In my experience, every langauge is broken into two dialectual parts:
1. The formal communications dialect
2. The bedroom + dinner table dialect
People who live in a european contry may notice that the formal dialect of their native langauge is dissapearing, and even, that many new concepts cannot be expressed in their native toung. But that doesn't mean that the bedroom + dinner table aspect of their langauge is going away. Germans don't have tummy aches, neither do Czechs. But both, "compile" their software and both preform a "git commit".
German speakers certainly use the word "kompilieren" which developed independently of the English "compile" a few hundred years ago. For computer programs it is used of course following the English example.
They don't have their own word for "commit". Instead they use the English one as a loan word. However, it follows all the regular grammar rules ("Ich habe das gestern committet"). Loan words are nothing new. They are adopted and merged into languages and often they reach a point where people don't notice anymore that they are foreign to the language.
Nowadays English is the major source of loan words. Before that it was French, and before that Latin. English is not taking over any more than the other two did.
It's much more complicated than that, and unless you know french, I doubt you'd guess what a "logiciel" is or an "ordinateur".
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language.
More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.
We call them floral arrangements in the midwest United States, not "bunch[es] of flowers". We also call them bouquets, nevertheless, I think the English language can handle that one just fine.
But a floral arrangement can be of various shapes, laid out in a wreath or across a table right? At least as I've heard it used, bouquet doesn't really refer to a wreath or other designs. Maybe I'm splitting nonexistent hairs.
I think what the above poster was referring to was the cultural connotations that are immediately invoked by a word or phrase that isn't really transmissible to someone not familiar with the language and its culture. The example of "bouquet" was likely to touch on the idea that the literal translation of the word would be more akin to their example of "bunch of flowers". Since the word has now integrated into English, there is an immediate understanding that you're not just referring to a bunch of flowers, but something meant to be aesthetically pleasing and usually to signify an event of some importance. I suppose the English language did handle the word, but it did so by just integrating the word, not by translating it.
The response to the parent comment was more to debate that there are a lot of words, concepts, and idioms that may carry an actual translation or similar concept in another, but the translations fail to capture the immediacy of the idea conveyed by the original word or phrase. It's not to say that there is no way to understand or interpret these bits of language unless you're a native speaker, it's that in many cases you lose a lot of the meaning without the cultural context surrounding it.
Culture and language are pretty inseparable; it's why transliteration is often frowned upon when doing translation works, and localization is considered important to helping the audience understand without imparting too high of a burden of knowledge of their part. Sometimes this burden of knowledge is simply unavoidable. But the ability of a word or phrase to evoke a specific idea/image/feeling in one language and to not do so in another is not impossible. If you know anyone for whom English is a second language (and has not spent extended time in the US), try to explain why "cut the cheese" is funny in English. They may understand conceptually that there is a rude meaning to the phrase, but I'm willing to bet they'd be more than happy to tell you that they'll cut the cheese in the kitchen.
It all depend on what you count as connotation, but I'd argue that if anything can be expressed verbally, then it can be translated. There is no such thing as untranslatability.
One thing that's very hard to translate comes from my native language - Slovenian. The grammatical number 2.
The same way most languages have singular and plural, Slovenian also has dual. It's much handier than always specifying "two somethings". Very few languages still have this feature. English for instance only has residual traces left.
"I'd argue that if anything can be expressed verbally, then it can be translated."
Have you made a serious effort to translate jokes, poetry, or advertising slogans between unrelated languages before you made that assertion? Were your clients unequivocally satisfied with your work?
You may be speaking of unexpressibility in a different sense, but the word "ineffible" literally means something which cannot be expressed in words: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ineffability.
I see lots of French milleniums writing each others in english on social networks. I don't think because they want to be understood by a foreign audience. Just because english has become the language of the internet, english expressions are becoming a sort of habit.
If the Internet pushes English enough to get every digital citizen to learn it, that would be one of the most compelling reasons for its social good.
I always hate all the talk about multilingualism as a good thing, when the consequence of language diversity is, one, people are wasting time in their youths learning languages for other peoples benefit, ie, those that want to "preserve" it, when the marginal utility of having excess languages is at best questionable. And two, if you do not know the primary language used for, you know, communicating with other human beings, especially English, your potential economic mobility is catastrophically crippled on a global scale.
Tu as tout à fait raison. Pourquoi perdrais-je mon temps à apprendre ta langue pour ton bénéfice, c'est une perte de temps total.
