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Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could always comm

Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could always communicate in Latin when you traveled. He also noted that the various lingua francas since Latin was lost have tended to suffer from becoming the world language. Looking at English today one is hard pressed to disagree.

AnimalMuppet 7y ago
How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.
- bryanrasmussen 7y ago
  I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture) I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English version of a sign or some sort of text. The English is riddled with laughable errors - why? Because everyone knows English and why would you ever hire a translator, just get Jules down in accounting to do it, he's great! (only it turns out Jules is not great) I will now, at the end of my explanation of how I think someone might want to make the argument, explain that I myself am not a supporter of the argument (nor do I know if this is indeed what Belloc supposed) and hope not to get one of those responses telling me how wrong I am in believing what I do not have a particular belief in.
  - notahacker 7y ago
    I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.
    - Loughla 7y ago
      Can I have examples of what you mean by this?
      - notahacker 7y ago
        Words which for usually fairly arbitrary reasons have the same plural and singular form are a particular irritant of mine, not least because of how awkward I feel having to correct them on colleagues' client proposals and presentations when I'd really rather be suggesting more useful changes. We've got a number of other nonstandard pluralizations and conjugations from ancient Germanic and modern loanwords alike, which wouldn't be missed if they were um... losed But taken further down the path of how the language could evolve to remove grammatical forms not actually conveying anything useful, I think we could happily make articles optional and preferred only when an a/the distinction actually matters; many ESL speakers communicate perfectly lucidly without them at all. Normally if don't include article in sentence it's not problem; except if I write business email like this people think I'm foreigner. Before English was a global language [and before the printing press tbf] Middle English managed to lose an entire set of grammatical gender markers affecting nearly every word, after the printing press we lost the thee/thou distinction [outside Shakespeare, the KJV and a few regional dialects], and yet we've still got grammar guides insistent on preserving 'whom' and claiming that despite how people actually speak the language one shouldn't really use 'you' as generic third party pronoun
    - umanwizard 7y ago
      I suspect that every language has just as many weird quirks as English, and you're only aware of English's because it's the language you speak/write best.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      The interesting part of that to me, too, is how many of them roundabout derive from eras where erudite and highly educated English speakers were forced to learn Latin as well, and in so doing apply Latin grammar rules to English that don't apply to natural English. The most obvious example being "never end a sentence with a preposition", which is a very clear grammar violation in Latin, but natural English has ended sentences with prepositions for a very long time. To a lesser extent I think it is also Latin education's fault why the "objective" case continues to linger in English, despite being so mostly dead, as it acts as an education marker. `Whom` is a zombie only insisted upon by certain educations and should just be buried and put out of its misery. The confusion around `me` versus `I` and which scenarios to use which probably will only get worse.
- hetman 7y ago
  Euro English is one example I can think of. The semantic shifts can make the language more ambiguous when used between different groups of speakers.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  Greek did, that's for sure...
triska 7y ago
In school, one of our teachers was also a priest, and he told us that his job once required him to travel to the (former) Soviet Union. His Russian colleague did not speak German, and he did not speak Russian. Latin was the only language in which they could communicate, and the first question by the Russian priest was: re publica missus? i.e., "[Were you] sent by the state?"
- schoen 7y ago
  Primo Levi managed to use Latin to communicate with a Polish priest with whom he didn't have any other language in common. > After World War II the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was walking back to Italy from Poland. Tired and starving, he met a priest, who spoke neither French, or German, or Italian. Ubi est mensa pauperorum? Levi asked. Where is the table for paupers? https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-bk-chamberlain21-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-bk-chamb... (I have also used Latin to communicate with a priest with whom I didn't share any other language, although it was less surprising because it was at a spoken Latin event.)
  - lou1306 7y ago
    Recently Liliana Segre, an Italian Auschwitz survivor and senator for life, was heavily criticized by (some) Italian politicians for proposing that the Parliament should set up a committee to investigate racism, anti-semitism and hate speech. Since some critics were saying that she did not "love her country" (or something to that effect), she replied by recalling a brief conversation she had at Auschwitz with a prisoner from Eastern Europe. Both were teenagers and they were only able to communicate thanks to Latin. Patria mia pulchra est; Familia mea dulcis est; Cor meum et anima mea tristes sunt. (My motherland is beautiful; My family is sweet; My heart and soul are sad). She was still attached to the same country that sent her there. (Full text in italian: https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_novembre_01/io-non-amerei-patria-ecco-cosa-dissi-una-ragazza-dentro-lager-birkenau-1c7a6148-fc7d-11e9-850d-5e44dc14944c.shtml https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_novembre_01/io-non-amere...)
umanwizard 7y ago
Do you have examples of languages that didn't "develop freely"? If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific. (In fact, what does it even mean for a language to "develop"?) There are many languages around the world that have followed their national evolution despite no contact with Latin, or even with literacy at all.
- JackFr 7y ago
  > If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific. I don't think that's a particularly good standard to judge recalling an observation made by Belloc.
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    Let me be more clear: I suspect that regardless of whether Belloc believed it, the assertion is either false or meaningless. The correct way to judge whether I'm write or Belloc is involves pinning down what we mean in a scientific way.
Iv 7y ago
Latin has been the language of erudite and priests but most of middle age had different languages used as trade linguo. The common latin root of many probably helped though.
Iv 7y ago
Wherever there are catholic priests, you'll find latin speakers. That's certainly a plus, though I really think that English surpassed its spread in so many ways. The global English we, non-native, use is a simplified one. It is its main appeal: an easy-to-learn language, a simple alphabet, many words of the modern world already phonetically transcribed in many languages. Latin is too rigid to still be used. Too hard to learn, especially by non-westerners and a culture of not allowing "incorrect" grammar (notwithstanding the fact that ancient Romans frequently were 'creative' in that respect) But yes, global English is much simplified. I consider myself fairly fluent in that dialect yet I have British friends who are able to converse in a vocabulary that makes me incapable of following their discussion. I guess that would be like me using old French and aged expressions.
- voldacar 7y ago
  Latin is easier to learn than English. A lot fewer edge cases and ad-hoc grammatical constructions

