I find myself incapable of accurately describing how low my opinion of this article (and especially the proposed "solutions") is without running very afoul of the code of conduct. Sufficient to...
I find myself incapable of accurately describing how low my opinion of this article (and especially the proposed "solutions") is without running very afoul of the code of conduct.
Sufficient to say I find it completely without any merit.
The term you're looking for is "Guardian article". Not to say they don't publish useful stuff too, but pissing people off with pseudo-progressive hot takes is sort of their thing.
I find myself incapable of accurately describing how low my opinion of this article
The term you're looking for is "Guardian article".
Not to say they don't publish useful stuff too, but pissing people off with pseudo-progressive hot takes is sort of their thing.
This was more or less my own reaction as a non-native too. The only solution proposal I'm not sure about is the patent one, and it's because I don't know much about the area. The others are all...
This was more or less my own reaction as a non-native too. The only solution proposal I'm not sure about is the patent one, and it's because I don't know much about the area. The others are all either unapplicable or extremely removed from reality.
Honestly, I think the best thing that would help is just better English education in the said countries. Language, especially speaking spontaneously and with understandable pronounciation, depends so much on practice. Consuming media in the said language and making international friends and chatting with them helped me the most.
An educational approach that is up-to-date on science of language learning would go a long way. I think UN and EU could make such programs, in order to facilitate communication and help with the mentioned problems in the said countries.
Fully agree. The fact that there's a language with which you can communicate with a very large part of the world is one of the good things about modern society. To throw that away would be...
Fully agree. The fact that there's a language with which you can communicate with a very large part of the world is one of the good things about modern society. To throw that away would be foolish. The fact that this language happens to be English matters much less.
"... translates into considerable savings for the education systems of English-speaking countries, which can then be allocated to other productive public investments." Seriously? I think learning...
"... translates into considerable savings for the education systems of English-speaking countries, which can then be allocated to other productive public investments."
Seriously? I think learning foreign languages is a vital skill to understand the world at large. If you don't speak any other language than you mother tongue, you are bound to have a very narrow world view. The other thing is that many smaller nations don't really have a choice but to learn a second language. I, for instance, can't expect people to all learn Dutch. The idea of using a neutral language like Esperanto is great in theory but would require a major power to push it, which I don't see happening (and this is coming from someone who has studied Esperanto).
Agreed. That is the essential issue IMHO. In Europe you can go for a long drive and end up in another country. In the U.S. that long drive might not even get you out of your state. The motivation...
I think learning foreign languages is a vital skill to understand the world at large.
Agreed.
many smaller nations don't really have a choice but to learn a second language
That is the essential issue IMHO. In Europe you can go for a long drive and end up in another country. In the U.S. that long drive might not even get you out of your state. The motivation just isn't there in the U.S..
The idea of using a neutral language like Esperanto is great in theory but would require a major power to push it
Agreed, it has already been tried and ironically Esperanto is one of the least spoken languages on the planet.
Fun fact, William Shatner starred in a movie to help promote Esperanto.
I think any artificial international language is a pipe dream, including Esperanto, but it does not even come close to being one of the least spoken languages on the planet. There are literally...
ironically Esperanto is one of the least spoken languages on the planet.
I think any artificial international language is a pipe dream, including Esperanto, but it does not even come close to being one of the least spoken languages on the planet. There are literally thousands of endangered languages out there, and a huge portion of these have fewer speakers than Esperanto does. Esperanto doesn't even have close to the number of speakers it would need to serve as an international auxiliary language as it was originally planned, and it has far fewer speakers than major national languages, but it's shockingly successful for what it is. No other conlang even comes close to it in number of speakers, much less having any number of native speakers.
I wouldn't recommend someone learn Esperanto instead of a natural language (though there is a little bit of research suggesting that learning it as a monolingual may make it easier for you to subsequently learn at least certain other languages). It's a hobbyist thing that appeals to certain people -- and the fact that it's got a large enough hobbyist community to facilitate conferences and meet-ups is still pretty damn impressive.
There are many valid criticisms of Esperanto. The "nobody speaks it" I find a little silly. Esperanto was created 137 years ago. How many natural languages where fully formed from scratch and...
There are many valid criticisms of Esperanto. The "nobody speaks it" I find a little silly. Esperanto was created 137 years ago. How many natural languages where fully formed from scratch and widely spoken in 137 years? Historically speaking, that's nothing.
EDIT": The second common criticism that is maybe a bit stronger is the whole "languages must evolve naturally to be useful", which ignores the fact that Esperanto does evolve naturally by their speakings and in ways that go completely around whatever their ruling body determine, much in the same way that languages like Portuguese and Spanish evolve naturally regardless of the recommendations mande by their respective "official academies"...
Really? It takes a lot of time and effort to learn a new language. Where is the motivation to make that investment if you can't use it? Yes, there is the intellectual stimulation, but you can get...
The "nobody speaks it" I find a little silly.
Really?
It takes a lot of time and effort to learn a new language.
Where is the motivation to make that investment if you can't use it?
Yes, there is the intellectual stimulation, but you can get by learning a new language you can actually use.
There are 2 million esperantists in the world. Not enough time has passed to consider it either a failure or a success because it takes a very long time for languages to stick.
There are 2 million esperantists in the world. Not enough time has passed to consider it either a failure or a success because it takes a very long time for languages to stick.
It is enough for someone deciding what language to learn in foreseeable future to choose something else if they want to invest their time and effort in a language they can use to talk to people with.
It is enough for someone deciding what language to learn in foreseeable future to choose something else if they want to invest their time and effort in a language they can use to talk to people with.
Oh. I do not wish to provide concrete advice in regards to what language a particularly person should learn. I am not an apologist of Esperanto nor do I speak the language myself. I just happen to...
Oh. I do not wish to provide concrete advice in regards to what language a particularly person should learn. I am not an apologist of Esperanto nor do I speak the language myself. I just happen to disagree with some clichés about Esperanto that are often repeated.
I think there are some other things to consider here besides pure numbers. From what I can see, there are three reasons to learn a language: practical, cultural or "access to content". Practical...
I think there are some other things to consider here besides pure numbers.
From what I can see, there are three reasons to learn a language: practical, cultural or "access to content".
Practical is because it makes life easier: things like access to jobs, oppertunities etc.
Cultural is because you want to immerse yourself in the culture behind the language.
Access to content is because you want to learn things/ access content that are mainly discussed and/or made in that language.
English has all of them. There are many people who learn English because they want to learn about the US, UK etc., but most just learn it because their favorite music is in that language or because all things related to programming or gaming are mostly in English.
For an international auxillary language (like Esperanto) all of these things need to be equal or better for it to succeed. This is very hard if not impossible without a major power or institution making Esperanto a working language or requiring it in some capacity. Two million Esperanto speakers are meaningless if they have no deep culture attached, have very little content and no content that is not available in other languages, and has no practical use (you don't get a job if you speak Esperanto, except at TEJO maybe).
You need to escape this catch 22 for an auxlang to become successful.
This is why I think one of the few ways Esperanto could gain traction, is if an institution like the EU, UN or African Union adopted it as a (co-)official language, but this is highly unlikely. Maybe in some alternate universe where the US becomes the enemy somehow and they want to distance themselves from them.
This is all coming from someone who likes Esperanto and can understand it btw.
I believe sign language might be an exception because some deaf people grew up very isolated and had to invent their own signs. Also, perhaps some pidgins and creoles, which happened when people...
I believe sign language might be an exception because some deaf people grew up very isolated and had to invent their own signs. Also, perhaps some pidgins and creoles, which happened when people without a common language were thrown together by circumstances. (A creole language is what happens when children grow up hearing pidgin and invent a grammar for it.)
But these things only happen when there is isolated hardship of some kind. Historically, many communities were isolated enough to have their own languages, because most people didn’t travel. But nowadays, inflicting that isolation on children, cutting them off from the world, seems cruel, and less language diversity is the consequence.
Most sign languages do in fact evolve over time, rather than being created top-down like Esperanto was. Sign languages are, in this respect, natural languages, not conlangs. That said, they can...
Most sign languages do in fact evolve over time, rather than being created top-down like Esperanto was. Sign languages are, in this respect, natural languages, not conlangs. That said, they can come into being very quickly -- Nicaraguan Sign Language is a favorite example. But this would also happen if you threw a bunch of hearing kids (or honestly even adults) with no common language together. The biggest difference is that most hearing kids aren't isolated from external linguistic input in the same way as deaf kids traditionally have been, since doing that would be extreme child abuse. This type of language development isn't very similar to the way languages like Esperanto are created at all.
Great observation! That is one more reason to be a little more lenient with a constructed language, given that, unlike most languages, they development is usually announced beforehand! Of course,...
Great observation! That is one more reason to be a little more lenient with a constructed language, given that, unlike most languages, they development is usually announced beforehand! Of course, constructed languages are not really made from scratch, but merely proposing it does not means that it is done!
It's a travesty that "everyone learns English" turned into "so if we speak English already we needn't teach foreign languages". My personal solution would be that everyone in the world should be...
It's a travesty that "everyone learns English" turned into "so if we speak English already we needn't teach foreign languages".
My personal solution would be that everyone in the world should be taught (at least) one foreign language to fluency of the most widespread. At a guess that's probably English, Spanish, and maybe French? I'm sure some Chinese dialects win in pure number of speakers, but I feel number of countries should weigh more heavily than number of individuals if the idea is to promote global communication.
Edit: looking at the wikipedia page for languages by speakers, Arabic would probably be a better pick than French - not "official" in quite as many countries, but more often a primary language. And an added bonus of it not using the latin alphabet.
I don't think in the end a classroom can ever take someone that is ambivalent to learning foreign languages and make them anywhere near fluent in one - at most A2 level mastery, if that. Which is...
I don't think in the end a classroom can ever take someone that is ambivalent to learning foreign languages and make them anywhere near fluent in one - at most A2 level mastery, if that. Which is different than, say, arithmetic.
Much has been bemoaned about classroom learning for languages in general, and it is a bad fit in general - you need to process a lot of input to learn a language, and that takes interest, and that takes a lot more time than usual. Which is different than other subjects. I think language learning inevitably takes more time, but different time - simply listening to media in that language will help you grasp it, but passively listening to people talk about math will not get you any mastery in that area. Which makes it uniquely bad for classrooms.
All that is to say, it will always be difficult for English speakers to learn foreign languages, because there's not much opportunity for immersion or motivation. If you're a Swedish student, you're constantly confronted with English media, from foreign movies, to of course the omnipresence of English on social media.
That just isn't the case for an American or even British student. You're not going to get them to read or listen to Arabic in their free time. They have no reason to want to do that. Anything of particular fame in Arabic is already translated anyway. They're not going to get anywhere.
You can already see this in how some countries learn English. Japanese students learn English throughout primary education, with an intensity that would make American kids cry. But for all that, they're a whopping 87th globally in English speaking ability.
They're literally next to AFGHANISTAN in English speaking ability. You just can't force this in a classroom.
Following this, it's likely no coincidence that the size of online language learning communities in the anglosphere tend to track more closely with the volume of readily available media a language...
Following this, it's likely no coincidence that the size of online language learning communities in the anglosphere tend to track more closely with the volume of readily available media a language has rather than number of people speaking it or the utility of being able to speak it.
The media sparks interest which grows into a desire to learn the language which is then made easier by having a lot of media to consume.
87th globally in English speaking ability is still enough that when I visited recently I could get by for three weeks having memorised the phrases "I don't speak Japanese" and "do you speak...
87th globally in English speaking ability is still enough that when I visited recently I could get by for three weeks having memorised the phrases "I don't speak Japanese" and "do you speak English", along with "excuse me", "sorry", and "thank you". A Japanese person visiting the UK with that little English would have a significantly harder time finding someone who spoke even a little of their language if they e.g. couldn't work out how to buy the right kind of train ticket.
Maybe true fluency is too lofty a goal, but even just parity with the education efforts that this linked article mentions would be a substantial improvement. When I went to school foreign languages weren't even introduced in the curriculum until age 11.
Pretty much just major cities (Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima), but that there were enough English-speakers around in cities is part of my point. London may have some...
Pretty much just major cities (Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima), but that there were enough English-speakers around in cities is part of my point. London may have some Japanese-speaking help available, but would Oxford, Bath, Edinburgh, Cardiff? Feels unlikely.
An alternative hypothesis is that Japanese schools are somehow especially bad at teaching English compared to other countries that seem to be doing better at it. But there are a lot of confounding...
An alternative hypothesis is that Japanese schools are somehow especially bad at teaching English compared to other countries that seem to be doing better at it. But there are a lot of confounding factors. I wonder if someone has studied this?
Maaaaaybe for writing. But even Arabic natives can have a hard time communicating even the basics with each other as you go from Western Sahara in the west to Oman in the east. Realistically, even...
Arabic would probably be a better pick than French
Maaaaaybe for writing. But even Arabic natives can have a hard time communicating even the basics with each other as you go from Western Sahara in the west to Oman in the east. Realistically, even relatively close countries are not having a fluent conversation with each other. A Tunesian isn't just having a lively debate with a Egyptian, who isn't doing the same with a Jordanian. The dialects are to different.
