Have we reached peak English in the world? | Hacker News Reader

Have we reached peak English in the world?

theguardian.com

68 pointsmsangi149 comments

No, not even close to that. English has 2 strengths very hard to overcome: it is both "cool" and useful. And those strengths are increasing a lot, compared to other languages.

There is an huge amount of pop entertainment convincing kids that English is the "cool" language to learn. Before it used to be just pop music and Hollywood crap. Now is YouTube, memes and software. Also, it is the language of "cool" brands from Nike to Starbucks. No other language comes close to this brainwashing.

And then there is English usefulness. It used to be the lingua-franca for just business, international relations and science. Now it is a lot more than that: it is the language of international social networks and forums such as HN and Reddit. For any kind of culture, technique or know-how someone would want to learn English. It is probably even more useful than math. In most countries, people will earn substantially more money if they know English. Hint: do you know any non-english programming language? Even those created outside of English cultures (e.g.: Python, Ruby, Lua, Coq) are written in English.

Edit: an anecdote that helps understand this. Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages", very similar to each other. It would make sense for people knowing one of these to learn the other, since it would be both easy and useful. However, all over Latin America or the Iberian peninsula, people put more money and effort into learning English than their other sibling language.

> Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages"

When I was visiting Portugal I stayed with two people, one from Portugal and the other from Spain. They had been living together for months before I joined them, and speaking to each other in their native languages.

I was a unilingual Anglophone, and to accommodate me, they both spoke English in my presence. It was only through the medium of English that they discovered that they had misunderstood each other for months about various things.

The fact that Spanish and Portuguese were similar lulled them in to a false sense of comprehension, when in fact there are many false friends (cognates) and divergent nuances.

I'm told this happens a lot among Scandinavians too, and Danish is known to be especially difficult for Norwegians and Swedes to comprehend completely, so many fall back on English to avoid misunderstandings.

Norwegian here, can confirm. I can speak to Swedes pretty easily with them in Swedish and I in Norwegian. Danes, despite the fact our languages are written about the same, are really hard to understand in speech. It's much easier to just switch to English.

Going further, I've found that the mainstream Swedish dialect is probably more mutually intelligible with the mainstream Norwegian dialect than some of the more obscure regional Norwegian dialects (and I say this as someone who grew up speaking one of those regional dialects).

I would read an entire blog post/article about this situation.

Indeed, Nordic cooperation, both in business and in civil service, switches to English when the Danes get involved even though some cooperation between Swedish and Finnish entities may be conducted in Swedish. People from Finland, especially ones whose native language is Finnish, have even more trouble understanding Danish pronunciation than Swedes or Norwegians do.

Switching to English doesn't require people from different countries, though. While in Helsinki Finnish-native and Swedish-native speakers typically speak Finnish with each other, there are parts of Finland where Swedish-speakers might not be fluent in Finnish and the most efficient mutual language with Finnish-speakers (who often aren't fluent in Swedish) is English.

Ah, it is the Danish "potato" in their throat :-)

The article itself admits "All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn". What that means practically is that pretty much all non-native-English speaking powers of the globalised world make the learning of English mandatory. If they have a compulsory education system that includes math and science, then I guarantee they also have English as a foreign language in the curriculum.

Several unlikely scenarios I can think of that would cause English to no longer be the top lingua franca of the world:

* aliens arrive and force us all to learn their language * technological breakthrough that allows extreme rapid language learning, everyone learns English of course, but they learn a bunch of other languages at the same time

When I shop for guitars I will look at Japanese sites for Ibanez models not offered in the US. The amount of English on their websites is surprising.

Japanese Example: http://www.ibanez.co.jp/index.html

Chinese Example: http://www.ibanez.com/cn/

My favorite drummer is Japanese, but much of her website is in English

http://kanadesato.wixsite.com/home/profile

Anecdotal: a few years ago, when Brazil was doing very well economically, I visited Chile and pretty much everybody was investing time/money to learn Portuguese, rather than English. I think it's a phenomenon that only lasted for a few years, and was heavily dependent on the current economic situation.

> it is both "cool" and useful

That's a bit short-sighted , the article is talking about centuries. Nevertheless it's probably correct that english will become even more widespread over the next century, in particular i think it will become a lot more mainstream in europe as the second language of necessity.

> That's a bit short-sighted

Yes, it is, I agree. But I just find it futile to forecast what will happen after I am dead.

How come?

I wonder if, as the Internet matures, it will fracture into a Chinese Internet (already exists, to some extent), a Spanish Internet, an English Internet, etc.

This siloing of the internet is already occurring. Being multilingual helps a lot, but even then, one has to jump through quite a few hoops to find the info that you are looking for in anything other than your “main” language.

You see this on GitHub a bit now.

