7 ms·

Having French as mother tongue, I always find fascinating when the French and German official bodies go postal about such a topic. It’s like looking some parent

• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  English being an amalgamated language and thus uniquely flexible is part of its power. We have options in style choices many languages formally don’t permit, e.g. when to italicise or, if quoting, whether to “exclude punctuation”, or “include it.” (As well as comma use.) As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
  • dqv 2y ago
    Just this morning I came across a guy called Mr Techpedia on YouTube and I was really surprised because I heard a lot of English phrases but also phrases that are in a different language or a dialect of English I’m not familiar with. It was actually really cool. It also reminds me of a time when I heard someone codeswitch from US Midwestern English to Malaysian English - there was a clear difference in word choice and pronunciation. Global/Internet English as a concept is really cool as well. I often (accidentally) adopt grammatical constructions from Global English that I believe come from that particular speaker’s native tongue. Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I’m glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.
    • catlikesshrimp 2y ago
      I am Spanish native, but the way I structure my sentence seems a google translation from chinese. People around me often don't understand the meaning, so I have to speak slower to structure my sentence in a more proper Spanish way. I suppose languages evolve around the way their corresponding population brains work. People can still learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but there is a language way that is the best fit to some people which is related to biology.
      • int_19h 2y ago
        There is no evidence for "biological inclination" towards certain languages. Take a Spanish kid and raise them on Chinese, and they'll speak it natively just fine, and vice versa. However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories. There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.
  • wil421 2y ago
    Is English just badly pronounced French?[1] I wish English would’ve adopted conjugation and other patterns the Romance languages use. I doubt it would’ve fit correctly. But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language. [1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounced-french-paris-academic-says-615b70e6 https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...
    • duped 2y ago
      > Is English just badly pronounced French? Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup." > But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language. They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin
    • YawningAngel 2y ago
      It's not a conjugation issue. "Champagne" is letter-for-letter identical in both languages, but pronounced differently for phonotactic reasons
      • MarkusWandel 2y ago
        It's a typical French loanword in German too: "Champagner" isn't pronounced with standard German prounciation rules. Even localized ones, e.g. in my childhood a sidewalk was called a "Trottoir" in the French pronunciation. For some reason nobody gets exited about French loanwords.
    • jcranmer 2y ago
      > Is English just badly pronounced French? No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
• ktosobcy 2y ago
  I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)
  • BitwiseFool 2y ago
    I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the King.
    • anthk 2y ago
      Hence the "Royal Academy of English" -> RAE, as in Real Academia Española.
    • lenerdenator 2y ago
      If it's English because the King speaks it, how come the most famous document written in (modern) English tells the King to take a hike?
      • int_19h 2y ago
        But the King is basically German. ~
      • kps 2y ago
        Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.
  • SllX 2y ago
    I’ve seen similar suggestions but one of the best things about English is that we don’t have that nonsense. It would just be a source of annoyance and consternation adding more noise to news and politics in the Anglosphere.
    • 2y ago
• chimeracoder 2y ago
  > There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language. > To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations. Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language" either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.
  • int_19h 2y ago
    Esperanto is indeed not culturally neutral (and was never supposed to be), but it's still vastly better in practice than other European languages precisely because of this overemphasis on Latin (and Greek) roots - because those are exactly the "fancy" words that tended to be borrowed most often historically even across language families. Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much of Europe. I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.
• deng 2y ago
  But this is not even about language, it's about spelling. For some reason, people forget that these are entirely different things. We are currently communicating in a language where there's often times no relation between the written and spoken word at all.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • samatman 2y ago
    A more accurate statement is that English is a language where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than phonetics. There's always a relation between a spoken word and its written representation, they're the same thing in different mediums.
    • makeitdouble 2y ago
      If we're going for accuracy, your statement would have to explain how it goes for other situations, for instance: - words spoken by toddlers: what's the spelling of a word that doesn't exist outside of a kid's brain ? In particular parents can accept it as a word without ever setting an associated writing. - written words that don't have a pronounciation: typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it. That's without going into words with phonems unrelated to their written form (XIV as fourteen for instance) and I assume there will be words that exchange spelling and pronounciation with others. Languages are plenty weird, we should embrace their weirdity IMHO.
      • WalterBright 2y ago
        > typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it. How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.
