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English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to

by toxik 7y ago

English is on course to eat up smaller languages. Mass communication has brought the world closer together, and with that, diversity is lost. It’s too early to say whether it’s for better or for worse, but here we are.

roenxi 7y ago
Going in the reverse direction - "a community speaks one language that then splits to two mutually unintelligible languages" seems so destructive that standardising on one language seems like an obvious and massive win for humanity at large. But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.
- L_Rahman 7y ago
  Why not stick with Korean pronunciations? The pronunciation is deterministic from the alphabet.
  - squiggleblaz 7y ago
    Korean pronunciation is hard. Also, maybe the pronunciation is deterministic, but the rules are non trivial. Indeed, there's some recent changes that made the orthography more complex (to keep orthographic forms more consistent across different inflected forms).
    - yorwba 7y ago
      The pronunciation may be deterministic for any given speaker, but different speakers can pronounce the same words differently. Not only differences in the national standards of North and South Korea, but also non-standard speech in different regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects Orthography becomes irrelevant as soon as you use Hangul to write a language entirely different from Korean, which wouldn't have the same inflected forms.
- pyrale 7y ago
  Language standardization is not something that exists. You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc. That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies. Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
  - acchow 7y ago
    > and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers. Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
    - pyrale 7y ago
      You can find some at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism. Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.
      - dfawcus 7y ago
        Corporate speak: 'leverage' when 'use' is perfectly functional, and less of a mouthful. Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.
        Narishma 7y ago
        Same thing for 'performant' instead of 'fast'.
      - magic_beans 7y ago
        What a fascinating rabbit hole.
      - pgcj_poster 7y ago
        Interestingly this also exists in the reverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-French_words_adapted_to_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-French_words_ad...
akie 7y ago
That's really not true. Many people I know also speak English, but that doesn't mean that they somehow forget how to speak their own language. If anything, small communities with an own language tend to be fiercely proud of that language, and do everything in their power to protect it [see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German]. And if these languages do disappear, it tends to be because the national language is taught in schools and slowly replaces it in younger generations.
- toxik 7y ago
  I’m a speaker of one of the smaller languages, and every educated person I know lament the inability to express themselves without resorting to English idioms. It isn’t that they don’t exist, some people are great at my language, it’s just that something like 99% of the movies I watch, podcasts I listen to, or papers I read are in English. I simply am much better at high level English than my own language. Colloquial English not so much though.
  - akie 7y ago
    Is the national language in your country English, or another language?
    - toxik 7y ago
      It is a different language, notably it's a northern Germanic language so the compatibility is fairly high. It also isn't mutually intelligible with English at all. I should maybe just say it's Swedish.
      - gerdesj 7y ago
        English started out life as a Germanic language but has changed somewhat over the last 1500 years. For example scir gerefe which becomes shire reeve and eventually sheriff. Yes, Rosco P Coltrane and company have a job title that is over 1500 years old. A shire is roughly a county in modern terms. For example Devonshire, Lanarkshire, Sir Fynwy etc in Britain. That last is Welsh. Look at words like day, tag, dag and so on in the various Germanic languages. When you see that in English, the letter g morphed into y in a lot of words, it makes sense and of course we have to allow for some rather random spelling in the past and a great vowel shift or two. I live in Yeovil which was recorded as gifle (a fork in a river) in about 900. The nearby river Yeo seems to be named after the town which is named for its location on a feature of the river ... These islands from 55 BC to 1066 AD became a revolving door to various invasions, some of which included Swedes and Danes generally as vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Italians (Romans) and any other tom, dick or harry that could find a boat and fancied duffing up a few Britons and settling down and raise a few apples and chickens! When the Northmen - Norsemen - Normans ie Duke William of Normandy turned up in 1066 they eventually did the job properly and ... eventually became English themselves and simply gave the language a bit of a twist. For example we have both Saxon and Frankish (French) words for many things eg meat: cow and beef, sheep and mutton, chicken and errr chicken, pig and pork. I think that because English has had so many influences in the past that it has developed a certain flexibility that many languages do not. It is also a relatively new language - only 1500 years old! I learned Latin at school for several years, along with French and lived in Germany for 10 years (off and on). English can be warped and twisted and generally abused and yet the meaning remains intact better than some other languages. The ultimate irony here is that I am talking about the new kid language on the block on HN!
squiggleblaz 7y ago
English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. What languages are threatened, aside from those already rendered weak by settler invasions (e.g. in the US and Australia) which are surely not part of your concern mentioned here. (I think they must be excluded since it's not relevant to the topic of the article and because you refer to "mass communication bring[ing] the world closer".)
- rossng 7y ago
  > English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. Yes, it definitely has. Ireland has (optimistically) ~1-2% native Irish speakers. Welsh is spoken by maybe 20-30% of people living in Wales. I couldn't find a number for native/fluent speakers, but it is certainly much less than that figure - probably similar to the Irish one. Scottish isn't even a language. There are languages called 'Scots' and 'Gaelic'. Again, both a spoken by a small minority.
thrwe434234 7y ago
Can confirm that this is the case in India. In fact it's much worse - due to a long history of colonization, most govt. services and education are exclusive to English speakers. Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO). http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/ http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/ India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.
- magic_beans 7y ago
  Indian English might be classified as a type of Creole.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO). Oh, come on: you’re saying that teaching English to Indian students makes them illiterate in both their regional dialect and in English? You’re going to need to cite something like that, and a link that tries to correlate “poor countries often speak European languages” to “they’re poor because they’re not speaking whatever they originally used to” (instead of “their language is probably a byproduct of being colonized, and they’re poor because of that and not because European languages have some inherent linguistic deficiency”). And if we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, I suggest you take a look at the graduates of top “English-medium” institutions of India: many of them are multilingual.
buboard 7y ago
cultures are diffused. doesn't matter if you speak an exotic language, you 've probably started to celebrate halloween

