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Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

theguardian.com

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Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#41

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

gaius wrote: post #11
devoply wrote: post #5

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.

One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#42

Post by jotm »

barking wrote: post #6

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

It is simpler than most European languages, in my experience, as well. Logical, not so much, heh

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#43

Post by RightMillennial »

louprado wrote: post #15

One complaint about English is that double negatives are not grammatically correct. The word "not" is so important it should be re-enforced in someway. Spanish supports double negatives. The French add redundancy with "ne" and "pas". It's worth noting that American gangsters often talk with double negatives and the U.S. military use the phrase "repeat NOT" since their discussions are often mission critical. But I am…

English does have double negatives, and they're grammatically correct when used properly. They simply cancel each other out which differs from Spanish where they add emphasis.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#44

Post by TravelAndFood »

opportune wrote: post #10
barking wrote: post #6

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the…

As a native English speaker who has passable Spanish, I think the main hurdle, which I guess wouldn't be called a "complexity", of learning Spanish to a high level is understanding native speakers in natural conversation given how fast they talk.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#45

Post by iforgotpassword »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #25
opportune wrote: post #17

The best point that the article touches on is that English is a good "neutral" language for countries like Sudan and entities like the EU with many different languages spoken. There is a bit of a snowball effect where any language having the advantage of being spoken as a cross-cultural communication language further incentivizes learning that language for people wishing to communicate in that manner. I think such a…

Computers will translate in real time. Binary is the universal language of classic computers based on electromagnetic physics. Assuming quantum computing or some other unforeseen technology doesn’t replace other forms of computing then we will likely all be relying on binary in one way or another.

I hope this will not be the case, because it would be yet another way in which we'd become dependent on computers and would be royally fucked if skynet would happen. Which probably wouldn't be too unrealistic if computers are smart enough to really understand and translate human languages with all their nuances and concepts like wordplays, humor and sarcasm.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#46

Post by jotm »

xeeeeeeeeeeenu wrote: post #24
barking wrote: post #6

My unsuccessful forays into foreign language learning have convinced me also that none are as simple and logical as our own beautiful language, English, innit?

English pronunciation is extremely hard. There are virtually no rules, you have to memorize pronunciation of each word individually. It is neither simple nor logical.

That doesn't really matter, you get used to more than a dozen quite different pronunciations within a week for basic talk, within a few months you can understand each other perfectly.

EDIT: Visit England you cunts (wrt downvotes).

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#47

Post by MereInterest »

opportune wrote: post #28
MereInterest wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English has the subjunctive mood as well, though it is phasing out of use. If you were to express a hypothetical, you would use "were" as the subjunctive tense. For example, the song title "If I were a rich man" rather than "If I was a rich man", or the previous sentence in this post.

yes, I had just realized that and added it as an edit. I'm pretty sure you can ignore the subjunctive and still have it be correct, i.e. I don't think there is anything grammatically wrong with saying "If I was rich", at least in the sense that it wouldn't be picked up on in casual speech

For the most part, yes. Though, if you flip the word order, it immediately sounds off. "Were I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds reasonable. "Was I a rich man, I wouldn't have to work hard." sounds rather jarring.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#48

Post by opportune »

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #33
opportune wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English grammar has a lot of exceptions. Personally I think Spanish is much simpler than English, and has a much more logical spelling system as well. The main complexity Spanish introduces over English is the subjunctive mood , which is less complex than the many fine details of the English language, IMO (such as learning how to use the word "do" as a helping verb). The English language actually does still have the…

What is 'English grammar'? (Hopefully you don't mean spelling.) And what are examples of such exceptions? (English doesn't strike me as having any more exceptions in morphology or syntax than any other language, and has a simpler morphology than many languages.)

A lot of English's exceptions are things we hardly notice as native speakers. For example, we have a lot of irregular verbs. Of course other languages also have these, but oftentimes they fit into more neat patterns or small verb classes as in Spanish. Using verbs together is more complex than in other language (when do you add the word to?). We have a lot of nouns that you treat specially, like glasses/pants/deer.

English also has a lot of complexity. Comparison adjectives can be difficult, e.g. when to use faster or more fast. Certain ambiguous sentences are only able to be deciphered through sheer exposure to the language + context, which is not necessarily easily transferable across languages ("I can't find my shoes" means that you so far haven't been able to find your shoes, whereas "I can't eat pork" means that you prefer not to eat pork for one reason or another, whereas "I can't see infrared" means that it is impossible for you to see in infrared).

English also has a weird way of asking question compared to other languages, i.e. in many other languages (most?) you normally say something like "You want to buy a hotdog" or "What you want?" whereas in English we require a varying assortment of nouns and helper verbs.

None of these properties, which may not even be most of them, are unique on their own, but in combination they add up to quite a lot. It's hard for me to even think of all the rules like this since I'm a native speaker, but when learning Spanish I noticed how much more uniform many of its rules are.

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#49

Post by opportune »

chillacy wrote: post #36
godzillabrennus wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computers will translate in real time. Binary is the universal language of classic computers based on electromagnetic physics. Assuming quantum computing or some other unforeseen technology doesn’t replace other forms of computing then we will likely all be relying on binary in one way or another.

Isn’t that like saying pressure waves are the universal spoken language, so it doesn’t matter if English wins, it’s all pressure waves at the end of the day.

Fundamental particles are the universal spoken language because all communication must be done through their interactions

Re: Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

#50

Post by 323454 »

colanderman wrote: post #16
devoply wrote: post #5

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

This is the idea behind Esperanto, the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second, to avoid privileging native speakers and promulgating hegemony. (Granted, Esperanto vocabulary and orthography is quite Euro-centric.) Learning a second language is difficult, especially one very unlike your native tongue. Native speakers of the de facto lingua franca always have…

Language is more like a virus than like a system. People will speak whatever language to which they are exposed. If it enables them to express most of the information they need to express, they will expose others to that language (reproduction) and tweak it on their own to be more expressive (mutation). This implies that it doesn't matter which language is "better" according to some technical or moral metric we might construct, it only matters which language can reproduce and mutate the fastest.

To make an analogy that the Hacker News crowd will appreciate: English is the C to Esperanto's Scheme. C as initially conceived was just good enough to write Unix and thus reproduce itself further, mutating along the way until it was simultaneously everywhere and unrecognizable. Scheme is beautiful and powerful and yet still mostly confined to textbooks.

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