They could debate in writing, though, or talk in modern standard Arabic - if the Tunisian remembers any from school.
Years ago when I was preparing a visit to Tunisia for Ramadan with my Tunisian friend, I started learning Arabic and he told me not to bother but to learn some French instead as more people will...
Years ago when I was preparing a visit to Tunisia for Ramadan with my Tunisian friend, I started learning Arabic and he told me not to bother but to learn some French instead as more people will be able to understand French or English than any particular dialect of Arabic.
Perhaps French is the better pick after all! I didn't know Arabic dialects varied that much. The advice to use French perfectly illustrates how my ideal solution would work, at least.
Perhaps French is the better pick after all! I didn't know Arabic dialects varied that much. The advice to use French perfectly illustrates how my ideal solution would work, at least.
I basically only understand English. I have a toddler level understanding of Japanese and French. And I have to say that as a beneficiary of an Anglophone-centric globe when combined with an...
I basically only understand English. I have a toddler level understanding of Japanese and French. And I have to say that as a beneficiary of an Anglophone-centric globe when combined with an increasingly globalized world means that those other cultures opinions are much more accessible to me.
But the big thing to note is that I actively seek them out. And I don’t think that is the norm. I think most people access the internet specifically to reinforce their existing opinions.
That's a good point. Many people learn other languages in order to be able to seek other opinions, but that doesn't that someone would do that if they know another language.
That's a good point. Many people learn other languages in order to be able to seek other opinions, but that doesn't that someone would do that if they know another language.
Do you speak French? Because the French dont speak the language the Academie Française tells them to speak. Sure, they follow certain orthographic decrees, but I've never seen a French person call...
Do you speak French? Because the French dont speak the language the Academie Française tells them to speak. Sure, they follow certain orthographic decrees, but I've never seen a French person call an email "un courriel," for example.
Edit: of course, you could also be talking about the systematic destruction of most local dialects, but most French people don't even know that happened, in my experience.
You can take my septante, huitante and nonante from my cold, dead and non-vigesimal hands. For those who don't get it Standard French uses a base twenty (vigesimal) system for numbers over 60. So...
You can take my septante, huitante and nonante from my cold, dead and non-vigesimal hands.
For those who don't get it
Standard French uses a base twenty (vigesimal) system for numbers over 60. So for instance 72 is litteraly "sixty twelve" (soixante douze), and 97 is " four twenty ten seven" (quatre-vingts dix-sept).
However, Swiss and Belgian uses a saner decimal system where 86 is simply "eighty six" (huitante six).
If by French you mean French Canadians, sure. But modern French is riddled with anglicisms ("week-end", "shopping", "marketing", etc, etc). People don't really use formal French day to day, and...
If by French you mean French Canadians, sure. But modern French is riddled with anglicisms ("week-end", "shopping", "marketing", etc, etc). People don't really use formal French day to day, and slang is used liberally. Also, don't get me started on spelling mistakes even highly educated people make very frequently...
The French are a beautiful example of failure to do so. They may succeed at killing minority languages, but they can't make Francophones actually follow their arbitrary "rules".
The French are a beautiful example of failure to do so. They may succeed at killing minority languages, but they can't make Francophones actually follow their arbitrary "rules".
I don't think it's your wider point, but you can very easily control language to a large extent. I see the point about the French below, and I'll not the French stage has mostly killed all...
I don't think it's your wider point, but you can very easily control language to a large extent. I see the point about the French below, and I'll not the French stage has mostly killed all competitors to French. Arabic mostly killed Coptic, English mostly killed te reo māori, etc. For that matter one, it's quite easy to control a language when the state kidnaps children. See also Australia. See also Nahuatl. All it takes is a state willing to kill.
You can kill languages, for sure. It's not a coincidence that this is often a huge component in destroying ethnic groups. But you can't keep a language around and thriving and control how people...
You can kill languages, for sure. It's not a coincidence that this is often a huge component in destroying ethnic groups. But you can't keep a language around and thriving and control how people speak it, at least not long-term. A language having active native speakers is diametrically opposed with controlling it.
I don't necessarily wholly disagree, but I'm not sure that was the wider point of the poster I replied to. You might say, you can easily control languages with tens of millions of speakers. But...
I don't necessarily wholly disagree, but I'm not sure that was the wider point of the poster I replied to.
You might say, you can easily control languages with tens of millions of speakers. But you can easily control Romansh, if your intent is to destroy it. My wider point is that the sentiment only really applies to dominant languages, and they're dominant mostly because of force.
I don't think the sentiment that you can't control language only applies to dominant languages. I don't think the ability to snuff out a language (almost universally the result of violence against...
I don't think the sentiment that you can't control language only applies to dominant languages. I don't think the ability to snuff out a language (almost universally the result of violence against its speakers) is the same thing as controlling language. It's hard to tell the specifics of what the poster you replied to meant for sure given the brevity of their comment, ofc, but I'd wager their idea of "control" is closer to that definition.
I have also heard about native English speakers actually struggling on international teams because they speak English and everybody else speaks the same not-quite-proper English. Or they may speak...
A second type of inequality relates to the use of a common language. In most professional contexts, a person is more effective and persuasive when using their native language. This inequality is difficult, but not impossible, to quantify.
I have also heard about native English speakers actually struggling on international teams because they speak English and everybody else speaks the same not-quite-proper English. Or they may speak faster and in more complicated sentences that their colleagues don't understand.
An American might use a bunch of baseball idioms because they've become a part of everyday language, or he may call something "a no-brainer," leading his colleagues to think he just said they don't have brains.
Yep, this is me. English is my native language, and the gap between my language skills and most of my fluent (C1 level) colleagues is still huge. While many young employees are truly fluent (C2+),...
Yep, this is me. English is my native language, and the gap between my language skills and most of my fluent (C1 level) colleagues is still huge. While many young employees are truly fluent (C2+), most of my colleagues understand idioms and proverbs better in Hindi or Chinese than English.
It can be frustrating since English is the business language, but I can't actually communicate in college-level English or use expressions that native speakers could easily follow.
Non-native English speaker here. I have more trouble understanding the English pronounciations of people from my own nationality than I do with native speakers.
Non-native English speaker here. I have more trouble understanding the English pronounciations of people from my own nationality than I do with native speakers.
It's not so much about pronunciation as word choice, complexity of ideas, and use of idioms. But being a regular on Tildes, I'm sure those aren't as big of an issue for you either.
It's not so much about pronunciation as word choice, complexity of ideas, and use of idioms. But being a regular on Tildes, I'm sure those aren't as big of an issue for you either.
I think you might be slightly underestimating non-native speakers -- they're usually pretty quick to ask if you say something they don't understand. The really insidious thing is when relatively...
I think you might be slightly underestimating non-native speakers -- they're usually pretty quick to ask if you say something they don't understand. The really insidious thing is when relatively common words are used differently by non-native speakers. As a native English speaker living in Europe for 5+ years, I've started picking up some of these myself. I basically switched to using "control" in the sense of check/inspect the way Germans use kontrollieren, even though I never would've used it that way back home.
This can also be an issue with native English speakers from other countries, though. The word "quite" still haunts me.
English is dominant for two simple reasons. Every time it encounters another language, it smiles, walks them down an alley, knocks them out with a brickbat, then steals all of their words for...
English is dominant for two simple reasons. Every time it encounters another language, it smiles, walks them down an alley, knocks them out with a brickbat, then steals all of their words for itself. Seriously, compare the thickness of an English dictionary to other languages, and count how many of them you'd have to stack on top of each other just to reach the same height. Pretty sure the only real competition it has in that department (pushing past 1.5 million words) is with Korean and Tamil, much older and more storied languages who have done their own share of stealing.
The other reason is that business dealings and legal contracts tend to happen in English because of the specificity it supports - particularly at the level of large corporations and governments. It's become the de-facto language of trade, and that's a lot of inertia. If you aren't dealing in English, you instantly and severely limit your options for who you can do business with.
There's no reason to bother replacing it. In fact with AI enabled translations already here, it seems even more pointless. The only case I've ever heard for replacing English (and all of the rest of them) comes from the concept of linguistic relativity which I wouldn't call hard science. Even if it's right, that doesn't give us any insight on what to replace the languages with. :P
IMO, all of that is just backwards justification. English is the lingua franca because of two reasons: geopolitics, and invention. It started in WW2 - by then, English had already grown as a...
IMO, all of that is just backwards justification. English is the lingua franca because of two reasons: geopolitics, and invention.
It started in WW2 - by then, English had already grown as a diplomatic language due to the increasing power of America, which combined with the UK, still one of Europe's great powers at the time, meant that the treaty of versailles was written in English. But the aftermath of WW2 cemented it.
Europe was bisected between America and the USSR. The Marshall plan meant that the US was for many years the lifeline of western Europe's destroyed economy. Meanwhile, in Asia, America was also the dominant power, having toppled Japan and installed a US friendly government.
Another big step came with the end of the Cold War - with the US as a sole monopole in global geopolitics, and by far the world's largest economy, English's naturally came with it as the most important language of diplomacy and economics.
Secondly, and equally important, was America's dominance in the invention of communications technology. The US and UK invented the telegraph. The US invented the telephone. The US invented the television. While the US did not invent radio, it was Fessenden in NJ that broke through wireless telephony.
And, of course, it was in the US that the internet was born and popularized, and in the US where the tech giants of the 2000s and 2010s were born.
All that meant that for the communication standards of today, English was default by virtue of being the language spoken by its inventors.
I think that any language that was spoken in America would have the same global influence. There are parts of English that make it good for learning, and parts that make it really bad. Languages are malleable, and in any future where a nation state dictates so much in world power and commerce, local modifications would be made to transition into a pidgin-esque state to be suitable for second learners over time.
Adding onto your second point, English is the universal language of aviation for the same reason: the airplane was invented in the US, and due to geographic reasons, aviation as a field was...
Adding onto your second point, English is the universal language of aviation for the same reason: the airplane was invented in the US, and due to geographic reasons, aviation as a field was adopted and developed here very quickly. WW2 likewise contributed to this state of affairs, as two of the major aviation superpowers in the war were natively anglophone.
The US also has a somewhat uncharacteristically excellent aviation safety and accident investigation apparatus that is rightly the gold standard worldwide. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it's one of the few regulatory things we actually do right.
I rarely see the fact that English is the lingua franca of international aviation brought up in these sorts of discussions, so I thought I'd mention it.
Going even further back, I imagine England's nautical dominance must have had a lasting impact on international maritime standards? At the very least, English has a lot of sailing jargon.
Going even further back, I imagine England's nautical dominance must have had a lasting impact on international maritime standards? At the very least, English has a lot of sailing jargon.
It's probably more accurate to say that British colonial power contributed more to the spread of English as an international language than their naval superiority, though it's all part and parcel,...
It's probably more accurate to say that British colonial power contributed more to the spread of English as an international language than their naval superiority, though it's all part and parcel, I suppose. Sailing certainly had an effect on English, as you say.
One considerable difference between sailing and aviation is that ocean-going craft are rarely required to file into a port single file, and if they do, its relatively simple for the port to dispatch a guide vessel to clear the way for larger ships.
Airplanes don't work quite that way. Planes require clear runway and airspace to take off and land, which requires much more precise and unambiguous communication between port and vessel. The speeds and energies involved are so great that botched communication between air traffic control and a plane is likely to lead to a much greater catastrophe than hull damage and lost cargo. Hundreds are likely to die.
All this strongly encourages agreement on a single universal language to be spoken at all airports above regional size. Due to the historical circumstances being discussed in this thread–including British colonial hegemony, the American invention of the first commercially viable powered flying machines, WW2 and US cultural exports–English is that language.
National Transportation Safety Board From the wiki: This is a decent quick look at the key reason though, IMO:...
The US also has a somewhat uncharacteristically excellent aviation safety and accident investigation apparatus that is rightly the gold standard worldwide. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it's one of the few regulatory things we actually do right.
The origin of the NTSB was in the Air Commerce Act of 1926, which assigned the United States Department of Commerce responsibility for investigating domestic aviation accidents.[6] Before the NTSB, the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA; at the time the CAA/Civil Aviation Authority) independence was questioned as it was investigating itself and would be biased to find external faults
Since its creation, the NTSB's primary mission has been "to determine the probable cause of transportation accidents and incidents and to formulate safety recommendations to improve transportation safety (in the USA)"
Basically, only absolute facts can be taken from an NTSB report and used in another legal case. Absolute facts. Not witness statements, for example. Why?
Because the purpose and point of the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Act that later codified their mission and procedures, is to improve the safety of transportation and transportation equipment/operations (aircraft, trains, cars, whatever) in the US.
Even with cockpit recorders, crews that have multiple members you could interview to build a more complete picture of a situation and what was happening, people who fear retribution will not speak. If you knew your statements to the NTSB (a government agency) would later bite you in the ass when the victims or families of same could use your cooperation with the NTSB against you in those other court cases, would you participate?
Some might, even if they knew they were burying themselves in a liability case, but most wouldn't. Few corporations would, and especially today corporations are by far the majority of transportation operators. Delta, BNSF, any major transportation corporation, they would have standing orders in their employee manuals to not cooperate with NTSB investigations due to liability concerns.
