Slashdot Mirror
English, The Global Internet Language?
There are a number of interesting links there as well, including one to an interview with David Graddol of The English Company U.K in which he comments:
The type of language switching and word borrowing that typically goes on in any multilingual community is now happening on the Internet on a massive scale, and it is difficult to know what long-term impact this might have on the way the international community will use English.
The main article stated, "As has been widely noted, the Internet, besides being a convenient vehicle for reaching mass audiences such as, say, the citizenry of Japan or Argentina, is also well suited to bringing together the members of small groups -- for example, middle-class French-speaking sub-Saharan Africans." The two comments together paint a picture of various communities across the net infecting each other with their jargon as the members they have in common carry linguistic information with them from place to place on the net. Because the net is notoriously devoid of geographical places, the divisions are solely on the basis of interest and language. Sufficient interest will motivate the transfer of ideas, although I can't see how sufficient fluency will overcome lack of interest. That implies that those people who do not participate in online culture will be the last to adopt the linguistic innovations that spread from here. And conversely, we will adopt their linguistic creations only when they don't attempt to replace one of our own. After all, how many regular Slashdot users mispronounce "Internet" as "Information Superhighway"?
Actually Churchill was an advocate of a restricted 500-word vocabulary English language. Believe it or not, it was called Basic English. It never got off the ground though because the people teaching it kept using words not on the official list (you are supposed to use compound words and such to compensate for the lack of a vocabulary).
Don Harlow has a huge amount of information about Esperanto, including a detailed history of the more successful auxlangs. There's also a debate on auxlangs.
Latin doesn't give special treatment to any country? Consider this:
You can take entire paragraphs in Italian and convert them to Latin with minor changes.
If you are in the West, you at least know the alphabet.
If you are in Eastern Europe, you at least know half of the alphabet.
If you are somewhere else, then you are f*cked.
You're really stretching here. You can give a close approximation to the sound of an unknown English word, but the phonetic element of a Chinese character (at least in my experience) pretty much serves as an aid to memorizing the pronunciation. It's not good for so much (and may not even be relevant) if you're just trying to guess.
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
Me too. Sorry about my poor English. Even I'm a OS programmer/designer, I'm not good at speaking / writing English, for I'm a Chinese. According to my mother, she could read Chinese pinyin ( based on alphabet ), so she may use computer with keyboard. But my father could use it, so he always only use mouse click here and there. As he just reads news, plays game, etc, English is never need to learn. And I have a Hanwan Chinese-input 'pen', my father never need use keyboard at all. Do you computer-living people could imagine it?
English as you know it arose around Shakespeare's time and slightly after Chaucer's. That's why you can read the former and not quite the latter.
Before that, it was basically a dialect of Old German.
English is a Germanic language with many (> 40%) expressions and words borrowed from other languages (mainly Latin-derived ones).
People (non-English speakers presumably) resist English so much mostly because it takes a lot of effort to learn a foreign language and in the learning process, you can't help but think that the grammer/vocabulary/etc. is totally weird and stupid. That was how I felt when I was learning French.
Americans are damned arrogant and think the world should learn English to accommodate us, but we shouldn't need to do likewise.
So are the French, but give the Americans credit: we are still a world superpower, and a large part of the developed world does speak English as a first or second language.
Hmmm.. as Timothy's post says: Because the net is notoriously devoid of geographical places, the divisions are solely on the basis of interest and language... If the net does become a force in world language development (this is yet to be seen), perhaps you should reconsider your point. All it will take for Chinese to become a world language is enough Chinese speakers getting on the net. A second point: the figures for number of speakers of Chinese refer to how many people are native speakers of Mandarin, a northern dialect which has been used as a model for a standard language called Putonghua. In fact, virtually every Chinese citizen, except for remote border areas such as Tibet, can speak Putonghua, which puts the number of Putonghua speakers at over a billion.
When the rabbit is caught, the dog goes in the pot.
According to USIC (United States Internet Council)
Native English speakers amongst to about 5% of the
world's population.
Don't forget Asia, South America, Europe have a
much bigger population than the US and the U.K. combined.
And Europe has already overtake the US in internet
new users growth rate, and Asia is just starting.
China alone has about 1.5 Billion population.
Then, you have India, with a hugh population,
and the most programmers on earth.
Then, Taiwan, S. Korea, Japan, the S.E. Asia...
So. Don't be surprise in a year or two. Most web sites
and usenet are in languages other than English.
- blowfish
plus most people in those countries you have mentioned speak English quite well from my experience with them when visiting europe
What is the advantage of being able to sound out words if you don't understand what they mean?
Because it's only one thing to learn (the meaning), rather than two things (the meaning and the idiogram).
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
> Oops...I forgot. Typos are a strictly English phenomenon...
Firstly, that was just a quip taking adavantage of the poster's misspelling(s) given the nature of the topic. Secondly, I didn't mention English per se, but rather American.
I find it absolutely amazing how true the stereotype of American's poor spelling is. All too often I can deduce the American origin of posters simply by the number and nature of spelling mistakes. While there is a good number of British, Australian, Kiwi, Indian and other English-speaking posters untouched by any sense of syntax, their numbers pale in comparison to their American counterparts, both in terms of quantity and scope.
I am sick and tired of the old excuse of content over form. Apologizing for one's poor spelling skills in a written medium is akin to apologizing for showing up with a hammer at a fishing competition. It might possibly get you some fish, but who dare endure the process of shame and misery? Poor spelling distracts the reader and undermines the message.
NOOO!!!
Repeat with me this basic point from any Linguistics 101 course: the spoken form of a language is basic (save for dead languages or sign languages). The fact that the orthographies are similar can only prove this indirectly at best.
from what i've heard english is considered by many to be the hardest to learn as a foreign language
Teehee... Hardest? Whatever. Of all the languages I've had to learn English is the simplest. Go try French and come back to tell me the results of your efforts. Pay particular attention to the overcomplicated-for-no-reason-at-all conjugation system, and the myriad of agreements all over the fscking place, and don't forget to take into account those dear exceptions. For the record neither of those two is my native tongue. People who think English is hard should go have a whirl around the world's languages. Their minds will likely be warped beyond repair, those poor fucks...
Puthongua (my speling might be out and in the west we call it mandarin) is currently the lingua franca of China. But a majority of chinese do not speak it and cannot understand it.
English with its relatively simple tonal structure and easy to use (and type) alphabet might well become more common in china than the state dialect.
But the empire long united must divide (ancient chinese proverb)
So i wouldn't be betting on this horse in any event.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
But let's not get into a "my language is better than yours" debate.
That was not my point, the post I was replying to claimed that English was really easy grammar wise. I was merely trying to say that English actually is quite a complex language to learn grammar wise and that this is no reason why English should be preferred as a global language above all other languages.
heh. i think that would probably be why i said "hindi" - read my post again.
BTW - Dialect != Language. There are a signifigant number of english dialects, french dialects, spanish dialects, etc. However, the language is still the same.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Americans generally speak only one language largely because of our geography. We live in a vast country with a single common language. Compare this to Europe, where countries are smaller, and cross border commerce and relationships are common.
Imagine how different it would be if people in Georgia spoke Georianiese and people in Florida spoke Flordonian. We would, out of neccessity learn each others languages. European countries are by and large the size of our states here, and there is a diversity of official languages for each of those countries.
So, it isn't laziness or arrogance that lends us to knowing only one language, any more than it is a sense of noble good will that Europeans know multiple languages. Both are products of need and circumstance.
c++ is my global language.
The anti-salmon
2. Americans are damned arrogant and think the world should learn English to accommodate us....
I agree. Nothing is more embarrassing than to be abroad and in line behind a fellow American tourist at a museum/castle/etc. who ignorantly yet unrespectfully demands in a shrill voice, "WHEN IS THE ENGLISH TOUR?!?"
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
The articles are in *cough* English...
use the fish, or maybe if can't read English anyway...
--
There is no K5 cabal.
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
However, in India you actually have completely different languages, not just dialects.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I thought perl was the Global internet language. :)
true. but these are very subtle differences in the grand scheme of things, and they certainly don't go so far as to make US English and British English two different languages.
the US word for dog: dog
the BK word for dog: dog
the French word for dog: Chien
sure, we have different slang in the UK and the US. but you DO know what a condom is don't you? Unfortunately, my french wife doesn't and now i have 3 kids and a bad case of the clap.
j/k.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Literate people in China can read both.
Yes, I think we can agree that english is the defacto "international" language. This of course has nothing to do with the number of people who speak it as a mother tongue, but because the last 200 years of world history has had english speaking countries as the most powerful. The brits built a big frigging empire that spread english bullies all over the place, and created footholds where the americans could start selling stuff as the brits declined in power. Currently the bulk of economic power in the world is in the hands of english speaking nations ( 4 out of the 7 G7 nations are dominantly english speaking ), and what with the incredibly persistent sales of cheap american media everywhere, its no wonder its so popular.
nobody's arguing that most of the world speaks english as a mother tongue, but everywhere in the world it is the #1 choice for a second language. I've realized this over the last few months as an english speaker in central europe.
But I think we can see that as the international economy continues to develop, this power is going to shift dramatically. After all, one must cater to the consumer, which has currently been mostly english speakers who had the means to be serious consumers. But currently Chinese and Indian languages are the most popular. As these people become more and more able to buy the products that the corps. want to sell, you'll see more and more a shift towards them as the consumer of choice. As more and more of them get cable tv and internet access, you'll see more and more content appearing in Chinese and Sanskrit.
Just a little prediction of my own, and good help the environment when 2 billion ppl are all clammoring for nikes and big macs.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Umm, I could never get used to talking in LOOP's and IF's etc etc in a normal conversation :=)
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
So the French were always considered uneducated vulgates back then too? ;]
English ist de internazionale idioma, point.
What's wrong with that (aside from the shrill voice)? Undoubtedly the museum/castle/etc. does have an English tour, and the person working there probably knows enough English to answer your question.
Among other things, English is the international language of tourism.
-Bruce
...why not start posting on Slashdot in our native languages, like swedish or french? Ärligt talat så vore det ganska skoj att se fler kommentarer skrivna på svenska. Dessutom så kan vi häckla personerna på andra sidan pölen utan att de förstår alldeles för mycket av det vi skriver. ;-)
War is one of the most horrible things a human can be exposed to. And one of the worlds largest industries.
English, Dutch and German were roughly the same language about 1000 years ago. English missionaries could travel along the north west coast of Europe trying to convert the heathens in their own language. In many ways English is a highly simplified version of German, with scandinavian, french and latin influences.
Even though German, French, Italian and Russian are far more common as a first or second language inside europe, English evolved into the third language of choice, to replace latin and French for that purpose. In my view the advantages by far outweigh the disadvantages.
The disadvantages are that since English is a living language, as opposed to Latin, native speakers have a strong advantage in education, and have less trouble getting their message accross to other people. (for example: Even though I am a scientist, an american intelligence test would probably classify me as a moron, because English doesn't come naturally to me, and my knowledge of the Anglo saxon cultural framework is limited)
People don't hate 'English' as such, it is convenient to have a standard tool for communicating with people from other parts of the world.