Merci de m'avoir ouvert les yeux.
J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.
Exactement. Quand j'étais plus jeune, je voulais de comprendre et communiquer avec des Francophones.
Je ne saisis pas que le majorité des jeunes en France apprennent et utilisent Anglais tout les temps. Donc à le début, c'était très difficile d'avoir un conversation sans les changent à anglais.
Maintenant je peux parler juste un peu le Français, mais l'expression quand un francophones réalise que je peux le comprendre est absolument fantastique :)
Bravo pour apprendre Anglais. Je souhaite que plus gens ont apprécié la lutte que les locuteurs non natifs ont quand ils apprennent un nouveau langue.
While I agree that language policing like you see in France or the drive for culture preservation via language in various parts of the world is tragically misguided if not actively harmful, the one thing that gives pause is that we do not have a 'perfect' language in english by any means. Learning other languages and lingustic evolution gives hope that we can trend towards better options in the future. So lets not declare english as the winner just yet.
What I would like to see is a language that is much more succinct, less bound in grammar rules/syntax but also less irregularities and ambiguities. English could evolve into this. Latin could have too but currently it is dead. Change happens.
But again, what language? We are not talking about computer languages. This is not a theoretical exercise in an ideal software world where you can start all over again. It's going to be one of the mainstream languages. Which one? Russian? Chinese?
Yes, currently Chinese is the main alternative with the most population and has some of the features I mentioned. It is also great for business with many people learning it to attract some of the chinese money floating around and lots of foreigners there to make their fortunes. But just a couple of decades ago it was russian. A major war between the US and China and it might be Hindi next. Never safe to predict the future.
Absolutely, but at the same time it depends on what you value in a language. That is kind of what this whole conversation is about, after all. English is garbage from any compative measure of language quality, its grammar is irrational, it has thousands of edge cases, it does not even use the entire range of human auditory sounds. But that constitutes a linguists evaluation of it - for probably 99.9999% of human beings, language is there to facilitate communication, in which case all the grammar breaks and eccentricities go out the window for the singular overriding and essential value of - do you and the other person speak the same language?
That is why English is so important now, since about half the world knows it, and the difference between knowing it or not could be the difference between perpetual poverty and improving standards of living.
In the same way, the cultural aspect cannot be considered relevant as much as the grammar cannot be, because the importance of having a language to communicate is overwhelming. There will always be people that like languages and learn them, language diversity will never die, but I also would wonder how you could ever hope to replace English with something better. It is the kind of thing that logically should seem obvious - a university department of smart people, or a global consortium, could come together and try to architect a language optimized for everyone, that has firm grammar rules and uses all the auditory notes of the human voice range, and prioritizes making common words short and such. But once you make that language, how do you teach it to the world? And in between, are you proposing people learn English and Earthish at the same time?
Well english has replaced itself many times, just compare old english, middle english, Shakespeare vs now. It is evolution and english is good at adapting, but even so, in Roman times no one would have predicted English to dominate society. These things can change quite rapidly and history is not at an end by any means. And with the internet, I think the changes/evolution could be quite dramatic.
One benefit of keeping languages around is that they help us understand what the brain is capable of. I'm with you on having a universal communication language, but keeping other languages alive does have some benefits.
One example is literature - literature often does not translate well at all. Another is psychology and brain functionality, as I say above. For example, there are languages out there that don't have 'left' and 'right' as concepts. Instead people use 'east' and 'west' or 'north' and 'south'. Speakers of these languages tend to have a very good grasp of their geospatial bearing as a result. Without these unusual languages, we would be very unlikely to think of experimenting with such a concept, much less be able to test it.
I did hear of one language about to go extinct (in central america, I think). There are apparently only two speakers of it, both elderly, that live a couple of streets apart... and they don't speak to each other because of some feud :)
Tower of babble must come down. We are so obsessed as a civilization with at the same time destroying languages through things like global capitalism, while at the same time preserving them. It's a weird combo.
I'm quite pessimistic concerning the future of multilingualism.
Small, isolated communities manage to preserve their language for century, but a community the same size in a big city can lose its language in the space of a generation or two.
EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY
Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.
That's obvious though, isn't it? People are going to gravitate towards adopting the language with highest economic and social capital (presumably why English took over French as an international language?).
English is also less weird than French, written English is pretty easy language. Spoken English not so much. Italian is perhaps much easier, but of course economic and social capital matters too.
