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Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

cnn.com

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Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#531

Post by Y_Y »

ramblerman wrote: post #514
thaumasiotes wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy. I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.

Knowing a romance language already helps in picking up another one but I wouldn't say you can communicate easily between Italian and Spanish. It would be like using your English to converse in Dutch.

I don't think that's quite fair. I have had Italian-Spanish conversations which were slow but not painful. With Dutch I can often guess what something means when I see it written down but understanding the spoken language is very hard and I can only pick out a few words here and there.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#532

Post by revelio »

ddkto wrote: post #71

As a Quebecer, all I can say is, join the club! For everyone shocked by this, it is much less extensive and onerous than the Quebec languages laws. Very roughly speaking, similar rules apply to all companies operating in Quebec with 25 or more employees, not just public officials.

There are also laws/government initiatives about the use of Welsh in Wales, so the theory that it's some sort of neo-fascism doesn't fit well there (Wales is run by Labour).

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#533

Post by Quarrelsome »

re-thc wrote: post #519
jacquesm wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> English is the most international language because of war, expansion and domination. That's one perspective. Another is trade. Trade is what caused my parents to learn English in the 40's and the 50's because it made them more employable.

It goes back to the same origins. Why do you trade? There has to be something to gain. Often that is a result of this act of war, expansion and domination. Sure we can assume we just want to trade peacefully. History has said otherwise. We want to trade with the biggest trading partners and a lot of them grew by raiding others.

you may also war because you trade though. Opium war is a good example of that where the war is inspired by difficulties trading.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#534

Post by thefz »

_vbnz wrote: post #33
hunglee2 wrote: post #14

I think we (Americans and Europeans alike) wholly underestimate how Americanised European culture is becoming. This is an observation rather than a criticism as I don't know whether this is 'good' or 'bad' but it is noticeable phenomena manifest through language, and probably an unintended consequence of the dependency of Europe on US communication technology, leading to the import of US communication styles, politic…

Yeah, it was shocking here in Stockholm when there were BLM protests in 2020. It's like people are more involved in US politics than their national politics.

> It's like people are more involved in US politics than their national politics.

You know when someone is incessantly speaking louder than others, drowning their conversations? ... yeah.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#535

Post by b3orn »

revelio wrote: post #527
schnitzelstoat wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they voted for the politicians that adopted those immigration policies - it doesn't happen by itself.

Those policies aren't actually popular though. They were were forced by the EU, other pan-European NGOs and a political class that has things nicely sewn up (i.e. if the major parties agree then you have nobody to vote for). Europe has a democratic deficit that gets airbrushed out a lot of the time. The UK had to leave the entire thing to try and get immigration under control and have still totally failed - they can'…

The EU doesn't have a Court of Human Rights, that's an institution of the Council of Europe, which is unrelated to the EU.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#536

Post by GoblinSlayer »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #506
stevekemp wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like English spelling. I grew up in the UK and prefer British-English to American-English, both in terms of spelling and pronunciation. That said English has terrible spelling compared to other languages, it's impossible to know how to pronounce a word just looking at the spelling. I don't need to give examples, as it is well-known already. I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak…

> I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won". English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones. This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.

Inconsistency of English is high compared to basically every other language.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#537

Post by re-thc »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #533
re-thc wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It goes back to the same origins. Why do you trade? There has to be something to gain. Often that is a result of this act of war, expansion and domination. Sure we can assume we just want to trade peacefully. History has said otherwise. We want to trade with the biggest trading partners and a lot of them grew by raiding others.

you may also war because you trade though. Opium war is a good example of that where the war is inspired by difficulties trading.

Was that really the reason? What difficulty? They created this difficulty to find a chance to invade.

There was a clear plan to create an addiction and even as it was banned to smuggle more and more into the country.

A lot of things don't happen by chance. So does a certain country not actually have "weapons of mass destruction" etc.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#538

Post by jwestbury »

stevekemp wrote: post #512
thaumasiotes wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won". English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones. This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.

English is very inconsistent, not that this necessarily makes it harder of course, compared to languages such as Finnish which has very regular grammar and no ambiguity with pronounciation. ("I could have read the red book, because I like to read." is just one example of inconsistent pronounciation. Spelling is non-obvious to people learning the language, again as a result of unusual and inconsistent pronounciation.)

Comparing to Finnish is... a choice. Finnish is known to be one of the most difficult languages to learn because of the incredibly variation in cases.

Different languages have different features which make them harder to different populations. A better description of English would be: English is one of the languages to learn. English has no complex case system. We do not have grammatical gender. Our use of grammatical number is limited and consistent (except in certain loan words). There are exceptions to these, but they are largely words which are so common as to be part of the foundational learning -- pronouns, primarily, where we preserve gender and where case goes beyond "add an apostrophe-s." Because case is not especially important, word order is important, which can be challenging for people from cultures with a different standard word order. Spelling is challenging due to both the vowel shift and the number of languages which have acted as input to English (at a minimum: native Celtic languages in Britain; Anglo-Frisian and its antecedents; French, both Norman and more southern dialects; and Latin and Greek pulled in by the early natural philosophers of the early modern period).

English does have an unusually high number of irregular verbs, which, combined with the spelling and pronunciation, can make it seem inconsistent; but there are many other ways in which English is startlingly simple compared to highly-inflected languages.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#539

Post by GoblinSlayer »

revelio wrote: post #521
mihaic wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has managed to export significant parts of its political discourse in places where it makes no sense to have those discussions, simply by controlling global news. I think you underestimate how much this is.

They don't control global news. How many people watch Fox or CNN outside the USA? The actual way this gets exported is via the HR firms and executive picks of American corporations. That then affects the funding of movies, TV shows, video games and everything downstream of that.

Facebook is global news.

Re: Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

#540

Post by thefz »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #336
Quarrelsome wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think its necessarily about the culture itself here, its merely a cheap populist tactic to rabble-rouse among a nation that has a rich history and struggles to handle the fact that its present isn't at that zenith. France do a lot of this sort of thing too. I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. While its fine for lulz, I worry that you're being sincere. Try…

I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage. Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy. We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing somet…

> If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.

Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.

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