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EU Leader Says English Is Losing Importance (politico.eu)
An anonymous reader writes: Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, opted to deliver a speech in French on Friday morning because he said "English is losing importance" in Europe. He gave the comments, which are unlikely to mend fences after a war of words between Brussels and London over Brexit negotiations, at the "State of the Union" conference in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio -- an annual event for European dignitaries. Juncker said he was opting for French because "slowly but surely English is losing importance in Europe and France has elections this Sunday and I want the French people to understand what I am saying about the importance of the EU." He spoke in English.
Of course someone who speaks French thinks English is "losing importance." They've been asserting that for decades now, because they are delusional. Anybody who ever has needed to deal with software written in France by French companies knows just how arrogant they are about speaking and writing French and only French, even if it means inconveniencing literally everyone else around them.
english is waning...you go right ahead and believe that
nothing to see here - move along
What people may not be aware of, is that computer languages, especially HTML and JavaScript will require people who want to enter the IT field to know at least elementary English. The keywords in HTML tags recognized by all browsers around the word are in English, as is the JavaScript language. While there are some interpreters of compiled languages like C++ in other languages (Chinese for C++ examples exists) the more popular languages have English keyword bases. (see like of non-English based computer languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
since this is the case, any country wanting "in" on the booming IT industry will have to know some basic English. The English speaking community got the core computer programming/formatting languages out first and as usual, first to publish will have more control it long term.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Head of the Corner Burger Stand announces "McDonalds is losing importance."
How many Chinese speak English compared with Français?
How many Indians speak English compared with Français?
How many Japanese speak English compared with Français?
C’est un homme stupide
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
Each new day yields another affirmation of the wisdom of UK deplorables.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
English is important, but if a language replaces it as a common tongue, it likely won't be a European language. If it shifts, it will be Mandarin/Cantonese, or Arabic. Maybe even Russian.
If not English, Spanish would be the more logical choice, imho.
Mandarin/Cantonese and Arabic are complicated languages which are wholly unsuited to keyboards.
And Russian... why in the world would we want to speak Russian?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Exactly. The "Big Two" European languages are German and French, and Poles, Swedes, Czechs, etc are going to learn German before French...
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
EU Leader is Butthurt
Well to be fair, England leaving the EU does indeed make English less important in the EU.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
For the cyka blyat!
Qu'est-ce que tu as pu dire à propos de moi, petite chienne?
Que dice el artículo?
Funny, I was just thinking the EU was losing importance...
This guy must be an idiot. The only language that is spoken by a roughly equivalent number of people in the world is Mandarin Chinese. Unless Junker intends to push for people switching to Mandarin, he should probably just sit down and stop making an ass of himself.
Its a good thing when there are fewer barriers to communication in the world. English for the most part, won on the global stage as the cross-over language. Short of another World War, I see little likelihood of this ever changing, especially when considering its embedded adoption in the technology sector.
Gewesen da, getan das. Scheiße war Bargeld.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
A petty if not justifiable or desperate move from EU.
It's basically on the brink of collapse, and that's not exactly a good thing. If France elects Marine Le Pen and goes for Frexit, EU is basically over. I didn't think they'd make it this obvious, but of course the only move EU has right now is to the ego of the richest countries left.
So, if he want to talk about importance, he should speak in German.
Espronto.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Don't know if this is true, but it's a damn good story:
At a NATO military conference, the French admiral was complaining, "Why do we have to speak English at all of these events?"
The Dutch admiral replied, "Because the British, Canadians, and Americans made sure we don't have to speak German."
He probably doesn't realize that all the French voter rolls are processed and the data input by Bulgarians who don't speak French.
Without using English, they wouldn't even be able to have their ballots printed.
All their government documents have to be translated into all the dozens of EU languages... by the same people. And those people only speak Bulgarian, English, and German. Very few people in the world want to learn French, and that includes people who translate French documents all day! It also includes French people, who often write the originals in English.
Considering French labor laws, there is no way that France would be able to afford to hire French people to do that sort of work.
It is true that if you visit France and appear to be a native English speaker, lots of people will pretend they don't speak it. Just practice asking, "Do you speak Russian?" first and then they'll answer you in English.
Without English, the EU wouldn't even work. If the French really think English is on the decline, they should be studying German because that would be the next choice for a "glue language" in Europe.
English is a bastard language. look at common spellings of words that are pronounced differently (tough, bough) etc etc, rules with exceptions, words that sound the same but are different (there, their)
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
When he realises English is the lingua franca in Europe I shall experience great schadenfreude.
lingua franca
Probably a Frankish language, or maybe even French?
He said that English is losing its importance and then gave his speech in French? That sounds like a Monty Python joke.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Once the UK leaves, English will be the mother tongue of less than 1% of the EU. It's the Brexiters who are doing the bashing to their own language by reducing its relevancy.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
What gives you the idea that criticizing Mandarin and ignoring Russian means that I'm defending English?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I have a lot of French and Russian friends that i've made during my travels. One thing that i've noticed between them is a sort of mild cultural annoyance that their language isn't as dominant like English or even to an extent Spanish.
The UK was an EU anchor tenant. No amount of EU sour grapes will change that fact. Even without them, everyone will still be wanting to speak English.
He's not right yet
If you mean Esperanto, then yes. It would be a better choice than French for ease of learning, especially when it comes to pronunciation.
Very few people in the world want to learn French, and that includes people who translate French documents all day! It also includes French people, who often write the originals in English.
Citation needed [even an anecdote would do]. Everybody wants to learn French [except for the Americans, of course].
Good time to remember that French used to be the official language in England, whose first Official English document was issued around 1350.
So you're saying a Frenchman said English is losing importance?
