9 ms·

English and Its Undeserved Good Luck

35 points by tintinnabula 11y ago

deadowl 11y ago
There's a melting pot effect, too.
adrianN 11y ago
German had a pretty good shot at becoming a lingua franca. It was the language of science for some time and the Holy Roman empire and the later Habsburg empire made it the predominant language in a quite large part of Europe. It was also reasonably popular in the US. Personally, I think English is an easier language than German so I'm glad that German didn't win. It's sad though that Esperanto or one of the other artificial languages isn't more popular.
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  > It's sad though that Esperanto or one of the other artificial languages isn't more popular. afaik for a non-Romance speaker, Esperanto is a wasted effort because it's as difficult to learn as any of the real European languages. Esperanto isn't as culturally-neutral as claimed.
  - adrianN 11y ago
    As a German speaker, I find Esperanto very easy to learn. You can have basic conversations after just a few hours of studying. I do think that it's very centered on European languages and a Chinese native speaker will have much more trouble learning it. But it still is simpler than natural languages, because it has no irregularities.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      > But it still is simpler than natural languages, because it has no irregularities. It will if it ever picks up speakers...
    - brandonmenc 11y ago
      > it has no irregularities I don't believe this is true, because I've heard linguists state otherwise. Maybe someone could come in and verify this, because I'm no expert. Here are some possible Esperanto irregularities: http://zompist.com/kitespo.html http://zompist.com/kitespo.html
  - akvadrako 11y ago
    What makes you think that? In fact China is one of the biggest proponents of Esperanto and Beijing University is the only one in the world that offers classes in it.
- Eridrus 11y ago
  Given the fact that German had a shot, I'm surprised the author expects English to remain the global language. The number of native speakers is small compared to Mandarin and as China modernizes it would be surprising if economic gravity didn't shift in that direction. Is the difficulty of Chinese writing enough to prevent it from becoming a global language?
  - undersuit 11y ago
    I think English's status as the current global language will be enough to stop Chinese from becoming the global language. You're looking at a situation where 5/6 of the world learns 3 languages, English, Chinese, and their native language(as the transition will not happen instantaneously) or a world where everyone learns English and their native language.
  - hencq 11y ago
    The number of native speakers for English might be smaller, but I think crucially it's spoken in a lot of different countries already, especially if you take English as a second language into account. This is anecdotal, but in my experience people from different non-English speaking countries will often use English to talk to each other. Of course that might change as China increases its clout, but I think that change might be much slower than China's economic growth rate.
  - sliverstorm 11y ago
    The other one I wonder about is Chinese typing. Alphabet systems, with only a few building blocks and many permutations, always seemed more suited to computers than character systems.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      This is not really a problem anymore. You type Chinese these days by typing it phonetically (in Pinyin using Roman letters, of course) and the computer figures out what characters you intend, with some help from the typist. It's not the most elegant thing in the world, but it works fine.
  - 11y ago
- tokenadult 11y ago
  My Hacker News user profile discloses much of my background in studying human languages. Esperanto is a big disappointment to anyone who knows multiple languages and knows linguistics well. It manages to be arbitrary and suboptimal in all kinds of ways that it didn't have to be arbitrary and suboptimal. And, alas, Esperanto has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for any more serious proposal for a constructed languages to serve as an international auxiliary language. The simple fact of the matter is that the international auxiliary language of the twenty-first century is English. New speakers of English added to the total for English each year by learning English as a second language strictly outnumber all Esperanto speakers combined. I have seen English used for that purpose in dozens of combinations of speakers of differing native languages. I have seen rather extensive use of English even for conversation among Chinese people with a certain level of education. (Although the younger generation in China is gradually becoming quite proficient in standard Mandarin in urban areas, Chinese people as old as I am or older sometimes find one another's Mandarin acquired as a second language more baffling than one another's English similarly acquired.) An extensive, linguistically informed write-up on the defects of Esperanto as an international auxiliary language, which is not my own write-up but which I recommend to friends like you, has long lived on the World Wide Web.[1] [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I have seen this same effect between québécois and french - two people who supposedly speak the same language give up and just talk to each other in English.
  - cperciva 11y ago
    I have seen rather extensive use of English even for conversation among Chinese people with a certain level of education. My favourite illustration of the role of English is a conference I attended in Copenhagen a few years ago. I was the only person present who was not a native Danish speaker; the entire conference was held in English.
jinushaun 11y ago
The article has a weird tone. It seems fairly obvious to me that English and the dominance of the British Empire in the 19th century followed by the rise of the USA as a superpower in the 20th century just happened to coincide with the rise of globalisations in the 20th century. It could've easily been any of the other previous imperialist super powers (Spain, France, etc), but those empires just so happen to have declined in power before globalisation. So in short, luck.