This article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted forever before".

I really doubt that English will be supplanted by Chinese, Chinese is way too hard to learn and they have an irrational fondness of their horrible writing system. The best the Chinese can probably hope for is the emergence of some kind of Pidgin that is easier to pronounce for them and contains more Chinese loanwords. The world will never learn their characters.

English is way too hard to learn and they have an irrational fondness for their spelling system.

Turns out that of various difficulties that languages can pose, English spelling is much less of a barrier than some difficult features that other languages have and that English notably doesn't have. (E.g. copious verb conjugations or noun cases or grammatical gender.)

I'm a native English speaker and I'm not going to defend how hard it is to learn.

But I would note that spelling in English over the last 20 years has rapidly gotten more fluid, thanks perhaps to texting.

I don't think we'll ever overcome the damage the timing of the great vowel shift[1] did, but perhaps in 50 years time it might be somewhat improved.

[1] "English spelling was first becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for the fact that English spellings now often strongly deviate in their representation of English pronunciations."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

So, this Great Vowel Shift caused most of the pronunciation differences that English has compared to other Germanic languages.

I always thought it was just so odd compared to its siblings, because it had lots of influences from the colonization phase, but that apparently was done beforehand already.

The Great Vowel Shift is why we write words in Modern English as if we were speaking Middle English. But even before then, the shift from Old to Middle English radically simplified the Germanic grammar of English. The other major change is the tendency in English to borrow foreign words rather than the tendency to adapt them to English--for example, we say television, not farseeing.

Since many technical roots derive from Latin, this somewhat artificially inflates the Romance root contribution to English.

maybe interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English

I have many relatives who type on their computers and phones exclusively in pinyin. You don't need to use Chinese characters at all.

Yes, there is emergent digraphia in China, because characters are fucking hard even for native speakers. Character amnesia, the effect where native speakers can't write common words, is becoming more and more common as keyboards become the dominant way of writing Chinese. I would be very surprised however if Pinyin became the official way of writing Chinese.

You don’t need to be able to write them but you still need to read them to choose the correct character after typing the pinyin. Or do they actually send the Latin transcription? That would be very ambiguous.

Depends on the person. I've seen some of them just send straight-up latin characters without translating it to a Chinese character.

Really? I’ve never seen pinyin written except as a learning aid (and as part of the modern keyboard input process). Chinese speakers will even air-draw characters if the context doesn’t make it clear in spoken language.

Cool. Do they type the tone accents or something like it (m`a m'a m-a) or go with numbers (ma1 ma2 ma3)?

> The best the Chinese can probably hope for is the emergence of some kind of Pidgin that is easier to pronounce for them and contains more Chinese loanwords

I could really see Mandarin take off if they would adopt a writing system similar to Vietnamese.

Me too, but if they keeps their current one ^^. If my understanding is of chinese writing is correct, then you could put any pronunciation on their characters. So we could have a universal writing system. If french, english and russian all mapped their words to chinese symbols, then we could all communicate through writing while keeping our languages. In practice it's obviously not this easy since we have different grammars, but I think the basic principle holds and we'd all be able to somewhat read each other.

Numbers are a great example of that. We all have our own words for numbers, but can all communicate it with its associated symbols (which are different in arabic script for instance, though everyone's agreed on european script).

Mathematics is full of those symbols we communicate with regardless of their pronunciation in different languages, e.g. the 'for all' and 'there exist' symbols for instance, but also the equal sign and the integral, set notation etc etc. They're all concept, ideas, and have associated symbols.

So why wouldn't we all use chinese 'synbols' for our 'everyday' vocabulary when we write. It's be harder to learn to read 1 language, but so much easier to learn to read all of them.

When we communicate in western languages an idea I from person A to person B; then when A translate I into a translation t in a language l that both A and B understand. then B translates back t into I'. It's actually pretty hard to get I' to equal I. Where as with chinese characters, my understanding is their characters are closer to the ideas themselves. Potentially making it easier to communicate between each other across multiple languages.

That's not how Chinese script works (or translation for that matter).

Chinese script is logographic: each character roughly refers to a single morpheme. There is also a degree of phonetic component to the script (to some degree, it's a game of playing "what sounds like fish and has to do with food?") But morphemes are not universal across different languages, and phonetic games can quickly become obtuse: Japanese kanji is basically completely unintelligible to Chinese speakers, despite literally deriving from Chinese.

Even within the different Chinese topolects, the actual comprehensibility of the standard writing system without having been specifically taught it is I believe only in the region of trying to understand Spanish knowing only French.

Japanese Chinese characters can have multiple morphemes, though they are still completely unintelligible even given the Chinese reading of a Japanese character.