Sounds like typical butthurt Frenchie behavior to me.
Disclaimer: I was born and brought up French. I think the language wars are fucking stupid and hate it when French people walk into a restaurant, making a scene at the fact the waiter doesn't speak perfect fucking French (add emphasis on the "fucking").
Fucking get over it!
I tend to rant.
Yes, interesting. What makes you think he did? According to all news reports I have been able to find, he spoke French.
I may have been mistaken. I may have read this quote and misapplied "The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said he would deliver his speech in English. “ If incorrect thanks for pointing that out.
The EU head honcho says English is losing importance after the UK leaves the EU.
It's left as an exercise to the reader to determine whether this message is backed by
a) reality
b) politics
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
English will be an important language for the next couple hundred years. Chinese recently became an important language to know (within the last 30 years). What English (as a language) is losing isn't important, but dominance. Twenty years ago, you would have heard that EVERYONE should learn English because it's the global language of business. Today, economics has changed and now you can be part of the global market while not knowing English. Moreover, with the (marginally) dominant nationalist/isolationist politics of Britain and America, globally minded countries will look to other countries (and thus their languages) for partnerships... but English will still be important.
Junker is generally regarded increasingly as a clown. Even with people who are actually pro-EU (like myself).
The sooner this bozo goes the better.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Only because English is an official language of only one EU country + a few micro nations.
But in terms of proficiency of language English is more widely understood throughout Europe than German and French combined. So regardless of what's official, English is by far the most important.
While you're right about which will learn German over French, it does gloss over the fact that of all the countries you listed English is by far the dominant, again even when you combine German and French.
The article says he will deliver the speech in English because it's important that the UK understands. It's not like most Brits can understand more than one language, not even Cockney.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
He should have said "Obviously I want to be understood by the French, but it is equally important than I am understood by the rest of the world."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For one, English is still the language of the United States who is still and exceedingly important trade and military partner with most of the world. That alone makes English pretty important. Likewise while the UK may be leaving the EU, they'll still be trading with the EU, nothing really changes there.
However the real importance of English comes not from the nations where it is the primary language, but all the nations where it isn't. The reason is that while English is only the 3rd or 4th most spoken first language it is, by a mile, the most spoken second language in the world. When people from different nations get together to do business, English is generally the language they use. Chinese is not widely spoken in Japan and Japanese is sure as hell not popular in China, but English is a common second language in both and so usually used when companies from the two nations do business.
In the EU it is even more important as there are a ton of primary languages. If you wanted to do business in the native language of all EU nations you'd need to speak Dutch, French, German (a couple variants thereof), Danish, Irish, Greek, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Hungarian, Greek, Turkish, Czech, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovak, Slovene, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Croatian. While you can find people with that kind of language skill, they are very rare and very sought after. Getting one for your firm is unlikely... However English is a popular second language in all those places, so you can do business in that. You can have people from Germany, Croatia, Greece, and Spain all at a table and English is a language they can probably all use whereas the likelihood that they all speak each other's native tongue is pretty low.
English has become the language of common exchange, and nothing seems to be changing that. Should another language take over for that, French is not likely to be it, much though the French may wish it was.
Language complexity has nothing to do with its dominance. If say Chinese or Russians become dominant in business, military, science, I can assure, you everybody will start learning Chinese or Russian
Of course he did. He was addressing the English speaking people at the time and telling them exactly why it is so important right now (on the eve of an election in France that will decide the fate of the EU in a literal sense) that he speaks French.
Today English is the most spoken language. But in terms of the future of the EU it is by far not the most important.
Sunday after the election one hopes that this will change again.
The keywords are irrelevant. It's simple enough to write a keyword translator. I wrote one that translated BASIC from a custom set of french keywords to English way back in the mid-80s for a friend. If you can't write a translator, or even just a series of macros or a regex or a perl script to do the job, you need to realize TIMTOWTDI.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The joke runs even deeper.
Every EU member state could nominate its "official" language when it joined. Of course, various countries nominated their most common language. France chose French, Germany German, Spain Spanish, you get the idea.
Ireland picked Irish because there was no reason to choose English with England already covering this. Malta chose Maltese because there was no reason to choose English because... yes.
Now, with England leaving, English will no longer be an official language of the EU. Yes, I'm not kidding. NO other member state named English an official language. Funny enough, a fair lot of representatives of various countries speak their own language and English, only. And a fair number of interpreters and translators, while required to speak more than just two languages, will have a hard time interpreting/translating when you can't use English as an intermediate anymore.
And while it is likely that this will at least be solvable by throwing more money at interpreters (it might be a bit tough finding someone with rare combos like Polish-Spanish), it doesn't solve another problem: With most delegates only really speaking their own language and English, in the near future, most talks between delegates will be held in a language that is officially not even spoken in the EU anymore. That alone makes the Brexit hilarious.
That and the fact that quite a few Irish delegates will soon no longer be able of even choosing a language from the interpreters that they can understand reasonably well.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Mother tongue huh? Well, my mother tongue is german, and I feel like 90% of germans around me, including myself, speak english most of the time. Even at the bar, because there is usually someone from the UK, who doesn't speak german quite as good, hanging out with us. Frankly, you're being ridiculous.
Over 50% of people in the EU will still understand English to a competent level because it is the language of international business and taught in many schools. It is true, statistically, almost no one will be speaking English as their native language once the UK leaves (although a decent % of Ireland speak English in their homes).
English will still be the most understood language in the EU even if not the native tongue.
German will be the most common native tongue in EU (as it already is).
French is only really important to France, parts of Belgium, and the parts of the world they once occupied.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Yes, interesting. What makes you think he did? According to all news reports I have been able to find, he spoke French.
