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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’

#341

Post by skissane »

carlmr wrote: post #337
skissane wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 seco…

Just the number of councils with similar sounding names makes the whole EU project sound like satire.

The EU has one of those "ideas" websites where people can post and vote on proposals. (Of course, most proposals are going to go nowhere, but maybe it will put the idea in the head of some bureaucrat somewhere.)

And their idea website already has a proposal posted to rename the European Council and Council of the European, in order to reduce confusion with the Council of Europe: https://futureu.europa.eu/processes/OtherIdeas/f/8/proposals...

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

#342

Post by billyruffian »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #115
Tsiklon wrote: post #15

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).

The UTC abbreviation was made as a compromise between french and english[1] rather than bloody-mindedness from any one nation. This was back in the day when such compromises could be reached without rancour.

For an example of the daft amounts of human life expended on examples of such trivialities, look at the amount of effort spent on arguing if the Concorde airplane should terminate with or without an 'e'.[2]

[1] https://www.space.com/what-is-utc.html

[2] https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/cabinet-office-100/the-s...

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

#343

Post by madia_leva »

Agingcoder wrote: post #118
madia_leva wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's history and education. In every country children are told quite silly things about the world and, in particular, about the importance of their country in the world. This is even worse for current or former empires (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Greece, Russia, US, China...). Children there are told they are special and superior in some way to other children who were born in other places. It's not surp…

First of all, I don't understand why the French government wants to do that - it's quite ridiculous. However, I also suspect that it has to do this kind of public stunt to satisfy the conservative right wing, especially with the presidential election next year. Furthermore, I think you are missing something quite fundamental here - French is pretty much one of the core building blocks of France, and no, this is not o…

I agree with you, in fact.

The issue is that the fact they decided to impose a single language to all the country is another example of the nationalism I was talking about. Deciding to erradicate existing languages and cultures for nationalistic reasons. That is cultural genocide. It's not unlikely of what Chinese are doing.

You can contrast this with the case of Switzerland or India where you see you can have a strong cohesion and feeling of belonging to the cpuntry without needing to erradicate significant parts of your own culture.

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

#344

Post by akvadrako »

mannerheim wrote: post #294
hulug wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, n…

Esperanto is still one of the easiest languages for Chinese to learn and the grammar is not very European; it also has elements mostly found in Asian languages:

https://www.translationdirectory.com/article715.htm

The Chinese are actually one of the biggest supporters of Esperanto too, offering degrees in it from major universities, regular broadcasts on official radio and some years ago teaching it in primary school.

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

#346

Post by anticensor »

mywittyname wrote: post #185
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

UTC works out better anyway. TUC and CUT are both terrible choices. With UTC the focus is on Universal Time and nobody cares what the C is for.

Universal Time as Coordinated

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

#347

Post by cinntaile »

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…

This isn't about changing the native language to English, France gets to keep its French language. This is about using the language that most people understand in the entire EU. French is not that language, English is. The vote went probably like this... We can choose between French and German, cause Britain left the EU. German is disliked by more countries than French hence French won. The end result is we need more interpreters and it costs the tax payers more money.

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

#348

Post by toyg »

popsicum wrote: post #339
toyg wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calm down. This is obviously going nowhere. Nothing is going to change, the French are just sending up some lead balloons for their own media, right before an election year (April 2022 presidentials). Do you really think 26 countries (most of whom don't speak French nor trade primarily with France) will just let Paris lord over them? Of course not. The working languages will stay the same; some overzealous French bur…

It will not happen overnight but it does fuel nationalistic ideologies which is counterproductive for EU as a whole. Just because a politician got butt hurt and wants to save his face, doesn't mean it's acceptable. I was really looking forward to see the EU flourish for years now and all I see is them concerning with offense, accusations and procrastinating issues or matters that don't serve the union but rather a pa…

> It will not happen overnight but it does fuel nationalistic ideologies

Sadly those ideologies fuel themselves. This is in fact an attempt at a propaganda victory, in an electoral year, to try and stop the ultraright from conquering the French presidence next April.