This has been done before, with Mongolian, and Manchu, and pre-Hangul Korean, and Japanese, and virtually every other language that neighbored on and fell into the cultural orbit of pre-modern China. It never really worked out that well, and almost universally was replaced with alphabets of one variety or another eventually, because it is impossible for people to become fluent without an absurd number of years of study when reading and writing in ideographs; at least comparable to the very short time it takes to train someone in an alphabet.

I agree here, I took several years of Mandarin and the language itself is pretty intuitive, it's just the writing that bogs you down. That said, I learned characters mostly by handwriting- if I had been taught exclusively using a QingPin input system, I could have focused on recognizing more characters than trying to remember stroke counts for each word.

I don't think that would help. Chinese is very heavy on homophones and the characters allow meaning differentiation. In spoken Chinese you have to rely on context. Written and spoken Chinese seem tightly coupled.

Context is just as present in writing as it is in speech.

No, not really. Chinese characters use different characters / radicals to distinguish homophones in a way that makes writing much easier to understand if you're shakier on the context.

It is true that Chinese characters contain so much nonphonetic information that writing can be understood even if you've written something that would be total nonsense if spoken aloud. And similarly, that extra information can substitute for a certain amount of context.

But it's obviously not necessary, because all writing still has just as much context as speech does. The fact that you need the context less doesn't somehow make it go away.

I know next-to-nothing about Chinese, but it seems to me that if a language can be spoken, it can be represented with a phonetic alphabet. There might be sentences in written Chinese that wouldn't make sense in spoken Chinese, and these wouldn't make sense in the phonetic alphabet either, but if we can agree that spoken Chinese is useful, then the phonetically written Chinese would also be useful.

However, if I were Chinese, I might worry that due to simplicity, the phonetically-written Chinese would eclipse the traditionally-written Chinese quickly. Those sentences which only make sense in traditionally-written, not spoken or phonetically-written Chinese, would obviously be a huge cultural loss. Not everything is about making business more efficient.

> I know next-to-nothing about Chinese, but it seems to me that if a language can be spoken, it can be represented with a phonetic alphabet.

You might be interested in this:

http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

One interesting thing I learned from it the logographic aspects of written Chinese have influenced spoken Chinese by encouraging short, phonetically-ambiguous abbreviations that tend to replace the original phonetically-distinct words.

> Those sentences which only make sense in traditionally-written, not spoken or phonetically-written Chinese, would obviously be a huge cultural loss.

That's already happened to a degree. The Chinese dropped written Classical Chinese for written Mandarin, which is based on a vernacular. That's akin to the West dropping written Latin in favor of vernacular writing. I understand Classical Chinese needs to be translated to be understood.

>I could really see Mandarin take off if they would adopt a writing system similar to Vietnamese.

They could also easily introduce a second, easier, writing system, and maintain a low-high kind of language (like many countries do). Eventually the second easier one will tend to dominate, but even until then, it will be easier for foreigners to learn it, and for chinese to learn both.

Japanese takes exactly this sort of 'embrace and extend' approach to building on top of the Chinese character base, with hiragana for native construction, katakana for foreign loanwords, and furigana (more of an orthographical sugar than a separate symbol set) to bridge the systems for the sake of easier learning..

>This article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted forever before".

Not many other arguments are needed. But it does offer another argument -- or at least implies it: the world where English speaking powers loomed large is now changing. Previous peripheral countries and market emerge -- China, India, and so on. Even inside the US, Spanish is growing faster than ever.

So while English might not be "supplanted by Chinese", it will be supplanted, either by a more balanced mix of languages playing more major roles (English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc), so by a mixed-up patois style dialect -- as predicted by some sci-fi films long ago, and as lived in many multicultural places like Singapore.

There are more arguments needed if you want to show that we're at peak English right now. India has English as an official language for example and is growing rapidly.

Only one argument is needed: everything comes to an end eventually. (Maybe not the universe itself, but certainly all earthly things.)

But the headline is asking if we're at the peak of English's dominance. That question requires a lot more than "everything comes to an end" or "global languages never lasted forever before" to answer it in the affirmative.

English isn't necessarily a great language, and it's not all that accessible (Spanish is more accessible, certainly). But it is the only contender that is sufficiently accessible to ensure continued dominance.

> Even inside the US, Spanish is growing faster than ever.

But is it getting established or just temporarily flaring up due to immigration? All of the 2nd generation Spanish-speaking immigrants I know use English primarily.

American English is the lingua franca and the language of education (especially advanced education) and the economically successful. Unless those things change, I don't see Spanish as getting any more established than other immigrant languages that have now died out in the US.