I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school. For me it was English, Latin (hated it) and French (as third language I also could have chosen Russian (would also have interested me) or ancient Greek).
>> People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British).
> I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school.
You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.
>
You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything.
I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".
You don't think the fact that English was more useful to you had anything do with your liking it more?
There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.
I think teaching the grammar first makes sense in German since this is the difficult and ugly part. In my opinion if this does not become a second nature you will be uncomfortable to communicate in German since otherwise you will always think uncofortable seconds how to build the correct case etc. . In other words: You will have difficulties becoming fluent if you aren't confident in the grammar.
At least in Japan, learning English lets you speak to all foreigners. The expectation is that everyone who can't speak the native language at least can speak English.
This leads to most English being spoken in the country having no native participant. Having too idiomatic English will probably lead to harder communication.
For computer parsing the language, this might matter. For humans learning the language, it accounts maybe one percent of the total effort to acquire it.
We humans all have the same hardware processing language. If some spoken languages were _actually_ more complex or too complex for that hardware to process, they wouldn't be spoken.
I think the point is not if something is out of reach of a basic human, but more that if it takes 10 years to reach basic proficiency, then it's not a language that will be fit to share with a huge amount of people from different backgrounds.
Now, I personaly think that if French actually reached a point where it would be shared as common language by billions of people it would have been broken down to a more efficient form. Creoles and other dialects derived from french all seem to get rid of the redundant bits.
> Uninflected languages usually have a more complex, constrained syntax, whereas inflected languages are more free.
Depends on what you consider as free.
For example German (more inflected than English) has a rather free order of clauses (where the order tells about the emphasis the speaker wants to express) opposed to English.
On the other hand, in English words are often used in a more flexible way than in German (even if you use a similar construction in both languages), because the stricter grammar makes this less comfortable in German than in English. For example: "iron" (en) is "Bügeleisen" (de). In English one can use the verb "to iron" for using the iron while in German there is an own verb "bügeln" for this. Just using the same word for an object and something you do with it is already interfered by the German grammar, in which verbs have to end in "en" or at least "n".
"Irregular" means that a perticular word does not obey the usual rules for inflection (an example of such a rule verb (without to) + "ed" -> simple past, e.g. "jump" -> "jumped"). For example "go" -> "went", "sing" -> "sang". You will usually simply have to learn those.
English grammar is also easier or you can use simple subset of English. However that can not be said for Italian, German, French or Russian. They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning. The hardest subject for English is "tenses" and you can also use small subset of them.
I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.
> They have gender rules that confuse foreign learners in the beginning.
I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language.
TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.
Usually you get a pretty good feeling for the rules that determine the gender for many nouns (at least for me in Spanish, French and Portuguese), so that for many nouns this will only be a problem at the beginning.
For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter.
Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).
Quite obviously, it is a PITA, which is why English dropped using gendered nouns in the first place - originally Old English had gender, but over the course of the middle ages virtually all traces of it disappeared, simplifying the language.
Something like 80% of the world population uses ungendered language.
Gender and tense questions make a lot of things really complicated! There are only two tenses in english, really. Compare to Spanish/French conjugations, or German declination questions.
(Because this is HN) in a way, English ends up being very LISP-y (more CL than Scheme though). There are very few base constructs, and some special vocabulary, but most "grammar" is really just vocabulary. Future tense isn't a tense, it's using 'will'.
There's hardness because of all the dialects, and particles. Though I don't really know of a language where particle use isn't of a similar difficulty.
English isn't very complex, but it is highly irregular and it has an absolutely massive vocabulary. It's easy to learn enough to be able to scrape by, but difficult to learn to speak fluently.
Italian is easier to pronounce (only 7 vowel sounds) and almost 1 to 1 to the written word (but 3 different signs for the k sound, still easy to read).
However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?
Well, I sort of disagree. As my handle implies, I'm named after a Numidian King (160-104 BC). I'm one of the "Kabyle people", a Berber ethnicity from Algeria, North Africa.
Although I was born in Algiers, we spoke Kabyle at home and most Kabyle people I know who were born elsewhere did, too.
If you go to cities like Tizi-Ouzou (one hour or less away) and Bejaïa, Kabyle is the lingua franca. That's the language people use to talk to each other. But you'd be understood if you spoke another Algerian language (Algerian dialects are a mish-mash of mostly Arabic, Kabyle, French, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish), or French.
