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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

#421

Post by fooker »

ozim wrote: post #408
fooker wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I speak 4 languages and have read literature for 3. The depth and diversity of modern english fiction has no parallel, at least for the genres I enjoy(sci-fi, fantasy, alternative history, thrillers).

What is your native language? Mine is Polish, for sci-fi I could not enjoy Stanislaw Lem translated to English. On the other hand I really enjoyed translation of H.P. Lovercaft to Polish. I find Douglas Adams "Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy" lot less funny in Polish. There was also really bad (in my opinion) translation of "Lord of the rings" to Polish which tried to translate proper names, but there was different one…

My native language is Bengali, far removed from English. I speak French and Spanish too, but not as well as English.

You are right about translated literature, though that was not my primary point.

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

#422

Post by monort »

felipemnoa wrote: post #283
enriquto wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use "fin de semaine" and people understands it perfectly.

Which is almost the literal translation to weekend or "Week End". Pretty much the same phrase used in Spanish (fin de semana) and I suspect in other romance languages. P.D. Funnily enough, I looked up the translation for weekend in Latin and google gave me "volutpat vestibulum" and yet for Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian I got a similar "Fin de Semana" phrase. I wonder why only the latin translation…

Ancient Romans just didn't use weeks, so the translation is probably a modern one. The closest to a weekend is a market day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae

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

#423

Post by cja »

travisjungroth wrote: post #273
Pissompons wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is the language of great literature The overall sentiment of your comment is good but I took issue with this particular statement. English is _a_ language of great literature. There's great literature written in basically all languages, you're just less likely to know unless you speak them.

You're critiquing a very narrow interpretation of a sentence written by someone in a second language.

Unlike some languages, German has articles, so his meaning (the language) is likely clear.

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

#424

Post by coldtea »

michaelmrose wrote: post #321
coldtea wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it will take the British and Americans a long time to go over the same thing as well when the time comes...

Get back to me in 20 years and we'll see how that went.

Who said it has to be in 20 years? It took a couple of centuries for the French.

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

#425

Post by ivanhoe »

English gained popularity as it was THE language of popular movies, music and then later Internet. Just like in the past you needed Latin to be able to read books and communicate with educated people around the world, today you need English. And in my eyes it's OK, we need some standardization in communication to be able to understand each-other, and English is a good practical choice as it's fairly easy to learn.

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

#426

Post by lawlorino »

gabordemooij wrote: post #398
hitekker wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is English your first language?

No, I'm Dutch. Our language has been affected deeply by English. People even make a lot of spelling mistakes because of English. For instance, our government building has a spelling mistake in the sign of their main building, it reads: 'Hoofd Gebouw' but this is wrong in Dutch, because it must be 'Hoofdgebouw' (without the space, but in English you write it as 2 words instead of one). People don't know a lot of Dutch…

> A lot Dutch people think they are really good in English, but we really aren't (sometimes native English speakers beg us to not try and speak English but use Dutch instead so they at least understand what is being said given their limited knowledge of the Dutch language).

As a native English speaker living in NL I'm really curious about this, could you describe a situation? The few Dutch people I work with have outstanding levels of English, although being at a company where ~90% of people in my department are non-Dutch, so English is widely spoken, my observation is clearly very biased. Plus I live in Amsterdam which I hear is very different from the rest of the country in this respect.

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

#427

Post by NihilumExNil »

romwell wrote: post #188
sudosteph wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well my source is a Linguistics Textbook (Language Files, 11th Edition, p15-16) but it says that these changes happened as late as the 17th and 18th centuries because Scholars considered written Latin to be the ideal language (likely because most historical works had been translated to Latin at some point). So even though ending sentences in prepositions had been common for centuries in spoken English, that became fr…

>- Don't ending sentences in prepositions >- Don't split infinitives >- Don't use double negative These seem to really be some rules that ain't nobody got time for!

My pet peeve in English as well as German is conjunctive use of "that" or "dass" respectively. I'm glad that you got right at least :)

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

#428

Post by olavk »

kaybe wrote: post #317
wozniacki wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... written by English or American authors, have a very refined way of pleasing the reader. Perhaps you could elaborate on that by contrasting how other languages say German authors writing in German approach the reader. Are they more curt or write in a matter-of-fact manner? How about other non-English language authors? Please expand if you've had the good fortune of reading fiction / non-fiction in various language…

I have the impression that basic German is quite technical. You can be poetic, even very poetic, but it is not easy. You can, however, easily describe the relation of one thing to another in detail. English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German. It is easier to use basic sentences compared to German, but the extended vocabulary is where the fun starts - so many beautiful words for poetic things. It is e…

> I have the impression that basic German is quite technical.

What does this mean?

> English has about 3 times the vocabulary compared to German.

This may be technically true, but as a user of a language, you are limited by your active vocabulary which is much smaller than the absolute vocabulary in either language. In other words, unless you are deliberately googling for synonyms to insert into your text, the larger vocabulary in English does not affect your ability to express yourself.

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

#429

Post by vvillena »

blattimwind wrote: post #380
zerb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Zwischenspeicher" is a magnificent word! Betweensaver. I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding. As an American who learned German in high school and have since only admired German from afar, that word sounds great and I love the way the meaning is derived.

> I love the Germanic way of nouncompounding. Sadly auto-correct makes people write very Un-German these days, because "the computer says its wrong". The computer is stupid and doesn't understand compounds. Smartphone keyboards similarly can't complete compounds. Either developers don't care about non-English-but-latin languages, or leaving the dashes out in compounds makes parsing them for computers way more difficu…

The English bias in phone keyboards and autocorrect systems is awful. There are lots of issues with verbal forms and diacritics. And if you dare to write in more than one language at a time, all bets are off.

I think this is one of the places where some public funds could make for good, useful research. Microsoft, Apple, and Google aren't interested in creating the perfect keyboard and autocorrect system for non-English languages, they will do the bare minimum and won't improve until someone shows them there's a better way (and it starts hurting sales).

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

#430

Post by sametmax »

geff82 wrote: post #99

I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me…

Agreed. As a french, I wish english were a mandatory official second language everywhere : forms, menus, schools, movies and signals.

I get the emotional attachment to ones own language but making it easy for the entire humanity to communicate is a much more important goal. It trumps culture and history. It trumps nationalism.

And why english ? Well i don't care. It could be anything really.

But the only thing that is used by most people than english is chinese, and it's only use way more locally or contextually as english, while being more complex.

English has very simple tenses, few symbols, not required accents and the industry and culture already use it massively all around the world.

It's full of useless complexity and artifacts like all language, but it's there.

Let's all add it to our toolbelt and be done with it.

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