Which would result in investigations that were less likely to find the probable cause of the incident. Which would then result in a lower probability of meaningful changes that would then go on to save lives.
So yes, it's an incredible miracle that, in America of all places, land of lawyers, we have a government agency that was set up with legislation and codified case law that effectively says "fuck courts, just talk us after the accident so we can try to figure out what happened and if it can be avoided in the future."
Safety regulations are written in blood. One of the reasons airline travel has become so safe is it didn't used to be. They didn't used to understand all sorts of things that can cause equipment failure, or dangerously confuse a pilot, for example.
But by rigorously investigating each accident, by questioning cooperating pilots and drivers and mechanics and crew members, holistic understanding of fatal accidents was built up over the years. They began to understand, with deaths to point to as proof, why a plane crashed or its engines failed and so on. They would then issue safety recommendations, which are usually adhered to.
Which is why, as just one example, airlines are required to maintain exhaustive records of all maintenance. Where the parts come from, were they certified, how many cycles they're rated for, and so on.
Normal business rules calls for maximum efficiency. Pushing the limits, in other words. But when pushing those limits to eke extra hours or cycles out of components risks those components failing, which could cause a plane of passengers to fatally crash, the safe move is to just replace the components. And to use a qualified, properly trained aircraft technicians to perform that maintenance.
This, incidentally, is one of the reasons the Boeing 737 Max disasters are so infuriating. Boeing decided to tap dance their way around the normal certification process for aircraft. Some of the upgrades they'd done to the 737 when they turned it into the 737 Max would by regulation require pilots to recertify on the 737 Max. Even existing 737 pilots. Why? Because Boeing had changed certain things about how the plane handled and flew and safety rules dictate a pilot be properly trained to understand that specific model of aircraft.
Previous disasters had spelled out how pilots who didn't have vast understanding of the plane they're flying could lose control. Which is exactly what happened when some of those new systems Boeing had added to the 737 Max began doing things that confused the pilots of those aircraft. Causing those aircraft to crash, and people to unnecessarily die.
All because a corporation decided "well, if we follow the rules, it'll cost us and our customers money, so let's just manage to classify this as a small upgrade that won't incur those costs and everyone can go back to making money. Pilots are pilots, they can manage." Until some of them didn't, and people died.
I guess I knew the how, but was more curious as to the why. I think it comes down to the fact that aviation regulation was being laid down in a time when strict regulation was seen as a good and...
I guess I knew the how, but was more curious as to the why.
I think it comes down to the fact that aviation regulation was being laid down in a time when strict regulation was seen as a good and sometimes necessary thing for the public good, rather than just a hindrance to corporate profit. I have a hard time imagining today's Congress and judiciary being so willing to lay down the law to protect the citizenry at the cost of megacorps' bottom lines.
Financial incentives for the aviation business aren’t as one-sided as you’re assuming. Airplane crashes are bad for business. Even today, many people are afraid to fly despite airlines having an...
Financial incentives for the aviation business aren’t as one-sided as you’re assuming. Airplane crashes are bad for business. Even today, many people are afraid to fly despite airlines having an excellent safety record.
No doubt it's ultimately bad for business, but as history illustrates, there are many in the business world who don't give a shit about protecting consumers or their companies if it means they can...
No doubt it's ultimately bad for business, but as history illustrates, there are many in the business world who don't give a shit about protecting consumers or their companies if it means they can extract a few pennies in cost savings today. Boeing's recent fiasco alone argues against your claim, let alone the hundreds of other industries with similar safety records. We could honestly be here all day recounting situations where concerns about long-term business sustainability have gone out the window in the pursuit of short-term profit.
I don’t think the story can be summed up as “Boeing’s leadership doesn’t care about safety.” They wouldn’t have gone through with it if they genuinely expected crashes. Crashes are extraordinarily...
I don’t think the story can be summed up as “Boeing’s leadership doesn’t care about safety.” They wouldn’t have gone through with it if they genuinely expected crashes. Crashes are extraordinarily expensive for an aircraft manufacturer and this is obvious to everyone.
They misjudged the risks. They somehow didn’t think their workarounds would really affect safety, because they thought the workarounds would work. But the way it played out is pretty much what anyone would expect if they got it wrong.
Other industries don’t work in quite the same way. Recalls are expensive in the auto industry, but we also expect automobile crashes. They don’t ground the fleet for similar problems.
You're arguing yourself in circles here. I never accused corporate types of wanting to cause death and destruction. They aren't Captain Planet villains. But the leadership of big corps of any type...
You're arguing yourself in circles here.
I never accused corporate types of wanting to cause death and destruction. They aren't Captain Planet villains. But the leadership of big corps of any type are liable to falling victims to wishful thinking as regards risk, and they do have immense influence on the way regulatory laws are legislated these days in the US.
Glad we agree about wishful thinking. I think it might be interesting to research what influence Boeing has had on the FAA. I don’t think guessing about it would be useful.
Glad we agree about wishful thinking.
I think it might be interesting to research what influence Boeing has had on the FAA. I don’t think guessing about it would be useful.
This response screams "MURICA" for lack of a better word. The television was invented by John Logie Baird, a Scotsman. There were steps towards the invention of the television over a number of...
This response screams "MURICA" for lack of a better word.
The television was invented by John Logie Baird, a Scotsman. There were steps towards the invention of the television over a number of decades involving scientists all over the world but Baird presented the first working mechanical television, or "televisor", to the public in 1925. He also then developed the first colour and 3D televisions afterwards. Farnsworths electronic television wasn't shown until 1927.
The telephone was being invented in different ways by multiple people but the patent was granted to Alexander Graham Bell, a Scots-Canadian who was working in both Canada and the US at the time.
Yes, the consumption of American and British media, whether it be novels, TV, films, music etc along with American political, scientific and economic dominance post-WW2 is a huge reason for the adoption of English as the lingua franca. A less savoury, but no less important reason for the dominance of the English language across the globe is due to the size and spread of the British Empire over a number of centuries, along with the century of Pax Britannica after the Napoleonic Wars until WW1, where Britain was essentially unchallenged militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. This allowed it control over it's colonies along with control over an "informal empire" where British interests could be controlled through trade with countries outside of its colonies.
I'd argue that motion pictures, recorded music, and the Internet are bigger influences on the solidification of English's dominance as a worldwide second language. Radio and television were never...
I'd argue that motion pictures, recorded music, and the Internet are bigger influences on the solidification of English's dominance as a worldwide second language. Radio and television were never fundamentally international media; range limitations for commercial towers saw to that. Telephony has never had quite as pervasive an influence over international culture as the others by virtue of its point-to-point nature and the high price of international connections.
Film and music, on the other hand, played huge roles in spreading American cultural influence due to their portability. Masters could be shipped overseas and duplicated in whichever market you please for relatively low cost back in the days when television was in its artistic infancy. Many markets were already primed to receive English-language cinema and music due to British political hegemony, which took a sharp decline after the wars. I think it's fair to say that British colonial dominance became supplanted by American cultural influence as the post-WW2 order showed that in some cases it's easier and more profitable to extract wealth from foreign nations by selling them garbage than by occupying and administrating them by main force.
So after decades of blue jeans and Jimmy Dean burning across the world, it's hardly a surprise that English should become the de facto first language of the Internet, even if the backbone of the network itself hadn't been largely developed by US military and academic interests.
Ultimately, it's pretty silly to get all nationalistic about such things, since history is always more complex than jingoism can tolerate. Having said that, while the details of @stub2b50's argument maybe aren't strong, the thesis seems reasonable to me.
It’s all connected. Did rock and roll become popular because it was played by radio stations, or did they play it on the radio because it was popular? Obviously both. And there are also...
It’s all connected. Did rock and roll become popular because it was played by radio stations, or did they play it on the radio because it was popular? Obviously both. And there are also international radio networks like the BBC, which probably had some influence.
Similarly, movies can be shown on TV and that’s where a lot of people saw them.
The synergy makes it hard to say which is more important. But I suppose the popularity of rock and roll in countries where it was banned is a point for recorded media (cassette tapes, typically.)
The popularity of British music (the Beatles, etc) is an argument against it being a specifically American influence.
While there are a lot of valid points about US geopolitical dominance of the 20th century, the statement "It started in WW2 - by then, English had already grown as a diplomatic language due to the...
due to the size and spread of the British Empire
While there are a lot of valid points about US geopolitical dominance of the 20th century, the statement "It started in WW2 - by then, English had already grown as a diplomatic language due to the increasing power of America" is unhinged. Sure, America was reasonably powerful internationally by WW2 but England dominated for a few centuries before that. Sure, they speak with that funny accent but I'm willing to bet that English is practical in India not because of America.
I think though, it's also proper to push back lightly on a couple of your assertions. Sure, Baird invented a form of television first, but he was also an English speaker, and his television wouldn't have been possible without American Theodor Case's invention, the Case Cell. Look at how important America is! Also, Graham Bell was a native English speaker, who chose to come to the greatest country on Earth, 'MURICA! On the serious side of Graham Bell, it stands that, since he died before WW2, it might be another check in the column of "English was spread by the English."
How is it unhinged? All that, and the language of diplomacy in Europe was French, and the language of science was German. English was not the lingua franca of the day when the sun shone most...
How is it unhinged? All that, and the language of diplomacy in Europe was French, and the language of science was German. English was not the lingua franca of the day when the sun shone most strongly on the British empire. And I shouldn’t have to mention that in East Asia, Chinese was still the closest to a common language in that period.
It was only after the 1940s, and Britain was soon about to be humiliated in the Suez Crisis, had lost most its colonies that English began supplicate as the commonly used language for commerce, politics, and science.
Obviously the British empire was important, if nothing else for being the reason English is spoken in the US, but English was just a language spoken by one the great powers of Europe in that period - not the language.
I suppose it's mostly the "It started in WW2..." part that I feel is unhinged. I agree that English came to increasingly dominate for a variety of social and geopolitical reasons (the expansion of...
How is it unhinged?
I suppose it's mostly the "It started in WW2..." part that I feel is unhinged. I agree that English came to increasingly dominate for a variety of social and geopolitical reasons (the expansion of English contents and the Treaty of Versailles being two big things) but I also think it ignores the several hundred years of British colonial expansion of English.
Did the definition of “unhinged” change at some point? It used to roughly mean “dangerously insane”, and that feels like a pretty strong condemnation of what ultimately seems to have been a minor...
Did the definition of “unhinged” change at some point? It used to roughly mean “dangerously insane”, and that feels like a pretty strong condemnation of what ultimately seems to have been a minor disagreement on the approximate timeframe when English became so prominent.
Maybe I’ve just gotten old, but I see “unhinged” thrown around with some regularity here, and it really rubs me the wrong way.
Like I said, the [it] in "it started" is English's use as the de facto global lingua franca. It absolutely did not have that position, or anything like it, before WW2, and I'd continue to argue...
Like I said, the [it] in "it started" is English's use as the de facto global lingua franca. It absolutely did not have that position, or anything like it, before WW2, and I'd continue to argue that. It wasn't even the dominant language on continental Europe for any kind of international dialogue, let alone the rest of the world.
That's not a slight of British empire's strength, but rather that they tried to stay away from continental politics, being content with their overseas empire and mainly aiming to keep the balance of power.
The influence of colonialism seems pretty clear - it’s the reason not only English but French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken in many countries. English started out as a very popular language...
The influence of colonialism seems pretty clear - it’s the reason not only English but French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken in many countries. English started out as a very popular language due to colonialism and grew from there. Colonialism is why it’s spoken in the US, after all.
So it seems hard to say which causes were most important. Success builds on success, the success of English has deep roots, and colonialism is part of the story. Without that it wouldn’t be in the running.
When tracing the historical roots of things, “all of the above” often works pretty well as an answer.
I just learned today that French--French of all languages!--doesn't have a word for a loaf of bread. Sure, you can talk about baguettes or miches, but what do you have if you have two baguettes...
The other reason is that business dealings and legal contracts tend to happen in English because of the specificity it supports
I just learned today that French--French of all languages!--doesn't have a word for a loaf of bread. Sure, you can talk about baguettes or miches, but what do you have if you have two baguettes and two miches? You have four breads. What??? How are you supposed to write a contract in a language that doesn't have a word for "loaf" or that no longer differentiates between the simple past and present perfect tenses???
What's wrong with four breads? Sure I have a loaf of bread and a murder of crows, but I only have two hands and one head. Measure words aren't universal in English either!
What's wrong with four breads? Sure I have a loaf of bread and a murder of crows, but I only have two hands and one head. Measure words aren't universal in English either!
I just explained what's wrong with it? Four breads could mean four loaves or just generally pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese milk bread. Or it could mean two baguettes, a loaf of...
I just explained what's wrong with it? Four breads could mean four loaves or just generally pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese milk bread. Or it could mean two baguettes, a loaf of sourdough, and a loaf of sandwich bread. The phrase is very imprecise and thus does not have much intrinsic meaning.
I mean, you would just specify. When Spanish doesn't have a bespoke word for something, I just specify what I mean. I don't get the sense that contracts in Spanish are particularly more difficult...
