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We have pretty much agreed upon the English language. Most people did not agree on it, but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance. Non-native speaker

by dhekir 12y ago

We have pretty much agreed upon the English language. Most people did not agree on it, but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance. Non-native speakers may still resent their disadvantage and would not call it an "agreement".

humanrebar 12y ago
> but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance Or perhaps English is good at some things that are especially useful these days? This was posted on HN a while back: http://garrett.damore.org/2014/10/your-language-sucks.html http://garrett.damore.org/2014/10/your-language-sucks.html ...the author proposes that certain languages are easier to represent electronically. I'd certainly like to see more thought and investigation along these lines. I think ascribing the entire thing to coercion is premature. Do you have any corroborating evidence for that position? EDIT: After writing this, it occurs to me that British colonialism was coercive in many (most?) aspects. That being said, English has been growing as a lingua franca (hah!) since the British empire has waned, so we need a mechanism more complex than coercion to explain the growing popularity of English.
- superuser2 12y ago
  It's probably relevant that early/dominant character encoding schemes were largely created by English speakers. Of course English is easier to represent. I'd be interested to see what advantages other languages pose. I wouldn't be surprised if there are foreign natural languages that are much easier to parse for meaning programmatically than English (i.e. languages where conjugation and word endings provide explicit information that must otherwise be inferred from context/knowledge of the world that it's much harder for a computer to acquire.)
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    Those are fair points. The above article seems to be claiming some objective things make English easier to represent, like the number of characters that can be represented by one byte and the way characters are combined into words (English is character sequences all the way down). Now, as far as causality, it's also interesting that certain standardizations and simplifications happened in the English language over the past several centuries since the printing press was invented, so it might not be as much of a happy coincidence as it appears to be at first blush. It's also worth pointing out that mechanized language preceeded computerized language by thousands of years, and Europeans weren't the first to the printed language game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asi... ...but the print revolution is generally attributed to Gutenberg, who certainly came much later. Why didn't the revolution happen in Asia? Why didn't Asian languages adapt to this new technology faster? Are the reasons for history all technical (Asian languages have technical debt from previous decisions) or can some aspect of Western culture be responsible as well, at least partially?
    - superuser2 12y ago
      We already see Chinese being simplified to make it feasible to type on a keyboard/mobile phone. Interesting times. I wonder if that's the same thing that happened with English and the press, just much later in history (probably related to China not industrializing until later in history.)
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  The United States isn't as good as empire as the British were, but it's still pretty coercive.
- lcedp 12y ago
  The article you mentioned is not actually about languages but scripts. As a example you can represent Chinese in transcription. English is popular due to historical, political and economic reasons not for any linguistic reasons. As any lingua franca ever was so far. If the world could agree on using easier to learn and more fair (meaning for all nations) language - we'd be speaking Esperanto or better Lojban.

by dhekir 12y ago

humanrebar 12y ago

> but were pushed towards it due to economic dominance Or perhaps English is good at some things that are especially useful these days? This was posted on HN a while back: http://garrett.damore.org/2014/10/your-language-sucks.html http://garrett.damore.org/2014/10/your-language-sucks.html ...the author proposes that certain languages are easier to represent electronically. I'd certainly like to see more thought and investigation along these lines. I think ascribing the entire thing to coercion is premature. Do you have any corroborating evidence for that position? EDIT: After writing this, it occurs to me that British colonialism was coercive in many (most?) aspects. That being said, English has been growing as a lingua franca (hah!) since the British empire has waned, so we need a mechanism more complex than coercion to explain the growing popularity of English.

superuser2 12y ago
It's probably relevant that early/dominant character encoding schemes were largely created by English speakers. Of course English is easier to represent. I'd be interested to see what advantages other languages pose. I wouldn't be surprised if there are foreign natural languages that are much easier to parse for meaning programmatically than English (i.e. languages where conjugation and word endings provide explicit information that must otherwise be inferred from context/knowledge of the world that it's much harder for a computer to acquire.)
- humanrebar 12y ago
  Those are fair points. The above article seems to be claiming some objective things make English easier to represent, like the number of characters that can be represented by one byte and the way characters are combined into words (English is character sequences all the way down). Now, as far as causality, it's also interesting that certain standardizations and simplifications happened in the English language over the past several centuries since the printing press was invented, so it might not be as much of a happy coincidence as it appears to be at first blush. It's also worth pointing out that mechanized language preceeded computerized language by thousands of years, and Europeans weren't the first to the printed language game. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asi... ...but the print revolution is generally attributed to Gutenberg, who certainly came much later. Why didn't the revolution happen in Asia? Why didn't Asian languages adapt to this new technology faster? Are the reasons for history all technical (Asian languages have technical debt from previous decisions) or can some aspect of Western culture be responsible as well, at least partially?
  - superuser2 12y ago
    We already see Chinese being simplified to make it feasible to type on a keyboard/mobile phone. Interesting times. I wonder if that's the same thing that happened with English and the press, just much later in history (probably related to China not industrializing until later in history.)
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
The United States isn't as good as empire as the British were, but it's still pretty coercive.
lcedp 12y ago
The article you mentioned is not actually about languages but scripts. As a example you can represent Chinese in transcription. English is popular due to historical, political and economic reasons not for any linguistic reasons. As any lingua franca ever was so far. If the world could agree on using easier to learn and more fair (meaning for all nations) language - we'd be speaking Esperanto or better Lojban.