There is a lot of resistance against the attitude predominantly associated with anglo saxon culture (American- especially). It is a rare fusion of the Island mentality of the English, the evangelical attitude of the pilgrims and the empirial mindset usually found in superpowers (the Roman empire was a good example, so was the British empire, and so is the American empire now).
Americans seem to assume by default that every sane human being would want to be an american deep down inside, and that people who don't are suspicious, enemies or freedom and security world wide. Other models of free societies are usually dismissed as primitive, contrived or indecisive. Even the posted article suggests that the USA is the only truly free society.
Strong, often violent resistance against cola and hamburgers is often dismissed as religious fanaticism, anal retentive tendencies or downright jealousy, but the fact is that arabs really like being arabs, and they don't just pretend to, out of fear that Allah may otherwise strike them down. The French like being French, the Russians are proud of being Russian etc. I feel patronised and belittled when an American tourist asks me for directions in my city, and then corrects my grammar when I give them in his native language.
We'd all get along a lot better if Americans (especially in politics and business) would stop viewing the world as made up of only two groups: flawed wannabe americans on one hand, and enemies of all that is good and holy on the other hand.
oh, no, no. I guess I just over looked it. And don't forget the USA continuing this imperialism. After the great American Native People's extinctions, we now do it more subtly. We hire other countries to be the thugs, so we can look prim and proper, to the congress people's sponsors (which is NOT the people).
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
Back in the olde days an immigrant came to the US who could speak no English except 'coffee doughnut'. Every day he went out for breakfast, lunch and dinner and all he could order was 'coffee doughnut'. He quickly got sick of this diet, and finally met with a fellow countryman who could speak his language. This friend taught him the word 'steak'. So next time he goes into a restaurant and when the waiter asked him what he wanted, the immigrant proudly says, 'Steak!'. The waiter askes, 'How would you like it, rare, medium or well done?'. The immigrant looks puzzled for a few seconds, and finally says, 'coffee doughnut'.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
A government service, like the welfare department, could very well have orders from the Govt that all cases should be handled in English. You want financial assistance, you gotta talk English. You want to get a job? ditto. Gotta go.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
This is only a rough guide, but more or less true.
I hope someone finds this as interesting as I do.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
One only has to read an American paper to find out how ignorant many of their journalists are about culture in Europe, Canada, Asia, whatever...
This kind of thing happens in every culture.
It's completely unrealistic for me to expect your average American or European to be familiar with hockey at the microscopic level that most Canadians are. By the same token most people outside the states don't give a rat's behind about college football, and I know very few North Americans who get into soccer (football) the way Europeans and South Americans do.
While different cultures are growing more and more similar these days, the fact is that many are still worlds apart.
Along the same lines: "Never attribute to malice that which can satisfactorily be explained by incompetence" - Napoleon
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
It's the supreme court, stupid.
Conservatives protect rights. They'd protect freedom of expression, just as they protect the right to bear arms, and the right of an unborn fetus.
Liberals, on the other hand, with their "censor music, tv, and movies", gun control, and pro-abortion stance... Remember just who is responsible for the DMCA, funding Colombia and sending helecopters for the War on Drugs (Vietnam started over nothing more), and the Communications Decency Act.
The best part about having a conservative government is that the media questions what they do. Clinton/Gore got a free ride on the several billion to Colombia.
--
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
With the rapid(and fortunate) acceptance of Linux across the world... It becomes easier for countries other than america to construct their part of the internet.
However, and correct me if I'm wrong on this, it is unfortunate that the Linux kernel(and everything else for that matter) only natively accepts 1 byte encoded european languages. For example, you cannot have a linux box completely in Japanese from boot. It's hard enough to contruct a box that'll work with japanese after starting X, much more the console, which does not support such 2 byte fonts natively.
Yes, unicode is being implemented, but it's still more of an addon than anything else... and there still is a majority of documents and html pages in (referring to previous example)EUC and SJIS.
Once you can boot and run linux completely in any language you want, then we'll see both a significant increase in Linux usage, and the fall of English as the dominant language on the internet.
Written English is pretty similar across most of the native-English-speaking world. Spoken English varies considerably more. However, it's the cultural assumptions, more than the language itself, that can hamper communication between speakers of various Englishes (and even more so between native speakers and non-native speakers). To take a simple example, Americans, and particularly Californians, don't get deadpan humor - the art of saying obviously false, highly exaggerated, or outrageous things with a straight face. British humor is laden with it.
One point to keep in mind with Chinese is that Mandarian and Cantonese (as well as the other Chinese dialects) share a common written form. However, Taiwan uses the traditional Chinese characters, while mainland China uses a simplified version, and people familiar with only one cannot read the other, IIRC.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
If you work around computers, you simply HAVE TO learn english.
Maybe in Czech Rep. What about Germany? I guess that Germany has a big enough market to produce enough learning material to be a proficient worker with just a little English.
On the other hand, German-language computer talk seems to have lots of Capitalized English Words.
there are no special symbols, special characters, just all the basic latin characters and thats it.
Depending on the definition. Romans need no w and mixed v and u, and i and j. And having q,w,y,x,j,c and z in the same character set, points heavily to it being the American SCII.
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__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Certainly wouldn't happen in Belgium now, as most people there speak at least three languages, English being one of them. I read somewhere that they have the highest number of people that speak 4 (or more) languages (French, Dutch/Flemish, English and German).
Yes, yes, I know, off-topic...
I don't think the native speakers of any language have a hard time learning to speak the language and if they study it in school, they'll be able to read it.
But for non-native speakers trying to learn the language, a phonetic alphabet has definite advantages over a character set. I can teach myself spoken Spanish vocabulary by reading a Spanish newspaper. Or if someone says something and I can't reproduce it properly, I can ask the person to write it down.
And for people like me who are learn more easily with visual cues, there is no alternative to oral learning in a character set language.
It's a lesser problem in languages which have inconsistent transliterations (like English unfortunately) or incomplete ones like Arabic or Hebrew (I think) which don't write vowels.
-Bruce
Of course English is a standard language throughout the world; one-quarter of the Earth's population was a subject of the British Empire at its height, with another 1/4 having been former subjects.
Those lucky Britons just happened to influence a large portion of the world's population right before the world went digital, thus, "Britannia rules the waves" once again... the waves of digital information that is. So, you can thank your local Englishman for more than just Monty Python or Fawlty Towers.
English is the default language, but I have seen forms and such in other languages. Spanish seems to be the next most predominant one where I live, so at the place where I had to go get my driver's license from, their signs were in both English and Spanish. I think that leaving out the official language from our laws makes it easier to deal with situations that sometimes occur in the U.S. I would imagine the U.S. government has forms for the most common languages, or at least translators working in their offices to help people that can't speak English to fill out the forms. Of course, they would also have to help with the amount of functionally illiterate people we have in the U.S. also
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
Transliteration is the wrong word. I don't know the right word for creating an alphabet from a spoken language.
-Bruce
Churchill was an advocate of a restricted 500-word vocabulary English language
From memory, "BASIC English" had 850 words plus proper nouns and some appendices. There was a Bible translated into it.
Anohter problem was that merely restricting the number of words didn't work. E.g. instead of "to tolerate" you would use "to put up with". Is it easier for a foreigner to remember that idiom than a new word. Basic English had to recourse to lots of idioms.
Anyway, variations of the theme of reduced vocabulary have been used as first steps to learning of the fully-bloated English language.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Your comments on flexibility of grammer and pronunciation are quite accurate. One advantage English has is that one can make a complete hash of word order, use the wrong word in the wrong context, and mis-pronounce things and still be understood. French and Italian like the words in the right order, but there is some leeway with pronunciation, but the Dutch seem to be _very_ picky about pronunciation.
However, a number of people who speak English well do seem to have trouble understanding the true "meaning" or sense of what is being said.
Computer "literacy" in the Windows sense won't help.
But all major programming languages are English-mathematics mixtures, and most of the language and API documentation is in English, and the result is that programmers tend to have some degree of proficiency in English by necessity. It's similar to Seaspeak and Airspeak, or English penetration in the sciences.
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
for years the Chinese people have been moving away from Mandarin and towards their local dialect
Are you saying that fewer Chinese people speak Mandarin now than in the past? Nonsense! The Chinese government has done a very successful job of promoting the understanding of Mandarin in China. People may still speak their local dialects is everyday life, but the vast majority of the country understand Mandarin. And that's a *huge* difference to 50 years ago!
-Bruce
Esperanto is easy to learn if you know one Anglo-Saxon language and one Romance language. Otherwise, it's just as hard as anything else.
Of course, for speakers of Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese or Farsi, it's harder than for you, but English is even harder. But they can be more motivated.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's an artificial language used to talk to computers. http://www.logban.org
You're right, English is undoubtedly the international language right now. Nobody could dispute that. That doesn't mean that it will be forever.
It came about mainly because of England's colonial success and America's economic might. But the British empire has crumbled completely, and nothing says that the US will be on top ecominically forever.
If Latin America ever becomes an economic powerhouse, Spanish could certainly give English a run for its money, especially with its higher growth rate.
However, I do doubt that a language is tied to a single country would ever become a world language. That rules out Chinese and Hindi. For multi-national languages with large numbers of speakers, you've got English, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, any others?
-Bruce
It's the way many machine translators work, unfortunately it's kind of a cheap shortcut.
You end up with a double translation with is inevitably going to end up worse than a specific one-to-one translation.
If you need any proof, try using a machine translator to translate something in English to any other language and back again. Es no bueno amigo! The fewer translations you make the less horrible the translation (but it will still be horrible anyway.)
-Bruce
I can't speak definitively, but in the 2 months i spent traversing china in late 96 the majority of english speakers i met expressed great difficulty in understanding Mandarin chinese.
'There is a Light that never goes out.'
The only problem is US English, which look less and less like English... and is more and more a combination of a few basic verbs and a word like in/out/off/on/over/under. Memorizing all the different meaning of those combinations is a problem to foreigners.
...
.iMMersE
I would have thought this would make it easier to pick things up - You learn what un/in/over/under etc mean, and then you learn the "few basic verbs" and you're well away.
Actually thinking about it, "newspeak" from George Orwell's 1984 springs to mind
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
The language isn't the only incompatibility.
This summer I had an opportunity to visit several European countries. Every country I visited had the differently mapped keyboard. French Keyboards actually require you to hold the shift key just to type numbers!
I couldn't even visit my own webpage because some European keyboards don't have a tilda key!
www.kettering.edu/~brad3378
English is just a corrupt form of Dutch.
I think English is closer to Friesish (Frison, Frieslander?), the language of Friesland, spoken by the descendants of the Anglosaxons who didn't cross the sea.
__
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
#!/usr/bin/php
.iMMersE
<?
$Uppers = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
$Lowers = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
$TotalLetters = strlen($Uppers)+strlen($Lowers);
echo $TotalLetters;
?>
---
# php aboveFile.php
52
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
of course, you can read what I've written, and know that this is a horrible idea, but in the past 100 years, the english language(s) has metamorphed into so many different dialects that we may even put the chinese to shame. we have our share of slang and coloquialisms (sp?) too, and because the computer doesn't understand them, we are stupid for using them.