I'm actually fine with that

It will end up being in tonnes of films, articles, everywhere. So long as it's pervasive people will just end up learning it naturally, it doesn't matter what the origins are or what it's called

So long as communication increases and barring conflict, we'll all eventually find a happy medium for inter-communication

> as lived in many multicultural places like Singapore.

Interesting example, since many people claim Singapore’s adoption of English heavily contributed to their rapid economic growth. Lee Kuan Yew himself said, “The key to avoid falling behind the world is English.”

>This article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted forever before".

But never before have we had a globalized world today like before. What happened before was a civilization would rise, have influence, and then collapse and be replaced by another with a whole different culture, including the language.

Now we have a single economy and technology, popular entertainment, and so on, and it will never go away (baring global ecological catastrophe), and English just happens to be its language. The costs of keeping it all but changing the language in midstream are just far to high to ever happen.

I used to think the writing system was horrible as well, but it actually has a ton of advantages as well. Pros and cons, like anything else.

Its main advantage is that you can use the same writing system with different languages, but it’s not like it’s ever going to be used with English or Spanish, so that’s not something that benefits it much as a world language.

The cons of the written language far outweigh the pros. It can’t be denied that it takes far longer to learn than anything else.

I've been exposed to the Chinese writing system via Japanese, who basically adopted it and made it their own, even perfected it in some ways (e.g. stroke order discipline and SKIP method dictionaries).

It's true the writing system doesn't make it ideal for a global lingua franca, but one of the main advantages I appreciate about it is its ability to disambiguate common strings.

In the Latin+Hindu-Arabic numeral world, we tend to argue about the best way to write dates, everything from 99/9/19 to 2037.04.01 to 4/1 or 13/5/2003 to 5/15/2019. The ISO published a standard, people more or less try to follow it, but in common usage it is still fairly ambiguous.

Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日

Personally I find this to be beautiful in its simplicity. We tend to use a separator anyway, dots or slashes or dashes or what have you, but add one kanji as a suffix and nobody will argue about whether 4/5/2018 is April 5th or May 4th because 日 (once you've learned what it means) will clearly mark the day and 月 will clearly mark the month.

You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

I wouldn't say all of written Chinese would make for a good lingua franca, but a limited subset seeing more use globally would be very cool.

>Without knowing any Chinese or Japanese though, you can probably figure out what this means: 2018年04月05日 or 2018年4月5日

I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.

>You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

Or simply use the ISO standard, which I do and I will assume that people I communicate with understand ISO and parse it correctly. If they don't it's not my problem.

>I would disagree. Until you clarified below, the characters behind the numbers had no meaning and it could have been May or April with equal probability to me, considering I do not know whether Asian culture, or to be specific Chinese, prefers month or day first.

That's not the parent's point though -- if you know the characters, the meaning is immediate. Whereas 2018/02/04 remains opaque.

I can't use emoji on here, but you could use them to write the date.

2017Earth04Moon06Sun perhaps.

Or, we already have (but don't use) the astronomical symbols. Most people understand the male and female symbols.

I actually never considered the astronomical symbols, that would work too. Not sure I would use emoji though, I mean, at least with Chinese writing it is still writing and once you know how, they're trivial to write, and in the case of year/day/month, about as trivial as any letter of the alphabet.

There's actually a recent precedent for this. The "@" symbol was almost completely unused prior to the late 90's. Email saved it from extinction, but now Twitter and other services have made it a universally understood named-person-entity indicator (which English never had before).

The 2nd and 3rd hanzi/kanji they used were quite literally the words for "moon" and "sun" (at least in Japanese, where they also mean "month" and "day").

That is exactly why I chose them. (我的普通话不好!)

> You could approximate this with Latin characters too, say 2018Y04M05D, but I think there is something to be said for having a distinct ideograph to improve readability and unambiguously mark a day, month, year, hour, minute or second.

Great, now you have n+1 standards …

About 1.5B people give or take already use or are familiar with this standard (Chinese ideographs, not my lame Latin spin on it), so we still only have n standards. This is more about picking one and extending its usage to other locales.

It already exists:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Durations

for one thing it's very economical spatially, something you'll quickly appreciate if you ever do any work (e.g. concept-mapping) where it's nice to be able to see and keep track of like 200 items on the screen at the same time. (a more homespun example is if you'd like to put a large number of meaningful words into one row (like your browser's bookmark bar))

also, it can be read horizontally AND vertically without needing to disassemble the graphemes or rotating your head 90 degrees. good luck doing that with english!

␣

◡

in case you're not joking, that involves disassembling the graphemes (the letters).

It's not horrible, but it just takes too long to learn as an auxiliary language. Just as the most powerful software usually loses market share to the easiest.

English is far from the easiest though. It's one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. The grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary is too inconsistent and large.

Spanish is a much easier language. It has clear pronunciation rules, a more limited latin-based vocabulary and few grammar exceptions.