I may have been mistaken. I may have read this quote and misapplied "The EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said he would deliver his speech in English. “ If incorrect thanks for pointing that out.
He explained why he was speaking in French, in English.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
English speaks for itself.
See title (written in English and understood throughout EU).
Arabic will soon be the official language of Europe.
If you read the article, he spoke in English because he wanted the English to understand him, and it's not like the majority of the UK speak ANY second language.
How do you expect to have an effective negotiating team when the people on the opposite side of the table can understand everything you say, but also have private conversations right in front of your face because you don't know any second language? Make fun of you with a straight face? Say that the only difference between you and a bucket of shit is the bucket? Debate strategy in private without leaving the room or whispering amongst themselves? Call you a dumb f*ck to your face?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
And now ponder how much you have to suck as a nation when other nations would rather willingly learn the language of a country that invaded and enslaved them not even a century ago than yours.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To be a business language people have to be able to learn it as adults, and be able to identify documents using just a phrase book.
The written form has to be based on the Latin alphabet. The reason is simple; lots of languages already use it. So there is broad familiarity with the concept of having a phonetic encoding system using approximately these same letters. No other writing system has that.
Russian is not viable in a post-Soviet world. It is laughable.
Chinese or Arabic-speaking people can look up phrases in a Latin alphabet using a phrase book. And nobody else is going to easily use theirs. So it is not even viable. It is not even 1% chance. Plus, other reasons.
is that once the UK leaves, English will no longer be an official language of any UE member country. Ireland declared Irish and Malta declared Maltese as their official language for EU purposes, even if their people speak mostly English.
If he were doing this to address Frexit, he wouldn't have spoken in English. His real target was the UK, which seems to think that they will get a better deal outside the EU than they have inside.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
They can chose language that has the smallest number of speakers in EU.
I really wish this were true, but it's just so far from reality. Political grandstanding of the worst order. As someone who speaks the broken English of a U.S. American, I think it is a terrible language and absolutely should not be the "universal" language of the world. It's just bad. Not particularly expressive, difficult for newcomers to learn, ridiculous, inconsistent grammar rules, etc. It is my hope that continued advances in machine translation will allow people to revert to using their own languages even more. Universal translators will one day be a thing. But today is not that day.
They don't have the population to take over the world, and if they blow up the world I still don't have to speak Russian!
...if the political leaders of this world are wondering why people are taking their stupid claims less seriously and turning toward other sources (ie the rise of "fake news")?
THIS would be the reason.
A major, possibly THE major political leader of the EU making a blanket, provably false statement.
Yet I expect Mr Tusk would also assert that because of his penchant for use of falsehoods, Mr Trump is "stupid".
What's "hypocrisy" in French, Mr Tusk?
-Styopa
French-Canadians as well.
I remember watching a Brian Mulroney press conference years ago (yes I'm old). One reporter asked a question in English, which Mulroney answered. After he finished another reporter asked pretty much the identical question - but in French! So Mulroney basically gave the same answer again.
This cycle happened three or four times during that press conference. It wasn't every question... but it was enough to be noticeable and quite silly.
#DeleteChrome
German is growing in importance in the east of Europe, mostly because lots of people from there want to work in Germany or Austria (where they also speak German). It's not only closer than France, Germans and (even more so) Austrians are still popular with their eastern neighbors, despite the more recent history. Germany gets lots of workers from Poland, Austria has many people from Hungary and now increasingly Romania going there to work. These people learn German, not English or French.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Plus the set of keywords is small and easy to learn anyway. The keywords used in programming languages are English words and they kind of have a similar meaning but really they're not all that natural to native English speakers. If they were, we could all start writing webapps as soon as we graduated kindergarten. No what I expect to start seeing is programs using English keywords and UTF8 variables names but the comments all being in native languages. The English-only speakers will be at a slight disadvantage.
The guy is from Luxembourg, not France.
What people may not be aware of, is that computer languages, especially HTML and JavaScript will require people who want to enter the IT field to know at least elementary English. The keywords in HTML tags recognized by all browsers around the word are in English, as is the JavaScript language. While there are some interpreters of compiled languages like C++ in other languages (Chinese for C++ examples exists) the more popular languages have English keyword bases. (see like of non-English based computer languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
since this is the case, any country wanting "in" on the booming IT industry will have to know some basic English. The English speaking community got the core computer programming/formatting languages out first and as usual, first to publish will have more control it long term.
Computer Languages are made up of keywords. There is a constant struggle to make programming more accessible by making computer languages more readable by adding syntactic sugar. However for a people who grew up writing a language where every symbol is not a letter but a keyword , computer languages are as readable as their natural language. I expect languages to come out which use Chinese characters for Keywords.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Juncker is not French, he's from Luxembourg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is demonstrable. Juncker's opinion is only an opinion, and a petulant one at that.
Bwahahahahaha, no.
You're mistaken. Counties are allowed multiple official languages. Ireland and Malta have English as one of theirs, so the eu will be obligated to keep English not just for reasons of practicality.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It's literally everywhere, including The New York Times. Please tell us how you have better sense of news than those guys.
You must be from France, because you're taking serious offense going through every comment in this thread mentioning this guy being from France, and specifying he's from Luxembourg. Not like there's any real difference between the two...
I tend to rant.
French is a dying language, spoken only in the former African and Southeast Asian countries, and a dying empire. Soon it will just be a stupid accent, which is too bad, I like Maurice Chevalier
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
On the world scale, the francophonie has more than 50 full members (84 if you include observers), even excluding the Central African Republic and Thailand (human rights violations).
Those countries comprise a billion people. Those "parts of the world they once occupied" are hardly insignificant.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
no, I'm not...
a lot of them don't even understand their native english either as their lack of ability to comprehend facts attests hence brexit
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If you're explaining, you're losing.