So for me, I just go there and I can just speak Kabyle in a small zone containing a little more than 2 million people (there are many more in neighboring cities, and many, many more in other cities, but that's the "HQ" with the highest capita/km² speaking the language daily).
I use five languages daily living in Algiers (5 million people). Though I think you're partly right for the "retaining the language" part since Algiers didn't retain the "original" language: it mixed a bunch of them and then retained that.
Most european languages are bound to disapear if Europe wants to achieve anything in common. You just can't if people don't understand each others, and if people all have to speak a common language, within a couple of generations, French, Spanish or German will be that old dialect that some old people insist on speaking but that new generations don't understand anymore. Everything has a begining, a peak and an end. Languages too.
Languages are incredibly complex and information-intense things to learn, store, and maintain in ones brain. It almost feels aggressive for high-tower liberals to talk about how important it is that minorities preserve their languages, when there can be real costs to their economic prosperity associated with having to divide their childhoods between a "native" tongue that is for practical use worthless, and English. Even worse when English proficiency is harmed in favor of a less useful tongue.
And that is not to say English is in any way a good language. It is dreadful. But language is not valuable for how well it pleases a gramaticist, but for its ability to facilitate communication, and right now English is so far and away #1 globally in that regard doing anything but trying to press every civilization to teach their citizens it is almost condemning them to poverty for some upper crust and downright selfish ideals of cultural diversity.
It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave.
Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape.
E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.
Mayan and Nahuatl (Aztec) are each spoken by more than that before we even address the much more diverse South American languages. Europe is far from the most prosperous place for minority languages. SE Asia and Central America are far better.
A unique european language is the last thing I wish to Europe. It's what's making Europe so rich in terms of culture. And a language is also representing a whole culture, there's is just concepts you can't express in other languages, it's not only communication.
By the way, I know it's HN and people here are more internationalized and pro-globalisation than the average but the actual reality on the ground is that the far right and nationalism is growing in most EU countries and the current trend is to limit the EU, not expand it even further.
There are a lot of factors here. Some communities fiercely protect their local tongue. Take Brittany in France for example. They still teach their native language, completely distinct from French, in public schools. This is how long after French has been the official language of France? Additionally, some countries in Europe, such as the Netherlands, have high rates of multilingualism. It is supposedly easier when you are born into it. This enables you to speak the administrative languages fluently while still speaking a native language at home only a few million people on the planet still speak. Loyalty to one's culture can have a lot to do with sustainability of a language. To an outsider, it may seem futile to learn a language like Italian for any kind of practical reason. To an Italian, to abandon their language would be sacrilege.
Globalism may be weakening some languages in the near term as it may make sense for people around the world to learn English or even Chinese, and maybe a few other languages. However, imagine if translation technology became advanced enough to conduct a normal conversation with each party speaking a different language. We might even hold on to that mysterious 4th official language in Switzerland (Romansh) after that. There are plenty of people who would love to go back to their hometown and speak nothing other than the language their parents taught them.
Uniting in language is a sign of increased communication and opportunity. The sooner we have a global language, the better. More opportunity, less war. I would think a bunch of engineers trying to create stuff would agree on that.
All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...) by forcibly cutting them off from the global economy.
But major languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
A common global language doesn't have to be a human language though. Technology to translate in real-time already exists, and is likely to improve far more quickly than anything that requires a rewrite of our cultural and political systems. It's a great deal more likely we'll speak as many languages as we do now but use technology to understand many more.
"Technology to translate in real-time already exists"
No. It does not. I do some translation work and a lot of multilingual interaction. There is no decent translation technology even for written communication outside technical documents. Even that is only barely decent between European languages. A serious attempt at usable translation of even the simplest texts between Asian languages and others does not yet exist.
Real time translation would multiply the speech recognition problem onto that still-imaginary translation technology.
I will admit there is a lot of hype but there is no substitute for human translators nor for simply learning a new language anywhere on the horizon.
It's early days, but the cutting edge stuff works for some limited value of "works". It's just about usable for casual conversations. But that's not the point I was making; what I'm saying is simply that the likelihood of getting working real-time translation on a computer is considerably higher than getting everyone to agree on a universal single language.
I can see computer-based real-time translation getting to the point where it's putting translators out of jobs in the next few decades. I can't ever imagine humanity transitioning to a single language, or even a limited scope single language for business. It just won't happen.