I mean, you would just specify. When Spanish doesn't have a bespoke word for something, I just specify what I mean. I don't get the sense that contracts in Spanish are particularly more difficult to write that contracts in English. A common parlance would've evolved (or have been defined in legislation), and that's what's used.
I don't see how English is particularly very different. Half the legal terms are in Latin. Which makes sense for French and Spanish, since those are just local varieties of Latin. But doesn't the fact that English, a Germanic language, seems to still need Latin in law imply that it's lacking as well?
Yes, you would. But you would have to. Imagine writing a story and having a character walk into a bakery. "There were four loaves of bread still on display." tells you what was behind the counter....
Yes, you would. But you would have to.
Imagine writing a story and having a character walk into a bakery. "There were four loaves of bread still on display." tells you what was behind the counter. On the other hand, it's much more complicated when you need to write "Il y eut quatre pains exposés...enfin non pas quatre styles de pains, c'était quatre euh quatre items en exposé et ils étaient tous des pains."
And the point was that this is for writing contracts, where you want your wording to be both precise and concise.
doesn't the fact that English, a Germanic language, seems to still need Latin in law imply that it's lacking as well?
No, it implies that law was historically practiced in Latin and then lawyers were elitists who kept the terms in Latin. The phrases are, for the most part, very easy to translate.
I just don't see that as a problem. If I were writing in Spanish, I would use context. Quedaban cuatro libras de pan, or quedaban 4 pedazos de pan, or quedaban 4 panes. This isn't a real issue...
I just don't see that as a problem. If I were writing in Spanish, I would use context. Quedaban cuatro libras de pan, or quedaban 4 pedazos de pan, or quedaban 4 panes. This isn't a real issue when writing.
It's like complaining about... I dunno, having to use the word "do" in English. You can't just say "you want bread?" like every language. You have to say "do you want bread?", even though the "do" is probably some sort of Celtic remnant that adds nothing to the sentence. But I don't think I'd say this English-only silly requirement makes it hard to write. It's just part of the language. Or how Spanish (and I'm assuming French) has a plural second person, yet in English, you have to use context when using "you", as it might be either singular or plural. English also lacks a formal you. If you want to write a character speaking formally, you have to add context, you can't just drop in an "usted".
Or even worse, how I can see literally any Spanish word in existence and immediately know how to pronounce it, yet even native English speakers mess up words like epitome and haphazard all the time.
There's a million things in English that are dumb, and plenty of times where you're forced to use context because the sentence isn't clear on its own. This is true of every language.
We say things like "you want bread?" every day. In fact, we even say things like "want bread?", although that would usually be "want some bread?" But instead of "would you like/do you want to get...
You can't just say "you want bread?" like every language. You have to say "do you want bread?"
We say things like "you want bread?" every day. In fact, we even say things like "want bread?", although that would usually be "want some bread?" But instead of "would you like/do you want to get lunch?", we'll say "wanna get lunch?"
But I don't think I'd say this English-only silly requirement makes it hard to write. It's just part of the language. Or how Spanish (and I'm assuming French) have a plural second person, yet in English, you have to use context when using "you", as it might be either singular or plural.
But that does complicate English. The grammar was simplified but the conveyance of information was made more difficult when the difference between the singular and plural versions of the second person were merged.
Or even worse, how I can see literally any Spanish word in existence and immediately know how to pronounce it, yet even native English speakers mess up words like epitome and haphazard all the time.
That, again, has no relevance to the discussion at hand about why English is used for contracts. It could be a purely written language and it would still be used.
Also, French like Spanish where you know how to pronounce (nearly) anything you read, but you may have no idea how to spell a word that you hear. For example, ver, vers, vert, verts, verre, verres, vair, and vairs are all sound alike. As you said, all languages have their quirks and you can usually find something equally silly in your own language. The point is that some languages are more flexible and extensive than others, not that some are explicitly better. The issue is that you bringing it up isn't relevant to the discussion that was being had before everyone decided to jump in to nitpick and derail the conversation.
But again, it's not more flexible. How are you? ¿Cómo estás? = Informal, singular ¿Cómo está? = Formal, singular. ¿Cómo están? = Plural. These a three ways I can say "how are you?" in Spanish,...
But again, it's not more flexible.
How are you?
¿Cómo estás? = Informal, singular
¿Cómo está? = Formal, singular.
¿Cómo están? = Plural.
These a three ways I can say "how are you?" in Spanish, reflecting amount of people and formality. English comes off as really poor here. And of course, you can say that you can say things like "how are you doing", and I could counter that you could say "que es la que", and I'm not sure I follow you when you say English is more flexible. It just looks like a regular language to me. Flexible in some areas, inflexible in others.
Regarding spelling, I can spell nearly everything I hear in Spanish. There are foreign loan words that might trip you up, and in many Latin American countries some distinctions have been abandoned (the difference between s, c and z), but the vast majority of the time, if you say a word, I can spell it correctly. This part isn't directly relevant, but you responded to it, so I felt I should address.
And I'm sorry, if you start saying some languages are more flexible than others, you're going to get pushback. I don't think anyone's being rude. They just think you're wrong.
You’re the one complaining that the French lacks precision when the corresponding English example you give is equally imprecise. I have no idea how you can seriously argue that “quatre pains” can...
You’re the one complaining that the French lacks precision when the corresponding English example you give is equally imprecise.
I have no idea how you can seriously argue that “quatre pains” can be interpreted to mean “four slices of bread”.
I just learned today that English doesn't have a word for 个. They just say 三人！How are you supposed to write a contract in a language that can't even distinguish 一个 from 一位 from 一种？
I just learned today that English doesn't have a word for 个. They just say 三人！How are you supposed to write a contract in a language that can't even distinguish 一个 from 一位 from 一种？
One could argue that this may be a limitation of the word "loaf" in English instead of a lack of definition from the French. Clearly baguettes and miches are different shapes and both can't be "loaf."
One could argue that this may be a limitation of the word "loaf" in English instead of a lack of definition from the French. Clearly baguettes and miches are different shapes and both can't be "loaf."
Wait how is "a bread" functionally different than "a loaf of bread" you can have "some bread" or "four breads" or "bread of rye" or "four breads please: two baguettes and two breads of rye" in...
Wait how is "a bread" functionally different than "a loaf of bread" you can have "some bread" or "four breads" or "bread of rye" or "four breads please: two baguettes and two breads of rye" in French.
Un pain
Du pain
Quatre pains
Pain de seigle
Quatre pains, s'il vous plait: deux baguettes et deux pains de seigle
It may not be how they would say it, but you can say all those things. Miche de pain usually means specific types of loaves.
If I walked into a bakery in Paris and ordered un pain, what would they say in response? If you walk into an American bakery and asked for a bread, they'd say "Alright, what kind?" Bread is a...
If I walked into a bakery in Paris and ordered un pain, what would they say in response?
If you walk into an American bakery and asked for a bread, they'd say "Alright, what kind?" Bread is a broad category like 'Meat'.
Imagine walking into the butchers and asking for "one meat please." Does that sound wrong? The English speaker in me can't understand why "one bread please" doesn't sound wrong. "Dame un pan" sounds wrong too, like, you gotta be specific about what type of bread you want.
How is that relevant to what I said? If you walked into a Honda dealership and asked for "one car, please," they would (look at you weird and then) ask you what kind of car you're looking for....
How is that relevant to what I said? If you walked into a Honda dealership and asked for "one car, please," they would (look at you weird and then) ask you what kind of car you're looking for. That doesn't mean that there's no reason for the term "car" to exist.
The same goes for walking into a bakery in Paris and asking for a bread. They would think you're an idiot, maybe call you one (especially if you have the wrong accent) and then ask what the hell kind you want.
The English speaker in me can't understand why "one bread please" doesn't sound wrong.
It does sound wrong? That's part of my point.
We use words to communicate ideas precisely. Obviously the French get by just fine without a word for "loaf," but my point was that if you're writing business contracts, you probably want to be able to precisely state that you're talking about a loaf and not a slice.
I see your point. It’s that native French language lacks the precision to communicate a specific request The fact that a French baker would call you an idiot is immaterial, because even a native...
I see your point. It’s that native French language lacks the precision to communicate a specific request
The fact that a French baker would call you an idiot is immaterial, because even a native French speaker lacks the capacity to make such a specific request. Right?
It absolutely doesn't lack the capacity to make the specific request. It's just that the assumptions of what the default unspecified form is is different. The bread example here is particularly...
It absolutely doesn't lack the capacity to make the specific request. It's just that the assumptions of what the default unspecified form is is different. The bread example here is particularly silly but this idea that languages are somehow incapable of expressing certain ideas because they don't express them in the exact same way as the language one is more familiar with is wrong. As a linguist, it's a really common myth that's a pain (pun intended) to combat.
I don't speak French, so I'm going to have to rely on secondhand info here and may not be your best source on the specifics of how French people order bread. That said, it's also unclear to me...
Exemplary
I don't speak French, so I'm going to have to rely on secondhand info here and may not be your best source on the specifics of how French people order bread. That said, it's also unclear to me from context which specific request you mean. Do you mean walking into a bakery and asking for a single loaf of bread? In both languages, it would presumably be unclear what type of bread you're asking for. In English, you can call many things a "loaf" of bread, and what type of bread would need to be communicated by modifying "bread" (e.g., a loaf of sourdough bread, a loaf of whole-wheat bread). In French, my understanding is that they would either use a more specific word rather than loaf (such as "une baguette" or "une miche de pain") or they would modify the word "bread" with an adjective, such as "un pain complet".
The difference between using "a loaf of bread" and "un pain" is more or less nonexistent semantically here, because "un pain" means a loaf of bread. It is clear in both languages that the speaker is not asking for a slice of bread because there is a specific term for a slice of bread that the speaker is not using. If the speaker wanted a single slice of bread, they would ask for it. The fact that "one bread" sounds a little weird in English in a way "un pain" doesn't in French is just an arbitrary difference between the two languages. It doesn't make one of them better or worse than the other, and in this case it's not even something that's more specific or concise in one language than in the other. The word "loaf" here in English is what's called a "classifier", a word that accompanies a noun to "classify" it based on some characteristic (in this case, shape/size). Mandarin has far more classifiers than English and uses them in contexts where English doesn't, but this doesn't make English inherently less able to concisely convey exact information than Mandarin either. Even within a language, use of classifiers can change over time.
Among linguists, it's nigh-universally agreed that no natural language is intrinsically incapable of expressing concepts that can be expressed in another natural language. Supposed "counterexamples" almost always fall into one of two categories:
The first is when a language lacks a specific word for something because its speakers have not previously commonly encountered it. This is solved by speakers borrowing or coining a new word once they encounter said thing and need to talk about it. This is obviously the origin of words like "baguette" or "spaghetti" in English -- you could absolutely have talked about those things prior to borrowing those words, but once these food items became common in the English-speaking world, English speakers borrowed words to refer to them more concisely.
Languages always need to create new words over time as the world changes, so this would be a thing even if there were only one language on earth anyway. Borrowings are convenient when another language already has a word for the thing in question, but other options are coining a new word (e.g., "brunch" or "sky-scraper") or repurposing an existing word to cover the new concept (e.g., "computer"). All languages are capable of doing these things, not just English, though some may prefer one strategy over the others. Even English has plenty of words that have not undergone this process because they're talking about stuff that English-speakers don't often talk about. Ask any fan of Chinese cuisine how impossible it is to figure out if you're buying 榨菜 or 芽菜 when looking only at the English label, for instance.
The second category is more similar to what @updawg seems to be trying to bring up, which is when languages divide semantic space differently or include certain concepts more prominently in their grammar than others. This is more often the cause of actual trouble in translation, but it still doesn't actually reflect some sort of inherent superiority of any one language over another in terms of expressing ideas -- when comparing any two languages, there will always be some ideas that are more concisely expressed in one language and some that are more concisely expressed in the other. Different languages have different semantic divisions with different nuances, but that doesn't make one of them better universally. Any perception that a given language is inherently better at expressing ideas in general is either due to a lack of experience with a variety of languages, linguistic or cultural bias towards a given language (usually your native language), or bog-standard racism/xenophobia.
I don't think the "loaf of bread" example is very good here, but here's an example (hopefully a more straightforward one) from a language I'm more familiar with. In German, words referring to professions and roles in society are nigh-universally gendered, even in many cases where they wouldn't be in English. If I say "My cousin is a student" in English, it is expressing less information than either "Mein Cousin ist Student" or "Meine Cousine ist Studentin" in German, because the German words include the individual's gender. In order to express the same idea in English, I would need to ether explicitly add an adjective -- "My male cousin is a student" or "My female cousin is a student" -- or somehow otherwise express the individual's gender in the conversation (perhaps by including an obviously gendered name or pronoun in the next sentence). And that's not even touching on the difference in the semantics of "student" in English, which is much broader than the German word!
At the same time, German lacks the ability to concisely avoid making this distinction. If my cousin's gender is not relevant to the conversation or I want to be vague about it without drawing attention it, English makes it easy to do so. In German, this is extremely difficult to do and generally requires neologisms or weird roundabout grammatical structures that draw attention to what you're doing (and if you can't think of why one might want to be deliberately vague about gender without drawing too much attention to it, remember that queer people exist). It's impossible to call one language "more concise" or "more exact" here because such an assessment relies heavily on very specific nuances that differ from one conversation to the next even in tiny examples like this, to say nothing of comparing whole languages more generally. It's far too context-dependent to insist that one language is generally better at expressing ideas than the other.