Ronald Reagan
The EU have been considering have the exit negotiations in french
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
It's not like every question on stackoverflow is unique. There are plenty of sites in other languages with plenty of code snippets. The official french PHP documentation, also available in 9 other languages. You can find french versions for most programming languages, including c++ and java, just by searching $PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE_OF_CHOICE examplaires . Or you can substitute the word "examplaires" for the the translation of the term "example" in the written language of your choice.
atoi()? Whatever your little heart and your imagination desires. For example, overload entier() to take strings in a header, and then a simple text substitution of atoi() to entier(). Or if you like conciseness, ent. 25% fewer letters than atoi.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Yes but you had to WRITE the translator first. The base language wasn't changed, you just added a translator to it.If you have to read source code, you are helpless without the tools, or knowing basic English. That is how people get locked into platforms. In any even the world standard is pretty much established. Translators solidify that if anything.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
On the world scale, the francophonie has more than 50 full members (84 if you include observers), even excluding the Central African Republic and Thailand (human rights violations).
Those countries comprise a billion people. Those "parts of the world they once occupied" are hardly insignificant.
From a worldwide perspective outside those areas they are. Most of the French speaking countries outside Europe are impoverished and not very well connected globally. That might change in the future, but there isn't really anywhere near as much reason to learn French as an outsider than there is English.
It could all be down to 19th century policies. The British knew their territories were too widespread to try to hold on to forever purely using military domineering, and so tried to make their presence at least partially tolerated by maintaining trade and cooperation. (not that Britain didn't do so terrible unspeakable acts- and conquering land in the first place could be considered impolite).
France, and Belgium showed little concern for the countries they occupied and were more brutal in their rape of those countries. They tried to make their territories too scared to rebel. The result is today, those countries are still recovering and relative backwaters.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm sensing a trend and preference to French here. Personal opinions are fine, but there is the basic fact that the methods are still in English and being objective. manuals are all nice, and the open source community has made great efforts to help there. But as long as the methods and core keywords of accept languages are English, you have to learn a little English. look, I've worked abroad in a couple places teaching ESL for awhile. And French is hardly the best example as there are many words that are similar to English or near cognates you can utilize there, but that is an isolated method. What about, say a language completely incompatible with romance languages. Say, Chinese. (I'd say Japanese but English has been integrated into a lot of common phrases in Japanese since WWII to the point an someone with no Japanese can pick out a few things accurately). The Chinese language is totally alien to English but a Chinese programmer is forced to learn many verbs and object names to program. A translator is likely to get it totally wrong as there are cultural elements to language as well. True Language is not just "grammar-translation" method which is abysmal for teaching communication anyway. It's true that programming keywords won't make someone fluent, but "Hello Word" examples has certainly gotten that basic meaning across. If you can apply your simple word translation in a meaningful way to languages like Chinese, Egyptian, or Swahili, koodos to you. Using the grammar-translation approach to getting keywords in an incompatible language makes it harder to program as you get an incorrect meaning of what it actually means. Sorry if English being important because of the tools is distasteful to you. I've thought about it for years. Bottom line, we have to accept something. And English was there first.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
English is a bastard language. look at common spellings of words that are pronounced differently (tough, bough) etc etc, rules with exceptions, words that sound the same but are different (there, their)
If that is your criteria for a "bastard" language, don't ever try to learn Chinese. There are hundreds of homophones (words that sound the same but have totally different meanings) and the writing is not related at all to the pronunciation (being a logosyllabic writing scheme)...
On the other hand if you combine all English and Chinese fluent (and semi-fluent) people in world they probably out number all other languages and the fact that millions of children successfully learn both languages all the time, it might be fair to ask what problem (if any) there might be with a
"bastard" language. French is after all kind of a "bastard" Celtic-Latin language...
+ Hebrew (Israel)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Let's look at The Numbers:
Number of native English speakers: 500 million
Number of native French speakers: 80 million
Number of 2nd language English speakers: 510B
Number of 2nd language French speakers: 192M
Chinese or Arabic-speaking people can look up phrases in a Latin alphabet using a phrase book. And nobody else is going to easily use theirs. So it is not even viable. It is not even 1% chance. Plus, other reasons.
Given the current trends in technology "phrase-books" are going the way of books (niche applications only). Even today, they have photo-translators (free apps available on Android anyhow, don't know about iOS) and they are only going to get better over time. Universal translators (good enough for identifying documents and traveling) are probably going to become ubiquitous in a few years.
Once the UK leaves, English will be the mother tongue of less than 1% of the EU. It's the Brexiters who are doing the bashing to their own language by reducing its relevancy.
Last summer my wife and I toured the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Slovakia, and Hungary. We encountered language barrier issues exactly zero times. Everybody we met - hotel staff, merchants, even random people in the street when we needed directions - understood and spoke English more than adequately for the purpose. Also true to a slightly lesser extent when we visited Amsterdam a few years back. I suspect tourism drives this as much as any other factor. We met a group of people travelling together who were from Sweden, and they spoke English so fluently and accent-free that I was shocked to learn where they were from (I had been guessing Canada).