I don't know about this. I suspect the rise in literacy has greatly helped stabilize the language. Editors of written works are quite consistent in grammer and usage and have had a huge influence on the spoken language. Even 50 years ago the misuse of the double negative ('I don't want no more.') was so ingrained in the spoken language that it wasn't ever expected to leave. Now the majority of the population believes that to be incorrect usage. That's not to imply that one way is better than the other, but to demonstrate the close in the difference between educated and uneducated speakers.
Also the recent broadcast media have had a large impact on minimizing the difference in the way people speak or at least in increasing the understanding of the differences.
I also think that the differences in say US versus British English are very overstated. Virtually anyone can make themselves understood by another English speaker with little difficulty. You think that spelling theater vs theatre or organize vs organise is a significant language difference? Compare that to difference between to Germany's German and Swiss German. Or to different parts of China whose dialects have little in common other than a shared written language.
-Bruce
> If you want to criticize something Americans are truly bad at, try geography.
Ok, add that to poor spelling.
> But if it's true, perhaps this is due the the wide access to the internet in America?
What, Americans spell poorly because they have wider access to the Internet? Hmmm... Ok, ok, I know what you mean, but I can't second it. I've lived in Europe, Australia and the US, and my personal experience face to face with people parallels my online observations. The real problem in the US is that a lot of people don't really see poor spelling as a deficiency. In fact, some actually take pride in it, as if to prove their deep knowledge on a particular topic by not even being distracted by this triviality of spelling. In few other places ourside the US do people so freely admit that they are poor spellers. Most people I know in Germany for example would never volunteer that kind of information.
This is pretty true - French is the "other" official language of the UN, and it's pretty hard to work for the EU too if you don't speak French (or German for that matter). Besides, there are many more French words going in the US English than Spanish words (heck, it gives speakers a European distinctive class to use French words, while using Spanish ones just gives you a "I just crossed Rio Grande yesterday" style that isn't so chic ;)
In this way, it could be argued (not that I neccessarily am) that the computers/internet/web are partially responsible for the gradual degradation of English as a whole - because it encourages inhomogeneity in the use of both forms.
Hmmm. I don't really buy it. Okay so now you unfortunately write color instead of colour, it's a minor spelling error in your country. Get a localized spell checker.
Besides who says there's any real English standard to 'degrade'. English is a dynamic language, all we can demand is that the accepted standard move slow enough for us to keep up.
Anyway, for me coding is a separate mode of thought from writing. Even though I'm coding SQL all day, when I'm asking someone to get something at the store I don't write:
SELECT beer
FROM microbrew_selections
WHERE size = sixpack
AND cost
-Bruce
What I advocate is requiring people to know enough english to do business with our government. If you can read a ballot written in english, then you don't deserve to vote. If you can't read a license application written in english, then you don't deserve the license. If you don't want to learn english, then we can continue to consider you a temporary visitor to our country. If you like our country and would like to stay, then we invite you to learn the local language and join us. Otherwise, thanks for the visit. Write us when you get home.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Oranje boven? Oh, and by the way, if you're going to hail your (our :-) Queen, you really should spell Koningin correctly. Royalty is easily insulted.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Your understanding of history must be non-existant then.
Only a racist thinks language and race are tied together in some way.
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What motivation will people who already do business in English have to spend months learning Chinese?
The fact that if you as a foreigner have gone through all of the trouble of learning the language, that this might very well earn you the respect to do business in a slightly more beneficial way when dealing with Chinese people? It is an up and coming industrial country, and many people predict that it will become one of the biggest industrial partners somewhere within the next 10/20 years.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
I've never noticed this. But if it's true, perhaps this is due the the wide access to the internet in America? In most countries, internet access is much more expensive and usage is far lower, most people with access being fairly well educated.
From http://cyberatlas.internet.com/, the US 43% of the world's internet users with 135.7 million, the UK has 17.9 million.
If you want to criticize something Americans are truly bad at, try geography.
-Bruce
You'd think so, the way christians continue to add their doctrine to the original documents and history of the USA.
(Example 1: The Pledge of Allegiance never included the line 'under god' until recently. Fortunately it's easy to leave out.)
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Un autre: maintenant!
And, even though I am not a computer-linguist, I suspect that ideograms would be easier to handle in a AI environment...
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Americans are bred for stupidity.
English is by far the easiest language to learn (Esperanto aside ;). The only problem is US English, which look less and less like English... and is more and more a combination of a few basic verbs and a word like in/out/off/on/over/under. Memorizing all the different meaning of those combinations is a problem to foreigners.
Spelling, for example, varies between the two different "dialects" of English. We use "Colour" - US people use "Color" etc. (This can be frustrating when you're using a US produced piece of software that refuses to supply a UK English dictionary).
Yeah god damn it! And w3c could at least allow us to write <centre>. Bastards.
:wq
Exsqueeze me?
UK...........59.5
Ireland.......3.8
Canada.......31.3
Australia....19.1
New.Zealand...3.8
-----------------
.............86.2
US..........275.6
Are there any other native English countries I'm forgetting? Maybe a few, but not enough to make up for the 189.4 million difference. Besides Canada's halfway in between anyway.
As for people learning it as a second language, I don't think you can say that they learn it specifically British or American. The spellings tend to be British but the pronunciations are much closer to American, especially in Holland and Scandanavia. A popular theory is that it's due to their large exposure to American movies and television. (though former British colonies do have more of a British bent.)
-Bruce
And in defence of Americans, I have to say that I found a great many poor spellers amongst Brits and Aussies as well. The fact is, people who learn English as a second language (as is my case, and I presume yours) tend to spell better than native speakers precisely because they learn to write English in parellel to learning to speak it.
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Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
LOL - that's a good one !
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Well slap me in an oven and call me a poppyseed bagel! if that don't just beat all.
I see what you mean, although it might not be actually a straight correspondance, there's probably a higher percentage who have / use computers and don't also have internet access. I know that in N.A. at this point it seems like having a computer and not having the internet is sort of a paradox, but even throughout most of europe, the internet is only just now starting to get the kind of attention it did in N.A. around '97. but I take your point.
I thought you were talking about something else originally.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Isn't the spelling Letzeburgisch? Seriously!
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Isn't UNL (It was a Slashdot story) supposed to be that machine interlanguage?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Yo quiero Taco Bell(tm)
I would guess that your typical Japanese person retains about as much English from school as a typical American retains from a few years of high school French. (Not much.)
.iMMersE
I wouldn't say that is true. I imagine that there is a lot of English speaking on the TV, well, certainly more that French speaking on US TV, so I think the retention of English for Japanese people would be higher.
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
There's really no ned to do it formally, as was hinted at above, it's been done informally for years. "Broken English" is spoken pretty much wolrdwide, and one of the reasons why I, like most other Americans, never learned another language - it's really just not all that necessary.
Whether you like it or not, the informal subset of English often called broken English is indeed the current lingua franca in most parts of the world...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
My turn to play...
US for weekend : weekend
UK for weekend : weekend
French for weekend : weekend.
US for condom : condom
UK for condom : condom
French for condom : condom
Oh look! By your argument, UK English,m US English and French are not different languages!
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.
I can understand U-571, but the Patriot? Come on, that was pretty factually correct (with a few "story enhancing" parts thrown in, nothing major). After all, history is nothing if not a point of view (had the Nazi's won the war, our history books would have viewed the events leading up to the war in a completly different light). We decided we had it with Britain taxing us and imposing it's will on us, we decided we wanted to be independant, and they didn't take it well. War ensued and we won, thus creating a country. Sure we are going to view them as the bad guys and us as the hero's in that war.
I also find it amusing that you would judge an entire popultion based on a few tourists you have seen. I could make the same racial connection by saying Japenese are all rude and impatiant because plenty of the tourists I've seen constantly cut in lines and ignore similar protocols.
Finkployd
I agree with you on the point of separate modes of thought, but that still doesn't mean that it doesn't confuse the programmer who writes in a different mode of english than he prgrams (should that be programmes or programs) in.
By the way I use a localised spell checker, but how does that help me? I'm from Australia and I actually spell colour like colour. But when I write html I gotta use color. I don't use the M$ autocorrect cause it's usually not (correct) and I hate having to wait for the spell check to go through a 30 page design spec after it's done. Still I suppose it's gotta be done.
I never actually thought about English as being a dynamic language, because as you said it changes slow enough for us to keep up with. A very valid point though.
i dont think ive seen a spanish or french command yet!
You don't know QueSO (from "Qué Sistema Operativo"), a tool for finding what operating system is running just by sending non-standard packets to the machine.
And 'email' is a French word.
And haven't you used a "neko" (JP "cat"), one of those cats running on your screen?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Sorry to interrupt and ruin your argument, but French for condom is not condom. It is either Préservatif (standard French) or Capote (colloquial). Condom is a city in the southwest of France. Rémi
Pity humans can't speak it fluently.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
True, true. The difference is even more apparent in Canada, where there is an entire province who's only official language is French. There are even quite a few German, Ukranian, and Russian towns along with the French. I mean complete villages where both commerece and living are conducted in those languages.
In Saskatoon, my English city in Saskatchewan, there is a school for people who speak only French. They do, however learn English in school, but everything else is learned in French.
It's amazing, even in the middle of English Canada it is a very big advantage to be able to speak French, German, and Ukraninan (in that order). I can live, work and go to school in English and French. I don't think either English or French are going away anytime soon.God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Face it, "English" really means US English.
Westerners (I am one) typically base world languages against their own personal experience. That is, English to be #1, Spanish is #2, and French is a quaint but dying language (grin)
I would not be totally surprised if China someday unseats the US as a world power, and having totally devestated their own country's ecology, they look to Sibera, Alaska, northern India and Russia for land to rape and "resettle".... like they are doing to Mongolia and Tibet.
Chinese as a world language is usually dismissed on the bases that the concentration of speakers is localized - but what if they weren't? We're talking about over 1/4 of the world's people under the thumb of a dictatorship always looking to distract their people. As the population gets on the net and becomes dissatisfied, one could speculate that a nice diversionary war would fan the flames of nationalism (remember the near-riots after the US bombed the Chinese embesy in Yugoslavia?).
More accurately, English is the world's BUSINESS language. I don't expect that to change in the next few hundred years however...
I'm an american. I took some German and spanish classes in college. Despite having enough spanish to be considered bi-lingual (ie I know all the grammer and enough vocabulary) I don't consider myself bi-lingual. Why is simple: I don't use it. If I was around spanish speakers every day I'd consider myself bi-lingual because I would have a use for spanish, and practice. However not having a reason to use it I don't.
If there was a reason to use a different language I would. I've read web pages in danish, and french from time to time, and I have had no traning in either language (other then they look like german or spanish, respectivly. If I needed to I could (re)learn to communicate in any language. I have no doupt that my grammer and spelling would be poor, but I could get my point across, and in the end that is what counts.