In regards to English's current position of dominance as a lingua franca, it's absolutely absurd to claim it's due to any inherent linguistic advantages of English as a language. It has no shortage of features to point to if you want to argue the exact opposite -- the writing system alone is a big one, but there are plenty of other idiosyncratic or unintuitive linguistic features of the English language. This is true of every language. No natural language is magically better for this purpose than another, and attempts to argue this are not cogent. The reason English became a global lingua franca is due to the political power (and to a lesser extent cultural influence) of first the British Empire and later the USA. The fact that English has far more terminology in certain useful domains is the result of this political and cultural dominance and its status as a lingua franca, not its cause. This is not remotely controversial among those who study languages scientifically, and attempts to claim otherwise are consistently grounded in an emotional attachment to that which is familiar and an unwillingness to consider that the familiar is not universally better.
Look I still don't understand why saying four types of bread in French and four breads in English is different or why saying 4 loaves of bread in English and four breads in French is dramatically...
Look I still don't understand why saying four types of bread in French and four breads in English is different or why saying 4 loaves of bread in English and four breads in French is dramatically different. They call things by different words and the word for loaf is even more specific and only applies to a couple of options.
I don't think it's actually lacking specificity, it's just using a different way of specifying.
I don't really understand your response to me either.
Whether it's loaves, types, flavors, or whatever, the qualifiers add specificity. A bread is a generic term, like meat or vegetable, and in casual speaking utilizes qualifiers to bring specifics...
four types of bread
Number, qualifier, item
four breads
Number, item
4 loaves of bread
Number, qualifier, item
Whether it's loaves, types, flavors, or whatever, the qualifiers add specificity. A bread is a generic term, like meat or vegetable, and in casual speaking utilizes qualifiers to bring specifics into play.
If coming to a party and I say "I'll bring bread" and show up with a pallet of pumpernickel I would technically be correct that I brought bread. If I walked into the store and asked for "bread" and they wheeled out said pallet that would also be correct, technically.
I guess it's the context that goes into fluency. At a bakery, saying "four breads" evokes the concept of the many types of bread that are available whereas in any other setting would lead to the follow up question of "Do you mean types or numbers?" If your boss said "Get four breads for the meeting," is that four croissants or four loaves or four styles?
It somewhat reminds me of the Arrested Development quote, "These are my awards, Mother. From army." "From army" obviously sounds wrong - it should be "from the Army" in common English and more specifically "from the U.S. Army" since there are multiple armies in the world but a native speaker should get by with "from the Army."
I dunno, are we talking around each other right now? Like a tetherball swinging around a pole. Don't mean to rile you up or anything.
Sure I guess I'm saying that just because a different language uses a different subset of qualifiers and its own context of when you'd say which types of bread vs some bread and have people know...
Sure I guess I'm saying that just because a different language uses a different subset of qualifiers and its own context of when you'd say which types of bread vs some bread and have people know what you mean, doesn't make one language less specific or more specific. I think we're agreeing there.
I just don't think the lack of a word loaf means that French is vague an unspecific when instead they collectively categorize bread in a different way. Maybe I'm wrong and bread terminology is a mess in France. My Duolingo has not been incredibly specific on the matter.
Four breads could mean four loaves or just generally pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese milk bread. Or it could mean two baguettes, a loaf of sourdough, and a loaf of sandwich bread. The phrase is very imprecise and thus does not have much intrinsic meaning.
Well, you would if they actually only say it the one way. I don't really understand your complaint but I'm willing to leave it be as I don't understand half the replies I'm getting as they seem to...
Well, you would if they actually only say it the one way.
I don't really understand your complaint but I'm willing to leave it be as I don't understand half the replies I'm getting as they seem to agree but equally make no sense.
This is my point, "loaf" is a defined shape, "boule" is a defined shape; neither equates a "universal unit of bread." Saying four breads could be pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese...
This is my point, "loaf" is a defined shape, "boule" is a defined shape; neither equates a "universal unit of bread." Saying four breads could be pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese milk bread is basically the same as saying it could be two baguettes, a loaf of sourdough, and a loaf of sandwich bread, especially seeing as the baguettes aren't called loafs in the example because "a loaf of baguette" is maybe the dirtiest thing you could say to a French person.
A loaf is not a defined shape. The wikipedia page on the Boule even says "The name of this rustic loaf shape...". "Loaf" is a universal word for a quantity of bread. And (in English) you would not...
A loaf is not a defined shape. The wikipedia page on the Boule even says "The name of this rustic loaf shape...". "Loaf" is a universal word for a quantity of bread. And (in English) you would not say "a loaf of baguette" because a baguette is a type of loaf. That would be like saying a bowl of a cup of clam chowder.
That depends on what they wanted. But that's not really relevant either because the point is that you can say "a loaf of sourdough bread that is six Inches wide, nine inches long, and four inches...
That depends on what they wanted. But that's not really relevant either because the point is that you can say "a loaf of sourdough bread that is six Inches wide, nine inches long, and four inches tall" and you have now specified that it needs to be a loaf that size and not a twenty foot long loaf that is sliced into 6x9x4 segments.
It's not a coincidence that the Lingua Franca at any given time tends to be the language of one of the most powerful groups, so I'm confident in saying this tax will never ever happen.
establishing a global tax on countries where the majority of the population speaks English as a native language and distributing the revenue to countries where English is taught in schools as a foreign language.
It's not a coincidence that the Lingua Franca at any given time tends to be the language of one of the most powerful groups, so I'm confident in saying this tax will never ever happen.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article. I'm just... not sure that there's a solution. Lingua francas have always been here. Akkadian, Aramean, Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, English,...
I don't necessarily disagree with the article. I'm just... not sure that there's a solution. Lingua francas have always been here. Akkadian, Aramean, Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, English, Spanish. The languages of dominant powers become lingua francas. Not always violently, but often so. Is this fair? No, but that's just how things are. You're never going to force monolinguals of the dominant powers to learn a second language.
I find myself incapable of accurately describing how low my opinion of this article (and especially the proposed "solutions") is without running very afoul of the code of conduct.
Sufficient to say I find it completely without any merit.
Signed, a non-native English speaker.
The term you're looking for is "Guardian article".
Not to say they don't publish useful stuff too, but pissing people off with pseudo-progressive hot takes is sort of their thing.
This was more or less my own reaction as a non-native too. The only solution proposal I'm not sure about is the patent one, and it's because I don't know much about the area. The others are all either unapplicable or extremely removed from reality.
Honestly, I think the best thing that would help is just better English education in the said countries. Language, especially speaking spontaneously and with understandable pronounciation, depends so much on practice. Consuming media in the said language and making international friends and chatting with them helped me the most.
An educational approach that is up-to-date on science of language learning would go a long way. I think UN and EU could make such programs, in order to facilitate communication and help with the mentioned problems in the said countries.
Fully agree. The fact that there's a language with which you can communicate with a very large part of the world is one of the good things about modern society. To throw that away would be foolish. The fact that this language happens to be English matters much less.
Signed, a fellow non-native English speaker.
Seconded. And I'm afraid I have to leave it at that, because CoC.
"... translates into considerable savings for the education systems of English-speaking countries, which can then be allocated to other productive public investments."
Seriously? I think learning foreign languages is a vital skill to understand the world at large. If you don't speak any other language than you mother tongue, you are bound to have a very narrow world view. The other thing is that many smaller nations don't really have a choice but to learn a second language. I, for instance, can't expect people to all learn Dutch. The idea of using a neutral language like Esperanto is great in theory but would require a major power to push it, which I don't see happening (and this is coming from someone who has studied Esperanto).
Agreed.
That is the essential issue IMHO. In Europe you can go for a long drive and end up in another country. In the U.S. that long drive might not even get you out of your state. The motivation just isn't there in the U.S..
Agreed, it has already been tried and ironically Esperanto is one of the least spoken languages on the planet.
Fun fact, William Shatner starred in a movie to help promote Esperanto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHUfHj2lTaM
I think any artificial international language is a pipe dream, including Esperanto, but it does not even come close to being one of the least spoken languages on the planet. There are literally thousands of endangered languages out there, and a huge portion of these have fewer speakers than Esperanto does. Esperanto doesn't even have close to the number of speakers it would need to serve as an international auxiliary language as it was originally planned, and it has far fewer speakers than major national languages, but it's shockingly successful for what it is. No other conlang even comes close to it in number of speakers, much less having any number of native speakers.
I wouldn't recommend someone learn Esperanto instead of a natural language (though there is a little bit of research suggesting that learning it as a monolingual may make it easier for you to subsequently learn at least certain other languages). It's a hobbyist thing that appeals to certain people -- and the fact that it's got a large enough hobbyist community to facilitate conferences and meet-ups is still pretty damn impressive.
There are many valid criticisms of Esperanto. The "nobody speaks it" I find a little silly. Esperanto was created 137 years ago. How many natural languages where fully formed from scratch and widely spoken in 137 years? Historically speaking, that's nothing.
EDIT": The second common criticism that is maybe a bit stronger is the whole "languages must evolve naturally to be useful", which ignores the fact that Esperanto does evolve naturally by their speakings and in ways that go completely around whatever their ruling body determine, much in the same way that languages like Portuguese and Spanish evolve naturally regardless of the recommendations mande by their respective "official academies"...
Really?
It takes a lot of time and effort to learn a new language.
Where is the motivation to make that investment if you can't use it?
Yes, there is the intellectual stimulation, but you can get by learning a new language you can actually use.
There are 2 million esperantists in the world. Not enough time has passed to consider it either a failure or a success because it takes a very long time for languages to stick.
It is enough for someone deciding what language to learn in foreseeable future to choose something else if they want to invest their time and effort in a language they can use to talk to people with.
Oh. I do not wish to provide concrete advice in regards to what language a particularly person should learn. I am not an apologist of Esperanto nor do I speak the language myself. I just happen to disagree with some clichés about Esperanto that are often repeated.
I think there are some other things to consider here besides pure numbers.
From what I can see, there are three reasons to learn a language: practical, cultural or "access to content".
Practical is because it makes life easier: things like access to jobs, oppertunities etc.
Cultural is because you want to immerse yourself in the culture behind the language.
Access to content is because you want to learn things/ access content that are mainly discussed and/or made in that language.
English has all of them. There are many people who learn English because they want to learn about the US, UK etc., but most just learn it because their favorite music is in that language or because all things related to programming or gaming are mostly in English.
For an international auxillary language (like Esperanto) all of these things need to be equal or better for it to succeed. This is very hard if not impossible without a major power or institution making Esperanto a working language or requiring it in some capacity. Two million Esperanto speakers are meaningless if they have no deep culture attached, have very little content and no content that is not available in other languages, and has no practical use (you don't get a job if you speak Esperanto, except at TEJO maybe).
You need to escape this catch 22 for an auxlang to become successful.
This is why I think one of the few ways Esperanto could gain traction, is if an institution like the EU, UN or African Union adopted it as a (co-)official language, but this is highly unlikely. Maybe in some alternate universe where the US becomes the enemy somehow and they want to distance themselves from them.
This is all coming from someone who likes Esperanto and can understand it btw.
None, because natural languages are never created from scratch. But every natural language has a substantial speaker base when it first forms.
I believe sign language might be an exception because some deaf people grew up very isolated and had to invent their own signs. Also, perhaps some pidgins and creoles, which happened when people without a common language were thrown together by circumstances. (A creole language is what happens when children grow up hearing pidgin and invent a grammar for it.)
But these things only happen when there is isolated hardship of some kind. Historically, many communities were isolated enough to have their own languages, because most people didn’t travel. But nowadays, inflicting that isolation on children, cutting them off from the world, seems cruel, and less language diversity is the consequence.
Most sign languages do in fact evolve over time, rather than being created top-down like Esperanto was. Sign languages are, in this respect, natural languages, not conlangs. That said, they can come into being very quickly -- Nicaraguan Sign Language is a favorite example. But this would also happen if you threw a bunch of hearing kids (or honestly even adults) with no common language together. The biggest difference is that most hearing kids aren't isolated from external linguistic input in the same way as deaf kids traditionally have been, since doing that would be extreme child abuse. This type of language development isn't very similar to the way languages like Esperanto are created at all.
Yes, these are not constructed languages, but they do show that it doesn’t take that long for a new language to evolve.
Oh yeah, absolutely, the point about the timeline is correct! If anything, Esperanto's timeline was weirdly slow due to its conlang status.
Great observation! That is one more reason to be a little more lenient with a constructed language, given that, unlike most languages, they development is usually announced beforehand! Of course, constructed languages are not really made from scratch, but merely proposing it does not means that it is done!
It's a travesty that "everyone learns English" turned into "so if we speak English already we needn't teach foreign languages".
My personal solution would be that everyone in the world should be taught (at least) one foreign language to fluency of the most widespread. At a guess that's probably English, Spanish, and maybe French? I'm sure some Chinese dialects win in pure number of speakers, but I feel number of countries should weigh more heavily than number of individuals if the idea is to promote global communication.