Maybe you don't know it, but you're using a translater that someone else wrote for every single program that you write, whether translated at compile time or run time, unless you're punching in hex codes into ram. So what's your point. It only takes ONE person to write the language. Or to take the language compiler or runtime source code and change the keywords to keywords of their choice, and distribute the new compiler or runtime interpreter, in which case the extra translation stage is skipped, and there's no worry about clashes between the old and new keywords.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The highest population growth is occurring in many of those countries. Population pressure plus environmental degradation are going to lead to mass migrations and wars that will, either directly or indirectly, affect everyone who isn't part of the 0.1%.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It seems like Esperanto should be everyone's 2nd language, simply because it's so easy to learn yet seems ~"complete", and more importantly, has been shown to make learning other languages easier to the point that overall you learn, say, more French if you learn Esperanto first, than if one spent the entire time studying French. So learn whatever you would have learned as a 2nd language, for the 3rd, and you saved time and got farther, overall (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Third-language_acquisition). And it seems to me the easiest way for someone to better understand the grammar of their own native language, by seeing a simple & clean example.
I don't think aficionados usually see it as a replacement for a first (or native) language, though that has been done intentionally by some (per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., or search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... for "native").
Then there's the side benefit of being by far the cheapest effective global route to everyone being able to talk to and understand each other, even if haltingly. For some people, learning English is simply too hard. For the rest, it's still a very big effort, and Esperanto is extremely easy by comparison. In terms of global cost/benefit, Esperanto seems like a big win. And it's fun!
An excellent, persuasive explanation from Claude Piron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(PS: There are other interesting constructed languages each with their pros & cons, but none with nearly the same amount of traction or interest as Esperanto. It's interesting to consider, given all that has been learned in the field so far, how to "optimize" a constructed human language, considering various factors like ease, familiarity, beauty, efficiency, computability, or whatever one sees as most important. Also, feel free to point me to how link text should be covered with a url when posting.)
A Free, fast personal organizer for touch typists: onemodel
The real problem with your argument is that new computer languages arise all the time. Even now...
When Ruby first came out I couldn't even decide whether I was interested because everything was only in Japanese, and it's still true than many libraries are first released with only Japanese documentation, and the English follows later...sometimes over a year later.
The current generation of languages clearly favors English speakers, but it's not like the Air-Traffic controllers, there's no real need for new languages to be internationally intelligible.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Methods don't have to be in English. Take the compiler or runtime source code and you can make all the keywords in any arbitrary language. And no, a properly made code translator does not get it wrong. I've done it.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Poverty and population growth unfortunately almost always go hand-in-hand. I have seen predictions about French overtaking English globally as a first language in the coming century. I don't think that will push French into being the world's dominant language though. If as you say, there are mass migrations from those poor population growth areas, it's usually the people migrating to learn the new language.
The only way there is going to be more pressure for people to learn French as a foreign language is if those French speaking countries get out of poverty and become financially important players on a global stage.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
It is true that if you visit France and appear to be a native English speaker, lots of people will pretend they don't speak it.
In Paris, maybe-- at least, that's the stereotype.
Get outside of Paris, though, and the French people are quite friendly and will be happy to speak with you in your bad French or in their pretty-good English or in whatever other language you both have in common.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"English losing importance," says man in member state of a multinational alliance that relies on the United States to keep its defense costs at rock bottom.
People who don't speak primarily English, often learn English because of tourism, trade and travel.
But sure, if you plan to not engage in the larger world economy, stick to whatever language your corner of the world speaks and bloviate about how Brexit is racist and nationalist.
Work Safe Porn
He has pulled that butthurt stunt before. Because he thinks that with the "brexit", the only country who speaks English are leaving.
He certainly going to alienate a lot more.
There's a lot of us who don't understand German or French and if they again threaten to drop English, there's a lot of us who won't be able to understand what the leaders of our country are saying.
It would be yet another nail in the EUs coffin, and even though I like the concept of the EU as it was originally sold. I don't want what we have now or where it's going. We where specifically told that it would NOT be the United States of Europe but a trade union.
But let them speak French, I will welcome that so that we can get rid of the EU.
How was Mandrake Linux, when it was around?
FWIW Luxembourg was, culturally and historically, part of the Holy Roman Empire. Huge difference.
At the top of your link: "all such lists should be used with caution." :-)
12% of the Eu's 510 million people have French as their mother tongue. That's over 60 million. Throw in 7 million in Canada, most who speak Quebec French (a variant of French, same as English Quebecers speak Quebec English and there are various variants of English in the UK). Hait has 10 million people, with mother tongue divided between "French" French and Haitian Creole (a local variant of French). We're already just 3 million under your 80 million native speakers.
Are you seriously going to maintain that the other 50+ countries of the francofonie have a total population of only 3 million people whose mother tongue is French?
The figure is full of shit.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Maybe. But if the EU continues its open doors policies w/ the Mohammedan world much longer, it won't be English against whom they'll be preserving their precious languages. They'll run the risk of being supplanted by Arabic, Turkish and Urdu.
Question is: will the French be as valiant in defending their language from being supplanted by Arabic, in the same way that they are vis a vis English? The Moors would be a lot more virulently anti French than the English ever were, even during the 100 years war.
If Esperanto was easy to learn to pronounce. Then why do all the Esperanto snobs complain about William Shatner in the movie "Incubus"?
I haven't seen the movie, but I suspect that has more to do with Shatner than with Esperanto.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
English is the only important language... you go right ahead and believe that
Okay, as someone who worked in Si Valley in the last decade - and I see no reason for that to have changed - the main languages that matter alongside English in the industry were/are Mandarin (maybe some Cantonese), Korean (to satisfy the hordes of Samsung, LG & Hynix), and Japanese. Oh, and Russian too, since Moscow is a major tech center, and Russian is the 2nd language in Israel
Anybody who thinks that languages like French, Arabic or German are anywhere near as relevant is fooling themselves. Spanish & Portuguese are there, for the Latin American market.
