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I have a theory that English is popular because pronunciation encodes almost no information so it works well regardless of accent. Some asian languages, and eve

• boredatoms 1y ago
  English is currently popular because money is always popular
  • dijit 1y ago
    This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct. If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though. The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics. Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common". Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.
    • lenzm 1y ago
      > the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because it's means making more money - in technology, finance, tourism, ...
      • nicoburns 1y ago
        That probably depends where you live. A lot of Nordic people tell me the learnt English as a kid watching cartoons, long before they were thinking of such things.
      • em-bee 1y ago
        we learn english because it is a subject in school. money does not come into consideration for most people. the motivation to teach english in school is another question however. as is the motivation for parents to pay for extra english classes outside of school.
    • yongjik 1y ago
      > The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules ... Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language. (Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no natural human languages in the world that are dictated by formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact descriptions devised to explain the language that is already there.)
      • shagie 1y ago
        > Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony#Ablaut-motivated_compounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony#Ablaut-motivated_comp... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English Tic Tac Toe is the one that I remember most easily... > Examples include: bric-a-brac, chit-chat, clip-clop, ding-dong, flimflam, flip-flop, hip-hop, jibber-jabber, kitty-cat, knick-knack, mishmash, ping-pong, pitter-patter, riffraff, sing-song, slipslop, splish-splash, tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tip-top, whiff-whaff, wibble-wobble, wishy-washy, zig-zag. Saying any of those in the wrong order sounds wrong to a native ear. It even shows up in Live, Laugh, Love. And then there's adjective order... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/... -- If people want a language with "proper rules"... head over to conlangs. https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil is my favorite (I've got a copy of the grammar guide that is on my shelf of random things next to Random Numbers by the RAND corporation).
      • dijit 1y ago
        English regularly violates its own rules and additionally has no correcting body (Swedish has central body that dictates language rules for example). That's part of why it's so difficult to fully master, and there are rules (sentence structure) for clarity, but there's no actually solid rules for pronunciation (it differs depending on word) or even what words are really proper words (there are central dictionaries that largely agree, but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects). English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history. Other languages might borrow some words but there's multiple branches of these inside english. You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other. Easy to learn; awful to master.
    • kergonath 1y ago
      > If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though. I really dislike this argument. It treats English as a mythical, exceptional language even though it really is not. English was not particularly hard or easy compared to other European languages. It did not have a particularly hard or easy structure, and orthography took centuries to normalise in continental languages as well. It had the quirk of combining Germanic grammar with Romance vocabulary, but that’s relevant for linguists, not most speakers. What happened is that it was simplified and adapted over the course of centuries. French was not displaced by English because of some magical language qualities. The French were displaced by the British somewhat, but mostly by the Americans and language followed.
• catlikesshrimp 1y ago
  Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image. Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance. I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way
  • OneMorePerson 1y ago
    Given the meaning of "accent" given in the article Chinese seems like a very accented language (saying that as a Mandarin speaker). Aren't Chinese tones the very definition of an accented language? (as defined by the article, accent is a broad term)
    • coffeeling 1y ago
      The article is talking about diacritics, ie. turning e to é and so on. Even by that standard, though, pinyin uses diacritics to mark tone.
  • teleforce 1y ago
    Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1]. Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters. Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system. As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler. [1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488 [2] Hangul: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
• ayende 1y ago
  French was the lingua franca for a very long time (pun intended)
  • jonathanlb 1y ago
    Former linguistics major here. Interestingly, 'lingua franca' originally referred to a specific pidgin trade language spoken in the Mediterranean. The 'franca' part referred to the Franks, who were originally a Germanic tribe that established kingdoms in what is now France and much of western Europe. By the late Byzantine period, 'Franks' had become a blanket term for all Western Europeans. What happened to both 'Franks' and eventually to 'lingua franca' is an example of semantic broadening.
    • acheron 1y ago
      Yes, the “Franks” in “lingua franca” were mostly Italians.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• OneMorePerson 1y ago
  Is it the case that it encodes no information, or is it the case that the information is somehow..."optional"? I know I selectively ignore unintentionally snarky or sarcastic tones from non native English speakers. Even the simple example of turning "ok" into "oook" can be used to imply someone is being unreasonable.
• mk_stjames 1y ago
  Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases. I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
  • kergonath 1y ago
    > I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce). Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before. Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.
    • cvoss 1y ago
      > I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before. This happens not infrequently to native English speakers. It's especially prominent for people who read a lot when they're young and develop a large vocabulary that doesn't get socialized until much later. My English teacher, of all people, was notorious for this. Real life examples from native speakers: Emphasizing the wrong syllable in "forage", "respite", and "parameter". Pronouncing "draught" like "fraught". Softening "chasm" and "chaos". And an extra syllable (long e sound) in "homogeneous".
• teleforce 1y ago
  Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most probably you won't understand most of the same sentences.
  • gwervc 1y ago
    Plus there is another 1/3 coming from Latin which French speakers has no issue understanding either. English is basically akin to a dumbed down pidgin of French (exponentially less verb conjugation, no gender agreement, less pronouns with the thou/you merge, less articles and annoying small words, etc.) starting over a Germanic core.
    • FridayoLeary 1y ago
      Harsh but that rings true. In it's defense i'll point out that English is exponentially more useful in the modern world and even French has started borrowing nouns from English. Also English has more words then any other language which in my mind makes it the best. (to clarify i know a little of other languages and i understand that there are concepts which English is not even equipped to express properly but i stand by what i write) I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.
      • jandrewrogers 1y ago
        Most words in foreign languages that most people believe don’t have an English equivalent often do, but the English word is so obscure that almost no native English speaker knows it, and as you point out, English vocabulary is so large that no one will ever come close to learning it all. English is the C++ of human languages. What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do? I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.
• paulmooreparks 1y ago
  Singlish says, "Hi." It's fascinating to watch that in action here in Singapore, as I find Singlish to be a compact and efficient form of English that greedily borrows words from Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Malay, Tamil, and a few other languages to enable rich communication among the various cultures, ethnicities, and language groups found here. It even borrows the grammatical structures of some of those languages, and yet the meaning still gets through. It didn't take me long to get comfortable with it, and it helped me appreciate the promiscuous nature of English even more.
• KurSix 1y ago
  But I think its global dominance has more to do with historical and economic factors than linguistic flexibility