cassieramen 11y ago
While the loss of languages is certainly hard to stomach, the biggest detriment to society is that is often signifies the loss of information. One common language used globally dramatically decreases the chances of information getting lost. It also has the benefit of increasing access to information over time. A great breakthrough can be shared globally, not insulated in one region. I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information. Why should a country hold on to their traditional language if it holds back the potential of its citizens?
- fao_ 11y ago
  > I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information. I think that language diversity is bad for the communication of information, but language preservation is good because there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English. If you still have a few people that speak their native language (Even as a second language), then those exact concepts are preserved.
  - wnoise 11y ago
    > there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.
    - mikeash 11y ago
      "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > If you still have a few people that speak their native language (Even as a second language), then those exact concepts are preserved. Huh? No they're not. All languages change; concepts will be preserved exactly as long as people want them.
cjensen 11y ago
It says a lot about the broken sensibilities of higher education that an Historian describing how an outcome occurred feels obligated to explicitly dissociate herself with the outcome ("I don’t intend any of this in triumphalist spirit"). Or for that matter, even to express an opinion on the moral correctness of the outcome. If an historian who happens to be from Egypt describes the governmental system at the time of the pyramids were built, would we expect them disavow the ancient regime? Even if they were describing the system under Nasser, a disavowal would be weird.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Russian history in 20-th century is so awful that you've got to make some statement about events. Unfortunately, people learned nothing and we're on track to repeat.
  - Mikeb85 11y ago
    Russian history in every century is brutal. They've been fighting off invaders pretty much since the beginning of time. From Mongol hordes to Muslim invaders to European invaders, and so on. And of course you're right - in the 20th century they had a world war followed by revolution followed by another world war in which they lost 20% of their population, and an economic disaster in which they lost half their GDP...
    - vdaniuk 11y ago
      >They've been fighting off invaders pretty much since the beginning of time Right. Russian Empire has grown to the size of one sixth of all land on Earth by defending from invaders.
      - dragonwriter 11y ago
        > Russian Empire has grown to the size of one sixth of all land on Earth by defending from invaders. Well, yeah. They just take very seriously the proverbial advice about the best defense...
civilian 11y ago
In the graphic of where English is the official language, Quebec should really be colored grey. :D
jerf 11y ago
Is there a language that deserves to be the world language? I mean, not "would be a good one"... deserves? (I'm sure many people would cite some beautiful language as a "good one", but remember that in the process of becoming the "world language" it would cease to be "beautiful" anyhow.)
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  I think Italian is way easier and contains more roots from Latin that other european languages also spot. But obviously Italian never come close to such capability.
civilian 11y ago
For more reading, the author recommends "English as a Global Language" by David Crystal. It's available in pdf here: http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/pdf/research/books/nation_branding/English_As_A_Global_Language_-_David_Crystal.pdf http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/pdf/research/books/...
saosebastiao 11y ago
Amongst global languages, English is unique in the sense that its arbiters of correctness are very weak. Many global languages have arbiter bodies which are considered authoritative (for example, the Real Academia Española for the Spanish language), whereas with English such institutions exist but they don't have much influence outside regional standards for formal publications. I would argue that the decentralized and weak arbitration of correctness is what allows it to thrive in extremely diverse cultures, as there is no concept of authoritative correctness that requires you to use a construct that is cultural in nature.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  The two "arbiter bodies" for English are the BBC and Hollywood. They define what "standard English" is for the world. (Actually, they define two, slightly different, standard Englishes, but they're close enough to keep the language unified, at least so far.)
Zenst 11y ago
Given English has had so many external influences from other languages over time from invasion alone then English, isn't as geographic as inferred by name. Even Shakespeare's time, the language then is not what is used to today and it still evolves and with that. Maybe English is were it is at because it adapts more quickly than other languages and with that English has changed much as a language over time and still does.
- evincarofautumn 11y ago
  Languages are generally simplified by contact with other languages, and because of the Norman Invasion, and later the British Empire, English has had a lot of of contact. Inversely, the more isolated a language is (e.g., by mountain ranges or seas) the more complex and idiosyncratic it tends to become. So yes, English has historically adapted more quickly than many other languages, but this doesn’t have anything to do with the language itself.
anigbrowl 11y ago