And yet if you weren't around, they wouldn't have been speaking English, would they? It's quite common for a group of people whose native language is $PICK_A_LANGUAGE to switch to English as soon as a single English-speaking person shows up. They aren't doing it to communicate with each other better - they're doing it because a hell of a lot of people whose first language is English simply cannot be arsed to learn a second language, or simply have passed the stage where they CAN learn a second language with any sort of proficiency.
It's a shame, because being able to communicate in two or more languages helps protect against the ravages of Alzheimers
Bilingual people with Alzheimer's outperformed single-language speakers in short- and long-term memory tasks, even though scans showed more severe deterioration in brain metabolism among the bilingual participants, the scientists said.
The ability to speak two languages appears to provide the brain with more resilience to withstand damage from Alzheimer's, said lead researcher Dr. Daniela Perani, a professor of psychology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan.
The more often a person swapped between two languages during their lifetime, the more capable their brains became of switching to alternate pathways that maintained thinking skills even as Alzheimer's damage accumulated, the researchers found.
Previous studies have shown that lifelong bilingualism can delay the onset of dementia by as much as five years, Perani said. However, no one has yet examined what causes that effect in the brain.
The bilingual people dramatically outscored monolingual speakers on memory tests, scoring three to eight times higher, on average.
Bilingual people achieved these scores even though scans of their brains revealed more signs of cerebral hypometabolism—a characteristic of Alzheimer's in which the brain becomes less efficient at converting glucose into energy.
The brain scans also provided a clue why this might be. People who were bilingual appeared to have better functional connectivity in frontal brain regions, which allowed them to maintain better thinking despite their Alzheimer's, Perani said.
Constantly using two languages appears to make the brain work harder. During a lifetime this causes structural changes to the brain, creating a "neural reserve" that renders the bilingual brain more resistant against aging, Perani said.
Bilingualism also sets up a person for better "neural compensation," in which the brain copes with its own degeneration and loss of neurons by finding alternative pathways through which to function, she said.
Maybe the decreased brain capabilities of unilingual people is a factor contributing to both Brexit and Trumpism? Certainly when people can communicate outside their local linguistic community they have more opportunities to be exposed to new ideas. Plus imagine the money that can be saved by delaying Alzheimers, if you need a financial incentive?
Like taking kids to cancer wards to discourage their smoking, maybe we can take them to old age homes to show the benefits of a second language. Old age homes are depressing enough - we should be doing what we can to delay entry just out of kindness.
Maybe it's time to bring back foreign language training as part of the core curriculum in both countries?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It is true that if you visit France and appear to be a native English speaker, lots of people will pretend they don't speak it. Just practice asking, "Do you speak Russian?" first and then they'll answer you in English.
Many decades ago there was a US TV show called Candid Camera that taped people's reactions to impossible/uncomfortable situations using a hidden camera. One episode featured a young woman with a VERY heavy suitcase seeking help in handling it in Paris. The woman was a native Parisian. The passersby she stopped pretended not to understand her French.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
This is for TV (and radio). This way they can cut the answer in the language of their TV channel. Sometimes the question get asked by a French-speaking journalist first and the same question will be repeated in English.
Nothing controversial, or even surprising here.
Haitian Creole (a local variant of French).
Hatian Creole is not mutually intelligible with French.
In West Africa, many people speak French, but few of them speak it as their mother tongue.
Russian writing is a lot more phonetic than English. Rules are a lot more logical, to the point you actually have a chance to pronounce a word properly based only on how it's written without knowing it. While English is full of silly rules like 'i' for some reason reading like 'ay' in some context and like 'i' in others.
And yet if you weren't around, they wouldn't have been speaking English, would they?
That is what we call "an assumption", and it has the additional attribute of being entirely unrelated to the question of whether English is losing importance. I have no idea what they would have been speaking if I wasn't there, and neither do you; maybe they prefer Klingon. I can tell you, though, that the folks from Sweden I mentioned were speaking English among themselves before we introduced ourselves to them; if they'd been conversing in Swedish (or Klingon), we wouldn't have participated.
As for my personal language skills, I am able to limp along in Spanish. Unfortunately, not a language of much use in the countries I mentioned. But your snippet on the benefits of bilingualism makes me wonder if there's a similar benefit associated with being conversant in multiple programming languages.
For real, just look at Eurovision ... _everyone_ talks in English except the French tard who gets called for the numbers.
As far as translating English into local languages, I agree. I doubt many local languages will ever provide large enough data sets for translation from those languages to be any good.
It was in `98 I tried to speak to a Chinese student on the bus and she smiled and bowed a couple times speaking Chinese and then pulled out a phone-sized computer and started speaking into it, and the computer explained that she didn't speak English but had a translator device. It worked pretty well. We have lots of students that don't speak English. But only from China. Nobody else has advanced enough language support to get away with it, even now.
Under narrow enough preconditions I'm sure it is even true.
I can't speak for Arabic, but Mandarin is fairly easy to type with modern input methods. You can even draw it onto your touchscreen (or onto your trackpad) if you're hardcore.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
But in terms of the future of the EU [English] is by far not the most important.
Why?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Would you say that people who want to enter the music field need to know at least elementary Italian?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
If those French-speaking countries get out of poverty and become financially important players, they're going to have a lot of English speakers. Dominant languages have momentum.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It is irrelevant what their mother tongue is, it matters what common language all the parties in the conversation speak.
When I visited Germany it was quite common to find people that spoke English. I spoke no German but I had a translation booklet. I know some Spanish but found no use for it. When in the vicinity of a major airport the signs had both German and English, because English is the mandated language for international pilots. Most everyone around the American military bases spoke English well enough to do business, there were even English language radio and TV stations. Even the French guy at the wine shop in Germany spoke English, which might have had something to do with its vicinity to the EU central bank in Frankfurt.
