13 replies to this topic

[Maecenas]

Nowadays English is the prevalent language in science and science brings bright future to everything connected with it. 2/3 of all scientific literature in natural sciences is published in English and near 1/3 of all publications in social sciences are in English. In many European universities students study their subjects in English. Moreover all popular music and films are in English, it dominates in cultural life.
If English became the only lingua franca, would it have bad or good consequences or maybe it doesn't matter at all? I guess that diversity of language is a good thing but I can't figure out why exactly. Does humankind lose anything when it loses one of its languages? Is it a vestige of nationalism in the modern world to defend a national language, wouldn't it be more "rational" to use one language?

P.S. Sorry for my poor English

Edited by Maecenas, 21 December 2012 - 07:08 PM.

[nowayout]

There is a problem with the design of the poll questions. The second and the third answers provided in the poll are not mutually exclusive. Answer 3 implies answer 2.

Edited by viveutvivas, 21 December 2012 - 07:50 PM.

[niner]

If English became the only lingua franca, would it have bad or good consequences or maybe it doesn't matter at all? I guess that diversity of language is a good thing but I can't figure out why exactly. Does humankind lose anything when it loses one of its languages? Is it a vestige of nationalism in the modern world to defend a national language, wouldn't it be more "rational" to use one language?

English as Lingua Franca... That's gotta annoy some French people. But this is a really good question. What makes a language "good"? It should be easy to learn, and the phonemes should be a good match for varied human vocal anatomy. The language should be able to efficiently encode ideas, and have enough flexibility that it can express whatever the human brain is capable of thinking. The written version should be sensible and work well with computers, which pretty much rules out pictorial systems. Out of all of these, the only one where I think English stands out is efficiency. Whenever I look at multiple translations of the same text, the English version is almost always the shortest. Many other languages just seem to use a lot more syllables to say the same thing. Then there's the question of the beauty of the language. How would you even begin to compare them on that front? But the big issue that overrides all of this is the large body of knowledge that's already encoded in the language, and the number of people who speak the language already. In this case, there is the majority of the scientific literature, and a lot of other stuff already written in English, and 1.8 billion speakers. The next largest number of speakers is Mandarin, with 1.3 billion. I've heard that there are more people in China who are learning English than the entire population of the US. I don't know if that's true, but if so, I guess the handwriting's on the wall that English is heading toward being the de facto world language. I could foresee a situation where the majority of the people in the world spoke English, mostly as a second language. In some smaller countries, I could see it supplanting the native tongue. I don't think we'd see the death of any major languages for a long time.

Technology is a big confounder, though. What if we had a really super good real time translation system, so you could have a verbal or skype conversation with a person who speaks a different language? What if all the world's literature could be translated flawlessly into any of the major languages? What if you could travel to the other side of the world quickly and cheaply? What if the developing world grows wealthy, barriers to migration fall, and people really start moving all over the world, falling in love with people from other language groups, and having kids? A lot of this will probably happen over the next century.

Do we lose something when we lose a language? Oh, hell yeah. The poetry alone is a huge loss. It seems like we'd have to lose a large part of a culture if no one speaks the language. We'd lose words for things that would have no counterpart in English. I wonder about the extent to which our language determines what we can think. Is there something to that, or is that some form of BroScience?

[nowayout]

Out of all of these, the only one where I think English stands out is efficiency. Whenever I look at multiple translations of the same text, the English version is almost always the shortest. Many other languages just seem to use a lot more syllables to say the same thing.

Interestingly enough, this is not true of the spoken versions. A recent study compared how long it took native speakers to say different translations of the same text. In all the languages tested, it took about the same amount of time. English may have less syllables than, say, Spanish, but they tend to be phonetically more complex and take a longer time to pronounce. The Spanish make up for longer words by pronouncing them more rapidly. Arriving in English-speaking countries from a Spanish-speaking country, it always strikes me that everybody must be depressed because they speak so slowly and glumly in comparison.