Edit: looking at the wikipedia page for languages by speakers, Arabic would probably be a better pick than French - not "official" in quite as many countries, but more often a primary language. And an added bonus of it not using the latin alphabet.
I don't think in the end a classroom can ever take someone that is ambivalent to learning foreign languages and make them anywhere near fluent in one - at most A2 level mastery, if that. Which is different than, say, arithmetic.
Much has been bemoaned about classroom learning for languages in general, and it is a bad fit in general - you need to process a lot of input to learn a language, and that takes interest, and that takes a lot more time than usual. Which is different than other subjects. I think language learning inevitably takes more time, but different time - simply listening to media in that language will help you grasp it, but passively listening to people talk about math will not get you any mastery in that area. Which makes it uniquely bad for classrooms.
All that is to say, it will always be difficult for English speakers to learn foreign languages, because there's not much opportunity for immersion or motivation. If you're a Swedish student, you're constantly confronted with English media, from foreign movies, to of course the omnipresence of English on social media.
That just isn't the case for an American or even British student. You're not going to get them to read or listen to Arabic in their free time. They have no reason to want to do that. Anything of particular fame in Arabic is already translated anyway. They're not going to get anywhere.
You can already see this in how some countries learn English. Japanese students learn English throughout primary education, with an intensity that would make American kids cry. But for all that, they're a whopping 87th globally in English speaking ability.
They're literally next to AFGHANISTAN in English speaking ability. You just can't force this in a classroom.
Following this, it's likely no coincidence that the size of online language learning communities in the anglosphere tend to track more closely with the volume of readily available media a language has rather than number of people speaking it or the utility of being able to speak it.
The media sparks interest which grows into a desire to learn the language which is then made easier by having a lot of media to consume.
87th globally in English speaking ability is still enough that when I visited recently I could get by for three weeks having memorised the phrases "I don't speak Japanese" and "do you speak English", along with "excuse me", "sorry", and "thank you". A Japanese person visiting the UK with that little English would have a significantly harder time finding someone who spoke even a little of their language if they e.g. couldn't work out how to buy the right kind of train ticket.
Maybe true fluency is too lofty a goal, but even just parity with the education efforts that this linked article mentions would be a substantial improvement. When I went to school foreign languages weren't even introduced in the curriculum until age 11.
Which cities and regions did you visit? I found most tourist areas are unsurprisingly familiar with basic English for customer service.
Pretty much just major cities (Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hiroshima), but that there were enough English-speakers around in cities is part of my point. London may have some Japanese-speaking help available, but would Oxford, Bath, Edinburgh, Cardiff? Feels unlikely.
An alternative hypothesis is that Japanese schools are somehow especially bad at teaching English compared to other countries that seem to be doing better at it. But there are a lot of confounding factors. I wonder if someone has studied this?
I think I worked out once that if you have Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic and French you can communicate with half the people on Earth.
Maaaaaybe for writing. But even Arabic natives can have a hard time communicating even the basics with each other as you go from Western Sahara in the west to Oman in the east. Realistically, even relatively close countries are not having a fluent conversation with each other. A Tunesian isn't just having a lively debate with a Egyptian, who isn't doing the same with a Jordanian. The dialects are to different.
They could debate in writing, though, or talk in modern standard Arabic - if the Tunisian remembers any from school.
Years ago when I was preparing a visit to Tunisia for Ramadan with my Tunisian friend, I started learning Arabic and he told me not to bother but to learn some French instead as more people will be able to understand French or English than any particular dialect of Arabic.
Perhaps French is the better pick after all! I didn't know Arabic dialects varied that much. The advice to use French perfectly illustrates how my ideal solution would work, at least.
I basically only understand English. I have a toddler level understanding of Japanese and French. And I have to say that as a beneficiary of an Anglophone-centric globe when combined with an increasingly globalized world means that those other cultures opinions are much more accessible to me.
But the big thing to note is that I actively seek them out. And I don’t think that is the norm. I think most people access the internet specifically to reinforce their existing opinions.
That's a good point. Many people learn other languages in order to be able to seek other opinions, but that doesn't that someone would do that if they know another language.
You can't control language.
Tell the French that.
Do you speak French? Because the French dont speak the language the Academie Française tells them to speak. Sure, they follow certain orthographic decrees, but I've never seen a French person call an email "un courriel," for example.
Edit: of course, you could also be talking about the systematic destruction of most local dialects, but most French people don't even know that happened, in my experience.
You can take my septante, huitante and nonante from my cold, dead and non-vigesimal hands.
For those who don't get it
Standard French uses a base twenty (vigesimal) system for numbers over 60. So for instance 72 is litteraly "sixty twelve" (soixante douze), and 97 is " four twenty ten seven" (quatre-vingts dix-sept).
However, Swiss and Belgian uses a saner decimal system where 86 is simply "eighty six" (huitante six).
And the best part is you get to annoy French people 😏
Double points for saying huitante chocolatines !
Edit: mission accomplished 😏
I support huitante but absolutely draw the line at chocolatines!!
Whoa whoaa, I support some activism, but this is borderline hate crime. What's next, emmental français ?
I had absolutely no idea that was how French numbers work!
How did that come about? To me that obviously makes no sense lol
If by French you mean French Canadians, sure. But modern French is riddled with anglicisms ("week-end", "shopping", "marketing", etc, etc). People don't really use formal French day to day, and slang is used liberally. Also, don't get me started on spelling mistakes even highly educated people make very frequently...
The French are a beautiful example of failure to do so. They may succeed at killing minority languages, but they can't make Francophones actually follow their arbitrary "rules".
I don't think it's your wider point, but you can very easily control language to a large extent. I see the point about the French below, and I'll not the French stage has mostly killed all competitors to French. Arabic mostly killed Coptic, English mostly killed te reo māori, etc. For that matter one, it's quite easy to control a language when the state kidnaps children. See also Australia. See also Nahuatl. All it takes is a state willing to kill.
You can kill languages, for sure. It's not a coincidence that this is often a huge component in destroying ethnic groups. But you can't keep a language around and thriving and control how people speak it, at least not long-term. A language having active native speakers is diametrically opposed with controlling it.
I don't necessarily wholly disagree, but I'm not sure that was the wider point of the poster I replied to.
You might say, you can easily control languages with tens of millions of speakers. But you can easily control Romansh, if your intent is to destroy it. My wider point is that the sentiment only really applies to dominant languages, and they're dominant mostly because of force.
I don't think the sentiment that you can't control language only applies to dominant languages. I don't think the ability to snuff out a language (almost universally the result of violence against its speakers) is the same thing as controlling language. It's hard to tell the specifics of what the poster you replied to meant for sure given the brevity of their comment, ofc, but I'd wager their idea of "control" is closer to that definition.
I have also heard about native English speakers actually struggling on international teams because they speak English and everybody else speaks the same not-quite-proper English. Or they may speak faster and in more complicated sentences that their colleagues don't understand.
An American might use a bunch of baseball idioms because they've become a part of everyday language, or he may call something "a no-brainer," leading his colleagues to think he just said they don't have brains.
Yep, this is me. English is my native language, and the gap between my language skills and most of my fluent (C1 level) colleagues is still huge. While many young employees are truly fluent (C2+), most of my colleagues understand idioms and proverbs better in Hindi or Chinese than English.
It can be frustrating since English is the business language, but I can't actually communicate in college-level English or use expressions that native speakers could easily follow.
But at least your colleagues don't cost as much money!
Since they're H-1B's, it's mostly that they're easier to abuse...
Non-native English speaker here. I have more trouble understanding the English pronounciations of people from my own nationality than I do with native speakers.
It's not so much about pronunciation as word choice, complexity of ideas, and use of idioms. But being a regular on Tildes, I'm sure those aren't as big of an issue for you either.
I think you might be slightly underestimating non-native speakers -- they're usually pretty quick to ask if you say something they don't understand. The really insidious thing is when relatively common words are used differently by non-native speakers. As a native English speaker living in Europe for 5+ years, I've started picking up some of these myself. I basically switched to using "control" in the sense of check/inspect the way Germans use kontrollieren, even though I never would've used it that way back home.
This can also be an issue with native English speakers from other countries, though. The word "quite" still haunts me.
Quite.
😭 I set myself up for that one.
English is dominant for two simple reasons. Every time it encounters another language, it smiles, walks them down an alley, knocks them out with a brickbat, then steals all of their words for itself. Seriously, compare the thickness of an English dictionary to other languages, and count how many of them you'd have to stack on top of each other just to reach the same height. Pretty sure the only real competition it has in that department (pushing past 1.5 million words) is with Korean and Tamil, much older and more storied languages who have done their own share of stealing.
The other reason is that business dealings and legal contracts tend to happen in English because of the specificity it supports - particularly at the level of large corporations and governments. It's become the de-facto language of trade, and that's a lot of inertia. If you aren't dealing in English, you instantly and severely limit your options for who you can do business with.
There's no reason to bother replacing it. In fact with AI enabled translations already here, it seems even more pointless. The only case I've ever heard for replacing English (and all of the rest of them) comes from the concept of linguistic relativity which I wouldn't call hard science. Even if it's right, that doesn't give us any insight on what to replace the languages with. :P
IMO, all of that is just backwards justification. English is the lingua franca because of two reasons: geopolitics, and invention.
It started in WW2 - by then, English had already grown as a diplomatic language due to the increasing power of America, which combined with the UK, still one of Europe's great powers at the time, meant that the treaty of versailles was written in English. But the aftermath of WW2 cemented it.
Europe was bisected between America and the USSR. The Marshall plan meant that the US was for many years the lifeline of western Europe's destroyed economy. Meanwhile, in Asia, America was also the dominant power, having toppled Japan and installed a US friendly government.
Another big step came with the end of the Cold War - with the US as a sole monopole in global geopolitics, and by far the world's largest economy, English's naturally came with it as the most important language of diplomacy and economics.
Secondly, and equally important, was America's dominance in the invention of communications technology. The US and UK invented the telegraph. The US invented the telephone. The US invented the television. While the US did not invent radio, it was Fessenden in NJ that broke through wireless telephony.
And, of course, it was in the US that the internet was born and popularized, and in the US where the tech giants of the 2000s and 2010s were born.
All that meant that for the communication standards of today, English was default by virtue of being the language spoken by its inventors.
I think that any language that was spoken in America would have the same global influence. There are parts of English that make it good for learning, and parts that make it really bad. Languages are malleable, and in any future where a nation state dictates so much in world power and commerce, local modifications would be made to transition into a pidgin-esque state to be suitable for second learners over time.
Adding onto your second point, English is the universal language of aviation for the same reason: the airplane was invented in the US, and due to geographic reasons, aviation as a field was adopted and developed here very quickly. WW2 likewise contributed to this state of affairs, as two of the major aviation superpowers in the war were natively anglophone.
The US also has a somewhat uncharacteristically excellent aviation safety and accident investigation apparatus that is rightly the gold standard worldwide. I'm not quite sure how it happened, but it's one of the few regulatory things we actually do right.
I rarely see the fact that English is the lingua franca of international aviation brought up in these sorts of discussions, so I thought I'd mention it.
Going even further back, I imagine England's nautical dominance must have had a lasting impact on international maritime standards? At the very least, English has a lot of sailing jargon.
It's probably more accurate to say that British colonial power contributed more to the spread of English as an international language than their naval superiority, though it's all part and parcel, I suppose. Sailing certainly had an effect on English, as you say.
One considerable difference between sailing and aviation is that ocean-going craft are rarely required to file into a port single file, and if they do, its relatively simple for the port to dispatch a guide vessel to clear the way for larger ships.
Airplanes don't work quite that way. Planes require clear runway and airspace to take off and land, which requires much more precise and unambiguous communication between port and vessel. The speeds and energies involved are so great that botched communication between air traffic control and a plane is likely to lead to a much greater catastrophe than hull damage and lost cargo. Hundreds are likely to die.
All this strongly encourages agreement on a single universal language to be spoken at all airports above regional size. Due to the historical circumstances being discussed in this thread–including British colonial hegemony, the American invention of the first commercially viable powered flying machines, WW2 and US cultural exports–English is that language.
National Transportation Safety Board
From the wiki:
This is a decent quick look at the key reason though, IMO: https://www.cshlaw.com/resources/what-information-from-an-ntsb-report-is-admissible-evidence-in-court/
Basically, only absolute facts can be taken from an NTSB report and used in another legal case. Absolute facts. Not witness statements, for example. Why?
Because the purpose and point of the NTSB and the Federal Aviation Act that later codified their mission and procedures, is to improve the safety of transportation and transportation equipment/operations (aircraft, trains, cars, whatever) in the US.
Even with cockpit recorders, crews that have multiple members you could interview to build a more complete picture of a situation and what was happening, people who fear retribution will not speak. If you knew your statements to the NTSB (a government agency) would later bite you in the ass when the victims or families of same could use your cooperation with the NTSB against you in those other court cases, would you participate?
Some might, even if they knew they were burying themselves in a liability case, but most wouldn't. Few corporations would, and especially today corporations are by far the majority of transportation operators. Delta, BNSF, any major transportation corporation, they would have standing orders in their employee manuals to not cooperate with NTSB investigations due to liability concerns.