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.

bryanrasmussen 7y ago
I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture) I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English version of a sign or some sort of text. The English is riddled with laughable errors - why? Because everyone knows English and why would you ever hire a translator, just get Jules down in accounting to do it, he's great! (only it turns out Jules is not great) I will now, at the end of my explanation of how I think someone might want to make the argument, explain that I myself am not a supporter of the argument (nor do I know if this is indeed what Belloc supposed) and hope not to get one of those responses telling me how wrong I am in believing what I do not have a particular belief in.
- notahacker 7y ago
  I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.
  - Loughla 7y ago
    Can I have examples of what you mean by this?
    - notahacker 7y ago
      Words which for usually fairly arbitrary reasons have the same plural and singular form are a particular irritant of mine, not least because of how awkward I feel having to correct them on colleagues' client proposals and presentations when I'd really rather be suggesting more useful changes. We've got a number of other nonstandard pluralizations and conjugations from ancient Germanic and modern loanwords alike, which wouldn't be missed if they were um... losed But taken further down the path of how the language could evolve to remove grammatical forms not actually conveying anything useful, I think we could happily make articles optional and preferred only when an a/the distinction actually matters; many ESL speakers communicate perfectly lucidly without them at all. Normally if don't include article in sentence it's not problem; except if I write business email like this people think I'm foreigner. Before English was a global language [and before the printing press tbf] Middle English managed to lose an entire set of grammatical gender markers affecting nearly every word, after the printing press we lost the thee/thou distinction [outside Shakespeare, the KJV and a few regional dialects], and yet we've still got grammar guides insistent on preserving 'whom' and claiming that despite how people actually speak the language one shouldn't really use 'you' as generic third party pronoun
  - umanwizard 7y ago
    I suspect that every language has just as many weird quirks as English, and you're only aware of English's because it's the language you speak/write best.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    The interesting part of that to me, too, is how many of them roundabout derive from eras where erudite and highly educated English speakers were forced to learn Latin as well, and in so doing apply Latin grammar rules to English that don't apply to natural English. The most obvious example being "never end a sentence with a preposition", which is a very clear grammar violation in Latin, but natural English has ended sentences with prepositions for a very long time. To a lesser extent I think it is also Latin education's fault why the "objective" case continues to linger in English, despite being so mostly dead, as it acts as an education marker. `Whom` is a zombie only insisted upon by certain educations and should just be buried and put out of its misery. The confusion around `me` versus `I` and which scenarios to use which probably will only get worse.
hetman 7y ago
Euro English is one example I can think of. The semantic shifts can make the language more ambiguous when used between different groups of speakers.
Koshkin 7y ago
Greek did, that's for sure...