I am fully aware of this definition, as it applies to formal logic and debates.
However, I am a firm believer in context.
I would be embarassing myself if I said, in a debate, "you're begging the question!" in a situation where your definition would not apply.
If I say this as a passing remark, not as a critique of another person's argument, it is not improper. The phrase can also mean "demands question be asked" in the proper context.
Language is a living, breathing thing.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
That's very nice, but won't somebody close the italic tag??
However, I do doubt that a language is tied to a single country would ever become a world language. That rules out Chinese and Hindi. For multi-national languages with large numbers of speakers, you've got English, Spanish, Arabic, Swahili, Russian, any others?
English and Spanish : sure - but French is about as big as Spanish (very spoken in Africa and in a few other countries all over the world).
Swahili : big African language - but no influance outside of Africa, 0 economic influence and almost 0 cultural influence... doubtfull it could get big !
Russian : declining economy, declining population (the Russian population shrinks by more than 1% every year), declining foreign influence : likely not a big internationnal language.
From what ESL classes I've worked with, it's fairly easy to learn enough English to get by, compared to many other languages. English grammar and syntax are pretty forgiving. However, it is a bit harder to learn advanced English (after all, native speakers have trouble with it) than many other languages.
Since, for the purposes of internet communication, basic skills are usually enough, English will do.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
However, if a child has learned more than one language, then the ability to pick up new languages is retained to some extent after puberty.
In other words, if you wish your children to be able to learn new languages, it is best to put them in an immersion class in another language, or get them a foreign nanny while they are still weans. (Sorry, "weans" isn't English, it's Scots for children. ;-)
I get a bit exercised about this because as a Canadian, I should be bilingual. However when I was a youth, second language training didn't occur in Manitoba schools until grade 7. My French test scores described an almost perfect parabolic curve - downwards. I don't know why they did this. They also didn't teach anything in mathematics beyond simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division until grade 8. Then for the next four years algebra, geometry, triginometry, and something else that I cannot for the life of me remember (I think it had something to do with cosines.) was crammed into our poor heads, where it remained only long enough to struggle through the exams.
I think the Dept. of Education (sic) thought children's brains would melt or something if they were overtaxed too soon.
Sigh, sigh.
Yours is not the first suggestion in this vein.
e wEnglish.shtml
m l
You ought to be amused by mark twain's 'plan for
the improvement of english spelling' at
http://www.skypoint.com/~camilian/humor/TwainsN
.. and possibly also his amusing critique of the german language at
http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.ht
How about a world of Linux and Finish :-)
Here in Japan, English is taught in school starting quite early. But that doesn't mean that all of the students are fluent in English. The reality is that to get any kind of fluency, they have to enroll in external classes or do a homestay abroad.
I would guess that your typical Japanese person retains about as much English from school as a typical American retains from a few years of high school French. (Not much.)
Personally, I have no knack for learning languages, but being in a situation where I am forced to use Japanese to communicate, I am learning. That's how it is - If you want to learn a language, go to a place where they speak it and not English. You'll learn.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
There is several reasons why english spread so much, but I think one is really important. You can learn just 3000 words to be able to fully express yourself in most cases. Basic english is something that really helps this language to spread. When you count into it kind of easy grammar...
if your assertion is correct, i wonder if it would be useful at all for someone to develop a formal basic english language subset so that native english speakers could explicitly restrict themselves to that subset when communicating to an international community - like an international open source project developers' mailing list. probably unnecessary, but perhaps useful as a stepping stone for a guided evolution towards a common global language.
h4w h4w h4w!
1337 sp34k0r1ng 15 4LL j0 n33d, 5ux0r5!!!!!!!!!!1!!!!!!!
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I wear pants.
http://www.cnn.com/interactive/specials/9911/futur e.outlook/content/language/
Which 'other continent' were you thinking of? Im in England, I believe a part of Europe? you might have heard of the place, its where English originated, not the US. Im not an 'other continenter', as you put it.
The Internet is capable of helping immigrants everywhere to remain proficient in their first language
. People could use their computers that way (in English)But why would we want to do that?
Ah yes, another Ivory Tower Artist worshipping diversity above all. Her viewpoint is essentially that people want to stay in their own language if they can, and that they inherently value their culture.
I think she over-subscribes to her theory. If it was accurate, Baywatch and other American cultural icons would not have the impact they do. If she were right, the vast majority of immigrants would form enclaves and insist on speaking their native tongue, rather than attempting to assimilate quickly. (Granted, there are enclaves, but they are very much the minority.) Lastly, if they saw it her way, there would be no cross-cultural fertilization or information flow; instead, the whole world would be balkanized.
When people hop on the web, it is for information, entertainment, or interaction. All of these are available (on the web) in greater quantity in English right now than in other languages. This is likely to be a self-supporting fact, as the creators of information and entertainment aim for the largest audience, which then becomes larger due to the material, etc. Very much like Windows vs. the Mac.
It's been done. And it's called... Basic English.
I'm an Irish astrophysicist working in France on a French /German project. The language of the collaboration is English, so all major meetings are in English. Here in France we all speak French at local meetings, even if there's a majority of native English speakers present. In Germany they speak English if there is even one native English speaker there. Cultural differences, I guess.
Consider the different meanings of pussy, fanny, bangs, and fringe.
Combine this with such American phrases as "I need to trim my bangs" or "He put it in my fanny pack" and watch the expressions on the Brit's faces! Outrageous!
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Have you ever tried typing a language like Chinese/Japanese, etc? It's terribly difficult. That is probably the number one reason why Chinese will never become the main language of the internet.
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"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
UK has about 60 million people so they've got about 30% online.
The US has about 275 million people, so they've got about 50% online.
Plus, I don't have any statistics for this, but I've read that people in the US spend much more time online per user because we generally pay a flat fee of about $20/month or less for unlimited access.
Cheers!
-Bruce
Does that mean that all or even a majority of the native population speaks it at all, let alone as a first language?
Heh. No kidding. Some would say that significant portions of *the US* don't speak English as a first, or second, language.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
English is the unofficial language of the world anyway... how come students all around the globe learn English at a young age (when one is the most adept at learning a language), while many US students are lucky to get 2 or 3 years of a foreign language in high school (which, speaking from experience, is not enough to do anything useful).
English is also the official language of air traffic control, so basically if you live in a non-English speaking country and want to be a commercial pilot, you must learn English. Of course, many pilots only learn enough useful English to communicate with ATC and nothing else, but that does say something.
Christ, this is so wrong it isn't even funny.
Japanese has three character classifications:
Hiragana (for Native Words and inflections) and Katakana (for Foreign Words and emphasis) are syllabaries: they can be considered akin to alphabets.
Kanji ARE Chinese characters, with all of the associated complications, including identificationa and dictionary complexities (radical tables, anyone?)
Sheesh.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
I am stationed in Southeast Asia and can give you some first hand statistics:
65% of all those Indians you mention, use English on a regular base - for example to talk to other Indians who happen to speak an entirely different native dialect
[that's about 500'000'000 people]
35% of Malaysians, Singaporeans and 50% of Filipinos speak English fluently
[that's another 40,000,000]
And that's not counting the upper crust and tech savy people in the Middle East, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, IndoChina, Indonesia, etc.
Not to forget the poor Aussies and Kiwis who claim that their gibberish is of English origin as well.
Overall, it seems that over 1,000,000,000 speak quite fluently one of various Englisg flavours, while another 500,000,000 have a basic understanding of the language.
That certainly beats any other language. After all, even the 1.2 billion Chinese, while using almost identical alphabetical characters, speak one of 6 main Chinese languages/dialects and Mandarin [which is usually mistaken for *Chinese*]
is only the 'official' language.
Only about half of the population claims a reasonable command of *Mandarin*, which puts them in second place behind English.
While I have no strong desire to turn France into America or make all French people into Americans, I still feel sorry for the French for wanting to be French. I presume the feeling was mutual. If it weren't, I wouldn't feel that way. :-)
I also feel sorry for Somali women for wanting to be Somali women, though for a completely different reason. Female circumcision is a horribly barbaric practice.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I don't see English as becoming the only
language on the net anytime soon.
Lotsa languages are used on the net. It is not
because english is used by people who don't
speak each other's language to communicate with
each other that English is likely replace those
languages.
French, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and Spanish
for instance are much more pleasant languages to
use than english so it would be illogical to
switch to english for everyday use.
It sure would be a boring world if we all looked
alike and spoke all the same language.
Actually he was a bastard. He was born out of wed-lock.
I believe very strongly that people should be able to speak and use whatever language they want in their private lives. However, I feel that the government's business should be conducted in English, or perhaps English and a simple-to-learn middleware language like Esperanto. It's not cost-effective to do otherwise.
Right now, the USA spends scads of money translating its forms and rules into other languages to cater to non-English speaking groups. Right now, Spanish and English get special treatment with the IRS. What about all the Japanese, Chinese, German, French, Russian, and Brazilian immigrants that must pay taxes? Is it fair to translate *just* to Spanish, and not offer the same documentation in other languages? When does it stop?
It's simply not cost effective to cater to every language, and it's not fair to single out one or two non-English languages above others. So, I see the best solution is for the USA to conduct business in English and an alternate neutral simple-to-learn language. Besides, Esperanto is all about preserving people's native language, and using Esperanto as a common second language.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I am natively speaking Czech/Slovak and my primary and secondary language are German and Russian, but you cannot help it. If you work around computers, you simply HAVE TO learn english. There is no way how to get around it. I have few friends that tried, but either they overcome incredible difficulties or they just gave up. But however english is my third foreign language, it soon became the one that I use most.
There is several reasons why english spread so much, but I think one is really important. You can learn just 3000 words to be able to fully express yourself in most cases. Basic english is something that really helps this language to spread. When you count into it kind of easy grammar...
And I especially like that there are no special symbols, special characters, just all the basic latin characters and thats it. Don't even talk about ease of computer recognition ...
But what I think will move english forward is the fact that more and more 3rd world countries use english as their official language. And these countries are now stepping forward too...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
"The Patriot" depicts Americans as nice, humane, honest, freedom loving, etc... people, while the UK soldiers are supposed to be ultra-evil, bent on terror and destruction, fachist peoples. In the movie, UK soldiers commit the worst more abominable crimes.
Of course this wasn't like that : there were an equal number of good and bad people on both sides, and the war was mildly violent for the time. There were innocents killed on both side, but civilians were not specifically targeted. Of course, "heroes" going to war to have a tax break from the Queen doesn't sound half as good, but reality is reality.
Another thing : in the movie, UK soldiers burn women and children in a church. Such a thing never happened during the civil war (it only happened once in France in 1944, when the SS took vengeance over a vilage and killed everybody this way).
We all know the American public doesn't learn history in books, so what will they think once they see the movie ? The average American is arrogant enough like this with his country, without the need of movies bending history to reinforce this feeling.
There is no such entity as "British English". Brits use International English, which is what Canada, Australia, et al use.
Americans use American English.
European non-english speakers learn international English because most people speak it.
Also, learn to spell "British". Its not a difficult word to remember - I'm sure you'd be mildly irritated if I started calling you "Ammerican".
