Comment by rasmafazi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rasmafazi | Hacker News Reader

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I can only emphasize that vernacular indeed has its place, if only to build local identity and belongingness. So, I am not advocating to abolish it. As I said, I speak vernacular with my own children, and they speak it with the kids of the neighbours.

However, if you do a serious subject, which is always global, but you do it in vernacular, you are missing out on the virtual global conversations that really matter. It will inevitably force your own contributions to the field to become sub-standard.

France recently decreed that they will prosecute people who post "terrorist" opinions on the internet in French. Of course, France will surely expand their action radius and seek to police any kind of subject, in order to control the "narrative", and make sure that it is favourable to what the powers that be, want you to believe; in line with what they have been doing for ages with newspapers and television.

The UK also want to do that but they face the enormous obstacle of English-language opinions posted from the USA, which are protected by substantial first-amendment free speech provisions. According to Brandenburg versus Ohio, even advocating the violent overthrow of the state, is firmly protected speech. Don't ever say a thing like that in vernacular, because the local-language government may seek to arrest you. Hence, you can expect a much freer discussion in English than in French, since it is unencumbered by national-state regulations that curtail possibly unpopular or anti-government speech. I can pretty much say whatever I want in English. Don't try that in Polish, German, French, Chinese or any other local vernacular.

> The UK also want to do that but they face the enormous obstacle of English-language opinions posted from the USA, which are protected by substantial first-amendment free speech provisions.

That's no obstacle. US laws don't apply to the UK, and the UK already has some heavy-handed internet restrictions that couldn't fly in the US. For example, in the UK, there is a list of child pornography sites that all ISPs are required to block. The internet does make jurisdiction a thorny question, but there are sometimes ways around that (note the old rules on British libel law, which pretty much held that you only had to justify some harm in England/Wales to sue for libel there--e.g., Donald Trump could have sued the New York Times for libel in the UK instead of the US. The UK did tighten up the residency requirements after the US passed a law basically saying "we're not going to cooperate in enforcement of UK libel law").

It's not a matter of English versus non-English. It's a matter of the ability of governments to enforce local legislation.

Your freedom of speech argument is incoherent.

If you're in the US the US government can't inhibit your freedom of speech - and this includes the speech you make in French.

And if you're in the US and you deny the holocaust it doesn't matter what language you use to do so, when you travel to a country where it's illegal to deny the holocaust you're going to find it tricky. (For varying degrees of tricky including "nothing at all happens; noone knows or cares".)

I respectfully disagree that vernacular makes contributions somehow substandard. It's still language and still affords a full range of expressibility. You're only saying that because in your mind you connote English with "professional" and whatever other niceties while vernacular is vulgar, uneducated, etc... But vernaculars have rich histories in many countries and by virtue of being used by the populace, have deep utility. Yes, they're not international, but English has only gained the status of lingua franca by virtue of its expanse; it could very well have been Chinese. They're nothing inherent to English that makes it superior and if we're solely basing our justifications on business use, like I said Chinese would be a better choice if you're looking towards the future. By the way, I highly recommend trying to learn about other languages, some of them have really beautiful systems, both verbal and written and some language features are really nice like phonetic alphabets.

Regarding France, I think you're conflating language with law. The only thing allowing France to police but the UK not to is the law, not the language itself. You think these countries aren't already capable of getting translators to look at comments reported to them? The language isn't protecting anyone, it's being in another country that has freer speech laws. Better advice would be to move to the US. (but in actuality isn't better advice because our government isn't really any better what with all the surveillance going on and our own terrorism hysteria)

There's a concept in linguistics called the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis [0] that I think you subscribe to—that language determines thought. It's failed to gain consensus by linguists but still isn't a closed matter. I think if we consider how people all over the world use language, we can find that they're just the same as us. The only thing preventing us from understanding them is our own implicit biases, our prejudices, our looking down on them. This sort of evangelizing of English isn't really that far off from the spread of Christianity through imperialism, though America's own "Manifest Destiny". We should think twice before imposing our will on others because we think it's by default better. At the end of the day unless you're working in an international market or planning to live elsewhere, you don't really need to know English specifically. I think everyone should learn another language, but instead focus on what languages interest you and which one you actually need, not just whichever is the top dog or has a sense of superiority attached to it. (similar to how white skin is now considered beautiful in a lot of countries, to the point where people are getting their skin bleached)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

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