by toxik 7y ago

roenxi 7y ago

Going in the reverse direction - "a community speaks one language that then splits to two mutually unintelligible languages" seems so destructive that standardising on one language seems like an obvious and massive win for humanity at large. But by raw number of languages standardising on English is probably not ideal. Probably some hybrid of Chinese grammar, Korean alphabet and Latin pronunciations would have been my pick for example.

L_Rahman 7y ago
Why not stick with Korean pronunciations? The pronunciation is deterministic from the alphabet.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  Korean pronunciation is hard. Also, maybe the pronunciation is deterministic, but the rules are non trivial. Indeed, there's some recent changes that made the orthography more complex (to keep orthographic forms more consistent across different inflected forms).
  - yorwba 7y ago
    The pronunciation may be deterministic for any given speaker, but different speakers can pronounce the same words differently. Not only differences in the national standards of North and South Korea, but also non-standard speech in different regions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_dialects Orthography becomes irrelevant as soon as you use Hangul to write a language entirely different from Korean, which wouldn't have the same inflected forms.
pyrale 7y ago
Language standardization is not something that exists. You could hope for merging of communities that create an unified language, but whenever two communities are not completely merged, each will coin new words, the pronunciation will drift, etc. That is because locutors create languages, not ruling bodies. Examples of that include canadian french, and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers.
- acchow 7y ago
  > and english as spoken in Europe, for which many words are not known to native english speakers. Have some examples of these english words that native english speakers wouldn't know?
  - pyrale 7y ago
    You can find some at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pseudo-anglicism. Even more of them can be found in business language, which did not become loan words.
    - dfawcus 7y ago
      Corporate speak: 'leverage' when 'use' is perfectly functional, and less of a mouthful. Only occasionally is it used in a sense when a magnifying effect is implied.
      - Narishma 7y ago
        Same thing for 'performant' instead of 'fast'.
    - magic_beans 7y ago
      What a fascinating rabbit hole.
    - pgcj_poster 7y ago
      Interestingly this also exists in the reverse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-French_words_adapted_to_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-French_words_ad...

akie 7y ago

That's really not true. Many people I know also speak English, but that doesn't mean that they somehow forget how to speak their own language. If anything, small communities with an own language tend to be fiercely proud of that language, and do everything in their power to protect it [see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_German]. And if these languages do disappear, it tends to be because the national language is taught in schools and slowly replaces it in younger generations.