It wasn't modded down - Anonymous Coward postings are given score:0
...
.iMMersE
I made exactly the same error as you a couple of weeks ago
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
I was looking over some statistics the other day, in some magazine, and it said that percentage of Americans that new more than one language fluently was extrememely low, in fact, anyone with English as their native language generally doesn't learn another language very well. But, a huge percentage of people that do not speak english as their native languag end up learning it anyway. Maybe this is a clue that people that know english don't need another language, and people that did not know english originally were forced to learn it to live in the real world. I think that is proof in itself that English is definitely the global language.
What is really funny is how Great Britain and the US are seperated by a common language. I had the pleasure of spending a summer with some people from London, and a lot of the time was spent laughing at some of the things that Americans use commonly and yet are horrendous to say in England. For instance, frolicing in the meadows is innapropriate for younger audiences in England.
The anti-salmon
Yes, it's usually spelt Koningin but my dear Papa informs me that in the phrase Leve de Konigin it is spelt differently.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
Not as annoyed as if you'd called him "Canadian", I'm sure!
.iMMersE
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
jamais.
Of course this wasn't like that : there were an equal number of good and bad people on both sides, and the war was mildly violent for the time. There were innocents killed on both side, but civilians were not specifically targeted.
While I'm not going to argue that the movie was slanted (and I'd have nothing against England producing a movie that told their story), there were civilians targeted. One could argue that the reason the war esculated was the actions of the British. Keep in mind that most DIDN'T want to break with England at the time, the heavy handedness of the British army killing protestors is what changed many minds.
Another thing : in the movie, UK soldiers burn women and children in a church. Such a thing never happened during the civil war (it only happened once in France in 1944, when the SS took vengeance over a vilage and killed everybody this way)
Such a thing DID happen during the civil war, but we are talking about the Revolutionary War (a simple mistake, I know what you meant). I honestly don't know if that happened during the war or not. We certainly didn't have the reporting capabilities we have now, so if it did it did happen we wouldn't even necessarily know.
We all know the American public doesn't learn history in books, so what will they think once they see the movie ?
As I've said to others in this article, the generalizations of Americans being stupid and arrogant is the same as me saying all Mexicans are dirty, all Japanese shifty, and all Jews greedy. Perhaps you should get your opinions of a population from a source other than movies and the occational ignorant tourist.
Finkployd
I recently spent a year working in Holland, and am now working in Germany. In both places the language of business has been English.
The German company is strange in that I'm the only person of English extraction that works here! Everyone else is predominantly German, with few other "foriegners".
Everyone speaks and communicates in English. All documents are written in English (with the odd grammatical error, but it's still better than my German!). All code is commented in English!
And this seems to be the norm in both Holland, and Germany.
I'm just wondering if this only takes place in the IT industry or has anybody noticed this in other industries?
-- "To ask a question is to show ignorance; Not to ask a question means you'll remain ignorant."
To be perfectly honest, i think that we're only going to go so far without a global language. As sad as it is for some "other-continenters" to face, english is just slipping into that role. You can argue about how this came about, but it's probably going to continue that way untill the US is no longer the #1 power in the world.
The issue is also this, while the US does not hold a monopoly on goold old DARPA Net, it was the first. and it comes to an argument of "when in rome..." If the internet was created by the spanish and everyone started to adopt that, i'm sure the language of the internet would be Spanish. (This is not to say that the de facto language right now IS english, but for all intents and purposes, english is the beast that rules).
I guess it's just getting annoying that everyone keeps having an argument about why it's so bad that English is becoming the foremost global language. Personally, i'm getting sick of it. Let's just pick a fsckin' language, make sure everyone speaks it (i guess except for people in the south - i still can't figure out what language that is they're speaking), and be on our merry way. If it's english, great...a ton of us already know what one. If not....i'm not lazy, and i'm willing to learn.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I disagree 100%. I'll wager that everyone reading knew perfectly well what the original poster was saying, the "misuse" has obviously entered the general lexicon and therefore is not a misuse, but a common and well-understood phrase.
-c
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain.
A concept I have done some thought on is that of an in between language, specifically tuned for the needs of machine translation. I think the only plausable way to do it at this point would be for the writer to actually know the language to begin with, as translating from english to machine, and then to whatever the user wanted would be just as problematic as our current state. Would this be feasable? Do you think it would be worth learning another language for that? Or would it be another Esperanto?
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
I find it slightly hard to beleive the point that the article makes about American English being the most common form of English. I mean, come on. The US may have the most dominant *culture* in the western world, but it doesn't have the population to be able to say that US English is the most commonly spoken. Then again...more and more kids around me (in New Zealand) are starting to say "mom" instead of mum... :\
I blame TV. :)
and if you don't speak it, you get modded down. </humor>
English is, and has been for hundreds of years, a living, evolving language, and always will be.
Its power is that it absorbs the most important current ideas and concepts from other languages, and also allows unfashionable words to die.
Some English words are now quite passé. (Oops I did it again.)
Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, this means very subtle differences in pronunciation and inflexion can radically alter the meaning of the words
True, but mucking up the tone is no grosser a sin than mispronouncing a vocoid. It is very difficult, for example, for Chinese to distinguish between the short a and short e sounds in English, which, phonetically, are really very close; learning to consistently distinguish "bet" and "bat" takes years of practice. Of course, context helps tremendously: where, in isolation, I might not be able to distinguish the two, I can be relatively certain you didn't say, "He hit the ball with a baseball bet."
By the same token, it can be difficult for a non-native Chinese speaker to distinguish between "horse" and "mother" in Chinese (to use the famous example), but in context, generally speaking a native Chinese is going to be able to figure out that you didn't say, "I like to ride mothers."
Tones are just another phonetic component of a Chinese utterance; my impression is that Westerners trying to learn Chinese entirely too much time worrying about them.
A Cantonese speaking workmate of mine once demonstrated this by saying two completely different sentences
You can find similar examples in any language, some which will even confuse a native speaker; the fact that one turns out to mean something incomprehensibly insulting merely adds dramatic impact.
imagine how much harder it would be if every word was a little pictogram that had to be rote-learned!
I will grant that learning to read and write Chinese is more difficult, even for native speakers, than learning to read and write English. However, it's not so difficult as all that, and Chinese is helped along by the fact that it isn't a purely pictographic system. In practice, it is partly phonetic and partly phonemic.
There are 214 "radicals" in Chinese; all Chinese characters are simply combinations of these. While 214 approaches an order of magnitude more than the 26 characters in the English alphabet, it means that the basic building set is not nearly so limitless as Americans tend to believe. Whereas to the American eye a Chinese character appears to be an undifferentiated mass of lines, to my eye, I see it as a collection of one or two or three radicals; when I see a new Chinese character, I can reproduce it immediately. Much the way an English speaker would see the word "seeing" not as six individual characters, but more as a combination of two morphemes: "see" and "ing".
Further, while not phonetic or phonemic to the extent of the English writing system, written Chinese does have phonetic and morphemic components; sometimes these provide clues as to the pronunciation and/or meaning of new characters.
So it's not like I have to flat-out memorize five thousand (the average adult written vocabulary) completely arbitrary pictographs.
My experience has been that the first hundred or so Chinese characters are the hardest part for foreigners. After that, as they begin recognizing the radicals and patterns, they begin picking up characters much more quickly.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Dough head!
... Correct them if you know better ...)
.iMMersE
%age of world population that don't speak English (roughly) = 5 billion.
50.4% of internet users are non-English speakers = 100 million.
5% of 5 billion = 250 million
So, less than 5% of non-English speaking people have access to a computer! Duh!
(Yes, I know the numbers are approximate, but I don't think wholely inaccurate, but they illustrate my point
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
The Web or the internet?
(windows user thought it's just the same)
For the web , i think maybe english is global.
but i disagree if everybody must use it.
anyway, most of advertising company need site
writen in english only. so that force webmaster
use english for the sake of money.
i did something like this.
i use Bahasa Melayu as primary, but i do own
english website for financial purpose.
any advertising company accept bahasa melayu as a
specific category/targetted audience?
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
...unless we standardize on English.
This is THE key issue of the Buchanan Party.
I see what you mean, although it might not be actually a straight correspondance, there's probably a higher percentage who have / use computers and don't also have internet access.
...but even throughout most of europe, the internet is only just now starting to get the kind of attention it did in N.A. around
'97.
...
.iMMersE
Oh, I agree completely, there are probably more people with computers, but I suspect the point that only 5% of non-English speakers have computers holds.
I agree with you here, but since by now the Internet is a proven thing rather than a "new fangled" thing, the take up has been much quicker, and growing quicker and quicker. A third of the UK are on the 'net, and largely speaking, that number has gotten online in the past 18 months, and the numbers are increasing all the time. Not as impressive as the 50% of Americans that the numbers seem to show are online, but as you say, we are perhaps 3 or 4 years behind you in terms of the attention given to the Internet.
If you can imagine if the take up in countries "new" to the Internet is as quick, or even quicker, it follows that within a few years from now, we're going to have a massive %age of the world's population on-line (We are approaching 5% at the moment), and as the figures in this discussion show, English is only the third (Or it's predicted in 2010, the fourth) most spoken language throughout the world, and it'll soon lose it's label of the "Internet Global Language"
codegolf.com - smaller *is* better.
Because they're stroke based and fairly formalized font faces, it's easier to do OCR on Asian languages. For example, Japanese Kanji are made up
of 150 or so drawings, combined in different ways to make the 6000 or so kanji as a whole (2500 commonly used). Recognize the 150 (which are usually 2-3 strokes total, and easier than recognizing the 54 english letters for both upper and lowercase) and you're set.
Handwriting recognition is easier as well - set stroke orders make it easy to recognize which character is being written. Theres a Unix program out there that does it IIRC.
BBK
I've recently read a very interesting work on the subject of Esperanto and second (non-native) languages in general. The URL is:
http://members.aol.com/sylvanz/gv1.htm
The author brings up points on how difficult second languages are to master(amount of time spent immersed in the langauage, idioms, grammer, etc) and the fact that most of us who have spent numerous years in school plodding through some language are lucky to be able to say "Hello" and "Where is the bathroom". The same goes for non-english speakers on english based web pages - they begin to learn certain things, but would never become fluent or even conversant by hacking away at web pages.
English in itself is an incredibly complex language (as is Russian, French, Chinese, etc) and to expect non-native or even non-american english speakers to adapt to one version would be entirely impossible.
The idea that some medium can influence the speech of people is not new. Quite a while ago, I read something on the fact that almost all major television programs, news, commercials, etc and movies in the US are created in the "Northern Dialect" (as opposed to a Southern Drawl). But this has not changed the use of that Southern Dialect at all.
The rather one sided view of Americans that English should be the world standard represents an arrogance that puts us in a bad light thoughout the world.
I suggest people try a language such as Esperanto, which actually is easy to learn and puts everyone on an equal footing liguistically.
Information on Esperanto can be found at:
http://www.esperanto-usa.org
Mi parlas Esperanto!
and for the last hundred years at least almost all innovations in the language have originated elsewhere.
What innovations?? Very new words still tend to be Latin or Greek in origin. eg: "internet", "aeroplane", "television"
The language evolved in England and that's why its called English. Just because other people chose to adopt it doesn't mean it's no longer English in origin.
If you don't like it, use something else...or invent your own.
</rant>
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
US English is a little too encompasing for your purposes i would think. Are you talking southern US English? Californian english? New England English, etc? And who's to say that "US English" and "British English" are really all that different?
When you say Chinese - are you speaking of Mandarin or Cantonese (i would assume Mandarin)?
Maybe things will be different in the China-dominated future being described, but currently language on the Internet is primarily enountered in its written form rather than its spoken form. This relates to ypur comments on both the variations in English and Chinese.
There are definite variations in English as spoken in different parts of the USA. However, they tend to disappear from written English, being either differences how words are pronounced or local slang. Local slang tends to disappear from written documents that are more formal than relaxed speech and from Internet documents written for a geographically diverse audience. Different as California and New York English may be from each other, I would wager that few literate Californians would have trouble reading the New York Times.
On the other hand, there are significant differences between written British English and written American English. These appear both in spelling ("colour vs. "color", "centre" vs. "centre") and lexicon ("boot" vs. "trunk", "lift" vs. "elevator"). We're not talking about local slang here but frequently used common words.
Written vs. spoken language has an even greater effect on your Cantonese vs. Mandarin question. The "Chinese language" is an interesting linguistic phenomenon. In its spoken form it simply does not exist. Cantonese and Mandarin are not two different dialects of one "Chinese language". They are completely different languages and are mutually unintelligible. On the other hand, the "Chinese language" has a definite existence in the written form. Written Mandarin is indistinguishable from written Cantonese. So, since the Internet is primarily a written medium, I would expect that when he said "Chinese", he was not referring to "Cantonese" or "Mandarin" but the written language that they both share.
As was pointed out elsewhere in the thread "Chinese" (the written language) is different in Mainland China vs. Taiwan. So you could reasonably ask to which of those two he was referring. I think that the geopolitical part of his argument made it pretty clear that he was talking about Mainland China, though.
Respectfully, David Tallan
Ireland is a member of the European Monetary Union. Malcohol.
Wo bu zhidao, zhishi wo de mao jiao "T-Chat," parce qu'il est un p'tit chat. Ta hao ke-ai :)
I think in English (my 2nd language) for all things technical because my 1st language has an absurd hundreds-singles-tens numerical system. I also use Usana spelling (if only it went further): and British everything else.
I was wondering if the language a child grows up learning as its 1st language would affect the way it thinks if it was something like Ido, which is bloody amazing.
CowboyNeal for president!
"Hit any user to continue."
The part about the boxes linking the voice to text, text to voice and computer translators was ridiculous.
If all it took was some genius to write down a set of boxes on a piece of paper and it would all work out, then this would be an interesting and thought provoking article.
The fact is that computers aren't replacing translators any time soon. Oh, sure, maybe English to Spanish or German or some other linguistic first cousin. But something tells me the English to Chinese computer translator is a long long way off. I live in China and I've tried what I could find in terms of digital translators and they can do word for word quick as can be, but that's missing the point. The concept of a word isn't even equivalent in these two languages.
Language aquisition is my bread and butter. I can tell you that a Chinese student --we're talking about human minds here which is vast linguistic power compared to computers-- whith a broad GRE prep vocabulary will inevitably stumble over even the simplest English verb phrase which is typically nothing more than a basic combination of a verb and a preposition. Why? There are no verb phrases in Chinese. In fact, for the most part you don't have verb tenses. You can have sentences without verbs at all!
Now, we're talking about a real difference. Translation English to Chinese is not just vocabulary substitution. This literary prop the writer uses in describing her friend drawing boxes on paper to invoke our awe at their linguistic insights is exactly where linguists and psychologists get their reputations as pseudo scientists.
[US-]english is only the choice of the internet generation (sic sic sic...) because the internet is free. in the US, the general populous (or what we percieve it is) belives that speech is free. so i believe that people who live in the US tend to treat all speech as free.
now, the problem with english is that nobody in the US speaks it. Or at least, very few speak it properly. Even fewer write it properly. This post is completely incorrect english, but most readers aren't bothered by this. they know to read what i mean, not what i actually wrote.
but machines can't do this... not without making the same leaps of faith that we human beings take for granted so often. and while everyone knows this, they still try and make the machines dumber.
yes, i do mean dumber. machines (as now) are extremely smart; they don't make mistakes. so this means that while you are reading anything, including this post, you are making many mistakes. it is only by making these mistakes that you're able to read this.
this isn't new news; we've known this for years. which is why we have made so many different programming languages, each encompassing an extremely strict (by englishes standards) notation by which the message is understood.
writing code in itself is not all that difficult (far easier than reading english, in many ways). so maybe we should be focusing on that movement; making ourselves (humans) smarter, instead of the computer dumber.
of course, you can read what I've written, and know that this is a horrible idea, but in the past 100 years, the english language(s) has metamorphed into so many different dialects that we may even put the chinese to shame. we have our share of slang and coloquialisms (sp?) too, and because the computer doesn't understand them, we are stupid for using them.
It is only in the past few months that the FISH started translating "Login" as "beginning activity" instead of "logarithm".
but as i've mentioned, it isn't just the coloquialisms the machine has to interpret: the computer must be taught to THINK.
in short: purely-MT will be going nowhere for a long time so long as Eliza sums up computer AI.
English is adaptable as hell and there's no one trying to keep it the same (heh, Acadamie Francais??).
dnnrly
Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
That's what I have been saying all the time: The universal language is Bad English
In Murphy We Turst
That's probably why it needs to borrow all its greatness from other languages, like "grande dame" or "language du jour".
Face it, guys, English is the Ankh Morpork* of languages and if it has never been defeated it is only because it never had an ennemy that it couldn't corrupt or make his own (i.e. probably more than half of English is not English anyway).
* For those that don't know what it is go and read a few discworld novel by Terry Pratchett.
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Yes, I'm very curious to see what happens at the point when online content, and by extension cultural content is truly produced proportionally to the consuming markets.
There are so many strange twists in the history of language that english may remain the "international" language regardless of what the actual %s of native speakers are. This could be likely because currently it is the second language of choice for people all over the world to speak, and the number of resources available in any country for learning english far outnumber any other non-native language. Throughout my travels I have often found that people for whom english is not native will use it to communicate when there is no other common language. ie. I have often heard French and German speakers communicating with each other in broken english, as it is a natural common ground.
Or one may see a natural drift towards learning the more dominant languages - being Chinese and Hindi variations.
Or, my own personal supposition, we may see the rise of several true english dialects. Despite the strong variations throughout the world of english speakers there aren't currently many true dialects of english. The few that do exist - I think of the Scottish dialect, the Creole of the Southern U.S. and the "Rastafarian" dialect of Jamaica - are not very largely used. The variations between U.S. english, U.K. english and those of Australia, N.Z. and Canada are not strong enough to qualify as dialects. However we may very likely see an emergence of true dialects, as the convenience of english as a common language mixes with the native languages of large markets to produce a mix optimized for ease of communication. 20 years from now will there be a Chinese-english and a Hindi-english that will be wide spread enough to be learned and studies as seperate languages in their own right?
Time will tell I guess, but its going to be very interesting.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Your story reminds me of the time my wife was studying in Austria. I had her hostel's phone number and her room number, and I practised for days (literally---international calls were expensive then, and we were just above the starving student stage) to get my German pronunciation right.
Came the day, and I asked proudly for ``Zimmer drei hundert vier and zwanzig, bitte'', to get the response ``Yes sir, one moment please.''
Crushed... :-) Thereafter I didn't even try.
I refuse to believe corporations are people until Texas executes one. -- desert rain on http://www.dailykos.com/user/
BTW, Windows 2000 and the Japanese version of Windows 98 come with an input method that does handwriting recognition. You use the mouse (or if you have one, a graphics tablet) to draw in this box on the screen, and after each stroke, it shows you a list of the possible characters. Rather nifty and fun to play with :)
you'll never see a French tourist in a foreign country starting to talk to people in the street in French...
Yeah, those French people are known the world over for being polite, humble, and bathed.
Glass houses... stones...
Hopefully someday the gross ignorance of foreign languages and history will backfire
That's it, stick to the high road.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Don't be ridiculous. The language of technology in India is ENGLISH. India will pass China in population within a few years (if they didn't jus t do it).
Add to that the fact that English is the official language of business, and of Air Traffic (pilots and air traffic controllers) and you have English as the world language.
This might mean English with an Indian accent, or British spelling, and perhaps some Germanic sentence structure but it is English none the less.
dough head!
look at the figures - if 50.4% of the internet users are non-English speakers it means they must have access to a computer! duh !
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Yeah, well momocrome, you're a fucking moron, k?
Q: How do you call someone who can speak 3 languages?
A: Trilingual
Q: How do you call someone who can speak 2 languages?
A: Bilingual
Q: How do you call someone who only speaks one language?
A: American...
The name "English" is an outdated term for the language we currently speak. While it is true that the language originated in England, it has been a long, long time since a majority of it's speakers lived there, and for the last hundred years at least almost all innovations in the language have originated elsewhere. Its about time the name of the language be changed to reflect the contributions that non-English citizens have made. I personally think a good name would be "MS Talk", but others might have different opinions.
aliens speak perfect English too
Klaatu barada nikto!
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Friesian is a celtic language. If you speak Freisian, have a go at learning Gaelic. You mite find it surprisingly easy.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
This is ironic, considering how I started this thread. I was just going for the cheap laugh there.
Of course, according to that winning patent, I now have to offer to proofread Slashdot for free. It hasn't been granted though (yet) so I'm safe for now.
-------
Vidi, Vici, Veni
very interesting figures, although I notice they've completely left out Indian languages.
considering that after China, India is the next largest populated country in the world, I would think that this would be an important language group to keep track of. Unless they've made the stupid mistake of putting Indian internet users into the english category because the official language of the country is English. That would seriously tilt the figures of the whole report the wrong way, because almost no Indians speak English as a mother tongue, and English is the official language of the government in order to have some semblance of national order in government.
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
english is not only the language of the internet, it is also the language of computers themselves (yes, i realize if you strip everything, its just a bunch of 0s and 1s)! think about it. what languages do we write our languages (programming languages) in? the commands are in english! nto proper english , mind you, but english words nontheless! i dont think ive seen a spanish or french command yet! what you lack of in smarts, you make up for in stupidity
Well the part about connecting text speech and machine translation is nonsense.
What's the difference between text translation and speech translation? You can look ahead in text, of course. You don't have to wait for the end of the sentence or thought, for example, you can move forward and back. The delay kills the usefulness of the machine translation for speech.
You simultaneous translators out there don't have to fear imminent job loss.
what's the matter with you? I use SQL in daily speach all the time. After all, english is a dynamic language ; )
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Remember where most chinese speakers live...in China. The language is way too concentrated currently. Additionally, by that rational, Hindi has a high likelihood of becoming the global language as well.
