4 ms·
> English is still the lingua franca Ironic that in order to say this, you used a latin phrase that translates to "language of the Frankish people".
by knodi123 7y ago
> English is still the lingua franca
Ironic that in order to say this, you used a latin phrase that translates to "language of the Frankish people".
- zrobotics 7y agoIronic? I think one of the main reasons English has become such an international language is how bastardized it is and how easily words & phrases are borrowed from other languages.
- NoodleIncident 7y agoThe fact that the Latin translation doesn't make any sense means that it was an English phrase the whole time, despite its etymology.
- mirimir 7y agoExcept that it doesn't mean what you imply. > The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca, the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from late medieval times, especially during the Renaissance era, to the 18th century. At that time, Italian-speakers dominated seaborne commerce in the port cities of the Ottoman Empire and a simplified version of Italian, including many loan words from Greek, Old French, Portuguese, Occitan, and Spanish as well as Arabic and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" (in the generic sense) of the region. > In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua means a language, as in Portuguese and Italian, and franca is related to phrankoi in Greek and faranji in Arabic as well as the equivalent Italian. In all three cases, the literal sense is "Frankish", leading to the direct translation: "language of the Franks". During the late Byzantine Empire, "Franks" was a term that applied to all Western Europeans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca