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Comment by curun1r | Hacker News Reader

> English overtook French for the banal reason that more people saw more individual benefit of learning it over a long period of time.

Add to that the fact that French doesn't tick all that many boxes in the "ideal language" test either. It takes its romantic roots and adds a lot more complexity than does Spanish, Italian or Romanian (and a bit more than Portuguese too).

Spanish seems like it would've been the best candidate to push as a universal language rather than creating Esperanto. Its pronunciation is simple and follows a few simple rules. It doesn't have that many irregular verbs. About the only complexity it has is the masculine/feminine of words. Introducing and pushing a gender-neutral variant of the language seems like it would've been a lot more successful than Esperanto has been.

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I would not be surprised if a very large component of the dominance of English is due to a dominant British Empire flowing directly into a dominant American empire, with a sidetrip into the near complete destruction of European economic output during WWII. Because the British and the Americans in the aftermath did not horde their academic research away from Europe (unlike Russia), it created the massive incentive that we continue to perpetuate today to publish everything in English.

In other words, Spanish is not more popular because Spaniards didn't invent the modern economy.

To some extent. But less because the British forced it on everyone than because Nigerians, Indians, Filipinos have all found it useful for their own purposes: these are all polyglot societies in which the elevation of a regional language would advantage one ethnic group over others.

But how did English become so dominant in Europe? It seems mostly like the Nordic countries heavily adopted English as an international language, and this was a major beachhead for English. German and Russian had historical baggage, but why not French, historically the standard?

Languages have always spread through invasion. English is spoken in the US, Australia, much of India etc because English troops arrived, latin America speaks Spanish because Spanish with guns went there.

Spanish speakers love to tout the simplicity of pronunciation but I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly. This is the main complexity of romance languages and was an immediate turn off to me.

> I'd argue conjugation and gender are just as complicated because they add additional memorization and dimension in order to speak correctly

I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy. What I find more difficult are all the irregular verbs.

On the other hand, I've been learning English for decades and oral communication is still difficult at times.

> I don't think conjugation is such a problem. I'm learning Spanish at the moment and learning the various endings is actually quite easy.

Did you get to Subjuntivo or Pretérito vs. Imperfecto yet? Unless you already speak Portuguese or Italian, that's when the verbs get tricky :)

Yes, I'm getting there :) I speak French which is somewhat similar. However, I feel that what is difficult are not the conjugations per se but the irregularities. Each irregular verbs is a new conjugation table to learn!

What? Spanish conjugation doesn't seem so bad. Simpler than French, at least. Bigger challenge with Spanish is that conjugation of second person stuff varies by dialect - Argentines, Mexicans, and Spaniards do it differently.

What you say about the second person is true, but all the forms are understandable by all Spanish speakers and all of them are «correct». It is mostly a matter of style.

> conjugation and gender are just as complicated

Perhaps introducing and pushing a gender-neutral and conjugation-simplified variant of Spanish would've been the way to make it more successful than Esperanto. Los Vegos anyone?

Eliminate gender, simplify the conjugations, deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality. Throw in some loan words from English to expand the vocabulary and keep the Anglos happy (with regularised orthography and conjugations, naturally). And encourage people to slow down when they speak

Do all this, and you'll have a very user friendly language that half the world's population will be able to pick up muy rapidamente

(I have a feeling this is going to end up like the joke about eliminating all the problems with British spelling, which is achieved by progressively turning it into something sounding like comedy German...)

>deprecate usted to avoid the social awkwardness of using the wrong level of formality

I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted". When you are writing to someone you are not very familiar and you want to sound more formal the way to go is to use a "implicit usted", which means you refer to the other person by name but use the third instead of the second person. Anyway, better avoid using "usted" directly, it sounds awkward in almost any situation.

'I'm Spanish and I think it has been months since I have heard "usted".'

This varies a lot between different Spanish-speaking countries. Heck, in Argentina they still use "vos".

But that's different, because in Argentina they have replaced the second person and "tú" by the third person and "vos". For them it's not a formal addressing at all.

However, I won't deny that for most Spanish-speakers Argentinians sound surprisingly polite.

Gender is actually a useful layer of redundancy when listening to someone speak. If you miss a syllable or two you can fill in the blanks sometime if you caught the article.

Ditto conjugation. I actually like in Spanish how it's redundant if the pronoun is included, and alternately you can drop the pronoun for brevity.

For most situations, having the verb matching in person and number with the subject is enough redundancy. Conjugating also the gender bring the problem that every single thing you can name needs to carry a gender even if the concept of "gender" do not have any meaning.

For Europeans, [Interlingua][0] would be ideal. The people that made it looked at a bunch of European languages, and look a least-common-denominator approach to lexicon, phonology, and syntax. The resulting language looks a lot like Spanish lexicon and phonology, with simplified English syntax.

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

Robert Heinlein apparently felt the same way, "Galactica" the language of spacefaring humans was based largely on Spanish in his books

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