But it was pure dumb luck for English that the British empire arose so quickly and so late. No it wasn't. Being an island nation and having both invaded and suffered invasions during medieval times, Britain understood that sea power was key to its security and invested heavily in naval power - as you'd expect an island nation to do if it had the resources. This doesn't mean just investment in boats and personnel, but in things like accurate clocks to aid navigation. The government of the day offered huge cash prizes to anyone who could make a chronometer that would reliably work at sea and technologists rose to the challenge. Britain did indeed benefit from a variety of other technological developments, but they basically deployed their blue water navy and colonial efforts in much the same way that the Romans did in the Mediterranean sea centuries before - and the success of Roman and Hellenic civilizations is easily observed in the ubiquity of Latin and Greek roots in the variety of European languages, and our ongoing use of the Latin alphabet. If the Roman empire had not collapsed in the 4th century (for reasons which are beyond the scope of this discussion) most of the world would be speaking Latin today. As with English, Latin thrived because the Romans were fairly skilled administrators of the territories they took over, prioritizing trade and economic growth rather than conquest and total destruction/ Latin and Greek are distinctive languages because they have a fully phonetic alphabet, whereas many other writing systems struggle with notating foreign languages. Ancient Hebrew, for example, derived from Phoenician writing and is based on the writing of consonant sounds and so it retains a strong oral tradition of Torah study because there are no letters for vowels and so the meaning of a given word in Hebrew depends heavily on context, substantially limiting its use by others lacking that oral tradition. The utility of an easy-to-learn alphabet should not be underestimated; look at the time cost involved in developing an adequate vocabulary in Chinese or some other ideogrammatic language. Japanese uses Chinese symbols as kanji (albeit with different meanings from Chinese, though Japanese schoolchildren learn both meanings) and has not one but two phonetic scripts, one for Japanese words (to help kids look up kanji in syllabic dictionaries) and one for foreign words. Oddly, though, Japan doesn't have a punning tradition based on homophony because the syllabic script came along much later. I apologize for the extreme over-simplifications above, but this is really a book-length topic that can't be properly argued in only a few paragraphs.
- douche 11y ago
WalterBright 11y ago
I don't buy that there's even a concept of a language "deserving" to be a global language. A number of the linguistic faults the author attributes to English are a consequence of it being a global language, for example, a great many English words are adopted wholesale from other languages, spelling and all.
danieltillett 11y ago
I can't believe that no one has mentioned the industrial revolution. The nature of the industrial revolution is such that which ever country got there first was going to dominate the world. The really interesting question is why was England the first country in the world to pull itself out of the Malthusian trap via industrialisation.
jfaucett 11y ago
Well, it is great we have a common language which facilitates scientific communication, I don't really understand why the author seems so apologetic about that. Conversely, the fact that the standard is a language where some nations inherently have an advantage over the rest of the world is an unfortunate side-effect of historical events. I also don't see the advantages leveling at any point in the future unless a country were to decide to completely give up its entire cultural heritage, literature, etc. and adopt English in every aspect of public life - and even then it would take minimally a generation before most of the new culture was assimilated, and would only level the field for said country. Also I think there are two distinctions that need to be made. The first is that there is a global lingua franca, namely English. Now the world has a new standard language instead of French in which to communicate about everything. I see this as a great win in the sense that we can all communicate with one another, the only negative part is that its not a level playing field, but this again is simply a discomfort, it was the same before when French and Latin were lingua francas. The second is the anglicisation of all cultures. Here in continental Europe you can almost literally observe the change as you see how many advertisements, marketing, technology, language, music, films etc. are directly imported from the English speaking world, even to the point where it now "sounds wierd" to use non-English words for certain things. Now you could see this as positive or negative. For one if you go anywhere you know what to expect, you have a universal culture to understand marketing, tech, restaurants, ads, doctors, educational systems, etc.. Of course on the flipside everywhere is the same, just as in the US you can travel thousands of miles and the stores, language, and restaurants are all the same. So you are getting sameness on a global scale. I see how the author could be sad about that happening and I think thats what's making him so apologetic. I even sympathize with him, English is great to communicate globally but I don't see why it and its countries' cultures have to encroach on all others, it seems to make the world a dimmer place. I've often wondered why we haven't created a language based off of knowledge gleaned from the cognitive sciences and universal grammar and phonology, to create a language that was perfectly regular and maximally easy to learn (orthography/phonology/syntax/semantics) for all speakers of any language. Its certainly possible, you could even make it much more efficient for text-processing and analysis purposes. You could likely cut down the time of acquisition to less than 6 months for B2 level fluency. Of course all previous attempts at synthetic languages tell us no one will use it. I wonder how easy it would have to be to cross the threshold? Probably impossibly easy given the number of rules required to generate an infinite set of discreet symbols...