Even professional translators have a hard time translating real time. To pick a random example,
"There's Jim's dog. Look, he's so happy to see me."
"Actually, it's she."
Try translating that into a language without grammatical gender: you could either spend thirty seconds explaining that English speakers have this weird habit of using different words for dogs based on their sex, or you're in for some serious improvization.
Or even better,
"There's Jim's brother."
Korean has a word for "elder brother", another for "younger sibling (of either sex)", but not a generic singular "brother of unspecified relative age". Good luck!
I'm sure more academic minds than mine have considered this, but yes, I totally agree, we are moving towards universal communication and culture and that has little to do with speaking the same language. I would argue that the Internet, capitalism and global transport are bringing us nearer to a point where productive mutual intelligibility is less and less of an obstacle.
For the sake of argument, let's say that "we" "agree" on standardizing on one of the world's most spoken languages: Spanish. This now means that you yourself need to master Spanish, that your kids need to master Spanish, and that all public use of English will need to disappear. Do you think that is feasible? I don't think that will ever happen, not even in a 1000 years.
Yes and no. Romanian had a Slavic layer in it, which you may count as a result of the significant interaction between Romance and Slavic populations around the Carpathian region. French and more-so English, can be counted in the same way as the by-product of Romance and Germanic groups intermingling. I'm not aquatinted with the degree of Germanic and Slavic mixing, but I presume that there should be (or have been) plenty as well. Just remember that Poland become actually polish only after the deportation of Germans, at the end of WW2. The language groups haven't merged more because of limited movement and interaction of their populace, a political effect. The political reasons were also the ones that actually worked in the other direction - of isolating masses of people and encouraging independent development of their cultural identity. The conclusion is that linguistic convergence is not the only natural effect that you may expect with time. Take a large enough mono-linguistic space, and give it a couple of centuries. After that you'll start noticing enough differences to warrant acknowledgment of distinct dialects or even languages.
The only real candidates with wide spread are English and Chinese (well, Mandarin). Tons of people already speak English as a second language, and Chinese has a wide diaspora with communities everywhere.
Your point is still valid, but Spanish isn't going to be the 'one' - if you were going to push the world to learn Spanish (because, say, it's easier in general than English or Chinese), then you may as well go the whole hog and get everyone to learn a synthetic language like Esperanto, which is easier again.
You make a very reasonable but demonstrably false assumption about language: that it is all about A trying to communicate an idea to B, as clearly and as efficiently as possible, and all involved are cooperative.
Reality is often much more complicated. Take the simple example of A talking to B with listener C. There's the scenario where a A wants to talk to B but without being understood by C. Or the reverse where A wants C to understand something but not B, whilst talking to B. And we can go on like this - see for example, this[0] RSA Animate by Steve Pinker about why we don't just say things explicitly most of the time.
As a result of all this we get stuff like jargon, coded slang, read-between-the-lines expressions, and yes: foreign languages. Because if you apply that insight to human groups, it becomes obvious that with human "tribes", the use of language is as much a way of excluding outsiders as it is about clear communication. In this light, stuff like youth slang always evolving into something unintelligible to adults makes perfect sense.
As long as there is a desire for selecting who doesn't understand you (which I think will always be the case), language diversification will be a thing. If you have access to New Scientist articles, this one[1] sums it up nicely
Addendum: it just so happens that there currently is another article on HN about this "veiled communication" phenomenon: Doctors' Secret Language for Assisted Suicide:
Uniting in language is a sign of increased communication and opportunity. The sooner we have a global language, the better. More opportunity, less duplicate code. I would think a bunch of engineers trying to create stuff would agree on that.
All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) by forcibly cutting them off from the more general online communities.
But major languages (Java, Javascript, C#) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
"The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects; In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings."
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread1. The formal communications dialect 2. The bedroom + dinner table dialect
People who live in a european contry may notice that the formal dialect of their native langauge is dissapearing, and even, that many new concepts cannot be expressed in their native toung. But that doesn't mean that the bedroom + dinner table aspect of their langauge is going away. Germans don't have tummy aches, neither do Czechs. But both, "compile" their software and both preform a "git commit".
They don't have their own word for "commit". Instead they use the English one as a loan word. However, it follows all the regular grammar rules ("Ich habe das gestern committet"). Loan words are nothing new. They are adopted and merged into languages and often they reach a point where people don't notice anymore that they are foreign to the language.
