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Comment by sargun | Hacker News Reader

I believe that this is one of the best things that TV has given us - the homogenization, and adoption of the English language. It eases communication and trade across cultures.

It also makes it cheaper to recruit people from all around the world with a given skill. Right now, there's a shortage in skilled welders. There's a massive number of skilled welders in Asia that make bit less money than the welders here do. Why can't we bring them across -- cost of certification? No. It's the language. Language enables globalization.

I'm sure there are still advantages to being bilingual that exist as well, but inventing, or adopting obscure languages to become one's mother tongue only seems counterproductive to me in the long run.

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I love English language, but I don't like it, and I find it unfortunate that it is the English language that has acquired the status of the most important international language today. Even the "standard" pronunciation turns out to be extremely hard to do correctly for non-native speakers, for many even after years of speaking it. The distinction between some phonemes is way too subtle for them to get right; some words are pronounced the same while spelled differently; some are the other way around. There is too much reliance on the context in determining the exact meaning of a word... The list can go on. The language was born as one among several used by the tribes living on an island, which may explain why it is so different from the languages of continental Europe.

It will likely get simplified as it keeps evolving as the "common tongue". Both spelling, and shedding phonemes that are just too close to distinguish without a lot of practice, or that are inconvenient for non-native speakers (to remind, most English speakers today are non-native).

There is too much reliance on the context in determining the exact meaning of a word

That is every language in the world

Babies are born with the ability to distinguish between any two frequencies that are important for a phonetic distinction. Within the first year, they begin to lose that ability and only retain frequency distinctions necessary for whatever language they're exposed to. So, when an adult can't tell the difference between two phonemes or has difficulty articulating it, it's because they weren't exposed to it early enough. So, the difficulty you describe would apply to any lingua franca. In the bullshit, completely impossible scenario where everyone in the world speaks one language, this wouldn't be a problem because there would only be one set of phonemes.

The homogenization and stabilization of language started with the printing press.

Radio, and then TV, started homogenization of pronunciation.

Agree there are huge advantages to us all agreeing on standards (English as language of business, metric system, etc). But from that doesn't follow that we all need to be monolingual.

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