Which would result in investigations that were less likely to find the probable cause of the incident. Which would then result in a lower probability of meaningful changes that would then go on to save lives.
So yes, it's an incredible miracle that, in America of all places, land of lawyers, we have a government agency that was set up with legislation and codified case law that effectively says "fuck courts, just talk us after the accident so we can try to figure out what happened and if it can be avoided in the future."
Safety regulations are written in blood. One of the reasons airline travel has become so safe is it didn't used to be. They didn't used to understand all sorts of things that can cause equipment failure, or dangerously confuse a pilot, for example.
But by rigorously investigating each accident, by questioning cooperating pilots and drivers and mechanics and crew members, holistic understanding of fatal accidents was built up over the years. They began to understand, with deaths to point to as proof, why a plane crashed or its engines failed and so on. They would then issue safety recommendations, which are usually adhered to.
Which is why, as just one example, airlines are required to maintain exhaustive records of all maintenance. Where the parts come from, were they certified, how many cycles they're rated for, and so on.
Normal business rules calls for maximum efficiency. Pushing the limits, in other words. But when pushing those limits to eke extra hours or cycles out of components risks those components failing, which could cause a plane of passengers to fatally crash, the safe move is to just replace the components. And to use a qualified, properly trained aircraft technicians to perform that maintenance.
This, incidentally, is one of the reasons the Boeing 737 Max disasters are so infuriating. Boeing decided to tap dance their way around the normal certification process for aircraft. Some of the upgrades they'd done to the 737 when they turned it into the 737 Max would by regulation require pilots to recertify on the 737 Max. Even existing 737 pilots. Why? Because Boeing had changed certain things about how the plane handled and flew and safety rules dictate a pilot be properly trained to understand that specific model of aircraft.
Previous disasters had spelled out how pilots who didn't have vast understanding of the plane they're flying could lose control. Which is exactly what happened when some of those new systems Boeing had added to the 737 Max began doing things that confused the pilots of those aircraft. Causing those aircraft to crash, and people to unnecessarily die.
All because a corporation decided "well, if we follow the rules, it'll cost us and our customers money, so let's just manage to classify this as a small upgrade that won't incur those costs and everyone can go back to making money. Pilots are pilots, they can manage." Until some of them didn't, and people died.
I guess I knew the how, but was more curious as to the why.
I think it comes down to the fact that aviation regulation was being laid down in a time when strict regulation was seen as a good and sometimes necessary thing for the public good, rather than just a hindrance to corporate profit. I have a hard time imagining today's Congress and judiciary being so willing to lay down the law to protect the citizenry at the cost of megacorps' bottom lines.
Financial incentives for the aviation business aren’t as one-sided as you’re assuming. Airplane crashes are bad for business. Even today, many people are afraid to fly despite airlines having an excellent safety record.
No doubt it's ultimately bad for business, but as history illustrates, there are many in the business world who don't give a shit about protecting consumers or their companies if it means they can extract a few pennies in cost savings today. Boeing's recent fiasco alone argues against your claim, let alone the hundreds of other industries with similar safety records. We could honestly be here all day recounting situations where concerns about long-term business sustainability have gone out the window in the pursuit of short-term profit.
I don’t think the story can be summed up as “Boeing’s leadership doesn’t care about safety.” They wouldn’t have gone through with it if they genuinely expected crashes. Crashes are extraordinarily expensive for an aircraft manufacturer and this is obvious to everyone.
They misjudged the risks. They somehow didn’t think their workarounds would really affect safety, because they thought the workarounds would work. But the way it played out is pretty much what anyone would expect if they got it wrong.
Other industries don’t work in quite the same way. Recalls are expensive in the auto industry, but we also expect automobile crashes. They don’t ground the fleet for similar problems.
You're arguing yourself in circles here.
I never accused corporate types of wanting to cause death and destruction. They aren't Captain Planet villains. But the leadership of big corps of any type are liable to falling victims to wishful thinking as regards risk, and they do have immense influence on the way regulatory laws are legislated these days in the US.
Glad we agree about wishful thinking.
I think it might be interesting to research what influence Boeing has had on the FAA. I don’t think guessing about it would be useful.
Lol. I suspect we agree about a lot. You just seem to be in a debating mood, I'll say.
This response screams "MURICA" for lack of a better word.
The television was invented by John Logie Baird, a Scotsman. There were steps towards the invention of the television over a number of decades involving scientists all over the world but Baird presented the first working mechanical television, or "televisor", to the public in 1925. He also then developed the first colour and 3D televisions afterwards. Farnsworths electronic television wasn't shown until 1927.
The telephone was being invented in different ways by multiple people but the patent was granted to Alexander Graham Bell, a Scots-Canadian who was working in both Canada and the US at the time.
Yes, the consumption of American and British media, whether it be novels, TV, films, music etc along with American political, scientific and economic dominance post-WW2 is a huge reason for the adoption of English as the lingua franca. A less savoury, but no less important reason for the dominance of the English language across the globe is due to the size and spread of the British Empire over a number of centuries, along with the century of Pax Britannica after the Napoleonic Wars until WW1, where Britain was essentially unchallenged militarily, economically, politically, and culturally. This allowed it control over it's colonies along with control over an "informal empire" where British interests could be controlled through trade with countries outside of its colonies.
I'd argue that motion pictures, recorded music, and the Internet are bigger influences on the solidification of English's dominance as a worldwide second language. Radio and television were never fundamentally international media; range limitations for commercial towers saw to that. Telephony has never had quite as pervasive an influence over international culture as the others by virtue of its point-to-point nature and the high price of international connections.
Film and music, on the other hand, played huge roles in spreading American cultural influence due to their portability. Masters could be shipped overseas and duplicated in whichever market you please for relatively low cost back in the days when television was in its artistic infancy. Many markets were already primed to receive English-language cinema and music due to British political hegemony, which took a sharp decline after the wars. I think it's fair to say that British colonial dominance became supplanted by American cultural influence as the post-WW2 order showed that in some cases it's easier and more profitable to extract wealth from foreign nations by selling them garbage than by occupying and administrating them by main force.
So after decades of blue jeans and Jimmy Dean burning across the world, it's hardly a surprise that English should become the de facto first language of the Internet, even if the backbone of the network itself hadn't been largely developed by US military and academic interests.
Ultimately, it's pretty silly to get all nationalistic about such things, since history is always more complex than jingoism can tolerate. Having said that, while the details of @stub2b50's argument maybe aren't strong, the thesis seems reasonable to me.
It’s all connected. Did rock and roll become popular because it was played by radio stations, or did they play it on the radio because it was popular? Obviously both. And there are also international radio networks like the BBC, which probably had some influence.
Similarly, movies can be shown on TV and that’s where a lot of people saw them.
The synergy makes it hard to say which is more important. But I suppose the popularity of rock and roll in countries where it was banned is a point for recorded media (cassette tapes, typically.)
The popularity of British music (the Beatles, etc) is an argument against it being a specifically American influence.
This is very funny.
While there are a lot of valid points about US geopolitical dominance of the 20th century, the statement "It started in WW2 - by then, English had already grown as a diplomatic language due to the increasing power of America" is unhinged. Sure, America was reasonably powerful internationally by WW2 but England dominated for a few centuries before that. Sure, they speak with that funny accent but I'm willing to bet that English is practical in India not because of America.
I think though, it's also proper to push back lightly on a couple of your assertions. Sure, Baird invented a form of television first, but he was also an English speaker, and his television wouldn't have been possible without American Theodor Case's invention, the Case Cell. Look at how important America is! Also, Graham Bell was a native English speaker, who chose to come to the greatest country on Earth, 'MURICA! On the serious side of Graham Bell, it stands that, since he died before WW2, it might be another check in the column of "English was spread by the English."
How is it unhinged? All that, and the language of diplomacy in Europe was French, and the language of science was German. English was not the lingua franca of the day when the sun shone most strongly on the British empire. And I shouldn’t have to mention that in East Asia, Chinese was still the closest to a common language in that period.
It was only after the 1940s, and Britain was soon about to be humiliated in the Suez Crisis, had lost most its colonies that English began supplicate as the commonly used language for commerce, politics, and science.
Obviously the British empire was important, if nothing else for being the reason English is spoken in the US, but English was just a language spoken by one the great powers of Europe in that period - not the language.
I suppose it's mostly the "It started in WW2..." part that I feel is unhinged. I agree that English came to increasingly dominate for a variety of social and geopolitical reasons (the expansion of English contents and the Treaty of Versailles being two big things) but I also think it ignores the several hundred years of British colonial expansion of English.
Did the definition of “unhinged” change at some point? It used to roughly mean “dangerously insane”, and that feels like a pretty strong condemnation of what ultimately seems to have been a minor disagreement on the approximate timeframe when English became so prominent.
Maybe I’ve just gotten old, but I see “unhinged” thrown around with some regularity here, and it really rubs me the wrong way.
Like I said, the [it] in "it started" is English's use as the de facto global lingua franca. It absolutely did not have that position, or anything like it, before WW2, and I'd continue to argue that. It wasn't even the dominant language on continental Europe for any kind of international dialogue, let alone the rest of the world.
That's not a slight of British empire's strength, but rather that they tried to stay away from continental politics, being content with their overseas empire and mainly aiming to keep the balance of power.
The influence of colonialism seems pretty clear - it’s the reason not only English but French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken in many countries. English started out as a very popular language due to colonialism and grew from there. Colonialism is why it’s spoken in the US, after all.
So it seems hard to say which causes were most important. Success builds on success, the success of English has deep roots, and colonialism is part of the story. Without that it wouldn’t be in the running.
When tracing the historical roots of things, “all of the above” often works pretty well as an answer.
I just learned today that French--French of all languages!--doesn't have a word for a loaf of bread. Sure, you can talk about baguettes or miches, but what do you have if you have two baguettes and two miches? You have four breads. What??? How are you supposed to write a contract in a language that doesn't have a word for "loaf" or that no longer differentiates between the simple past and present perfect tenses???
What's wrong with four breads? Sure I have a loaf of bread and a murder of crows, but I only have two hands and one head. Measure words aren't universal in English either!
I just explained what's wrong with it? Four breads could mean four loaves or just generally pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese milk bread. Or it could mean two baguettes, a loaf of sourdough, and a loaf of sandwich bread. The phrase is very imprecise and thus does not have much intrinsic meaning.
I mean, you would just specify. When Spanish doesn't have a bespoke word for something, I just specify what I mean. I don't get the sense that contracts in Spanish are particularly more difficult to write that contracts in English. A common parlance would've evolved (or have been defined in legislation), and that's what's used.
I don't see how English is particularly very different. Half the legal terms are in Latin. Which makes sense for French and Spanish, since those are just local varieties of Latin. But doesn't the fact that English, a Germanic language, seems to still need Latin in law imply that it's lacking as well?
Yes, you would. But you would have to.
Imagine writing a story and having a character walk into a bakery. "There were four loaves of bread still on display." tells you what was behind the counter. On the other hand, it's much more complicated when you need to write "Il y eut quatre pains exposés...enfin non pas quatre styles de pains, c'était quatre euh quatre items en exposé et ils étaient tous des pains."
And the point was that this is for writing contracts, where you want your wording to be both precise and concise.
No, it implies that law was historically practiced in Latin and then lawyers were elitists who kept the terms in Latin. The phrases are, for the most part, very easy to translate.
I just don't see that as a problem. If I were writing in Spanish, I would use context. Quedaban cuatro libras de pan, or quedaban 4 pedazos de pan, or quedaban 4 panes. This isn't a real issue when writing.
It's like complaining about... I dunno, having to use the word "do" in English. You can't just say "you want bread?" like every language. You have to say "do you want bread?", even though the "do" is probably some sort of Celtic remnant that adds nothing to the sentence. But I don't think I'd say this English-only silly requirement makes it hard to write. It's just part of the language. Or how Spanish (and I'm assuming French) has a plural second person, yet in English, you have to use context when using "you", as it might be either singular or plural. English also lacks a formal you. If you want to write a character speaking formally, you have to add context, you can't just drop in an "usted".
Or even worse, how I can see literally any Spanish word in existence and immediately know how to pronounce it, yet even native English speakers mess up words like epitome and haphazard all the time.
There's a million things in English that are dumb, and plenty of times where you're forced to use context because the sentence isn't clear on its own. This is true of every language.
We say things like "you want bread?" every day. In fact, we even say things like "want bread?", although that would usually be "want some bread?" But instead of "would you like/do you want to get lunch?", we'll say "wanna get lunch?"
But that does complicate English. The grammar was simplified but the conveyance of information was made more difficult when the difference between the singular and plural versions of the second person were merged.
That, again, has no relevance to the discussion at hand about why English is used for contracts. It could be a purely written language and it would still be used.
Also, French like Spanish where you know how to pronounce (nearly) anything you read, but you may have no idea how to spell a word that you hear. For example, ver, vers, vert, verts, verre, verres, vair, and vairs are all sound alike. As you said, all languages have their quirks and you can usually find something equally silly in your own language. The point is that some languages are more flexible and extensive than others, not that some are explicitly better. The issue is that you bringing it up isn't relevant to the discussion that was being had before everyone decided to jump in to nitpick and derail the conversation.