> It's one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn.

It's really not that hard. The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers. The fact that it's very analytic [1] is also helpful. I found Spanish harder because the numerous verb conjugations are too difficult to remember. My native language's conjugations are even harder, but luckily I've been learning it since I was a baby.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

>The sheer amount of media available in English makes it easier to learn than the languages where you have to specifically seek out texts written by native speakers

It seems that way because you only look or notice English content.

Because it's often the best content available for any given topic. If I had any reason to specifically seek out Spanish, French, German content I'd probably be a little better at these.

Chinese languages are actually pretty easy to learn to speak. All the grammatical sharp corners have been knocked off over the centuries.

Chinese written language, I agree, is a challenge for people used to alphabetic languages.

For someone coming from an atonal language, it can be very difficult to learn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

Everybody's MMV; I have more trouble with the difference between "Kirche" (church) and "Kirsche" (cherry) in German.

Well, yeah. There is little beauty or structure to the mainland's new-new writing system, but the traditional one found in Taiwan can be used as a great help when homophones confound.

And English (like many Germanic languages) has other big advantages, like the ability to easily create new words and combine words.

How do you know that's not the case with Chinese?

It is all about "what language do I need to learn to have a good income". The difficulty of language matters little, as long as speaking the language badly is still more profitable than not speaking it at all.

That is partially about economic power (if your country offers many good jobs, people near you have an incentive to learn your language), and partially about military power (if you can make another country speak your language at gunpoint, at least in government-related jobs, their economical power becomes another argument for learning your language).

Therefore the popularity of Chinese will depend on how easy it will be for people who learn Chinese to increase their income. Compared with the expected increase of income from learning English.

Argument "but most important people in China speak English anyway" is less relevant if learning Chinese provides you even better advantage from cooperating with them. For example, most people in Germany speak English, but I suppose that being fluent in German still makes it easier to find a job in Germany.

So you have to learn German to work better in Germany, and French in France. You can list every country like that. But if you want to work with anyone in the world with one language, that's english. And that's its power, the new latin.

I can see some people learning a specific language because they plan to work with/in a specific country but I can't think of any language that seriously rivals english as a universal language.

German, French, English and Latin.

I can't disagree with this more strongly. Not only is it a useless opinion piece with not a bit of data to support the conclusions drawn, but I'm certain it's dead wrong to boot.

English is the beginnings of a global language. The language of human beings, rather than just the language of a particular culture or nationality. More people speak English than any other language. More people are learning English as second language than any other language. It's the defacto language of international business, the sky, the sea, of science, of movies, television, and games, and most importantly of the internet itself. There is more information available on any topic, in English, on the internet than any other. To the point that if you don't know how to search in English and read in English, you're at a serious information disadvantage. This is why for software developers, where information is king, English is the lingua franca.

Look at us, here we are people from all over the world, and we're all communicating in English because it's the common denominator.

It has little to do with the relative economic power of England and America at this point. In terms this group will relate to - English has stronger network effects going for it than any other language - and I expect its importance to only increase going forward.

Too much pop culture outside of the US is produced in English even though it's consumed mostly by non-english speaking markets. Swedish music, for example. And lets not forget that software engineering's lingua franca is still English, regardless of where the finished product will be consumed.

China might supplant the US as the consumer market but it will take a long time for the rest of the world to adapt to its language. Japanese, German and Russian doesn't even hold a candle to English dominance during the 20th century even though the German and Japanese economy were going very strong and the Soviet Union had a very powerful presence. Even in Finland English edged out Russian.

How you mean "even in Finland" and "edged out"? Finland resisted Russification when under Russian rule and was more on the Swedish and German language orbit before English took over after WWII.

Because after WWII Finland was very influenced by the Soviet Union. Finland tried to avoid enacting or supporting policies that opposed the Soviet Union during the cold war, especially during the first half when the USSR was Finland's largest market.

There's even a word for it, "Finlandization", which means not upsetting the super power right next door even though you secretly really don't like it.

But since Finland wanted to have access to the global, capitalist market English was the way forward. I don't think national pride made them break away from the Soviet sphere of influence it was money, and English is still the language of global business. Until the opportunity cost of learning some other language than English for your field is too big countries will most likely stick with English.

English is a lot like x86: yeah it's got a lot of warts but it's ubiquitous and fairly simple to learn the basics.

The biggest problem English has in my opinion is that you can't guess what a word is pronounced like..

That's its primary strength as well, as it means that English can adopt a word from any other language and expand without causing any linguistic issues. Most languages are stunted by their formality and rules, but English is already a mongrel. We're happy to import tortilla, hors d’oeuvre, origami, sheikh, schadenfreude and hundreds of other words without a thought, as well as make up new ones on a yearly basis (vape, selfie, etc.). Not many other languages are so flexible, as frustrating as it may be.

Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.

There's no reason why other Romance languages can't incorporate loan words in the same way. In fact, they all do. English is nothing special.

Sure there is: they tend to have authoritative academies that resist foreign, and particularly English, intrusions in their languages.

The French government publishes ridiculous phrase books for avoidance of convenient English loanwords. Quebec goes further, using the power of the law. The Spanish Royal Academy is the keeper of the Spanish language.

English has no authorities. Therefore English is able to adapt and evolve, and it is able to more easily borrow from other languages. That's part of the success story for English, no doubt, though obviously the dominance of American soft (and hard) power has a great deal to do with it too.

Nobody (or near enough) follows the recommendations of those governmental bodies anyway. People in France say "DJ," not "platiniste," and "hashtag," not "mot-dièse."

I'm not sure how that applies.

Granted, I have a _very_ limited knowledge of languages. I speak German. And persist/keep trying to reach some level of competency in English.

German has French (and English .. and more..) loan words as well. I'd still argue that it's _a lot_ easier and more consistent to pronounce than English.

(I might just be entirely blind to German issues that are basically the same, because .. I constantly stumble about English's warts and grew up with the German ones. There's a lot of bias involved, I think)

> Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.

Not so surprising, this is a uniquely american thing~, there is no such thins as spelling bees^ in the rest of the anglosphere either.

~ It's probably bleeding out to the rest of the world now.

^ "spelling bee" itself has an interesting etymology: http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee

edit - how the hell do you escape an asterix on HN?

You don't. Most people use bracketed numbers for footnotes, or obscure characters like †.

Also, it's called "asterisk". Asterix only needs to escape from the Romans. ;)

> […] or obscure characters like †.

The 'dagger' also called 'obelisk'¹. There's a double dagger (‡) if you need another footnote, but yeah, they're not as versatile as just using numbers.

1: Not to be confused with Obelix: Asterix' chubby friend the Romans are usually (vainly) trying to escape from.

You can escape an asterisk by separating it with spaces like this: * . Then it won't appear as cursive, even if you use * several * of them.

The HN formatting rules are really minimal: https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Loan words are a universal phenomenon.

Yeah but he's saying they break pronunciation rules in other languages. They don't in English because the pronunciation is already all over the place.

Also, they aren't universal - France tries really really hard to avoid them. They'll make up new French words for concepts that English would just import.

Loanwords often don't break pronunciation rules in English either. Vladimir, prosciutto, croissant are all pronounced as if they were English words by everyone but the most pedantic, and they sound very different in their origin language. Even surnames arent pronounced "right", cfr. Buscemi

Prosciutto and Buscemi are normally pronounced basically right, from what I've heard, setting aside the usual English reduction of unstressed vowels. Italian words typically suffer less deformation than French ones. "Bruschetta" being an exception.

> ... croissant are all pronounced as if they were English words

People may not pronounce croissant like the French do, but they certainly do not pronounce it as written, which would be something like Croy-sant. People say cri-sont.

> People may not pronounce croissant like the French do

It's pretty close, well within the range of regional variation in English pronunciation.

I already gave two examples (and there are many more): Tortilla and hor d’oeuvres. Neither are pronounced phonetically.

How is being able to guess how to pronounce a word most of the time worse than never being able to guess?

Another one: in Castellano Spanish (not in Latin America though) foreign words are always spoken with their Spanish pronounciation, even the English ones. A funny cultural shock indeed.

Actually, you generally can. I mean, if I were to type askrillengtauntabuler and to ask you to pronounce it, you'd probably come out with the same phonetics that I used to write it down.

The problem English has with pronunciation is that we have a habit of insisting on importing foreign words with foreign pronunciations and insisting that they be spelled with their foreign spelling. Even if the source language isn't written in Latin script. (Bonus points for people who insist on using foreign case rules for converting to plurals, and double bonus points for people who do it wrong and insist that the wrong way is the most correct spelling.)

The great vowel shift in English meant that words aren't spelt how they sound. This also effects imported words, because sometimes their spelling is pre-vowel shift and sometimes not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

To speak English "correctly" you have to be able to pluralize the Latin, Greek, French, and Germanic way:

* octopi * phenomena * tableaux * oxen

Mostly this is just used for people to show off their erudition, since it would be easier to understand if everybody used the plural suffix rather than these weird declensions.

* octopuses * phenomenons * tableaus * oxes

Also, honorable mention for _childs_.

> * octopi

Congratulations on winning the double bonus points! Octopi is not even the correct Latin plural.

