Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The world's most influential languages

andaman.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–75 of 75 posts

Re: The world's most influential languages

#71

Post by PostOnce »

AngryParsley wrote: post #52
PostOnce wrote: post #51

Fig. 3 lowest estimate for # of English speakers is Current population of the Anglosphere (Australia / Canada / New Zealand / United Kingdom / United States) = 435M; I'll eat my hat if What the hell was that estimator smoking? Hell, the max estimate there (~500M) is probably closer to a reasonable minimum.

The figures in the article are from 20 years ago. Back then, populations were smaller and many countries were just ramping-up English education for students.

I didn't catch that, thanks. Curiosity killed the cat, so:

Population of Anglosphere in 1992: 364M... <300M speakers still seems very low even 20 years ago.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#72

Post by zalew »

pjmlp wrote: post #70
dguaraglia wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, that's something that always amazed me: I lived in Brazil for 7 years (coming from Argentina) and became fluent in Brazilian Portuguese in the process. Funnily enough, I don't have any problem at all understanding most Portuguese people, whereas my wife wouldn't be able to understand half of what they said. How does that work? :)

Having a few Brazilian friends, I would say they have some hard time getting our pronunciation, whereas foreigners seem to be more open minded, kind of. I have lived this experience with French. I have less problems to understand French Canadian than my French friends.

American English is also easier to understand for most foreigners than some accents of English (and I mean only the ones from England).

Re: The world's most influential languages

#73

Post by batista »

batista wrote: post #62
hugh4life wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Movies and TV shows will be the least of English hegemony. Science, Tech, and Business is where it rules and it will never be displaced by any language currently on earth. A future constructed language may have a chance though.

> Science, Tech, and Business is where it rules and it will never be displaced by any language currently on earth. Never? The language of science, tech and business has already been displaced several times. It's far easier than you think. At some point it was Greek. Then Latin. Then French. Then English. The Chinese, for one, could not care less about english content. They have their own "Google", their own forums, m…

No, downvoting won't change the future.

Arguing against my position might work better...

Re: The world's most influential languages

#74

Post by Datonomics »

lmm wrote: post #56
Datonomics wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.

An incompatible variant of English would have none of the network advantages, at which point you might as well use a fully designed conlang like lojban. An alternative, phonemic alphabet for foreigners might have more hope, though even then the use case is narrow.

I was thinking it could be designed initially to be 80% compatible with English, in order to gain a high rate of adoption. then introduce changes every 5 years.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#75

Post by Datonomics »

rogerbinns wrote: post #44
Datonomics wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.

You would enjoy Bill Bryson's book Mother Tongue. At one point (several hundred years ago) English was going through a period of simplification and rationalization but it was also during that period that dictionaries, newspapers etc become popular. Consequently some words had already become consistent and some hadn't and we are somewhat stuck with poor timing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English-That/dp/0…

Thank you for the recommendations. How do you think English speaker would respond to a version of English which had changes like: Each sound had its own letter and all spelling was phonetic?
Post reply on HN