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The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground! According to Wikipedia we have: * Germ
by heinrichhartman 5y ago
The sane thing to do after the Brexit, was to embrace English as main language, since it has not become neutral ground!
According to Wikipedia we have:
* Germany: 56% English speakers, 14.5% French speakers
* Italy: 34% English vs. 19.43% French
* Spain: 22% English vs. 11.73% French
* Sweden: 89% English vs. 8% French
I can't get over how bad this decision is.
How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_French_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_distribution_of_F...
- akmarinov 5y agoHaving it as a work language just means that they’ll pout if whatever document they’re sent isn’t in French for the 6 months they are in charge - nothing more. No big deal.
- kelnos 5y agoNot really, the article says: > “We will always ask the Commission to send us in French the letters it wishes to address to the French authorities, and if they fail to do so, we will wait for the French version before sending it,” the diplomat said. "Send us French or consider your request to be second-class and ignored until you send us French".
- akmarinov 5y agoBefore that it says: > The unnamed diplomat said all high-level meetings of the Council – the body which helps sets the political agenda in Brussels – will be conducted in French instead of English during the six-month presidency. It’s only during the Council, outside of the Council every country expects documents in their language.
- estaseuropano 5y agoThose meetings anyway have interpreters.
- azinman2 5y agoIt’s seriously the most French thing ever
- dharmach 5y agoEverybody should use google because it's the most used search engine.
- cheph 5y agoWhat is a category mistake?
- arthurcolle 5y agoHave you heard of Google? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_mistake
- silicon2401 5y agoAnecdotally I can confirm those stats for Sweden. Some of the things I was blown away by in Sweden are: 1) Everyone's beautiful 2) Everyone's super tall. I'm 184cm and saw multiple women every day that were taller than me, let alone men. In the US it's quite rare for me to see women taller than me. 3) Everyone's rather slim. It's nice to see a population at healthier weights than what I'm used to in the US 4) Not once did I find somebody who couldn't speak English, from workers at train stations to museums to airports. It was crazy. In contrast, Germans being about 50/50 matches up with my experience. Italy felt lower than 1/3 even in Venice, but I spent much less time there. Sweden sure is amazing; can't wait to visit again.
- chrisbennet 5y ago184cm = 6ft
- mywittyname 5y agoOkay, so this makes me wonder something. So 6 foot tall (72in) is like a magic number for American men. That's like the threshold for manliness in popular culture. If you were to plot the self-reported heights men in America, you'd absolutely see a dip at 70 and 71 inches, then a big spike at 72in. What's this magic number in various metric countries? 185cm seems like a sound choice, but I could see it being 190 in some places.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- solveit 5y ago180cm in Korea.
- 1_player 5y ago190cm (6'3) being a threshold for "manliness", as you say, has no bearing on actual human average sizes and might just be your personal bias showing. I think there's definitely a threshold around 6' in English cultures, possibly 180 cm in Europe, but in my personal experience it's not seen an important metric as the magic 6' number in Anglo cultures.
- lefstathiou 5y agoIn the real time strategy world (eg Starcraft, Warcraft), this strategy is called “turtling”. Perceived as low risk… it’s a defensive move aimed at creating moats in hopes that you buy enough time to out tech your competition; it rarely results in a win against any real player (which the US, Germans, Russians and Chinese are) and wastes everybody’s time by creating unnecessary friction. Reason often prevails over the long term thankfully.
- Camillo 5y agoIt's not actually a decision yet, is it? It's just something the French want to do. Presumably everyone else will oppose it, for the reasons you gave.
- Hamuko 5y ago>How can you ignore these kinds of discrepancies? The French are (pardon my French) assholes, that's how. Even when the jury votes were announced in the 2021 Eurovision, all of the national representatives held their commentary English, except for the French representative, who did it almost entirely in French. It's also the reason why the European Parliament can never ever abandon Strasbourg even though it makes absolutely no sense at all.
- dang 5y agoNationalistic flamewar will get you banned on HN. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Hamuko 5y agoI don't see it as a "nationalistic flamewar" as much as "calling spade a spade".
- dang 5y agoI totally get that, but the thing is: what determines whether you're making a high-quality/substantive or low-quality/flamewar contribution has not only do with your perspective, but also that of the reader—or rather the distribution of reader perspectives that your comment is landing with. The key thing to understand is that the value of a comment is the expected value of the subthread it forms the root of: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22expected%20value%22%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... If you want an in-depth explanation of this, the best one I know of is this lengthy interaction I had a few weeks ago with a commenter in a similar situation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161365. The in-depth portion starts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27162386.