Nothing a few diacritical marks couldn't fix. Tried, tested, failed. (Benjamin Franklin tried to get Americans to adopt a writing system with diacritics. It didn't take.)

Just Spanish-style accent marks for some of the polysyllabic words would be a win, but it doesn't really matter. No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant. If we did adopt stress diacritics we'd end up with more homophones that differ only in stress, which would complicate an already complex language unnecessarily.

I like English as it is.

> No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant

would they now?

remember that read rhymes with lead, and also read rhymes with lead

Well, whichever "read" or "lead" we're talking about, I'm certain they are pronounced differently by, say, Kiwis, than, say, New Yorkers -- each of us still has to have two prononciations, yeah, but we mostly make do.

In the case of "read" and "lead" we just learn this by rote early on, shrug our shoulders, and try not to think too much about it. English has a lot of this, but really, not that much, and at the end of the day it's a pretty accessible language (as demonstrated by the many who speak it as a second or third language).

Other languages are more accessible than English. E.g., Spanish. But every language has complexity buried somewhere in it. Spanish has several regular forms of verb irregularities, and also a bunch of irregularly-irregular verbs to boot, with over 4k irregular verbs altogether -- and I'm saying Spanish is more accessible than English, but maybe I'm wrong.

French is rather complex, IMO. Like all Romance languages it has a ton of verb conjugations including a ton of subjunctive moods. It has as much phonetic complexity as English, and a ton of orthography rules ("all words that start with af... have a double-f except for Afrique, and some dozen other words I don't remember").

Japanese has Kanji, counters (over a thousand of those), tons of homophones, four writing systems...

Chinese languages have Chinese ideographs. Say no more.

Hangul is simple enough, I guess, since it is phonetic, but there must be complexity somewhere in Korean -- perhaps someone will tell us about it, but it's a fair guess on my part that Korean has complexity in it.

Russian is famously difficult to learn.

Etc..

English is phonetic enough that if you know either the written or spoken form of a word you can take a pretty good guess at the other one, and will almost certainly recognize it if it is presented to you. It's just harder than it needs to be.

Well, I wrote that with the experience of someone that knows no foreign language but English and reads a lot of books.

I wish I had a $currency for every time I used a word that I understand, can spell, know well - and got laughed at by people speaking English natively for the mispronunciation..

So I beg to differ: Going from the written form to the pronunciation is failing quite often, at least for me.

It’s not that simple. There are quite a few definitions of an epithet. ;)

https://youtu.be/RAGcDi0DRtU

Languages come and go, up until WWI, French was the global language. Only 50 years ago, knowing Russian was a massive asset and the language reached a lot of countries. Now English is the undisputed main one but there's indeed no guarantee it will stay that way, who knows what the future will be made of.

> French was the global language

It wasn't, it was just the primary language for diplomacy. Other languages were the de facto standard for other things e.g. English for maritime usage, German for science and maths.

What's unusual about the current situation is that English dominates in the fields that have the most global reach: international trade, music/film/TV and technology. This is almost exclusively due to US hegemony in these fields for the last 70 odd years.

What is also unusual about the current situation is how quickly things can change on a global scale. As such, I also don't see any reason to believe that English will dominate indefinitely.

But I also see no reason why we'll move to another single, hegemonic language. Dominant languages might split by function again or special purpose languages may spring up. I see embryonic versions of the latter in my children's electronic communications.

Yes, this is something I think will be more likely; English might lose its grasp of area A to one language and lose area B to another language. I don't think we'll see one national language dominate again for a long time because this is a globalized post-industrial world, I don't think we'll see the rapid transformation of just one part of the world like the 19th and 20th century again.

My parents' generation never used French to the same degree that we use English today, though. Its marketing machines (such as Hollywood) are tremendous.

In these parts of the world (Romania, Eastern-Europe, granted, a very Francophile country back in the day) middle-class people were regularly using French as the means of personal communication in the inter-war period. Just recently I’ve seen a post-card sent by a Romanian husband to his Romanian wife from a Romanian seaside resort sometime around 1930 which was written entirely in French. Lots of first names were also being French-ified for written informal communication, like the Romanian Gheorghe being changed into the French Georges. Once the communists came to power after WW2 almost all of that vanished, partly because the newly arisen middle-classes were not as “cultured” as the inter-war middle-class (even though knowing French was still seen as you being “an intellectual”, so to speak).

Once the communists fell and capitalism took over English sort of became lingua-franca for business communication, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any people using it for personal communication the same as they were using French before WW2. Not trying to refute your observation or anything, which I find entirely correct, just wanted to add a small piece of language trivia.

Oh, no doubt about that; in Portugal our middle and upper classes were knee deep in French language and culture. One of our best writers wrote a lengthy text humorously complaining that "Portugal was a country translated from French".