Another metric is ease of understanding, which depends on things like how much redundancy there is, how much overlap there is between similar words, how clearly words tend to be pronounced, and so on. Here English falls behind. I learned English much earlier in life than Spanish and have lived much of my life in an English-speaking environment, and yet I often find Spanish easier to follow especially in environments with high ambient noise. It is also difficult even for native speakers to make out the words of many English songs, whereas this is seldom a problem in Spanish.

Edited by viveutvivas, 21 December 2012 - 11:28 PM.

[trance]

The next largest number of speakers is Mandarin, with 1.3 billion. I've heard that there are more people in China who are learning English than the entire population of the US. I don't know if that's true, but if so, I guess the handwriting's on the wall that English is heading toward being the de facto world language.

Traveling China extensively each year, I can relate to this. It's common in Beijing and Shanghai to see most all road and advertising signs in both languages throughout the cities -- even in the outlaying smaller (?) neighborhoods in these two cities. A great majority speak English on some level in either city -- maybe too much so nowadays. A lot of western influences have changed both of these cities particularly.

Venture further into the country's interior and you're routinely stopped by many of the younger generation for no other matter than for them to practice their English for the very first time with a native speaker -- and to laugh, they are always laughing when they do this with me. Many have told me that English is required curriculum in most all elementary and high schools these days. Along with the modern problems of sorting and manipulating computerized data in Chinese characters (other than by stroke counts or pinyin equivalents), they have standardized on English in many areas for this reason too.

[xEva]

I agree that Spanish is much easier to learn, both grammar-wise and pronunciation. But English is it. It is the lingua franca and will be so for another century at least, maybe it will last a few centuries like Latin did.

I grew to like English. I like that it is a conceptual language, almost like Chinese. I mean it is common in English to have the same word for a noun, a verb and an adjective, which in other European languages requires a different suffix or ending or both. Lack of cases and virtually no verb conjugation is what makes English a conceptual language where the structure of the sentence and word order determines the meaning. For comparison, the cases in Russian allow for a very loose structure, Spanish and Italian are in the middle; and in Chinese the structure is paramount too but the order is often in reverse from English.

And yes I think that grammar and usage of words (roots and connections) determines the speaker's mentality, how he approaches and relates to the world. You start appreciating this better when you get to know languages that are not too similar. I think it is good that everybody on the planet will now know at least 2 languages (well, everyone except Americans lol).

Edited by xEva, 22 December 2012 - 05:56 AM.

[Brafarality]

I agree that Spanish is much easier to learn, both grammar-wise and pronunciation. But English is it. It is the lingua franca and will be so for another century at least, maybe it will last a few centuries like Latin did.

I respectfully disagree: I think spelling and pronounciation may be more difficult in English but, otherwise, it is possibly the easiest language on the planet to learn. The masculine and feminine genders of nouns alone in Spanish makes it more difficult. But, both sound beautiful whenspoken, in my opinion, so I hope both stick around a long time. Happy holidays!

[The Immortalist]

To me it makes no sense for languages to have noun classes based on gender/neutral. Isn't that very inefficient? From reading the wikipedia article on grammatical gender there are two ways to describe a cat if it's small depending on it's gender. http://en.wikipedia....xample:_Spanish
Rather than call the small cat Pequeno or Pequena depending on it gender why not just describe both as Pequen ?

[nowayout]

To me it makes no sense for languages to have noun classes based on gender/neutral. Isn't that very inefficient?

All languages have fossilized inefficiencies and redundancies. The one you mention is no more redundant that English requiring you to say "I am/you are/he is", instead of, for example, the less redundant pattern "I is/you is/he is" that some other languages use.

Sometimes redundancies can aid parsing in noisy environments, though, just like checksums in information theory, so they are not completely useless.

Edited by viveutvivas, 23 December 2012 - 07:20 PM.

[maxwatt]

Mandarin for concise brevity, but often ambiguity whether accidental or intended. English for precision. Spanish for poetry. French for philosophy (it is possible to make the most inane idea sound profound.) I don't know what German is good for (see MArk Twain's essay on that language.)*

Linguistic diversity occurs in areas where abundant resources and challenging terrain result in non-interacting pockets of population. Two of the most linguisticly diverse areas before industrialization were northern California and West Africa.