Nowadays English is the major source of loan words. Before that it was French, and before that Latin. English is not taking over any more than the other two did.
Furthermore, there is no such thing as a "concept that cannot be expressed" in a language. More often than not when people say a language has "no word for X", they turn out to be wrong, and even when they're right, the concept can be expressed through paraphrase.
That's why we have loanwords.
Why else would a bouquet not be called "a bunch of flowers". Because a bunch of flowers is something different than a bouquet.
The response to the parent comment was more to debate that there are a lot of words, concepts, and idioms that may carry an actual translation or similar concept in another, but the translations fail to capture the immediacy of the idea conveyed by the original word or phrase. It's not to say that there is no way to understand or interpret these bits of language unless you're a native speaker, it's that in many cases you lose a lot of the meaning without the cultural context surrounding it.
Culture and language are pretty inseparable; it's why transliteration is often frowned upon when doing translation works, and localization is considered important to helping the audience understand without imparting too high of a burden of knowledge of their part. Sometimes this burden of knowledge is simply unavoidable. But the ability of a word or phrase to evoke a specific idea/image/feeling in one language and to not do so in another is not impossible. If you know anyone for whom English is a second language (and has not spent extended time in the US), try to explain why "cut the cheese" is funny in English. They may understand conceptually that there is a rude meaning to the phrase, but I'm willing to bet they'd be more than happy to tell you that they'll cut the cheese in the kitchen.
The same way most languages have singular and plural, Slovenian also has dual. It's much handier than always specifying "two somethings". Very few languages still have this feature. English for instance only has residual traces left.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number)
You can translate it, of course, but it's going to look and feel awkward.
Have you made a serious effort to translate jokes, poetry, or advertising slogans between unrelated languages before you made that assertion? Were your clients unequivocally satisfied with your work?
We use those as stems, over which we add our own orthography, morphology and syntax.
I always hate all the talk about multilingualism as a good thing, when the consequence of language diversity is, one, people are wasting time in their youths learning languages for other peoples benefit, ie, those that want to "preserve" it, when the marginal utility of having excess languages is at best questionable. And two, if you do not know the primary language used for, you know, communicating with other human beings, especially English, your potential economic mobility is catastrophically crippled on a global scale.
J'aime bien aussi ta deuxième phrase qui sous-entend qu'on ne peut communiquer avec les autres qu'en anglais. Je me demande comment je faisais pour discuter avec mes parents quand j'étais petit. C'est sans doute de là que vient la tragique incommunicabilité qui a marqué mon enfance.
Je ne saisis pas que le majorité des jeunes en France apprennent et utilisent Anglais tout les temps. Donc à le début, c'était très difficile d'avoir un conversation sans les changent à anglais.
Maintenant je peux parler juste un peu le Français, mais l'expression quand un francophones réalise que je peux le comprendre est absolument fantastique :)
Bravo pour apprendre Anglais. Je souhaite que plus gens ont apprécié la lutte que les locuteurs non natifs ont quand ils apprennent un nouveau langue.
That is why English is so important now, since about half the world knows it, and the difference between knowing it or not could be the difference between perpetual poverty and improving standards of living.
In the same way, the cultural aspect cannot be considered relevant as much as the grammar cannot be, because the importance of having a language to communicate is overwhelming. There will always be people that like languages and learn them, language diversity will never die, but I also would wonder how you could ever hope to replace English with something better. It is the kind of thing that logically should seem obvious - a university department of smart people, or a global consortium, could come together and try to architect a language optimized for everyone, that has firm grammar rules and uses all the auditory notes of the human voice range, and prioritizes making common words short and such. But once you make that language, how do you teach it to the world? And in between, are you proposing people learn English and Earthish at the same time?
One example is literature - literature often does not translate well at all. Another is psychology and brain functionality, as I say above. For example, there are languages out there that don't have 'left' and 'right' as concepts. Instead people use 'east' and 'west' or 'north' and 'south'. Speakers of these languages tend to have a very good grasp of their geospatial bearing as a result. Without these unusual languages, we would be very unlikely to think of experimenting with such a concept, much less be able to test it.
I did hear of one language about to go extinct (in central america, I think). There are apparently only two speakers of it, both elderly, that live a couple of streets apart... and they don't speak to each other because of some feud :)
EDIT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IBfgUNpRsY Note that the title is kinda stupid, it's obviously not their native language if they can barely speak it, and that's kind of the point. Note also that their parents come from a huge language community which is in no danger of disappearing anytime soon and nevertheless, it's not enough.