But this was still a small minority, even if influential, and even there actually knowing how to speak French wasn't universal.

English language cultural exports are a large part of it, but so is the internet. I could speak/read/write English years before taking English classes in school. IRC and bulletin boards were largely to blame for that, much more so than movies/TV.

I suppose kids these days have access to online content in whatever their native language is, but when I was growing English was the only option.

English is like Facebook, it has a huge network effect now, making it hard for people to leave, even if they want to.

Facebook has no use. No real penalty to leave it. Speaking English has a real economic impact

If your parents are from Europe, there's a good chance that all the administrative papers (including driving licence) were available in French and a lot of the main buildings would have French signs at that time. Just look at the old train station of Sofia for example: https://24timezones.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/img_0033.jpg, the new one has English instead of French now.

Im still hoping a constructed language like esperanto takes the mantel but that is such a pipe dream.

I see language adoption similar to currency adoption. Mainly through fiat power and leverage of network effects.

I think the world is more likely to end up using a simplified mashup of most used languages rather than a new one, especially Esperanto with all its faults.

Sounds like interlingua.

What? Not Toki Pona?

The author of this article wrote a very interesting book about the connection between language and empire, "Empires of the Word".

https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/d...

It is really interesting to read about how languages outlast their cultures. Latin comes to mind of course, but as the book discusses this was also the case with Sumerian and others.

I hope this will matter less (if it even matters now) once automatic translation of web pages gets good enough and those google auto translate earbuds actually start to work

The author makes the argument that automatic translation could prevent the rise of a new lingua franca: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/...

Automatic translation requires Strong AI. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge

> "Chinese, too, is great."

What an awkward way to end the article. What does he mean? Is he telling us his opinion of the language with one word, "great"?

Perhaps as an afterthought he added that line in case anyone wondered whether he thought the language was "great" or "not great", so he's kindly cleared up any confusion about that!

At the moment, the kind of Chinese you would want to talk to, almost always speaks English.(Except when you are sourcing parts in Shenzhen)

My exposure to Chinese people is heavily biased towards (1) highly educated youth who (2) feel like talking with foreigners. Despite that, it's very clear that this extremely selected population displays the full range of English ability, from native-level proficiency through near-total inability to speak or understand.

Drop down to students at a merely second-tier university, or people a little older, or top-tier students who don't bother to approach foreigners because they know there's no hope, and you'll find people with even less English than that.

Not considering Chinese who spend majority of his life outside of china, Ones overall competence correlates with the mastery of English. Bad English means: My parents neglected or could not pay for good education. Sadly this is some-what true for this generation.

Correlates, yes. But one of the best students I've met, who in a mock visa interview answered the question "it costs a lot of money to live in America. Can you afford it?" with "we have a hundred million RMB", was basically unable to function in conversation. (In the same interview, which was meant to be conducted in English, more than three quarters of her responses were just "什么意思？".)

Some people aren't interested in learning languages. Some people have tremendous difficulty.

What is "the kind of Chinese you would want to talk to"?

I see plenty of talk here about a "world" or dominant spoken language, and nothing so far about the extinction of viable languages now.. how quick people are to pile on to commonality .. many possible things to say but leave it there for now

I vote for English as a global standard everywhere and also ASCII only. We never really needed more, bye bye umlauts, dreierle-S, emojis and all that.

Side note rant on languages: the fact that on Duolingo there are more people willing to learn made up languages like Klingon or High Valyrian, rather than Arabic, says a lot about how invested many anglophones are about opening up towards other cultures.

Hopefully peak English has been reached.

>Side note rant on languages: the fact that on Duolingo there are more people willing to learn made up languages like Klingon or Game of Thrones, rather than Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin or Spanish, says a lot about how invested many anglophones are about opening up towards other cultures.

I would rather assume that it says a lot about how invested they are in popular culture and casual learning, because learning Klingon might actually be a fun diversion, and a lot less effort than learning Mandarin or Arabic.

I don't understand why you would pick Arabic as an example here. There are languages you could take as alternatives to the mentioned fantasy languages (Mandarin, German if you read a lot of technical literature, etc) that are significantly more relevant and likely to be useful online.

Surely the Arab world has no use online, especially lately /s

Considering that Duolingo doesn't even have an Arabic course yet and won't until August...

https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online

Considering they postponed it for years maybe that's my point?

Huh? No, you still have no point. Your point would only make sense if they only had "western" languages and then the pointless toy languages, but that's not the case at all.

Maybe made up languages are interesting in their own right because they're made up, and are therefore a totally different endeavor than a "real" language.

Maybe people like to occasionally do things just for fun instead of for practical reasons.

Also, where's your evidence that the people learning High Valyrian and Klingon aren't also learning Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc.?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com