- CodeGlitch 5y agoIreland: 99% English
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- melesian 5y agoI doubt it's as low as that! Malta and the Netherlands are other countries where a large majority also speak English. In some places in the EU the UK's union jack flag is being replaced with the Irish tricolour on bank ATM's display of language choices, which amuses the Irish.
- Macha 5y agoIf you consider the alternative to be monolingual Irish speakers, for sure they're way less than 1%, but I imagine if you group them with monolingual Polish/Portugese/Chinese speakers, you might get up to a whole percent
- pyuser583 5y agoThat is funny.
- alberto_ol 5y agoAccording to the wikipedia page linked above republic of ireland: total english speakers 98.37% as first languge 93.22% For the UK the figures are: total speakers 98.3% as first language 92.3%
- cipher_system 5y agoFor Sweden and Germany all (guess >99%) of the french speakers speak english way better then french. The amount of english we're exposed to is so massive and the french is basically non-existent. This is such a useless egoistic move from the french, just accept that english is the lingua franca.
- throwaway-571 5y agoI’m french and most of the content i watch is also in english, made mostly by americans with an american point of views and ways of resolving problems. Sometime in british english with british point of view. I think it’s sad that that you don’t seem to realize that it’s a problem that most of the content we are exposed comes from a single culture. As for the move, it’s totally useless, and if they wanted to be strongest against english they should have said “we’ll only accept communication in french or german” but that would have meant most of the communications would have been in german.
- ciarcode 5y agoI don’t understand, you think that switching to French will expose us to each single European country culture?
- ptr2voidStar 5y agoHaha, OP has no awareness of his/her bias!
- foresto 5y ago> you don’t seem to realize that it’s a problem that most of the content we are exposed comes from a single culture. I don't think GP's desire to minimise language barriers among 27 co-operating governments implies that they are oblivious to cultural bias. I do think the latter is an issue worth addressing, but this is probably not an effective or appropriate way to do it.
- nico_h 5y ago
- MomoXenosaga 5y agoIf you give Dutch politicians the choice of speaking French or Dutch with translators in an international meeting they will use English. But I don't think the French really care about how other cultures work. It's all nationalist nonsense and living in the glorious past for them. See Strasbourg.
- mywittyname 5y agoThis behavior isn't limited to France. French Canada sure would like it if more people spoke French.
- cinntaile 5y agoPerhaps this can be generalized? Language entitlement seems to be a thing among French speaking regions. Whether it's French Canada, French Belgium or France?
- Bayart 5y agoFunny to see so much drab posturing about our supposed « language entitlement » while almost calling for languages to be rolled over and wiped out by English. I'm quite certain the position of French-Canadians has little to do with « entitlement », and more with how trapped they feel. Not that Anglo-Canadians would give a rats ass about the actual motives of Québec's cultural policy, as long as it can get weaponized for political currency. Frankly this entire thread reeks.
- tharkun__ 5y agoIndulge us, what are those actual motives? Not that I believe that the rest of Canada somehow has the moral high ground or something but what is going on in Quebec language wise is frankly completely non-understandable from an outsider's point of view. From that both sides have good and bad arguments in the debate but at this point things are just silly. It feels like a never ending blood feud. The vicious cycle has to be broken. Yes the Anglos weren't nice to French speakers. I sympathize. Now the French speakers want to legislate doing the same to Anglos? Are they crazy? Sorry but sympathy withdrawn immediately!
- WalterBright 5y agoIsn't it ironic that English is the Lingua Franca?
- MarkLowenstein 5y agoThank you! I'm always saying "English is the Lingua Franca of the tech world"...and no one ever gets the joke.
- WalterBright 5y agoHaha. What's sad, my galvanized friend, is the younger generation doesn't get my cataclysmic Wizard of Oz allusions. I'm just consulting with the rain.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- vram22 5y agoBon mot. Let's make French the Lingua Anglia (or should that be Langue Angleterre). #PardonMyFrench #PardonnezMoi
- tagrun 5y agoNo, because "lingua franca" derives from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca which has nothing to do with French, apart from people who didn't understand it mistook it for "French".
- svieira 5y agoPart of the empire the Franks founded was named "France" and France still traces its origins to Frankish kings. So connecting a trade language spoken by the empire-before-the-empire with the empire of France doesn't seem that far off-base to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks
- 5y ago
- KaiserPro 5y agoIts the most French thing I've seen in a long time, and it make me inordinately happy. The french political class: "It eez time to stick eet to ze germans and ze eengleesh"
- Koshkin 5y agoThis has just reminded me about this: http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html http://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html
- fangorn 5y agoI suppose the next logical thing is for them to say: "I fart in your general direction".