35 points by tintinnabula 11y ago

There's a melting pot effect, too.

German had a pretty good shot at becoming a lingua franca. It was the language of science for some time and the Holy Roman empire and the later Habsburg empire made it the predominant language in a quite large part of Europe. It was also reasonably popular in the US. Personally, I think English is an easier language than German so I'm glad that German didn't win. It's sad though that Esperanto or one of the other artificial languages isn't more popular.

brandonmenc 11y ago
> It's sad though that Esperanto or one of the other artificial languages isn't more popular. afaik for a non-Romance speaker, Esperanto is a wasted effort because it's as difficult to learn as any of the real European languages. Esperanto isn't as culturally-neutral as claimed.
- adrianN 11y ago
  As a German speaker, I find Esperanto very easy to learn. You can have basic conversations after just a few hours of studying. I do think that it's very centered on European languages and a Chinese native speaker will have much more trouble learning it. But it still is simpler than natural languages, because it has no irregularities.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > But it still is simpler than natural languages, because it has no irregularities. It will if it ever picks up speakers...
  - brandonmenc 11y ago
    > it has no irregularities I don't believe this is true, because I've heard linguists state otherwise. Maybe someone could come in and verify this, because I'm no expert. Here are some possible Esperanto irregularities: http://zompist.com/kitespo.html http://zompist.com/kitespo.html
- akvadrako 11y ago
  What makes you think that? In fact China is one of the biggest proponents of Esperanto and Beijing University is the only one in the world that offers classes in it.
Eridrus 11y ago
Given the fact that German had a shot, I'm surprised the author expects English to remain the global language. The number of native speakers is small compared to Mandarin and as China modernizes it would be surprising if economic gravity didn't shift in that direction. Is the difficulty of Chinese writing enough to prevent it from becoming a global language?
- undersuit 11y ago
  I think English's status as the current global language will be enough to stop Chinese from becoming the global language. You're looking at a situation where 5/6 of the world learns 3 languages, English, Chinese, and their native language(as the transition will not happen instantaneously) or a world where everyone learns English and their native language.
- hencq 11y ago
  The number of native speakers for English might be smaller, but I think crucially it's spoken in a lot of different countries already, especially if you take English as a second language into account. This is anecdotal, but in my experience people from different non-English speaking countries will often use English to talk to each other. Of course that might change as China increases its clout, but I think that change might be much slower than China's economic growth rate.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  The other one I wonder about is Chinese typing. Alphabet systems, with only a few building blocks and many permutations, always seemed more suited to computers than character systems.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    This is not really a problem anymore. You type Chinese these days by typing it phonetically (in Pinyin using Roman letters, of course) and the computer figures out what characters you intend, with some help from the typist. It's not the most elegant thing in the world, but it works fine.
- 11y ago
tokenadult 11y ago