How many Chinese (Cantonese?) are overseas? How many Hindi-speakers?
I'm really asking?
I think that it is very important to ascertain the worldness of these languages to think about the emigrants. I guess that there are Chinese all over East Asia, and in Europe and North America, and Indians/Pakistanis in Britain, the Caribbean, the Pacific and black Africa.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Christianity is the official religion of USA, isn't it?
L'Anglais, Le Langage Internet Global?
Hey democracy lovers, add Quorum as a c
Perhaps I over-stated the difficulties of learning Chinese (I've never tried, so can't comment from first-hand experience).
And Yes, the English language is messy and inconsistent, both in spelling and sentence structure. I know several highly intelligent people who have lived in English speaking countries for over 10 years, and still don't speak it well.
My point is, however, that speaking it well is not the important thing, what's important is, how easy it is to speak badly. Or, to put it another way, if you have 6 hours on the plane with a phrase book, will you be able to find your way from the airport to the hotel, and then buy a meal in a restaurant that evening?
The things that are bad about English will not stop a foreigner from getting a meal, or finding his way back to the hotel afterwards. The things that are bad about Chinese will.
Over half of the worlds population use some variation of the Latin alphabet (I'm including the Russian and similar alphabets here). There would have to be a hell of a good reason for all those people to decide that the "world language" will be one that uses a completely different writing system, especially when that system is acknowledged to be difficult, even for a native speaker.
Personally, of the languages I've been exposed to while travelling, I'd say Spanish it is a better candidate for World Language than English. It's fairly consistent gramatically (too many irregular verbs, but hey, one irregular verb is one too many) and I _love_ the Spanish approach to spelling.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
The point that the author of the piece seems to miss, is that people learn second languages for a second good reason: to communicate with those who speak those languages better. Historically, there are three main ways that communication is advantageous: in politics, in trade, and in cultural ideas.
In politics, the idea is that you learn the langauge used by the state that is occupying your nation. This allows you to get on better with the occupation forces, to prevent you from being one of those they coerce. So, for instance, many Poles know Russian. English itself is strongly influence by French, dating from the Norman conquest. And in the 19th and early 20th century, French was the language of diplomacy based not on any aspect of French, but rather, Napoleon and the political and legal systems exported forcibly from revolutionary France.
Note that, nobody learns a second language of a weak nation for political reasons. They only learn the language of strong nations, because those are the only nations likely to occupy other nations for long.
The second reason to learn a second language is to trade goods with people who speak the second language better -- crassly, to make money faster.
But note that nobody is going to bother to learn the language of poor people; you want to trade with the people with the money.
Finally, it is useful to know parts of a second language if there is important technical or cultural innovation going on amongst it speakers, since this gives you an edge in using those innovations yourself, among your own language group. This is why, for instance, so many italian words still are used for musical instruments and notation -- because the renaissance started in Italy.
But once again, note the correlation with wealth. Innovation, both scientific and cultural, happens in places with the money to afford leisure time in which to innovate.
So, if we look at the world now, we find the English, as spoken by the US, in by far the strongest position of any language in the world.
Although the US does not occupy any foreign nations, per se, we have forces in many other nations and entangling treaties with half the world it seems. As the fools willing to be the world's policemen, everyone wants to talk to us.
But mainly, it is our richness that will make English the world language. We have by far the largest economy in the world, and we have the freedom to innovate both scientifically and culturally, and we do. People will learn english to do business with us, in order to buy our computers, our internet services, and our rock music.
Other societies often hate us for our political pushiness, but they are always going to want our ideas and our money.
I'm a native English(US) speaker, but I wouldn't mind learning another language if it were the "common" one. I learned Spanish because of my wish to travel in Latin America and my desire to speak the native language of the people there.
:)
That being said, I think that it's inevitable that English will be the universal common language. Haven't any of you seen Star Trek? Everyone in the whole damned Universe speaks English.
Anyhow, I'd like to see the English language morph into something more friendly to both the human and the mechanical users. The main problem that needs to be tackled is the large number of spelling exceptions. The Simplified Spelling Society has a simple solution called "Cut Spelling". Here's an example.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I'm an English speaking (well, sort of) American. I was travelling to Norway on business one time so I learned enough "phrase book" Norwegian to get by.
I walked up to a Airline counter in Western Norway after just flying in from Oslo. The man at the counter looked up and, before I could speak, said "Hello, can I help you?"
How did he know I spoke english? There weren't many native english speakers around at the time. Must have been some cultural cues.
Americans probably should try to learn enough of a foreign language to get by, but these days, in many countries, you just don't have to. Perhaps Americans are arrogant, but they are probably more lazy... (Maybe laziness and arrogance are the same thing? Hmmmm...)
-Jordan Henderson
Take my country Australia (Aussie Aussie Aussie!) for example. Australia is *very* multicultural, we have Australians who have all sorts of native backgrounds, Italian, Spanish, German, Asian, African, American, you name it we have it, and in quantity. Constantly there are people migrating to Australia all the time, and even if their native language isn't english, they will still learn it, and fairly quickly. Probably not because they have to, but because they want to. Sure we all can speak in our own native languages if we really wanted to (I have an Italian background myself) but we mostly speak english.
A great majority of the world speaks or can speak english. Therefore, its only normal for the internet to have a high usage of the english language. There is a NEED to be able to comunicate on a global scale (look at what you are reading now), the english language is obviously default.
I lost me sig.
Chinese and Japanese OCR exists.
It may not be used that frequently, but just do a search on Chinese OCR and you will find some.
The problems with English start with the fact that it's an amalgam of Old German (a verb-final language) and French (a verb-medial language). This has connotations beyond simply where the verb in a sentence occurs; it affects word order in all phrases, as verb-final languages tend to put the heads of all their phrases at the end - adjectives preceed nouns; main verb follows auxiliary verb; and so forth. While English has largely adopted and adapted itself to verb-medial patterns, it retains many vestiges of its Germanic origins; as a result, even where one might reasonably expect consistency, English has the tendency to surprise.
In addition, English has amassed a large number duplicate vocabulary: pig/swine, deep/profound, small/little, big/large and so forth. Pig, profound, little, big, et alia, come into the language via its Latin roots, while it draws the others from its Germanic heritage.
There is also the problem of the Great Vowel Shift -- also a result of the Anglo-Saxon merger with French. While pronunciation changed, written English has retained much of its pre-Shift spelling, resulting in more confusion. This problem was exacerbated by the borrowing of so many words from the French, whose phonetic written system differs so drastically from the German. The result is that there is rarely just one way to represent a phonetic sound in English, and English seems to delight in taking advantage of this fact. I can, for example, write the long o sound as "ow", "ough", "oe" "oa", "o--e", "oo", "eau", "ew", "ou", or of course "o". Conversely, a single letter or combination can have several different pronunciations, even within the same word. In "circle", for example, "c" is pronounced two different ways.
What's more, some English letters are entirely redundant. C, for example, merely duplicates K and S, with no phonetic identity of its own. And Q is entirely anachronistic; to begin, it never occurs without U; and the QU combination could, phonetically speaking, be completely replaced by KW. PH (a hold-over from Greek) merely duplicates the efforts of F. And so forth.
English isn't the most difficult language in the world. For that honor I'd nominate Lingasa, a central African language full of implosives, clicks, gutterals, and a seven-state gender system which includes animate/inanimate, rock/non-rock and climbs trees/swims, and a conjugation system that depends in part not just on person and number like English, but also the time of day (day or night) the utterance is made, who makes it (males and females conjugate differently; vocabulary also differs between the sexes) and to whom it is made (male or female, child or adult), social status, and whether or not it's currently raining outside (I'm not kidding!). Bottom line: while nobody knows for sure, estimates suggest each and every Lingasan verb has between fifteen and twenty five thousand possible conjugations. Kind of makes French look like a child's game.
So, no, I wouldn't say English is the most difficult language in the world to learn. But I do think there are much easier ones.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
My point is, however, that speaking it well is not the important thing, what's important is, how easy it is to speak badly
Okay, point taken. I guess I can't judge this, as I haven't been around enough foreign speakers of either English or Chinese to judge which badly spoken language is the more difficult to understand. I have been known to say, however, that it's too bad circumstances have forced English on the world. I even told some British English teachers here that I thought one of the worst things England ever did was give English to the world. They were wont to agree with me.
I would also agree with you about the writing system. I would not, myself, propose Chinese as a world-language candidate for precisely that reason. Spoken Chinese is, I think, relatively easy to learn. No verb conjugations, no tense, and a basic vocabulary which tends to be non-specific almost to the point of ambiguity; where English speakers, for example, have to select between "see", "watch", "look at", "view", and "read", or "speak", "say", "tell" and "talk", Chinese provides a single word.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
there were many reasons for the war of idependence - one chief one that doesn't get much play is that there was a huge amount of land speculation going on in lands that the British gov't was planning to protect from settlement from the colonies for the Iroquois to carve out a state for them
Oh please. The British are the only civilization with a worse record than the US in terms of conquring and spreading over native people's homeland and society. I agree the movie was slanted, but you aren't going to make your point effectivle if you put forth such an unbelievable arguement.
there was a concern that the British would make slavery illegal (which they did after the turn of the 18th century
So did we, it just took slightly longer. At the time of the revlotionary war slavery was not nearly the economic powerhouse it was before the civil war. Although I will concede that after the revolutionary war slavery skyrocketed, a mistake that this country eventually DID correct.
Nowhere did I say that the movie was the gospel truth. No movie is, they are entertainment. However, the truth lies somewhere between the movie version and yours.
Finkployd
Granted, but I think the British did it on a larger scale. The point that the British wanted to conserve and set aside land for the indians and we wanted to kick them off their land being the cause for the war is still laughable though.
Finkployd
2. We won WW2 [of course, with some help
3. We've been to the moon.
(but don't tell the French that English is the global language.)
-- "Perceptions create reality. By changing your perceptions you change your reality."
As the Chinese economy develops, so will Chinese influence, and you may begin to see some internationalization of Mandarin. But this is several decades into the future, at least.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
Visit
http://www.ecocap.demon.co.uk/
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Think about it... English has more rules than exceptions! In Europe, most languages are pronouncable at first glance... once you know the rules. In English, the only teacher is experience, because every word has potential to be the exception!
Now in fairness, the Roman alphabet is the best accessible subset of type... and pronunciation isn't the biggest issue. Conjugation of verbal tenses, discernment of homonyms... these kinds of things make English look downright batty.
Nope, they just all have babelfish in their ears :)
He who knows not, and knows he knows not is a wise man
Shenme? Wo kan de dong ni siao mao de mintzi, inwe wo shuo fa-wen. Keshir, j'aime des chiens meilleurs parce qu'ils sont plus amicaux que des chats.
Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC
The Fresh Aire radio interview show has an interview of Singapore's first prime minister -- Lee Kuan Yew that mentioned this very subject. Singapore had numerous dialets, as well as Chinesse and English. In the 1960's they decided to make English the offical language.