OPEC member nations use English as its official language, even though none of the member nations have it as their "mother tongue".
International banking is done in English. International air travel is in English. International oil trade is in English. English is the closest thing we have to a universal language right now. If some EU snob thinks that the "brexit" is going to diminish the importance of the English language in international trade then he's going to find himself getting corrected quickly. The UK may be leaving the EU but that does not mean that trade to the UK stops. Trade with other English speaking nations also continues.
When I visited my Army buddy in Germany I made a conscious effort to not look "American" since I knew Americans are often targets for violence and pickpockets. I did not wear any blue jeans, only khaki style slacks. I wore Doc Marten boots. The coat I wore was an Australian/Western style duster. I guess it worked because when in the airport security line to head back home I was in line behind a British family, which I thought might lead the people to at least ask what language I spoke when it came to my turn. The lady with the metal detector started to talk to me in German. When I replied in English she said, "Oh, you're English!" Yep, I'm "English". I'm of German ancestry so this tall and thin guy, with (then) jet black hair, and snow white skin follows a group of Brits I guess I looked more German than English. They were shorter, rounder, with a hint of red to their brown hair and faint freckles on their skin. That was the most memorable moment of knowing I fit in, people generally seemed to assume I spoke German but more often than not they switched to English when I tried to speak German back.
Another memorable moment was going to a restaurant to sit and have a drink while walking with my friend. We were greeted by a rather curvacious waitress and shown a table. We ordered in broken German and paid for our drinks. When we wanted a second drink a rather flat chested waitress started to take our order but she ran off suddenly. We were confused for a minute until she returned with the buxom one which spoke to us in English. I was doubly pleased with this, I didn't have to try to speak German and I got another look at the pretty girl.
That was another thing that struck me. Even though I apparently looked "German" enough that people thought nothing of it until I looked confused when spoken to, they switched immediately to English. I thought that given the proximity to France and Italy that people might first try French or Italian, maybe even Spanish which I studied in high school and college and thought I might have to rely upon. Nope, English was their immediate fall back.
I recall seeing a recent video on the French election in which the commenter made the observation that while the video was in English he knew it might get a lot of views in France since 40% of the people in France spoke English. So, I suspect even the French in Germany speak English. In every EU nation at least 20% of the population speak English, perhaps not as their "mother tongue" but they do speak it. A quick Wikipedia search tells me that roughly half of the EU population speaks English.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The international technical conferences I go to in Europe and Asia are held in English. IETF RFCs are written in English. Internationally, pilots talk with air traffic control in English.
Even if the UK disappeared, English would still be relevant in the EU.
Let's be clear, Mandarin has 1.05 billion speakers. English has 1.01 million speakers. That is #1 and #2 worldwide.
French is way, way down the league tables, at 272 million speakers. Below Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, Malay, and Russian.
Over the next 20 years, French may gain another 20-30 million speakers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but English will gain similar numbers if not more from Nigeria and India.
Why? Because it's not "stdio.h" (standard input output), but "esstd.g" (entrée sortie standard). I thought that was self evident.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Those people don't need to learn English, they already learned it in school, and likely French, too.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Number of 2nd language English speakers: 510B
Number of 2nd language French speakers: 192M
Assuming the B stands for billions I'm sure many would like to know how far our galactic empire stretches. Realistically yeah I agree, if people speak a second language it's by far likely to be English.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Thailand is neither a member of the francophonie, nor was it ever colonized/occupied by European conquerors.
That is one reason why the Thai consider themselves so special.
While most Thai learn English, many speak several local languages and understand or even speak Mandarin.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Basically every 'arab' in France speaks French. What is your point?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
if there's a similar benefit associated with being conversant in multiple programming languages.
Of course it is.
However as most languages evolve into multiple paradigm languages (object oriented + functional + generic) and have higher level concepts in the libraries, this is less needed in our days (considering you are fluent in Java/Scala or C++).
Around 1995 I was on a talk in Frankfurt, Germany, by Bjarne Stroustoup.
His final words were something like:
"However everyone of us should learn more programming languages.
And natural languages, of course!"
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Why you believe that the Latin alphabet is easier for an outsider to learn than e.g. Sanskrit or Khmer or Arabic for you, is beyond me.
There are a few complicated alphabets, but if a 5 year old child of a camel herder, can learn the Arabic script in about a year, it says quite a lot about you that you believe you or any other adult westerner is less capable than a 5 year child.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
or simply have passed the stage where they CAN learn a second language with any sort of proficiency.
One of the greatest myths of second language acquisition... Personally I learnt my second language to native fluency as an adult, starting my studies at 18 years old. However I have also met previously monolingual people who have learnt that second language in their 50s and 60s and are perfectly fluent by any reasonable measure. There is no cut-off point for learning a language unless your mental state is deteriorating rapidly such as Alzheimer's or another debilitating illness.
Mother tongue huh? Well, my mother tongue is german, and I feel like 90% of germans around me, including myself, speak english most of the time. Even at the bar, because there is usually someone from the UK, who doesn't speak german quite as good, hanging out with us. Frankly, you're being ridiculous.
In Australia the local SBS TV channel sometimes broadcasts crime dramas from places like Sweden and Germany in the original language, and I've been surprised that when they have to interrogate someone from a different country they switch to English without extra comment or exposition.
I think Australia has one of the lowest percentages of people speaking a second language, but considering our geographical position, which one should we choose? Chinese might make sense, but due to its tonal nature of verbal speech and the foreign characters it's bloody hard to learn as an adult if you don't have a gift for languages.
Not like there's any real difference between the two...
Then I wonder: who is the bigger idiot, you or him?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"Not like there's any real difference between the two..."
You should get out more. Travel the world a bit.
Why?
