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[rant]why do english/chinese companies don't give a damn about other languages..

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coppice:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 24, 2020, 05:28:17 pm ---English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form).

--- End quote ---
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.

Cerebus:

--- Quote from: coppice on March 24, 2020, 05:57:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 24, 2020, 05:28:17 pm ---English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form).

--- End quote ---
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.

--- End quote ---

All true - almost, I'll come to that in a moment - but if you were making a logical choice for a new lingua Franca it wouldn't be English. As to the point about English "absorbing" from other languages, I can tell you (sitting here in pyjamas on the veranda of a bungalow*) that we don't "absorb", we don't even borrow, we wholesale steal.

*I'm not really doing that, in March, amid a public lockdown, and it is obviously an illustrative literary device to introduce some English words that were stolen from the Indian subcontinent (Urdu, Hindi (borrowed from Portuguese) and Hindi respectively).

CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 24, 2020, 05:28:17 pm ---If we're seriously aiming for a new  lingua Franca (literally latin for the French language, but intended to mean a common world language) then it ought to be Spanish. Of all the European languages that have taken hold in the rest of the world it is the most regular and the easiest to learn.

English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form). French is little better in regard to the same things. German's too much of a minority language to get out of the starting blocks (and putting the verbs at the end of sentences is just evil). Italian would be a good alternative to Spanish (simple spelling, reasonably regular grammar), but Spanish has got a huge head start on it. On headcount alone there's an argument for Chinese, but it's so different from most other languages (tonal pronunciation, ideograms) that it doesn't get out of the starting gate.

--- End quote ---

Have to agree for the most part, although Spanish is in many ways as bad as English in terms of local variations. 

It would be interesting to see how things develop over the next couple of hundred years.  Will telecommunications and video slow or stop the pronunciation drifts that split Latin into the various Romance languages?  Which languages will grow and which will shrink.  Chinese, English, French and Spanish all seem to be in the running as major tongues, with Arabic a dark horse contender.

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on March 24, 2020, 04:56:22 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 24, 2020, 02:38:20 pm ---
--- Quote from: wizard69 on March 24, 2020, 12:13:43 pm ---It is also why the best thing we could do is to get the rest of the world to give up on their native languages and make English a universal language.   The trend of the last few decades to teach students in the USA a foreign language has been a huge mistake, a waste of money really.   Instead we should have been raising a armies of English teachers to send around the world.

--- End quote ---

Hmm, it has its merits, but the thing is we tried this when there was a British empire that spanned the globe and still those pesky foreigners still insisted on sticking with their own languages. The French, Dutch and Germans tried it too before us and also failed. Remember too that before we could get started on the rest of the world, that we'd have the massive uphill task first of teaching you Americans to speak English too.

--- End quote ---

Having studied a couple of languages other than American I find a lot of merit in learning other languages.  It aids in understanding of how American English came into being and also provides insight into some different world views.  Those world views are only a bit different for European languages, but get much larger for others. 

But I do agree it would be useful if everyone spoke a common language.  And for all of Cerebus comment (which I am sure is somewhat tongue in cheek) if all spoke as close to a common language as Americans and British do it would serve the usefulness criteria.  Even if a speaker of one of the extreme American dialects and one of the extreme British dialects found it totally impossible to communicate.  People on this forum do pretty well and come from all parts of the former British empire.

--- End quote ---

They would probably get an Australian to translate!

My brother used to relate incidents from when he was in the Occupation Forces in Japan in the late 1940s, where some Brits & Americans couldn't understand each other & called upon him to translate.
Even funnier, some Americans couldn't understand each other, & he needed to do the same thing for them.

Of course, that was many years ago, & differences in dialects have been very much reduced since then.

My Bro had a gift for languages, & taught himself Spanish, initially so he could understand Spanish speakers on Shortwave radio.

It came in handy when he worked at ATN7 in the early days.
The German makers of some important equipment reshuffled their stock to deliver on time, so the gear turned up with Spanish labelling & manuals!

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 24, 2020, 06:26:12 pm ---
--- Quote from: coppice on March 24, 2020, 05:57:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: Cerebus on March 24, 2020, 05:28:17 pm ---English is the current defacto lingua Franca and is horrible from a language student's point of view, too irregular, weird spelling and pronunciation (even in Noah Webster's bastardized form).

--- End quote ---
There are 3 reasons why English is so widespread today. 1) The British Empire spread it around the world. 2) The dominance of the USA drives it forward.  3) Its a flexible language that is happy to absorb from others. Point 3 makes it messy, but it also means it avoids being exclusionary. Some European languages have tried to exclude pollution by foreign languages, and its making them fossilize and lose relevance. People are generally accepting of English.

--- End quote ---

All true - almost, I'll come to that in a moment - but if you were making a logical choice for a new lingua Franca it wouldn't be English. As to the point about English "absorbing" from other languages, I can tell you (sitting here in pyjamas on the veranda of a bungalow*) that we don't "absorb", we don't even borrow, we wholesale steal.

*I'm not really doing that, in March, amid a public lockdown, and it is obviously an illustrative literary device to introduce some English words that were stolen from the Indian subcontinent (Urdu, Hindi (borrowed from Portuguese) and Hindi respectively).

--- End quote ---

Interestingly, in Oz, where the default house is a single storey one, the word "bungalow" doesn't normally immediately bring such dwellings to mind.
It suggests, instead, a somewhat tumble-down place, along the lines of a "beach shack!

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