There was a brief discussion on the introduction techniques, including the concept of language specific schools (English was taught as a second language in all non-English schools).
http://search.npr.org/freshair/dayFA.cfm?display =day&todayDate=10%2F24%2F2000
You are probably dutch, considering your nick that is very close to Hyronimus Bosch a dutch poet.
Actually, it's from Hyeronimus Bosch, the Flemish? painter, a surrealist from the 17th or 16th century.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
First of all, I am not a linguistic expert of any kind. However, I can give an opinion about several languages that I know
Cantonese and Mandarin are not candidates for world languages, regardless of how influential China may become in future, because they're too frickin hard for foreigners to learn.
.
The majority of speakers of any 'world language' will speak it as their second (or more) language, and many will speak it badly. Some languages are more suited to this than others..
English, regardless of what you may thing of it's spelling and sloppy sentence structure, is easy to speak badly. You can jumble the syntax, and mis-pronounce it barbarously, and an English speaker who is paying attention will (usually) understand you fairly well. A Russian armed with an English phrase-book can fairly successfully buy bus-tickets, tell the cab-driver where he wants to go, etc.
Cantonese and Mandarin are tonal languages, this means very subtle differences in pronunciation and inflexion can radically alter the meaning of the words. A Cantonese speaking workmate of mine once demonstrated this by saying two completely different sentences, that sounded identical to me (even when I got him to repeat them several times, and listened really carefully). One was an ordinary innocuous sentence you might use while shopping, the other was grossly offensive - the worst thing you can possibly say about someones mother! There's no way a tourist with a phrase-book is going to get the pronunciation accurate enough to communicate reliably.
On top of that, there is the problem with the written form. Again, any language with a non-phonetic writing style is inherently more difficult for a foreigner to learn. The one thing people complain about most often when learning English is the inconsistent spelling, imagine how much harder it would be if every word was a little pictogram that had to be rote-learned!.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
They already did that. It's called Lojban. www.lojban.org
Why won't it be adopted here on /.?
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Well I've been through the lot on -1 and no where can I find mention of royalties :-). English is my first language and my last language. Not one post mentioned the *real* power of English, that being spoken English lends itself to accents very easily, the reason for this is, spoken English uses lips instead of throat. To understand this, observe the frequency of gestures with different languages. Using lips gives a more subtle nuancy of meaning, by virture of more control of sound, do you really want to talk as though you are spewing.
However I do agree written English is a mess, and its spelling moreso
Peter.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
Amount of pages in different languages, users, etc: http://www.glreach.com/globstats/ind ex. php3
According to this, English is 49.6% of the internet population.
bug.gd: error search engine. Humanity working together to solve all errors.
My parents would not understand it. Because they only read Spanish. :=)
MOD THE CHILD UP!
English is the grande dame of the internet, not some language du jour. English is not a kludge consisting of some funky words that we so irregardlessly made up. English is the Big Kahuna!
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
How about Mandarin? Last I heard it was the most spoken language in the world. From what (little, I might add) I understand, it is a Chinese dialect especially used in southern China? Regardless of the current standing in the real world, the article may be correct about the online world being almost all English. But the more important factor than current statisics is growth.. Are there any stats for the relative growth of languages on the internet?
offers some good thoughts on American English as the lingua franca of the Internet, and lists some of the most common and egregious errors in the use of English.
Posters on /. would do well to review the list Paul Brian's compiled. =)
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
of course, you can read what I've written, and know that this is a horrible idea, but in the past 100 years, the english language(s) has metamorphed into so many different dialects that we may even put the chinese to shame. we have our share of slang and coloquialisms (sp?) too, and because the computer doesn't understand them, we are stupid for using them.
I agree with you completely. English is an entirely too irregular language to be used for global communication. Especially this horrible spelling system. Who else remembers learning "I before E, except after C..." in their school days and wondering why it had to be so confusing?
Well, we can du something abaut that. First off, let's meke sum sense aut uf thu vawels; no more uf this "I before E" crap, just plein Latun and short vawels. And wi can toss aut thos silli treiling E's whail wi'r at it.
Thu cansonants also niid tuu bi cliind up. No mor "GIF or JIF?" argyuments--wun saund pur kansonant hiir. And wi kan teik keir uv TH, SH and CH bai riuzing q, x, and c.
But qu vaulz ar stil kunfyuzing, so let's get rid uv kapitulizeixun. nau wi kAn yuz kApItUl lEtUrz for xOrt vaulz. And wi kAn also yuz kApItUlz for kansonants: N for "ng", Q for "qis" or "qat" (As apozd tu "qiN").
fainali, wi hAv klind ap QU spElIN Uv INglIx! nau If wi kAn onli gEt rId Uv al Qoz IdiUmz...
o, And dUz EniwUn no hau tu pronauns "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"? ai nEvr fIgyurd Qat wUn aut.
(Translation: Oh, and does anyone know how to pronounce "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"? I never figured that one out.)
Chinese characters have very strict structure, and there are a large number of them. While you have a lot more choices, they're much better defined.
Even easier than OCR in Chinese is handwriting recognition. There are some really good Chinese handwriting recognition programs in routine business use already. For eg, I was in HK last week with my GF. She went to a government social security type office to sort out some stuff for her family. The interviewer there took all her notes and filled out the forms on a page-sized touch pad with a stylus, and the PC recognised and input all the writing on the fly.
I watched over some shoulders in electronics stores while people were trialling palm-like devices. Handwriting recognition there was very good as well.
The key is that Kanji (Chinese characters) not only have a strict structure, the stroke order _AND_ even the stroke direction is well defined. (Look closely at those chinese calligraphy style fonts and you'll see that one end of a line is always thicker than the other - the 'brush' starts out thick and thins as the ink is used and the writer lifts it off the page).
All that structure, stroke order and stroke direction stuff is well defined in Chinese culture - the kids have it drummed into them at school. The end result system is a handwriting method that is very easy for a computer to recognise with very high and repeatable levels of accuracy.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
American English is only recognized at about 95% (realworld) accuracy, even after being trained to a specific speaker. This is even after developing pretty mature hidden markov models, and having pretty powerful cpus. Other languages are very far behind, as it would take a lot to build new HMMs to deal with the many different phonems that other langauges have (mandrin chinese is especially dificult)
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Now look at programming. Supporters of C might say the same thing - "C is the most common language, why can't everyone else use it?" Or Java - "Java is the easiest language to use, let's make everyone learn it." Even Pascal - "Your bank is probably using it, why shouldn't everyone else?"
The reality is that everyone has their favorite language and uses anything else out of necessity. I prefer Java, but I will use HTML or csh or whatever to get the job done. People feel the same way about their spoken language. They only use second or foreign languages when they have to, and as the rest of the world catches up to the economic and journalistic prosperity of the US people will demand services in their own language, and why shouldn't they? Now if only someone would come up with a computer language that can do everything :)
(taken from http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/begs.html )Not to be overly pedantic, but it is a little ironic that your post itself employs one of the most commonly misused phrases in the English lexicon:
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
English as refered to on the internet (and in the case of computers in general, is more likely than not american english. I mean I can't tell you how many times I have had to run through pages and pages of manually written html files (written in a text editor not that gui dreamweaver/flash shit) and do a find and replace for align="centre" with align="center".
While this is a slight difference, it is significant, because there are a large number of non-American English speaking programmers out there and all these people have to learn how to program in one form of english and then go back to reading & writing in their native form of english.
What you end up with here is alot of programmers who end up being confused about which english language mode they're in most of the time which gradually leads to a degradtion in the quality of both written forms of english over time.
In this way, it could be argued (not that I neccessarily am) that the computers/internet/web are partially responsible for the gradual degradation of English as a whole - because it encourages inhomogeneity in the use of both forms.
By the way most of the design methodolgies I have been taught at uni - when it comes to computer (software) systems design - deal with design systems that use graphical methods with direct dependence on english language interpretations and uses. Has anyone seen any design methodologies that aren't actually in english ?
Sure, plenty of less-developed countries have English as one of, if not the only, "official" language.
Does that mean that all or even a majority of the native population speaks it at all, let alone as a first language? Absolutely not!
(I wish I could find my sociolinguistics class notes *sigh*)
I do remember that in at least one case, English was designated the "official" language to keep a war from breaking out between speakers of the two main languages actually in use in the country in question.
The official language of Haiti is French. Do most Haitians speak standard French? No. Most Haitians speak a local creole that speakers of standard French would find difficult to comprehend.
Of course, given that these people don't generally have Internet access, they may not be seen as relevant to the discussion. I'm just pointing out that they exist in large numbers.
:)
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
Are there any language majors out there? I am wondering how old English really is. Is it a new language created out from the mass migrations of more modern times? Why do people hate or resist english so much? Is it because it is the language Americans speak, and bastardise in so many instances with their 'sodi pap' and 'uh-huh' (sorry that came from Upper Michigan)? I skimmed over the article but I'd like to see some discussion on the subject. I am interested in what /.'s think.
illenium.net - ultimate sk8 shop online
Esperanto actually contains a great deal of ambiguity and obscurity. See Why Esperanto is not my favourite Artificial Language , Learn Not To Speak Esperanto! , a Wired article on the subject , Lango , and The Problem of an International Auxiliary Language and its Solution in Ido for more information.
I do agree with your point that language is dynamic, ever-changing and organic. I suppose if enough people continue to misuse this phrase it will enter the general lexicon and the transformation/bastardization will then be more formally recognized. But this hasn't happened yet, so for now it's simply wrong to apply the term this way.
I'm done nitpicking, I am surprised at myself for being so pedantic, and I apologize if I've annoyed or offended you. People who confuse it's with its and they're with their deserve this kind of response, not someone who has used a term in an understandable, if technically incorrect, way, and who obviously has a firm command of the language.
Cheers.
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
I use Dejanews a good bit (yes, I have a saved copy of the classic search form), and every time
I do a search, there's usually fair fraction of
posts in foreign languages (even if you set it to
only search English results).
Most commonly, I see taiwan-chinese (the tw. newsgroups, a lot of which seem to be relayed from BBSes), Russian (from the fido7 domain), along with German (lots of linux posts, de. newsgroups), italian (it. newsgroups), Dutch (nl. newgroups), some Norwegian and Finnish (no. and sfnet. respectively).
Oddly, the "major" non-english languages are poorly represented. I see relativly little Spanish or French. Most of the Asian language posts seem to come from Taiwan.
Two major reasons:
1. Distance from concentrations of foreign language speakers. Since I live in New York, it would be fairly easy for me to drive to Quebec, but that's about it in terms of going someplace where the signs are all in another language (not counting the local alphabet-soup neighborhood). Contrast this with the much shorter distances between European countries.
2. Americans are damned arrogant and think the world should learn English to accommodate us, but we shouldn't need to do likewise. This is nothing new -- my mother was an exchange student in Belgium about 30 years ago when some of the other American students she traveled with walked into a post office and started loudly berating the man behind the counter because nobody there spoke English. Never mind that English isn't one of the two official languages of the country.
Rude. Very rude and arrogant. And the Internet seems to be making it worse, unfortunately.
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today