When you want to speak to a group of nations it's best to speak in a language they can understand.
Over 50% of the population of Europe speak English.
Only 20% speak French.
One language grants you an audience of an additional 220 million people.
French is one of the official languages of Mali, which was once a French colony. There are numerous native languages with official status. English is NOT an official language.
However in Mali English is the common language for trade, business, and technology.
The same seems to be true for the other impoverished, post-french-colony nations.
English rulz.
So what? >50% of the population of India speaks Hindi. And the primary powers of their national government are native speakers. I'm not saying it's right that minorities there don't rise in power, I'm only pointing out facts and categorizing them as best as I can.
Not everyone in the United States speaks English natively, some don't speak it at all. There are people growing up speaking Spanish, French Creole, Swiss German, one of dozens of Tribal Languages, etc. But I hope we can agree that the people who operate the civilian government and military of the United States are speaking English every day.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Every child in China has learned at least a few years of English since the mid 1980s, putting it somewhere around 500 million people who at least understand it somewhat - in one country alone. Add in India, and you easily have over a billion people who are somewhat capable in English right there. What India and China does basically dictates how "worldwide percentages go" and since English is THE chosen second language for those countries - it will continue to dominate the rest of the world. No matter what the French (or francophiles) desire.
Try to get around India or China speaking just French or German. Then try it with just English. It's orders of magnitude easier in English - heck, even the road signs are in Mandarin and English!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
it is likely that this will at least be solvable by throwing more money at interpreters
Ah, about that. The EU has something of a funding crisis hitting in 2019.
Jean-Claude Juncker and the other eurocrats have proven to be so self-centered and closed to criticism about their inefficient monthly moving back and forth between Brussels and Strassbourg, their huge salaries, huge allowances and free pension schemes, expansion into former USSR and middle East territory, inability to make southern countries to behave themselves financially, turning the border control in a ferryman operation to make human traffickers rich, and much more, that the only way to change the EU is to step out of it, and start a New EU.
The UK is the first of the net-contributing countries, a few more and the EU goes bankrupt. The New (or North) EU will consist of the net-contributing old-EU countries.
This message is brought to you from the Netherlands.
He's also the man who, after a working dinner with the British Prime Minister called her "delusional" and "living in a different galaxy".
In public.
And whose staffers leaked extensively about this working dinner the day afterwards.
Yes, that Mr. Juncker. His words are definitely to be taken with a grain of salt.
More so after after a few glasses of wine and a copious meal.
Also true to a slightly lesser extent when we visited Amsterdam a few years back.
I call bullshit. I've never met a person in Holland who didn't speak English. ... embarrassingly enough. :-)
Hell many of them correct mine
Well Spanish is the next most spoken language
Well at least this horribly incorrect fact (Spanish is #5) is consistent with the rest of the wrongness of your post.
Not like there's any real difference between the two...
You must be from America. Specifically some of the dumb fuck parts of California where people can't even get through school.
Citation needed
http://google.com/
Briton who actually can be arsed to learn the local languages here.
As often as not, when locals learn where I'm from and break out into English, they are doing it to use me as practice, not because they feel sorry for me.
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
Who gives a toss what Drunker says?
Assuming the B stands for billions I'm sure many would like to know how far our galactic empire stretches.
ShanghaiBill didn't say human speakers. Perhaps you were unaware that mice speak English, as shown in documentaries such as Cinderella.
Plus the set of keywords is small and easy to learn anyway
Yes, and they have nothing to do with English grammar, or word inflections, or orthography (once you memorize that small set of keywords), or any of the other things that are important to learning English as a natural language.
The relevance of programming-language keywords to learning English is scarcely more the relevance of Greek letters in mathematical notation is to learning Greek.
Now, learning to read comments written in English in source code has some relevance to learning programming, since so much extant source has comments in English; and so some extent the same can be said for identifiers. But again there's a mighty gulf between having basic reading competency in a language and being able to speak or write it. I've had reading courses in French, but I never learned to speak it or even really understand any of the spoken language; and similarly the two years I had of Japanese made me much better at reading it than writing or speaking.
English has been the generally accepted international language for a very long time.
Does the world really need to stop and change this now?!
Are there not more pressing global issues at hand?!
Would someone please pull Mr Juncker's head out of the sand?!
Sounds to me more like a stab at flinging contempt at the UK for BrExit!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
No, I'm from Canada, and I was mindlessly ranting.
Glad it made your day though.
I tend to rant.
I'd love to visit Europe someday, but my list of places to visit start in much more remote locations. Seeing as I live in Canada, I don't actually need to leave the country for the most part. I'd rather die to a grizzly bear than some religiously fulled fanatics.
I tend to rant.
Out of the 4 people who bashed my head in for my out-of-line comment, yours was the most insightful. Thank you.
I might actually look into it, but for the record, my comment was 100% written with about 2 minutes of research time and rantMode set to true.
I tend to rant.
You'd be happy to learn that the risk of dying by grizzly in Canada is about as high as the risk of dying from a terrorist attack in Europe.
I live in the GTA and will fly with the whole family to Germany in the summer.
Not when they enter it, but after a while they have learned a number of Italian words. http://www.musictheory.org.uk/...
I don't think you understood my point.
Generally, I enjoy seclusion from the population.
I tend to rant.
Oh right, didn't read this properly. No much to worry about in European remote places (no bears anyhow, but wolfs are making a comeback).
Sarcasm?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Je ne comprends pas
You said English is "not the most important." But then you gave reasons that seem to support that English is the most important.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Timing and context is everything.
English wasn't important for the duration of the one speech that Junker directed at the population of France. As the French election is over, and as it's the most widely spoken language in Europe, it's important again.
got it
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."