        • makeitdouble 2y ago
          That gives an hint on which words had similar endings, but there's still a chance we're wrong about how these endings sound in the first place.
• fredgrott 2y ago
  fun fact its English that is the bastard here...same way Creole was formed as language...i.e. borrowed from elsewhere in this case Danes(Anglo) and Saxon part of Germany... and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...
  • talideon 2y ago
    No, English was not formed the same way as creoles are. A creole is a language that develops from a pidgin. That's a process of increasing complexity. English underwent _simplification_ due to significant contact with non-native speakers. That's the opposite process and gets referred to as "creolisation", which happens to languages all the time. Almost all the Romance languages underwent some degree of amount of it. Some pidgins and jargons might've developed along the way and influenced the change, but the key difference with creolisation is that the modern language didn't primarily develop out of these.
• Muromec 2y ago
  Why invent Esperanto if Dutch already exists and is the most reasonable European language to learn.
  • lolc 2y ago
    Finally a modest proposal to unite the European people.
• makeitdouble 2y ago
  > lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language. Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though. Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.
  • dbrueck 2y ago
    Mal: "We got work to do, dong ma?"
• sjm 2y ago
  When I lived in Bordeaux I remember seeing billboards basically advising young people to not use "txt speak" and instead write "real French" to preserve the language.
• nicbou 2y ago
  Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. For Quebec this has always been a threat. I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’s somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming a vaguely American, California-based culture. Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It’s only right to feel concerned about it.
  • jjtheblunt 2y ago
    I wonder if the spread of English is because it's like a barycenter pulled by multiple languages, so not too far afield if coming from any of those languages.
    • gavindean90 2y ago
      My thoughts are that any language that can embed other languages in it has the capacity to be a global lingua franca. English was firstest with the mostest.
      • jjtheblunt 2y ago
        seems plausible.
    • colechristensen 2y ago
      I think it has a lot more to do with the global British Empire pre-WWI followed by American dominance post WWII. Perhaps there's an argument that the success of both had at least a small contribution from the characteristics of the language.
  • burningChrome 2y ago
    >> Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. One of the most fascinating things I learned about language in college when I was working towards my degree in Anthropology, a graduate student who was my class did their Master's on the linguistic differences between European French and the French Canadian (specifically the Quebec version) versions of the language. She did extensive research on the origins of the language and why they diverged. Absolutely fascinating work. On a lighter note, I happened to play hockey with many, many Canadian players. My best friend was from Ottawa and everybody asked him if he spoke French and said he did and said, "Its like here, you feel like you're speaking French with a Kentucky accent." which always got a good laugh from our teammates.
• int_19h 2y ago
  Esperanto is still frustratingly complex with regard to phonemes for an international language. I think most speakers of many European languages don't realize just how complex their phonologies are on average. Slavic languages probably take the cake there with stuff like 5-consonant clusters that can even include sequences of plosives and affricates, but then you also have Germanic languages (and French!) with their insanely large vowel inventories. Compared to that, Esperanto is relatively simple, but when you look outside of Europe, having 3-consonant clusters or phonemic contrast between plosives and affricates at the same place of articulation (e.g. "t" vs "t͡s") is very unhelpful. That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at. Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.
  • Joker_vD 2y ago
    The problem of consonant clusters is a bit overstated IMO. I once saw some English speaker complaining about how difficult it is to pronounce Russian, like take a phrase "на встрече" — there are 4 consonants at the start of that second word, wtf! — even though that cluster is exactly the same as the one in the English phrase "of strength"; this cluster even undergoes essentially the same simplification/reduction in both languages. But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.
    • int_19h 2y ago
• freeone3000 2y ago
  Living in Quebec, I see the perspective. It’s not that there is a particular hatred of english; there is simply an explicit exclusion of anything non-French. From such a perspective, it doesn’t matter if the One World Global Language is English or Cantonese or Esperanto, it must be fought against to preserve French
• EasyMark 2y ago
  I don’t know but a very large and vocal portion of Americans would also flip out if something as basic as a new way to indicate possession was to be added to the English language. “Bending a knee to the _____________’s”
• Terr_ 2y ago
  > lingua-franca Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.
• JPLeRouzic 2y ago
  It seems to me that today's French is not exactly the French of 50 years ago. Orally it does not look so different but when the same people write, the difference is apparent. All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French. For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune": "plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."
• 1-more 2y ago
  > Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo. IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.