> all I see is them concerning with offense, accusations and procrastinating issues

All you see is what the anglo press wants you to focus on. The Union is doing ok; they agreed some historical aid packages to help their most troubled economies, moving one step forward towards a real shared treasury; they changed rules to try and sort out the "Eastern problem" of Poland and Hungary, the impact of which we'll see in the next 5-10 years, particularly on refugee policies; they are slowly grinding down their internal tax havens, and fielding multiple attacks to the monopolistic FAANGs; and are slowly clarifying a constitutional setup that is not even 30 years old, and hence still very much in-progress. (There was a bit of a fumble on vaccines but, as we've seen this week, nobody really came out well of COVID response, and they are reaching a decent velocity now.) On Northern Ireland, their internal public opinion wants them to hold firm against UK trickery; this will generate some hate on the English press, but it's a problem entirely of England's own making (and yes, I use "England" on purpose here).

For something coordinating 400m people over a territory that's never been so united, the EU is doing incredibly well. 30 years after the American Revolution ended, the US was still very fragile internally and went to war with Britain and France; a lot of internal tensions were not solved until the US Civil War, 60 years after the US Constitution was ratified. The EU is not at war, hopefully we'll continue to settle our disputes around a table, and that's the real victory.

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

#349

Post by tgragnato »

JProthero wrote: post #330
tgragnato wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please do not attribute to me things I did not write. I did not mention positivism, which is not necessarily embedded in the political environment we have today. The main contributions in rationalism and empiricism are not French. German philosophy is not generally positivist, but that’s not what I wrote.

> The main contributions in rationalism and empiricism are not French. Are you certain of this? I can think of many contributions to rationalism and empiricism made by French speakers that I feel are important. The metric system, for instance, was in large part a French project [01]. Here are a few French rationalists and empiricists that came to my mind when I read your comment: Alain Aspect Contemporary exerimental…

"The main contribution in rationalism and empiricism are not French" does not equal "French speakers did not contribute relevant knowledge in rationalism or empiricism"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empiricism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism

Hindu and Greek philosophers, Islamic golden age, Italian renaissance, British empiricism, Scottish Enlightenment, Austrian/German empiricism, US Pragmatism, ...

I'm not trying to neglect French rationalists and empiricists. Of course they exist, ... together with the many other scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, ... from many other cultures. Each single culture contributed less than the sum of the others simply because rationalism and empiricism are the fruits of global knowledge.

When detailing reasons for pushing the adoption of French in Europe, Macron acknowledged the work of Victor Hugo, who "believed that French would be the language of Europe, would today perhaps be a little disappointed" and promoted the re-examination of past colonialism in Africa, seeking to use the language as a tool to "reset a complex history in the continent".

The reasons for pretending the use of French in Europe are nationalistic. In an incident, European diplomats defined "overly dramatic, a statement of anger that clearly need no translation" when a French diplomat left his chair empty after the Council decided to use only-English in a working group.

This development was foreseen in 2017 (pre-Brexit) when Mario Monti said "The EU, when the UK leaves, should take the decision of upgrading the use of the English language in EU affairs. I think we should upgrade the ways we use English and it should become the language of the EU. I exaggerate a bit - there should be a bit of French. It will be a very appropriate gesture to the UK. It would help us Europeans to become more competitive by using fewer languages."

The statements of Mario Monti was pragmatic, it defines an issue and propose a solution. The behaviour of French diplomats is stubborn and nationalistic.

Disclosing too that I'm Italian.

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

#350

Post by antirez »

Spanish is the way to go: the most spoken language in the world among the ones spoke in EU, very simple to learn for many countries in EU, quite regular, very spoken in the US. French is a terrible language from the POV of pronunciation rules: it is insane to abandon English to pick the language that gave English many of its problems.
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