My Hacker News user profile discloses much of my background in studying human languages. Esperanto is a big disappointment to anyone who knows multiple languages and knows linguistics well. It manages to be arbitrary and suboptimal in all kinds of ways that it didn't have to be arbitrary and suboptimal. And, alas, Esperanto has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for any more serious proposal for a constructed languages to serve as an international auxiliary language. The simple fact of the matter is that the international auxiliary language of the twenty-first century is English. New speakers of English added to the total for English each year by learning English as a second language strictly outnumber all Esperanto speakers combined. I have seen English used for that purpose in dozens of combinations of speakers of differing native languages. I have seen rather extensive use of English even for conversation among Chinese people with a certain level of education. (Although the younger generation in China is gradually becoming quite proficient in standard Mandarin in urban areas, Chinese people as old as I am or older sometimes find one another's Mandarin acquired as a second language more baffling than one another's English similarly acquired.) An extensive, linguistically informed write-up on the defects of Esperanto as an international auxiliary language, which is not my own write-up but which I recommend to friends like you, has long lived on the World Wide Web.[1] [1] http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I have seen this same effect between québécois and french - two people who supposedly speak the same language give up and just talk to each other in English.
- cperciva 11y ago
  I have seen rather extensive use of English even for conversation among Chinese people with a certain level of education. My favourite illustration of the role of English is a conference I attended in Copenhagen a few years ago. I was the only person present who was not a native Danish speaker; the entire conference was held in English.

jinushaun 11y ago

The article has a weird tone. It seems fairly obvious to me that English and the dominance of the British Empire in the 19th century followed by the rise of the USA as a superpower in the 20th century just happened to coincide with the rise of globalisations in the 20th century. It could've easily been any of the other previous imperialist super powers (Spain, France, etc), but those empires just so happen to have declined in power before globalisation. So in short, luck.

cassieramen 11y ago

While the loss of languages is certainly hard to stomach, the biggest detriment to society is that is often signifies the loss of information. One common language used globally dramatically decreases the chances of information getting lost. It also has the benefit of increasing access to information over time. A great breakthrough can be shared globally, not insulated in one region. I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information. Why should a country hold on to their traditional language if it holds back the potential of its citizens?

fao_ 11y ago
> I question the need to preserve a language if it inhibits the positive spread of information. I think that language diversity is bad for the communication of information, but language preservation is good because there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English. If you still have a few people that speak their native language (Even as a second language), then those exact concepts are preserved.
- wnoise 11y ago
  > there are words in other languages that are difficult to articulate in English. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us.
  - mikeash 11y ago
    "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > If you still have a few people that speak their native language (Even as a second language), then those exact concepts are preserved. Huh? No they're not. All languages change; concepts will be preserved exactly as long as people want them.

cjensen 11y ago

It says a lot about the broken sensibilities of higher education that an Historian describing how an outcome occurred feels obligated to explicitly dissociate herself with the outcome ("I don’t intend any of this in triumphalist spirit"). Or for that matter, even to express an opinion on the moral correctness of the outcome. If an historian who happens to be from Egypt describes the governmental system at the time of the pyramids were built, would we expect them disavow the ancient regime? Even if they were describing the system under Nasser, a disavowal would be weird.