- Koshkin 5y agoBut French sounds like poetry: Je pète dans votre direction générale!
- mumblemumble 5y agoIt looks even worse outside of Western Europe. Bulgaria, Hungary, and Lithuania are more like 1 or 2% francophone, but at least 1/5 anglophone. I'm no expert on international politics, but it seems like that would severely disadvantage these countries, wouldn't it? With a smaller pool of politicians and technocrats who are proficient in the working language of the EU, they'll have to rely more on translation, and will consequently be less able to communicate efficiently when representing their respective countries.
- ggggtez 5y agoThis is just a nationalist policy. Even the French don't think it's actually practical. It's just "see, France can push other countries around too".
- posterboy 5y ago* France: 0% proper English, 99.9% French their English is terrîble
- mahkeiro 5y agoThe ability of a native english speaker to speak any other language than their own is abysmal…
- string 5y agoNot exactly surprising given the ubiquity of the English language. I always find it funny how it's used as a criticism of English speakers. We are no less able to learn other languages, it's just far less of a necessity. I can speak a bit of German, a bit of French, a bit of Japanese, a bit of Lingala, etc. Inevitably whenever I attempt to speak these languages in their native environments, I am spoken to in English. So I can learn them as a hobby but need to far less out of necessity.
- based2 5y agoLanguage arrangements at the Court of Justice of the European Union https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo2_10739/en/ https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/jcms/Jo2_10739/en/ "The Court needs a common language in which to conduct deliberations. That language is, by custom, French."
- forty 5y agoI'm French and honestly I don't really care that much about that but for some reason if I had to choose, I'd rather have EU things done in German for example than English, that would make much more sense to me (even though I speak some English and really no German).
- CoastalCoder 5y agoCan you elaborate on your reasons?
- throwaway-571 5y agoi would guess “anything but english”, and German is more spoken in the EU than french.
- forty 5y agoIt's hard to say but somehow it feels to me that English is the language of "the competition" (the US). It might feel anecdotal to many people, but language is a powerful tool. It's how so many French people consume so many US series and music (and btw we are probably one of the country which are the most protective on this). And https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/opinion/france-cnews-americanization.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/02/opinion/france-cnews-amer... It's not by chance that many invaders tend to force their language to country they invade (the French being no exception, they did both in former colonies and in our own current territory during the French revolution - that's actually a very hot topic currently in France, as some "immersive teaching" of regional languages were found unconstitutional a few days ago) And well, I'd rather be more German than more American. But I'm one of those who feel more EUropean than french, so maybe that's why :)
- magicalhippo 5y agoMy dad told me some time ago that for certain "low risk" documents, the EU distributed them in Norwegian to the Danish and Swedish camps, despite Norway not being in EU. The point being that both can read Norwegian sufficiently, and it saved one translation. Not sure if it's still done this way.
- estaseuropano 5y agoDefinitely not. All documents have to be in the official languages.
- throwaway-571 5y agoI think embracing english as the main language of the EU is the worst idea since Brexit. It’s anything but neutral. It’s a concession made to the brits and a trojan for the Americans. They left, they can f right off and take their piss poor excuse of a language with them. It works for programming, insults and not much else. If they hadn’t joined the EU to sabotage it, maybe english wouldn’t be as popular in the EU. Let’s force the 3 letter agencies to improve their deep learning NLP models for other languages. Nobody speaks it in the EU, but if we’re going with popular languages i also don’t think mandarin would be an appropriate language. I’m french and I think there should be a common EU language, and for political purpose it should a truly neutral language, like Esperanto or another novlang. (Or maybe french should become the lingua franca of the EU if French official communications to the EU could only be in German) Latin is rooted in catholicism, which is anything but neutral in terms of history and human rights. Let’s level the playing field a bit, there is enough english in the world. [this post made in english, and I write most often in english because nobody reads french compared to english]
- fumblebee 5y agoWhat a depressingly resentful and scornful take against op’s well reasoned comment. Taking a position is fine, shouting through your keyboard is discouraged.
- throwaway-571 5y agoI have nothing against op’s well written and documented comment but it is describing the status quo. it’s like saying cobol is the most used programming language, why use java or python?
- throwaway-571 5y agoOP is describing the logical reason for english, i’m presenting the emotional reasons against it.
- maleldil 5y ago> I write most often in english because nobody reads french compared to english The irony.