Overall, the intrinsic qualities of a language matter little if at all in driving its adoption.
People learn English because they want to speak with Americans (and earlier the British). Everything else is irrelevant.
> I rather think most people learn a particular set of language because they have to pick it in school.
You are using "learn" in a completely different sense than rvense is. Far and away the majority of people who have to take language classes in school don't learn anything. People who study a language because they want to communicate with people who speak that language, do learn.
I know few people who really try to learn a new language after school (which is IMHO a pity, since there exist free options in the internet), so for the typical person it is "one either learned the language in school and got to an at least medium level (on which one can, if one wants to (say, because one wants to communicate with others), build later on in life) or one will never learn the language".
There is also the way these things are taught. The most common third language to learn here is German, and instead of, you know, focusing on fluency and learning to actually use the language, or watching good German films or reading interesting German literature, what you get is rote memorization of inflections.
This leads to most English being spoken in the country having no native participant. Having too idiomatic English will probably lead to harder communication.
We humans all have the same hardware processing language. If some spoken languages were _actually_ more complex or too complex for that hardware to process, they wouldn't be spoken.
Now, I personaly think that if French actually reached a point where it would be shared as common language by billions of people it would have been broken down to a more efficient form. Creoles and other dialects derived from french all seem to get rid of the redundant bits.
Depends on what you consider as free.
For example German (more inflected than English) has a rather free order of clauses (where the order tells about the emphasis the speaker wants to express) opposed to English.
On the other hand, in English words are often used in a more flexible way than in German (even if you use a similar construction in both languages), because the stricter grammar makes this less comfortable in German than in English. For example: "iron" (en) is "Bügeleisen" (de). In English one can use the verb "to iron" for using the iron while in German there is an own verb "bügeln" for this. Just using the same word for an object and something you do with it is already interfered by the German grammar, in which verbs have to end in "en" or at least "n".
"Irregular" means that a perticular word does not obey the usual rules for inflection (an example of such a rule verb (without to) + "ed" -> simple past, e.g. "jump" -> "jumped"). For example "go" -> "went", "sing" -> "sang". You will usually simply have to learn those.
This isn't true.
I also agree with the economic and social capital argument.
I learn Spanish and Portuguese and I'm not the slightest confused by the gender rules - it's rather what I'm used to, since I speak German as native language.
TLDR: YMMV, but I don't think this holds if you come from a non-English background.
For example (I will use examples from German, since this is my native language) typical rules (probably you will find exceptions) are that nouns that end in "-chen" or "-lein" (endings for diminutive, though this is not always obvious (for example "das Mädchen" is a diminutive of "die Maid")) are neuter. Or nouns that end in "-e" are feminine. Or nouns that end in "-er" are masculine (at least if they mean "a person/object doing something" (counterexample: "das Wunder" (the wonder) - but this is not a person/object doing something) - the same holds for verbs ending in "-erin" being female. Or if you turn a verb into a noun ("das Wandern" from "wandern" - to wander) it will be neuter.
Of course there will be enough nouns for which you simply will have to learn the gender, but I don't believe it is that amount of effort (and most other languages have a much more regular pronounciation than English).
Gender and tense questions make a lot of things really complicated! There are only two tenses in english, really. Compare to Spanish/French conjugations, or German declination questions.
(Because this is HN) in a way, English ends up being very LISP-y (more CL than Scheme though). There are very few base constructs, and some special vocabulary, but most "grammar" is really just vocabulary. Future tense isn't a tense, it's using 'will'.
There's hardness because of all the dialects, and particles. Though I don't really know of a language where particle use isn't of a similar difficulty.
However its words have genders to remember to make plurals and match adjectives and possessives. Verbs have desinences for each tense and person. English can be irregular, but Italian has more details to memorize. Still, as you wrote, people don't use the easiest language but the language that gives the most benefits. Latin is so much more difficult than Italian but it had its (very long) heyday, right?
Although I was born in Algiers, we spoke Kabyle at home and most Kabyle people I know who were born elsewhere did, too.
If you go to cities like Tizi-Ouzou (one hour or less away) and Bejaïa, Kabyle is the lingua franca. That's the language people use to talk to each other. But you'd be understood if you spoke another Algerian language (Algerian dialects are a mish-mash of mostly Arabic, Kabyle, French, Turkish, Italian, and Spanish), or French.