guard-of-terra 11y ago
Russian history in 20-th century is so awful that you've got to make some statement about events. Unfortunately, people learned nothing and we're on track to repeat.
- Mikeb85 11y ago
  Russian history in every century is brutal. They've been fighting off invaders pretty much since the beginning of time. From Mongol hordes to Muslim invaders to European invaders, and so on. And of course you're right - in the 20th century they had a world war followed by revolution followed by another world war in which they lost 20% of their population, and an economic disaster in which they lost half their GDP...
  - vdaniuk 11y ago
    >They've been fighting off invaders pretty much since the beginning of time Right. Russian Empire has grown to the size of one sixth of all land on Earth by defending from invaders.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Russian Empire has grown to the size of one sixth of all land on Earth by defending from invaders. Well, yeah. They just take very seriously the proverbial advice about the best defense...

civilian 11y ago

In the graphic of where English is the official language, Quebec should really be colored grey. :D

jerf 11y ago

Is there a language that deserves to be the world language? I mean, not "would be a good one"... deserves? (I'm sure many people would cite some beautiful language as a "good one", but remember that in the process of becoming the "world language" it would cease to be "beautiful" anyhow.)

guard-of-terra 11y ago
I think Italian is way easier and contains more roots from Latin that other european languages also spot. But obviously Italian never come close to such capability.

civilian 11y ago

For more reading, the author recommends "English as a Global Language" by David Crystal. It's available in pdf here: http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/pdf/research/books/nation_branding/English_As_A_Global_Language_-_David_Crystal.pdf http://www.culturaldiplomacy.org/academy/pdf/research/books/...

saosebastiao 11y ago

Amongst global languages, English is unique in the sense that its arbiters of correctness are very weak. Many global languages have arbiter bodies which are considered authoritative (for example, the Real Academia Española for the Spanish language), whereas with English such institutions exist but they don't have much influence outside regional standards for formal publications. I would argue that the decentralized and weak arbitration of correctness is what allows it to thrive in extremely diverse cultures, as there is no concept of authoritative correctness that requires you to use a construct that is cultural in nature.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
The two "arbiter bodies" for English are the BBC and Hollywood. They define what "standard English" is for the world. (Actually, they define two, slightly different, standard Englishes, but they're close enough to keep the language unified, at least so far.)

Zenst 11y ago

Given English has had so many external influences from other languages over time from invasion alone then English, isn't as geographic as inferred by name. Even Shakespeare's time, the language then is not what is used to today and it still evolves and with that. Maybe English is were it is at because it adapts more quickly than other languages and with that English has changed much as a language over time and still does.

evincarofautumn 11y ago
Languages are generally simplified by contact with other languages, and because of the Norman Invasion, and later the British Empire, English has had a lot of of contact. Inversely, the more isolated a language is (e.g., by mountain ranges or seas) the more complex and idiosyncratic it tends to become. So yes, English has historically adapted more quickly than many other languages, but this doesn’t have anything to do with the language itself.