- SllX 5y agoThe EU has a 6-month rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union. So this is the President of France postulating that when his country takes the Presidency next year, he will use that to push French to be the next working language. I don’t know what the President of the Council of Europe does besides Chair meetings, but apparently it includes setting the language for which the meetings will be held in. So this isn’t something the EU as a whole has determined will be policy going forward, more like the first guy to drop his pants in a newly opened frontier for dick-waving. If this was something the President of the Council of the European Union could do unilaterally anyway, then my read is that Emmanuel Macron would have pulled this stunt, Brexit or no Brexit, and Brexit is just convenient political cover. More likely this won’t last more than the 6 months that France has the Presidency, and it will be amusing to see if say, Hungary the next time they have the Presidency insists on high level communications in Hungarian.
- MichaelZuo 5y agoThanks for providing some insight into the inner workings. It’s worrying seeing one of the nominal leaders of a union of over half a billion people succumb to these pressures. Clearly he is intelligent and perceptive enough to understand the consequences. And besides the long term costs that can be reasoned out, all sorts of emotions, insecurities, etc., will undoubtedly come flying out from many quarters. I doubt if these sorts of topics can be discussed calmly by anyone invested in the change.
- DaiPlusPlus 5y ago> Clearly he is intelligent and perceptive enough to understand the consequences. Yes. The consequences are hopefully getting re-elected as a moderate at a time when right-wing populism and nationalistic rhetoric is popular. The next French election is next year. If this is what it takes to keep Le Pen out then consider ourselves fortunate.
- hutzlibu 5y agoI mean, this language stunt is quite harmless, but you can only appease the rightwing nationalist a certain way, before you become one of them.
- pizzazzaro 5y agoThe UN uses French and English as working languages, so there is a precedent for French or English as the working language. No primarily English-speaking nation is a part of the EU. The skill gap will be resolved. Until then? Traslators are already a normal part of the working process.
- pier25 5y agoI'm from Spain (but also a native French speaker) and I totally agree. I haven't done the math, but I'd bet in the EU there are probably more English speakers than any other native language.
- jgwil2 5y agoLet's not forget about Ireland.
- sangnoir 5y agoYou're sampling the wrong population - what you're doing is akin to finding the most popular "development environment" in a company by asking the entire staff complement (including those in marketing, facilities management and finance) their proficiencies. You're likely to settle on Excel as the preferred tech platform. Instead of asking everyone, ask your developers who'll be doing the actual work.
- ranguna 5y agoI don't think those numbers would change a lot if you asked people from the working demography. I know very little people my age that speak enough French to be able to work, however, everyone I know my age speaks English.
- gip 5y agoI'm curious what do you mean by "bad" in that context? In my book, asking people to practice or learn a new language is not inerently bad. Decision-making should not be reduced to the law of the majority. If Europe wants to push people to learn and practice more foreign languages, I'm all for it. (Disclosure: that starts with me, I speak 3 languages and I'm learning a fourth one).
- hollerith 5y agoThe head of the English department of my local community college (in the US) told me that it takes about 7 years of study for an average immigrant's English to get good enough that native speakers start wanting to have conversations with the immigrant. Some people require much less time, but for most people, learning a new language (particularly learning to speak it and not just read it) is a very large investment in time. Some claim that learning a second language will make a person better at thinking -- or confer other broad advantages, but I am unconvinced by the evidence I have seen for those claims. To improve him or herself and his or her society, the person would do better to spend the time he or she would have spent learning a second language learning science, history, technology and practical arts. Switzerland wants its young people to study both French and German because it wants to remain one country and to avoid splitting into a German-speaking country and a French-speaking one. That is an example where it makes sense to advocate and to encourage bilingualism IMO. I have a lot of sympathy for the Swiss policy of encouraging bilingualism. I have much less sympathy for the general belief that bilingualism and trilingualism are good in themselves. Human lives are short; people should focus their learning on the things that most advance themselves and their societies. I guess you could argue that all of Europe is in a milder version of the Switzerland situation: that it is necessary for European individuals to invest a lot into learning second and third language to keep Europe integrated and to prevent wars from breaking out. Maybe that is the root of the belief among Europeans that it is good to learn multiple languages. But I can't help notice that if there were a button that when pushed, makes it so that all of Europe (or all of the world) magically becomes fluent in the same language, I would vote for pushing the button: the advantages are great (namely, freeing up time currently devoted to the learning of second and third European languages for learning more potent things) and the risks are low IMO (the main risk being the small probability that different languages really do confer on their learners significantly different cognitive strengths and weaknesses).
- wdb 5y agoJust as stupid as the plan to travel between Brussels and Strassbourg
- nico_h 5y agoEverybody uses Javascript, why use another programming language? English is newspeak. They should just replace English as one of the three working language of the EU with esperanto / ido / interlingua or another conlang.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]