But again, it's not more flexible.
How are you?
¿Cómo estás? = Informal, singular
¿Cómo está? = Formal, singular.
¿Cómo están? = Plural.
These a three ways I can say "how are you?" in Spanish, reflecting amount of people and formality. English comes off as really poor here. And of course, you can say that you can say things like "how are you doing", and I could counter that you could say "que es la que", and I'm not sure I follow you when you say English is more flexible. It just looks like a regular language to me. Flexible in some areas, inflexible in others.
Regarding spelling, I can spell nearly everything I hear in Spanish. There are foreign loan words that might trip you up, and in many Latin American countries some distinctions have been abandoned (the difference between s, c and z), but the vast majority of the time, if you say a word, I can spell it correctly. This part isn't directly relevant, but you responded to it, so I felt I should address.
And I'm sorry, if you start saying some languages are more flexible than others, you're going to get pushback. I don't think anyone's being rude. They just think you're wrong.
“Four loaves of bread” doesn’t tell you what kind either.
That's like saying that "cars" doesn't tell you if you mean Hondas or Fords. The point is that it tells you if you mean loaves or slices, etc.
You’re the one complaining that the French lacks precision when the corresponding English example you give is equally imprecise.
I have no idea how you can seriously argue that “quatre pains” can be interpreted to mean “four slices of bread”.
I just learned today that English doesn't have a word for 个. They just say 三人！How are you supposed to write a contract in a language that can't even distinguish 一个 from 一位 from 一种？
One could argue that this may be a limitation of the word "loaf" in English instead of a lack of definition from the French. Clearly baguettes and miches are different shapes and both can't be "loaf."
They can't both be a thing of bread? What? And how is it a limitation of English if English can express the exact same thing or call them loaves?
Wait how is "a bread" functionally different than "a loaf of bread" you can have "some bread" or "four breads" or "bread of rye" or "four breads please: two baguettes and two breads of rye" in French.
Un pain
Du pain
Quatre pains
Pain de seigle
Quatre pains, s'il vous plait: deux baguettes et deux pains de seigle
It may not be how they would say it, but you can say all those things. Miche de pain usually means specific types of loaves.
Or am I misunderstanding?
If I walked into a bakery in Paris and ordered un pain, what would they say in response?
If you walk into an American bakery and asked for a bread, they'd say "Alright, what kind?" Bread is a broad category like 'Meat'.
Imagine walking into the butchers and asking for "one meat please." Does that sound wrong? The English speaker in me can't understand why "one bread please" doesn't sound wrong. "Dame un pan" sounds wrong too, like, you gotta be specific about what type of bread you want.
How is that relevant to what I said? If you walked into a Honda dealership and asked for "one car, please," they would (look at you weird and then) ask you what kind of car you're looking for. That doesn't mean that there's no reason for the term "car" to exist.
The same goes for walking into a bakery in Paris and asking for a bread. They would think you're an idiot, maybe call you one (especially if you have the wrong accent) and then ask what the hell kind you want.
It does sound wrong? That's part of my point.
We use words to communicate ideas precisely. Obviously the French get by just fine without a word for "loaf," but my point was that if you're writing business contracts, you probably want to be able to precisely state that you're talking about a loaf and not a slice.
Fair enough, upon reading (and rereading) your post I thought you were arguing for the opposite, my mistake.
I see your point. It’s that native French language lacks the precision to communicate a specific request
The fact that a French baker would call you an idiot is immaterial, because even a native French speaker lacks the capacity to make such a specific request. Right?
It absolutely doesn't lack the capacity to make the specific request. It's just that the assumptions of what the default unspecified form is is different. The bread example here is particularly silly but this idea that languages are somehow incapable of expressing certain ideas because they don't express them in the exact same way as the language one is more familiar with is wrong. As a linguist, it's a really common myth that's a pain (pun intended) to combat.
So how would you make that specific request in the French context?
I don't speak French, so I'm going to have to rely on secondhand info here and may not be your best source on the specifics of how French people order bread. That said, it's also unclear to me from context which specific request you mean. Do you mean walking into a bakery and asking for a single loaf of bread? In both languages, it would presumably be unclear what type of bread you're asking for. In English, you can call many things a "loaf" of bread, and what type of bread would need to be communicated by modifying "bread" (e.g., a loaf of sourdough bread, a loaf of whole-wheat bread). In French, my understanding is that they would either use a more specific word rather than loaf (such as "une baguette" or "une miche de pain") or they would modify the word "bread" with an adjective, such as "un pain complet".
The difference between using "a loaf of bread" and "un pain" is more or less nonexistent semantically here, because "un pain" means a loaf of bread. It is clear in both languages that the speaker is not asking for a slice of bread because there is a specific term for a slice of bread that the speaker is not using. If the speaker wanted a single slice of bread, they would ask for it. The fact that "one bread" sounds a little weird in English in a way "un pain" doesn't in French is just an arbitrary difference between the two languages. It doesn't make one of them better or worse than the other, and in this case it's not even something that's more specific or concise in one language than in the other. The word "loaf" here in English is what's called a "classifier", a word that accompanies a noun to "classify" it based on some characteristic (in this case, shape/size). Mandarin has far more classifiers than English and uses them in contexts where English doesn't, but this doesn't make English inherently less able to concisely convey exact information than Mandarin either. Even within a language, use of classifiers can change over time.
Among linguists, it's nigh-universally agreed that no natural language is intrinsically incapable of expressing concepts that can be expressed in another natural language. Supposed "counterexamples" almost always fall into one of two categories:
The first is when a language lacks a specific word for something because its speakers have not previously commonly encountered it. This is solved by speakers borrowing or coining a new word once they encounter said thing and need to talk about it. This is obviously the origin of words like "baguette" or "spaghetti" in English -- you could absolutely have talked about those things prior to borrowing those words, but once these food items became common in the English-speaking world, English speakers borrowed words to refer to them more concisely.
Languages always need to create new words over time as the world changes, so this would be a thing even if there were only one language on earth anyway. Borrowings are convenient when another language already has a word for the thing in question, but other options are coining a new word (e.g., "brunch" or "sky-scraper") or repurposing an existing word to cover the new concept (e.g., "computer"). All languages are capable of doing these things, not just English, though some may prefer one strategy over the others. Even English has plenty of words that have not undergone this process because they're talking about stuff that English-speakers don't often talk about. Ask any fan of Chinese cuisine how impossible it is to figure out if you're buying 榨菜 or 芽菜 when looking only at the English label, for instance.
The second category is more similar to what @updawg seems to be trying to bring up, which is when languages divide semantic space differently or include certain concepts more prominently in their grammar than others. This is more often the cause of actual trouble in translation, but it still doesn't actually reflect some sort of inherent superiority of any one language over another in terms of expressing ideas -- when comparing any two languages, there will always be some ideas that are more concisely expressed in one language and some that are more concisely expressed in the other. Different languages have different semantic divisions with different nuances, but that doesn't make one of them better universally. Any perception that a given language is inherently better at expressing ideas in general is either due to a lack of experience with a variety of languages, linguistic or cultural bias towards a given language (usually your native language), or bog-standard racism/xenophobia.
I don't think the "loaf of bread" example is very good here, but here's an example (hopefully a more straightforward one) from a language I'm more familiar with. In German, words referring to professions and roles in society are nigh-universally gendered, even in many cases where they wouldn't be in English. If I say "My cousin is a student" in English, it is expressing less information than either "Mein Cousin ist Student" or "Meine Cousine ist Studentin" in German, because the German words include the individual's gender. In order to express the same idea in English, I would need to ether explicitly add an adjective -- "My male cousin is a student" or "My female cousin is a student" -- or somehow otherwise express the individual's gender in the conversation (perhaps by including an obviously gendered name or pronoun in the next sentence). And that's not even touching on the difference in the semantics of "student" in English, which is much broader than the German word!
At the same time, German lacks the ability to concisely avoid making this distinction. If my cousin's gender is not relevant to the conversation or I want to be vague about it without drawing attention it, English makes it easy to do so. In German, this is extremely difficult to do and generally requires neologisms or weird roundabout grammatical structures that draw attention to what you're doing (and if you can't think of why one might want to be deliberately vague about gender without drawing too much attention to it, remember that queer people exist). It's impossible to call one language "more concise" or "more exact" here because such an assessment relies heavily on very specific nuances that differ from one conversation to the next even in tiny examples like this, to say nothing of comparing whole languages more generally. It's far too context-dependent to insist that one language is generally better at expressing ideas than the other.
In regards to English's current position of dominance as a lingua franca, it's absolutely absurd to claim it's due to any inherent linguistic advantages of English as a language. It has no shortage of features to point to if you want to argue the exact opposite -- the writing system alone is a big one, but there are plenty of other idiosyncratic or unintuitive linguistic features of the English language. This is true of every language. No natural language is magically better for this purpose than another, and attempts to argue this are not cogent. The reason English became a global lingua franca is due to the political power (and to a lesser extent cultural influence) of first the British Empire and later the USA. The fact that English has far more terminology in certain useful domains is the result of this political and cultural dominance and its status as a lingua franca, not its cause. This is not remotely controversial among those who study languages scientifically, and attempts to claim otherwise are consistently grounded in an emotional attachment to that which is familiar and an unwillingness to consider that the familiar is not universally better.
It's that it lacks the ability to concisely convey exact information to the degree English can.
Look I still don't understand why saying four types of bread in French and four breads in English is different or why saying 4 loaves of bread in English and four breads in French is dramatically different. They call things by different words and the word for loaf is even more specific and only applies to a couple of options.
I don't think it's actually lacking specificity, it's just using a different way of specifying.
I don't really understand your response to me either.
Whether it's loaves, types, flavors, or whatever, the qualifiers add specificity. A bread is a generic term, like meat or vegetable, and in casual speaking utilizes qualifiers to bring specifics into play.
If coming to a party and I say "I'll bring bread" and show up with a pallet of pumpernickel I would technically be correct that I brought bread. If I walked into the store and asked for "bread" and they wheeled out said pallet that would also be correct, technically.
I guess it's the context that goes into fluency. At a bakery, saying "four breads" evokes the concept of the many types of bread that are available whereas in any other setting would lead to the follow up question of "Do you mean types or numbers?" If your boss said "Get four breads for the meeting," is that four croissants or four loaves or four styles?
It somewhat reminds me of the Arrested Development quote, "These are my awards, Mother. From army." "From army" obviously sounds wrong - it should be "from the Army" in common English and more specifically "from the U.S. Army" since there are multiple armies in the world but a native speaker should get by with "from the Army."
I dunno, are we talking around each other right now? Like a tetherball swinging around a pole. Don't mean to rile you up or anything.
Sure I guess I'm saying that just because a different language uses a different subset of qualifiers and its own context of when you'd say which types of bread vs some bread and have people know what you mean, doesn't make one language less specific or more specific. I think we're agreeing there.
I just don't think the lack of a word loaf means that French is vague an unspecific when instead they collectively categorize bread in a different way. Maybe I'm wrong and bread terminology is a mess in France. My Duolingo has not been incredibly specific on the matter.
As I put in another comment:
Wouldn't French differentiate the other way, four types of bread?
It could. But you couldn't be sure if they didn't actually add that word.
Well, you would if they actually only say it the one way.
I don't really understand your complaint but I'm willing to leave it be as I don't understand half the replies I'm getting as they seem to agree but equally make no sense.
This is my point, "loaf" is a defined shape, "boule" is a defined shape; neither equates a "universal unit of bread." Saying four breads could be pumpernickel, ciabatta, focaccia, and Japanese milk bread is basically the same as saying it could be two baguettes, a loaf of sourdough, and a loaf of sandwich bread, especially seeing as the baguettes aren't called loafs in the example because "a loaf of baguette" is maybe the dirtiest thing you could say to a French person.
A loaf is not a defined shape. The wikipedia page on the Boule even says "The name of this rustic loaf shape...". "Loaf" is a universal word for a quantity of bread. And (in English) you would not say "a loaf of baguette" because a baguette is a type of loaf. That would be like saying a bowl of a cup of clam chowder.
But, if your spouse asked you to grab a loaf of bread at the store and you came back with a baguette, how happy would they be?
That depends on what they wanted. But that's not really relevant either because the point is that you can say "a loaf of sourdough bread that is six Inches wide, nine inches long, and four inches tall" and you have now specified that it needs to be a loaf that size and not a twenty foot long loaf that is sliced into 6x9x4 segments.
It's not a coincidence that the Lingua Franca at any given time tends to be the language of one of the most powerful groups, so I'm confident in saying this tax will never ever happen.
I don't necessarily disagree with the article. I'm just... not sure that there's a solution. Lingua francas have always been here. Akkadian, Aramean, Greek, Latin, French, Arabic, English, Spanish. The languages of dominant powers become lingua francas. Not always violently, but often so. Is this fair? No, but that's just how things are. You're never going to force monolinguals of the dominant powers to learn a second language.
Here’s an idea.
Rotate the dominant language every decade.
Better start learning Chinese because you’ll need it in 2030.
When is Sanskrit’s turn?