anigbrowl 11y ago

But it was pure dumb luck for English that the British empire arose so quickly and so late. No it wasn't. Being an island nation and having both invaded and suffered invasions during medieval times, Britain understood that sea power was key to its security and invested heavily in naval power - as you'd expect an island nation to do if it had the resources. This doesn't mean just investment in boats and personnel, but in things like accurate clocks to aid navigation. The government of the day offered huge cash prizes to anyone who could make a chronometer that would reliably work at sea and technologists rose to the challenge. Britain did indeed benefit from a variety of other technological developments, but they basically deployed their blue water navy and colonial efforts in much the same way that the Romans did in the Mediterranean sea centuries before - and the success of Roman and Hellenic civilizations is easily observed in the ubiquity of Latin and Greek roots in the variety of European languages, and our ongoing use of the Latin alphabet. If the Roman empire had not collapsed in the 4th century (for reasons which are beyond the scope of this discussion) most of the world would be speaking Latin today. As with English, Latin thrived because the Romans were fairly skilled administrators of the territories they took over, prioritizing trade and economic growth rather than conquest and total destruction/ Latin and Greek are distinctive languages because they have a fully phonetic alphabet, whereas many other writing systems struggle with notating foreign languages. Ancient Hebrew, for example, derived from Phoenician writing and is based on the writing of consonant sounds and so it retains a strong oral tradition of Torah study because there are no letters for vowels and so the meaning of a given word in Hebrew depends heavily on context, substantially limiting its use by others lacking that oral tradition. The utility of an easy-to-learn alphabet should not be underestimated; look at the time cost involved in developing an adequate vocabulary in Chinese or some other ideogrammatic language. Japanese uses Chinese symbols as kanji (albeit with different meanings from Chinese, though Japanese schoolchildren learn both meanings) and has not one but two phonetic scripts, one for Japanese words (to help kids look up kanji in syllabic dictionaries) and one for foreign words. Oddly, though, Japan doesn't have a punning tradition based on homophony because the syllabic script came along much later. I apologize for the extreme over-simplifications above, but this is really a book-length topic that can't be properly argued in only a few paragraphs.

douche 11y ago

WalterBright 11y ago

I don't buy that there's even a concept of a language "deserving" to be a global language. A number of the linguistic faults the author attributes to English are a consequence of it being a global language, for example, a great many English words are adopted wholesale from other languages, spelling and all.

danieltillett 11y ago

I can't believe that no one has mentioned the industrial revolution. The nature of the industrial revolution is such that which ever country got there first was going to dominate the world. The really interesting question is why was England the first country in the world to pull itself out of the Malthusian trap via industrialisation.

jfaucett 11y ago

Well, it is great we have a common language which facilitates scientific communication, I don't really understand why the author seems so apologetic about that. Conversely, the fact that the standard is a language where some nations inherently have an advantage over the rest of the world is an unfortunate side-effect of historical events. I also don't see the advantages leveling at any point in the future unless a country were to decide to completely give up its entire cultural heritage, literature, etc. and adopt English in every aspect of public life - and even then it would take minimally a generation before most of the new culture was assimilated, and would only level the field for said country. Also I think there are two distinctions that need to be made. The first is that there is a global lingua franca, namely English. Now the world has a new standard language instead of French in which to communicate about everything. I see this as a great win in the sense that we can all communicate with one another, the only negative part is that its not a level playing field, but this again is simply a discomfort, it was the same before when French and Latin were lingua francas. The second is the anglicisation of all cultures. Here in continental Europe you can almost literally observe the change as you see how many advertisements, marketing, technology, language, music, films etc. are directly imported from the English speaking world, even to the point where it now "sounds wierd" to use non-English words for certain things. Now you could see this as positive or negative. For one if you go anywhere you know what to expect, you have a universal culture to understand marketing, tech, restaurants, ads, doctors, educational systems, etc.. Of course on the flipside everywhere is the same, just as in the US you can travel thousands of miles and the stores, language, and restaurants are all the same. So you are getting sameness on a global scale. I see how the author could be sad about that happening and I think thats what's making him so apologetic. I even sympathize with him, English is great to communicate globally but I don't see why it and its countries' cultures have to encroach on all others, it seems to make the world a dimmer place. I've often wondered why we haven't created a language based off of knowledge gleaned from the cognitive sciences and universal grammar and phonology, to create a language that was perfectly regular and maximally easy to learn (orthography/phonology/syntax/semantics) for all speakers of any language. Its certainly possible, you could even make it much more efficient for text-processing and analysis purposes. You could likely cut down the time of acquisition to less than 6 months for B2 level fluency. Of course all previous attempts at synthetic languages tell us no one will use it. I wonder how easy it would have to be to cross the threshold? Probably impossibly easy given the number of rules required to generate an infinite set of discreet symbols...