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This article touches on a broader point that I had always found fascinating - what is the relationship of language to the ability of a culture to spread around
by ufmace 9y ago
This article touches on a broader point that I had always found fascinating - what is the relationship of language to the ability of a culture to spread around the world? The promotion of American culture around the world owes a lot IMO to the British Empire and it's promotion of English around the world. Which in turn owes a lot to the culture of the British Empire, and the relatively light-handed way in which they ruled it. That's the only way it was possible for them to dominate and spread their language and culture throughout so many places. Control of it as a formal empire fell apart, but it left the seeds for kind of a soft American empire, when America became a world power and started spreading ideology and massive amounts of media around the world.
It's interesting that nothing like this seems to happen for any other language and culture combination, most notably Chinese for this article. How much of the lack of ability for Chinese to spread as a culture is just how damn hard it is to learn Chinese as a non-native? Or is it that the Chinese just don't seem that interested in spreading their culture and ideology farther than they can directly benefit from? Or is the fact that they aren't interested in that based on them knowing and even taking pride in their language and culture being particularly impenetrable? Related to this article, it seems notable that movements within China to radically simplify the language never seem to pick up much steam. Sure, it would be insanely complex to do on a logistical level, but even above that, it seems like nobody is much interested in it.
It reminds me a little of thinking about AIs. They say that an AI will only want to do what it gets programmed to want to do. It may become smarter and more powerful, but there's no reason for it to change what it wants to do. Changing what it wants to do would itself be an action, and it has no reason to take that action, because it isn't part of what it originally wants to do. It seems similar that cultures sort of evolve to care about some things and not care about other things, and efforts to make them care about something they don't care about at best have quite the uphill battle.
- kccqzy 9y ago> It's interesting that nothing like this seems to happen for any other language and culture combination, most notably Chinese for this article. False. It has happened. Chinese culture has spread to neighboring countries, but that's almost a millennium ago. Ever wonder why in the Unicode BMP there's a huge block of "CJK ideographs"? It's because historically the Japanese, Korean, (and Vietnamese) all use Chinese characters in their communication. Sure their respective languages are very different but the script is the same. And at that time China had plenty of influence over these neighboring countries.
- gizmo686 9y ago>but the script is the same. Not entirely. There scripts are the same enough (and large enough) that the designers of Unicode wanted to combine them into a single character set. God help you if you actually want to combine these languages within a single text. The writing systems are different enough that to get a good result, you need to use a font that was designed for the language you are reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
- pjc50 9y agoFrench spread with the French colonies, Spanish with the Spanish ones. That's why Spanish is actually spoken by more people than English. I would put a good part of the English-language dominance down to two factors in addition to colonialism: - no central language approval body (no Academe Anglaise) - Hollywood, the BBC and the World Service. > the Chinese just don't seem that interested in spreading their culture and ideology farther than they can directly benefit from? Traditionally the end of Chinese outward-looking culture is attributed to the end of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_voyages , but I'm sure it's more complex than that.
- notahacker 9y agoI think the main thing is that the legacy of the English colonies (which were more populous and diverse than the French or Spanish ones) was continued by the dominant economic power that succeeded in them around the time international communication started to become direct and real time, and education became seen as a universal right necessary to participate effectively in the economy. And as cultural output goes, it's not just Hollywood and the BBC, but also the majority of the internet, and the programming languages and computer science theorems that sit underneath them that haven't been comprehensively localised, because sometimes it's just easier to learn English. Given the overhead of learning new languages, in an era of mass communication the world's auxiliary language ought to be even more of a winner-takes-all market than search or social, but French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and Russian have a headstart and a very dedicated user base. Not sure how big an advantage the lack of central language body is though: on the one hand it means that people using it in an idiosyncratic local way as an auxiliary language aren't subject to foreign third parties insisting they're doing it wrong, and can inject other shared vocabulary and adjust to each others' fluency level. But on the other hand there's nobody influential to promote any attempt to fix English's confusing irregularities and dreadful orthography(ies) and lack of authority to appeal to doesn't stop people being terribly snobby about "correct" English.
- vacri 9y ago> That's why Spanish is actually spoken by more people than English. Spanish has more native speakers than English, but when you include people using secondary languages, there are more English speakers in total than any other language.