's mother tongue: YEEEY! - language that is not attached to any one culture: 10x YEEY! Think about it! This could help global not just European unity: all the people of Asian and African origin who already speak fluent English could instantly em…

The part I like best about your utopia is the irony that it leaves all native english countries out by design. "Thanks for giving us this tongue that has allowed us to transcend as humans, now GTFO"

Anglo-american culture did enough appropriation itself... no reason to feel bad for appropriating its language :P

(Though, tbh, "international high-English" as spoken has a very latin vocabulary, with non-native-English speakers often choosing the latin variant of words instead of the "native UK/US" phrasal verbs and such, eg. "we're accelerating" instead of "we're speeding up" or "we're gaining up speed", "inadequate" instead of "unfit", "superfluous" instead of "useless" etc. Not sure if to love or hate it, mostly loving myself it I think, but it's interesting and sort of contributes to more precise/explicit communication.)

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#225

Post by lifthrasiir »

akvadrako wrote: post #215
lifthrasiir wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's get your facts straight: > Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. ...only for many Indo-European speakers.

That's not true. Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc... None of those advantages only apply to Indo-Europeans. It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family. http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat... China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University a…

> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. (I'm a native Korean speaker with a working knowledge of English as you can see. And I'm not even opposing to Esperanto in general.) It would be great to have concrete numbers to backup this claim; by comparison, it seems that the prior Esperanto knowledge actually helps learning European languages [1], which again indirectly shows the European influence to Esperanto.

> It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family.

The article correctly points out that the "European" or "Asiatic" labels are not necessarily good groupings, but that's only because those groupings completely disregard both the history and the linguistics. It is absurd to say that Esperanto is very different from other Indo-European languages because Esperanto is isolating and others are not [2]. When we are gauging simliarities the historical influence cannot and should not be dismissed.

> China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.

There are several Esperanto courses around the world, I'm aware of one in Korea, and that doesn't make the state a sort of supporter. Talking about China Radio International (CRI, originally known as Radio Peking), it is comparable to Voice of America (VOA) in such that both are propaganda broadcasts and target as much languages as possible. It is not special for them to have Esperanto versions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method

[2] That is, even after acknowledging the unusual statement that Esperanto is not agglutinative because its "affixes" can in fact freely move inside a word (and even concludes that Japanese is also not agglutinative to the similar extent). I think this is a fair assessment by its own, but it would be inappropriate to reframe the original question with a unusual definition.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#226

Post by phiresky »

s_dev wrote: post #72
rofo1 wrote: post #29

The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact. We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other. Everyone learning a…

It's vital small languages are preserved and that the world doesn't become monolingual. Communication is a funny word -- we often mean it to commuincate with others but often we communicate with ourselves in the present -- and to our furture selves -- e.g. code comments are often for your future self as well as other programmers. People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently" and diversity of thou…

> People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently"

This widely held belief is absolutely not a proven fact. It's called linguistic relativity or linguistic determinism [1] and the strong form (language determines thought) has not been taken seriously by researchers in the field for a while.

The weak form (language can have somewhat of an impact on the way you think) has not been proven or disproven and is a topic of debate. You just state it as if it was known, even though the causal relationship of most examples you could name can easily be the other way around (culture / thinking affects how a language develops).

I'd argue that everyone learning and speaking the same language would have immense benefits for a global society. You can keep recordings in museums and linguistic researchers to keep a historical record of languages, just like we have for other tools and methods that we no longer have any use for.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#227

Post by jacquesm »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #204
jacquesm wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why English is such a success. By losing nuance in the words but making up for it in the sentences the language becomes a lot easier to learn. I'd much rather have the common language of the EU be English even without an English representation in the EU than to have to parse EU legal documents in French or German. The occasional contract is bad enough. At least with English there is a level playing fie…

But a major practical concern is that after Brexit the EU doesn't have Common Law countries left (except maybe Ireland and Malta, but I don't know really). For law and contract texts, Code Civil (Napoleonic Law) will be even more prevalent than before. So I can't see a good reason to stick to English which is simply an awkward language for expressing continental civil law concepts when there's a very large body of la…

I really can't follow your argument. The EU laws are brand new and not usually connected to the civil code of the countries of the EU, who all have their own take on a lot of stuff. Case in point: the GDPR. The English text is used as the reference by the various countries that have now implemented it, there are translations but anything before the EU courts will most likely be conducted in English and use the English text. Regardless, those texts can be translated and nothing stops a country that is worried about its citizenry being unable to read the text to translate it.

I don't see any major influence of either common law or the Napoleonic civil code on the EU legislation, though the court process arguably has been influenced strongly by those principles.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#228

Post by jacquesm »

Xylakant wrote: post #190
jacquesm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My country (NL) isn't small enough to have a realistic demand that everything be translated into Dutch as well. That means that for us here adaptation rather than rejection is the norm. To see other countries' representatives storm out of meetings because their linguistic preferences are not followed is one of those things that show me that the EU still has a very long way to go. To 'only use English' is not a dictat…

I see your point, but I’d prefer if that was resolved in a different way. I’m absolutely in favor of translating all important records to all official languages in the EU.

So am I, but that was not infringed on. The EU already gave French, German and English a head start. Your typical Czech, Italian or Spanish representative would have a much better position to make that case than the French ambassador.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#229

Post by Svip »

bryal wrote: post #212
Svip wrote: post #186

I'm sorry, but this opinion piece sounds pretty dumb. It almost reads like a troll post. The fact that so many in this comment thread seems to be concurring with its suggestion is troubling enough. If you really want to alienate the EU from the average EU citizen, make English its official language. And adopt a version only a tiny minority really speaks too, just to salt the wound! I'm not sure whether to be scared o…

> Everyone on Hacker News speak English, but it's not a majority in the EU who speaks or understands English comfortably. But a majority is comfortable with German or French? Also, I can promise you that at least for Sweden, a vast majority of population would prefer English being the official language of the EU to something like French. We may not always be completely comfortable speaking English, but it's a languag…

I am not arguing for another language than English, but rather to maintain the status quo and keep all 24 languages official. Including English, even if no member state technically provides it. Which is probably what is going to happen anyway, Brexit or no Brexit.

Re: EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)

#230

Post by akvadrako »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #225
akvadrako wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc... None of those advantages only apply to Indo-Europeans. It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family. http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat... China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University a…

> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc... I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. (I'm a native Korean speaker with a working knowledge of English as you can see. And I'm not even opposing to Esperanto in general.) It would be great to have concrete numbers to backup this claim; by comparison, it seems that the prior…

>> Esperanto is easy to learn because it's very regular, has a small vocabulary, phonetic spelling, etc...

> I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true.

Do you mean esperanto doesn't have those features (regular, small vocab, phonetic) or that those features don't make a language easier to learn?

Because either claim sounds farfetched.

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