English's preponderance is largely due to the succession of one English-speaking world empire with another, England --> USA. This is the first time that has happened. Had things gone differently 60 or 70 years ago, we might all be speaking German as a second language. Instead, English has supplanted German for scientific and technical journals. Except for botany, which still accepts papers in Latin, a requirment only recently relaxed: they are beginning to accept English.

A language's suzerainty depends more on political and economic factors, IMO. If the imminent collapse of technological civilization due to climate change occurs, populations will become fragmented, and so will spoken language. English to be like Latin, the written language of the educated? Already 'Strines (Australians) are hard to understand unless they talk slowly. But maybe there is something to ease of pronunciation; in one international Dutch company's headquarters in Holland, if a native Dutch speaker had a sore throat he would switch to English. Less painful to pronounce. Achhhh.

China may offer an example of what is to come if our civilization remains intact: there are over 60 recognized languages, and more undocumented. Almost all understand Mandarin (and now some English) but each city has its own dialect or slang, so much so that normal speech in Chengdu, or Hunan south of Changsha will not be understood by a Mandarin speaker from the northeast. In Shanghai, they speak Wu, as different from Mandarin as French from Spanish. Various mutually incomprehensible Wu dialects are spoken south to Fujian,where Min (related to Vietnamese) and Chaozhou are spoken, then Guangzhou, where you hear Cantonese, the second most widely spoken language in China. West in Hunan, there are four dialects of Xiang, old Xiang retaining glottal stops, tones and other features of Middle Chinese. "Li siaow Yingyu bu?" instead of "Ni shao Yingyu ma?" ("Do you speak English?" a most useful phrase any other language.)

My point is this: other languages will survive if their native speakers hold on to them, which they will do if there are enough of them, and they continue to speak their tongue at home with their children. Vive la langue française.

* "Any language that calls a 'glove' a 'hand-shoe' displays a singular lack of imagination." -- Mark Twain

Edited by maxwatt, 23 December 2012 - 08:22 PM.

[Maecenas]

* "Any language that calls a 'glove' a 'hand-shoe' displays a singular lack of imagination." -- Mark Twain

I don't know the reason why Mark Twain was so rude to German language, but German philosophy is without a doubt the most creative thing any language has ever produced.

[maxwatt]

Mark Twain was a humorist... of sorts. I apologize for continuing to make German the butt of his jokes, but the language does have its peculiarities. Twain told of an English matron who heard Bismark was the greatest orator, so she determined to listen to one of his speeches at the Reichstag. Speaking no German herself, she hired a translator to interpret as the Chancellor spoke. Bismark began speaking, and went on a bit...she asked "what is he saying?" "Shh..". the interpreter said. Bismark continued to speak, and again she asked "What is he saying?" ... "Shh..." said the interpreter. "I am paying you good money to translate! Tell me what he is saying!" The interpreter said "Please, madam, I am waiting for the verb."

Despite Twain's opinion, on reading Rilke one realizes eigentlich Deutsch ist schön, deutsche ist wie Musik. Not to belittle German philosophy but I am far more impressed with Rilke than with the whole of German philosophy.

[Lazarus Long]

In 1998 I wrote a paper called "Internet English as the Global Second Language". Pretty much everything I predicted has come to pass. I also agree there is a flaw in the way the poll was phrased, as implied by the title of that old paper I would argue that English will become a global "Second" language without destroying all other languages. Most small languages are however sadly doomed and we are seeing that in the current accelerating rate of their extinctions. Ironically there was a good BBC article recently on this subject titled "NYC, Where Languages Go to Die".

However currently dominant world languages like, Spanish, Chinese (both Mandarin and Cantonese) as well as regionally supported languages like Japanese, French, German, even Hebrew and Arabic and numerous others will continue throughout this century and for some time to come. Chinese and Spanish will even compete with English for dominance as a global second language when they both become more important to global trade. What will become the norm by the end of the century is bi and multilingualism I suspect as mono-linguists are placed at severe disadvantage to compete in a global marketplace.

[DeadMeat]

Yes, because aliens hid mind control machines deep in the earth's crust to manipulate us so that after a while the dominant language becomes a language resembling English, to promote space tourism.
http://www.webcomics...e&chapter=47788