So for me, I just go there and I can just speak Kabyle in a small zone containing a little more than 2 million people (there are many more in neighboring cities, and many, many more in other cities, but that's the "HQ" with the highest capita/km² speaking the language daily).
I use five languages daily living in Algiers (5 million people). Though I think you're partly right for the "retaining the language" part since Algiers didn't retain the "original" language: it mixed a bunch of them and then retained that.
And that is not to say English is in any way a good language. It is dreadful. But language is not valuable for how well it pleases a gramaticist, but for its ability to facilitate communication, and right now English is so far and away #1 globally in that regard doing anything but trying to press every civilization to teach their citizens it is almost condemning them to poverty for some upper crust and downright selfish ideals of cultural diversity.
It's unclear if "Europe" wants anything of the sort at this point, and you seem to assume that English would be the common language, which is not unreasonable since it's the one currently being used, but it's not politically acceptable, and it'll be worse if the UK finally decides to leave.
Note also that Europe is probably the part of the world where minority languages are in better shape. E.g Catalan is spoken by 4 million native speakers, which is more than all of the native american language speakers combined.
Even if there are more minority languages in SE Asia and South America, I'm not sure they're treated better there than in Europe.
Europe may want to achieve some things in common but not at the expense of not achieving other things not in common.
Per the article: step outside the European worldview to see how cultural viewpoints elsewhere understand and express the value of multilingualism
By the way, I know it's HN and people here are more internationalized and pro-globalisation than the average but the actual reality on the ground is that the far right and nationalism is growing in most EU countries and the current trend is to limit the EU, not expand it even further.
Globalism may be weakening some languages in the near term as it may make sense for people around the world to learn English or even Chinese, and maybe a few other languages. However, imagine if translation technology became advanced enough to conduct a normal conversation with each party speaking a different language. We might even hold on to that mysterious 4th official language in Switzerland (Romansh) after that. There are plenty of people who would love to go back to their hometown and speak nothing other than the language their parents taught them.
All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386...) by forcibly cutting them off from the global economy.
But major languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
No. It does not. I do some translation work and a lot of multilingual interaction. There is no decent translation technology even for written communication outside technical documents. Even that is only barely decent between European languages. A serious attempt at usable translation of even the simplest texts between Asian languages and others does not yet exist.
Real time translation would multiply the speech recognition problem onto that still-imaginary translation technology.
I will admit there is a lot of hype but there is no substitute for human translators nor for simply learning a new language anywhere on the horizon.
I can see computer-based real-time translation getting to the point where it's putting translators out of jobs in the next few decades. I can't ever imagine humanity transitioning to a single language, or even a limited scope single language for business. It just won't happen.
Or even better,
Korean has a word for "elder brother", another for "younger sibling (of either sex)", but not a generic singular "brother of unspecified relative age". Good luck!Your point is still valid, but Spanish isn't going to be the 'one' - if you were going to push the world to learn Spanish (because, say, it's easier in general than English or Chinese), then you may as well go the whole hog and get everyone to learn a synthetic language like Esperanto, which is easier again.
For critics of Esperanto see
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm
Reality is often much more complicated. Take the simple example of A talking to B with listener C. There's the scenario where a A wants to talk to B but without being understood by C. Or the reverse where A wants C to understand something but not B, whilst talking to B. And we can go on like this - see for example, this[0] RSA Animate by Steve Pinker about why we don't just say things explicitly most of the time.
As a result of all this we get stuff like jargon, coded slang, read-between-the-lines expressions, and yes: foreign languages. Because if you apply that insight to human groups, it becomes obvious that with human "tribes", the use of language is as much a way of excluding outsiders as it is about clear communication. In this light, stuff like youth slang always evolving into something unintelligible to adults makes perfect sense.
As long as there is a desire for selecting who doesn't understand you (which I think will always be the case), language diversification will be a thing. If you have access to New Scientist articles, this one[1] sums it up nicely
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628941-700-war-of-w...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11704216
(replying to myself because I cannot edit my comment anymore)
All of that being said, the study of language is very important, and the differences that exist should be recorded for scientific study. Maybe it even makes sense to preserve the real outlying communities (http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/) by forcibly cutting them off from the more general online communities.
But major languages (Java, Javascript, C#) are redundant standards that should be consolidated ASAP.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/08/05/t...