triska 7y ago

In school, one of our teachers was also a priest, and he told us that his job once required him to travel to the (former) Soviet Union. His Russian colleague did not speak German, and he did not speak Russian. Latin was the only language in which they could communicate, and the first question by the Russian priest was: re publica missus? i.e., "[Were you] sent by the state?"

schoen 7y ago
Primo Levi managed to use Latin to communicate with a Polish priest with whom he didn't have any other language in common. > After World War II the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was walking back to Italy from Poland. Tired and starving, he met a priest, who spoke neither French, or German, or Italian. Ubi est mensa pauperorum? Levi asked. Where is the table for paupers? https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-bk-chamberlain21-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-bk-chamb... (I have also used Latin to communicate with a priest with whom I didn't share any other language, although it was less surprising because it was at a spoken Latin event.)
- lou1306 7y ago
  Recently Liliana Segre, an Italian Auschwitz survivor and senator for life, was heavily criticized by (some) Italian politicians for proposing that the Parliament should set up a committee to investigate racism, anti-semitism and hate speech. Since some critics were saying that she did not "love her country" (or something to that effect), she replied by recalling a brief conversation she had at Auschwitz with a prisoner from Eastern Europe. Both were teenagers and they were only able to communicate thanks to Latin. Patria mia pulchra est; Familia mea dulcis est; Cor meum et anima mea tristes sunt. (My motherland is beautiful; My family is sweet; My heart and soul are sad). She was still attached to the same country that sent her there. (Full text in italian: https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_novembre_01/io-non-amerei-patria-ecco-cosa-dissi-una-ragazza-dentro-lager-birkenau-1c7a6148-fc7d-11e9-850d-5e44dc14944c.shtml https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_novembre_01/io-non-amere...)

umanwizard 7y ago

Do you have examples of languages that didn't "develop freely"? If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific. (In fact, what does it even mean for a language to "develop"?) There are many languages around the world that have followed their national evolution despite no contact with Latin, or even with literacy at all.

JackFr 7y ago
> If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific. I don't think that's a particularly good standard to judge recalling an observation made by Belloc.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  Let me be more clear: I suspect that regardless of whether Belloc believed it, the assertion is either false or meaningless. The correct way to judge whether I'm write or Belloc is involves pinning down what we mean in a scientific way.

Iv 7y ago

Latin has been the language of erudite and priests but most of middle age had different languages used as trade linguo. The common latin root of many probably helped though.

Iv 7y ago

Wherever there are catholic priests, you'll find latin speakers. That's certainly a plus, though I really think that English surpassed its spread in so many ways. The global English we, non-native, use is a simplified one. It is its main appeal: an easy-to-learn language, a simple alphabet, many words of the modern world already phonetically transcribed in many languages. Latin is too rigid to still be used. Too hard to learn, especially by non-westerners and a culture of not allowing "incorrect" grammar (notwithstanding the fact that ancient Romans frequently were 'creative' in that respect) But yes, global English is much simplified. I consider myself fairly fluent in that dialect yet I have British friends who are able to converse in a vocabulary that makes me incapable of following their discussion. I guess that would be like me using old French and aged expressions.

voldacar 7y ago
Latin is easier to learn than English. A lot fewer edge cases and ad-hoc grammatical constructions