toxik 7y ago
I’m a speaker of one of the smaller languages, and every educated person I know lament the inability to express themselves without resorting to English idioms. It isn’t that they don’t exist, some people are great at my language, it’s just that something like 99% of the movies I watch, podcasts I listen to, or papers I read are in English. I simply am much better at high level English than my own language. Colloquial English not so much though.
- akie 7y ago
  Is the national language in your country English, or another language?
  - toxik 7y ago
    It is a different language, notably it's a northern Germanic language so the compatibility is fairly high. It also isn't mutually intelligible with English at all. I should maybe just say it's Swedish.
    - gerdesj 7y ago
      English started out life as a Germanic language but has changed somewhat over the last 1500 years. For example scir gerefe which becomes shire reeve and eventually sheriff. Yes, Rosco P Coltrane and company have a job title that is over 1500 years old. A shire is roughly a county in modern terms. For example Devonshire, Lanarkshire, Sir Fynwy etc in Britain. That last is Welsh. Look at words like day, tag, dag and so on in the various Germanic languages. When you see that in English, the letter g morphed into y in a lot of words, it makes sense and of course we have to allow for some rather random spelling in the past and a great vowel shift or two. I live in Yeovil which was recorded as gifle (a fork in a river) in about 900. The nearby river Yeo seems to be named after the town which is named for its location on a feature of the river ... These islands from 55 BC to 1066 AD became a revolving door to various invasions, some of which included Swedes and Danes generally as vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Italians (Romans) and any other tom, dick or harry that could find a boat and fancied duffing up a few Britons and settling down and raise a few apples and chickens! When the Northmen - Norsemen - Normans ie Duke William of Normandy turned up in 1066 they eventually did the job properly and ... eventually became English themselves and simply gave the language a bit of a twist. For example we have both Saxon and Frankish (French) words for many things eg meat: cow and beef, sheep and mutton, chicken and errr chicken, pig and pork. I think that because English has had so many influences in the past that it has developed a certain flexibility that many languages do not. It is also a relatively new language - only 1500 years old! I learned Latin at school for several years, along with French and lived in Germany for 10 years (off and on). English can be warped and twisted and generally abused and yet the meaning remains intact better than some other languages. The ultimate irony here is that I am talking about the new kid language on the block on HN!

squiggleblaz 7y ago

English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. What languages are threatened, aside from those already rendered weak by settler invasions (e.g. in the US and Australia) which are surely not part of your concern mentioned here. (I think they must be excluded since it's not relevant to the topic of the article and because you refer to "mass communication bring[ing] the world closer".)

rossng 7y ago
> English still hasn't eaten up Irish, Scottish and Welsh. Yes, it definitely has. Ireland has (optimistically) ~1-2% native Irish speakers. Welsh is spoken by maybe 20-30% of people living in Wales. I couldn't find a number for native/fluent speakers, but it is certainly much less than that figure - probably similar to the Irish one. Scottish isn't even a language. There are languages called 'Scots' and 'Gaelic'. Again, both a spoken by a small minority.

thrwe434234 7y ago

Can confirm that this is the case in India. In fact it's much worse - due to a long history of colonization, most govt. services and education are exclusive to English speakers. Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO). http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/ http://sankrant.org/2011/03/the-english-class-system-2/ India, due to its deeply colonial state apparatus, is well on its way to losing most of its languages in the coming century. I think this is also the case with African nations - which might explain why the sub-continent (not just India) and Africa share so much in terms of human development indicators.

magic_beans 7y ago
Indian English might be classified as a type of Creole.
saagarjha 7y ago
> Due to this unchallenged linguistic apartheid, public education is slowly switching over to "English medium", which is increasingly creating a class of nowhere men, who neither know their own languages nor English. This structural discrimination has knock on effects on the economy which are as yet unknown, and unexplored (due to geopolitical reasons IMO). Oh, come on: you’re saying that teaching English to Indian students makes them illiterate in both their regional dialect and in English? You’re going to need to cite something like that, and a link that tries to correlate “poor countries often speak European languages” to “they’re poor because they’re not speaking whatever they originally used to” (instead of “their language is probably a byproduct of being colonized, and they’re poor because of that and not because European languages have some inherent linguistic deficiency”). And if we’re talking about anecdotal evidence, I suggest you take a look at the graduates of top “English-medium” institutions of India: many of them are multilingual.

buboard 7y ago

cultures are diffused. doesn't matter if you speak an exotic language, you 've probably started to celebrate halloween