Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

Thanks for this. I always wondered why the road leading west from Trafalgar Sq was called Pall Mall.

The war came about through a trading inefficiency. The Chinese markets at the time (still holds relatively true today) was a selling market, not a buying market. They weren't interested in European goods. So European trading vessels would have to stock up on silver as currency, and sail to China to trade the silver for desirable goods such as porcelain and silks.

European merchants didn't like this because its far more efficient to profit on every leg and the first leg of hauling silver was a loss with a mostly empty hold, so were seeking a product to sell to the Chinese market that would have pull that they could fill cargo holds with. Due to their lack of scruples, they discovered that opium was such a product and set in motion the very events that still plague us to today of growing opium across Asia to sell to China.

As a flood of cheap opium entered the market through the criminal gangs at the time (who were buying the opium through profitable liaisons with the British) the Chinese authorities set about cracking down on the trade in the interests of its people. Eventually this brought them into conflict with the British and in interests of keeping the ports open to the opium trade the first of two opium wars was declared.

The wikipedia article probably puts it better than I have [1].

> They created this difficulty to find a chance to invade.

If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century (although it would have still been a significant challenge given the might of China's manpower at the time). The British were a brutal force but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation, wealth was more of a primary motivator. So its much like US foreign policy today which is typically flexed to promote interests relevant to American GDP. It remains ugly when its flexed but its arguably a kinder aim than that of a fully imperialistic force such as say: the Mongols of the 14th and 15th centuries.

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

What I found was that they often did but wouldn't claim to speak it. As in couldn't discuss literature or hold a job in language X but fluent enough that they had no issues reading directions or interacting with locals.

> "I read the docs" uses what is generally called the "plain form" (the name describes the form, not the meaning that calls for the form), and it expresses that the verb is stative[1], describing a fact about the subject ("I am the kind of person who reads the docs") rather than describing an event that takes place at a particular time.

"Perfect" was the wrong word for what I meant, you're right. I was referring to the difference between the continuous form and the plain form, which doesn't exist in many other languages. For example, in French, "je lis les docs" can mean either "I am reading the docs" or "I read the docs (in general)". My point is, even though a native English speaker (or anyone past B1 or so) understands the difference between these two phrases, many foreign speakers actually don't, and would use them more or less interchangeably, relying on context.

Lots of grammar is like this: it helps reduce the amount of context necessary, but it's not critical to text comprehension. If you speak French while using the wrong genders for nouns, people will still understand exactly what you mean - it will just sound strange and maybe make certain complex phrases more confusing than they're used to. This happens very commonly when a language is picked up as a lingua franca by many foreign speakers.

> This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them

Tone exists in all human communication, but it is used very differently in tonal languages. In almost all non-tonal languages, a rising tone indicates a question, a flat tone indicates a statement, and certain other tones indicate the mood of the speaker.

But in a tonal language, particularly one with absolute tones like Mandarin Chinese, tones are more similar to vowels, consonants, or stress accent: they are an intrinsic part of words or syllables. The difference between "mā" (high tone) and "má" (rising tone) is not one of intention, they are simply two completely unrelated syllables/words (the first means "mother", the second means "numb"). There are three more words that use what would be the same syllable in a non-tonal language (transliterated as mà, falling tone, mǎ, falling then rising tone, and ma, neutral tone).

Even worse, moving from a neutral tone syllable to a high tone syllable may sound like, which to a Mandarin Chinese speaker would be equivalent to moving between a syalble using "a" to one using "e" would be interpreted as a rising tone (and thus a question) by a non-tonal language speaker.

As a white British male I was never a victim in this so I know the apology is not for me, but I greatly appreciate the message you convey. It felt wrong seeing no replies to your post; this is deserving of a response and so: thank you for your time and your honesty.