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Comment by johan_larson | Hacker News Reader

I'm disappointed none of the various constructed "universal" languages (like Esperanto) ever took off. Having a single common language spoken by everyone would be enormously useful. As it is, the closest we have is English, but it's a natural language and therefore complicated and difficult to learn.

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And yet easy enough for basically everyone in the world to learn.

Just think, it could’ve been French. It was dominant for many many years.

Russian was a huge candidate as well. Wanna learn that? I’m a native Slavic speaker and I wouldn’t wish a Slavic language on anyone who needs to become fluent enough to do business.

Spanish was (is?) a big candidate too, that one is about as hard as English i guess.

Portuguese? I can’t tell how hard it is, but it sounds more difficult to me than Spanish.

Arabic was a strong contender once upon a time as well. That to me seems very difficult to learn.

Of course we could go for Chinese. I hear that’s easy to learn conceptually, but hard to learn how to speak properly.

Ultimately we landed on English in part because of the cultural and historical dominance, and in part because it’s just easy enough for anyone to become fluent enough. The nice thing about it is that it steals language constructs and words so liberally from other languages that anyone can find something familiar to grab onto.

I second this feeling. I'm not a native English speaker but I often see myself hoping that it becomes ever more prevalent.

Unfortunately there's a lot of resistance to accepting it as the official universal language, not in small part due to the anti-multeralist stance of the major anglo nations. One can only hope Brexit doesn't make German a virtual necessity to deal with the EU in the long term.

> One can only hope Brexit doesn't make German a virtual necessity to deal with the EU in the long term.

The EU has had more than twenty official languages for many years, I don't think it is likely at all that this will suddenly change to one language. I also don't think there is any chance for English being removed, since it is the most widely understood language in the union (the UK being a member or not has no relevance to that).

Internally the EU uses almost only French, English, and (to a much lesser degree) German. Many documents are only available in French and English.

I have a feeling that the right timing of English-speaking political dominance in 19th and 20th century combined with global information technology boom has contributed a lot here. It could have been French (and in a sense was) if they had had movies and Internet earlier.

To me English doesn't feel logical at times (maybe a subjective observation) but at least we all can agree that the ortography with its historical baggage is not optimal.

Personally, I think the most helpful thing has been the cultural dominance of English language movies and TV series in my youth. Also, much of today's computer technology coming from the US, all that material is in English. It could have been any of those languages, because I don't strongly believe in that languages are intrinsically difficult to learn. They are just different. And typologically, English is quite distant from my native language.

I think your point about cultural dominance, and specifically youth culture, is the key one.

I travel a fair bit and it still surprises me how often I hear English, usually lyrics, regardless of the local language.

English isn't particularly logical. This is partly because it is a hodge-podge of Germanic and Latin roots. I think its also because it's so widely used. It's accepted a ton of vocab from around the world and usage seems to have a "natural selection" effect on grammar.

I'm not sure I agree about French. It was the main diplomatic language before American hegemony but I'm not sure it ever really took off much as a second language. I actually think that German was the natural choice if things had turned out differently. The reason is that, in the 20s and 30s, German was the lingua franca of science and technology. Germany was also a pioneer in film. These were only just starting to dominate culture at that time and, without the upheaval of WWII, could easily have spread from there.

French did take off in many places. In Romania for example we even borrowed something like 20% of our current vocabulary from it. However English became popular in the age of mass literacy, mass transport mass media and the Internet. Huge expansion vectors for a language.

Also English had multiple support points instead of 1 (France): UK, US, British colonies.

Yes, German is perhaps a better recent example (late 19th, 20th century), having similar technology and science reasons that work for English today.

It could have been French (and in a sense was) if they had had movies and Internet earlier.

Earlier? The French invented the movie theater.

They isolated themselves right off with Minitel, though.

I was thinking like 17th up to 19th century earlier when French was the dominant international language in many domains :)

> Just think, it could’ve been French. It was dominant for many many years.

Or German, which was also a very widely internationally used language in science before the wars.

yes, but the English spoken by most non-natives is actually something like an Esperanto. the pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar is almost normalized and an artificial dialect. i think English is a very good compromise. the only problem are French people and other communities who disdain English for patriotical, historical, or political reasons.

I think My Language is a good compromise. The only problem are not My Language speakers and other communities who disdain My Language for patriotic, historic or political reasons.

as my fake username suggests - I'm a German.

I'm a native speaker of German, and anytime someone wants to try their mediocre German on my, I cringe, and quickly move to English to move the conversation along.

For some reason, it's not half has horrible to listen to broken English. Unless it's by Germans, in which case I usually leave the room. Or drop the class, as it happened during my studies.

And it's called "airport english"

I always thought Wolf Blitzer was "airport english"

English is considered to be very difficult language and I find it to be a historical tragedy that English became the lingua franca of the world. I remember that as a child I could not wrap my head around the "spelling competitions" I saw in English cartoons. What is the deal with spelling words? If you can say it you just spelled it, if you can read it you just pronanceed it. And that is only one of many things that make English difficult. Only Chinese Mandarin with its tonality could be worse (will be worse?).

Spelling difficulties are are artefact of what makes English so powerful, though -- its ability to simply adopt foreign words any time it feels the need to do so.

The base language was formed by crashing two major European language families into each other a thousand years ago, and we've been happily borrowing words from every other language on Earth ever since as we've needed them. If we want to make up a brand new word, as we so often do in science, we'll probably reach for a handful of Greek and Latin prefixes and suffices and stick them together any way we like.

After a thousand years of this, English is probably the language with the biggest and most expressive vocabulary of any language in the world.

I think the spelling difficulties have more to do with English not having phonetic spelling than with it having many loanwords, prefixes or suffixes. I speak Portuguese and we have lots of loanwords as well but after a while they are all spelled like the rest of the words are instead of copying the original spelling. And every once in a while there is a spelling reform to replace archaic spellings with more modern forms (this never happened with English because it was politically unpopular)

How words are spelt (!) in en-gb definitely owes a debt to the word origin, or sometimes the imagined origin ...

http://mentalfloss.com/article/59320/5-words-are-spelled-wei... has a couple of nice examples.

I think the cause of a lot of the bizarre spelling in English is the "Great Vowel Shift" - basically, sometime between 1350 and 1700, most uses of most long vowels changed their pronunciation.

Obviously (because this is English), the change didn't apply universally, but it applied widely enough to move our pronunciation out of sync with the European languages it was derived from.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift for more detail.

When you say a thousand years ago presumably you mean the pre-French Norman language mixed with the Old English from 1066?

I'd go back to the Roman invasion, at least, and the mixing of Latin as the official language of Roman Britain with the Brytthonic language(s) [themselves already probably mixing with other earlier Celtic tongues].

Some of the Latin in English (and Cymraeg) was adopted via the Norman/French tongue but there's pretty clear evidence -- AFAICT, I'm not a linguist -- of Latin being retained and adopted from the occupation. That presumably gave us a Creole as a starting place to add in Germanic (Saxon, Frisian, Jutlandish), Celtic (Irish, Pictish?), and Nordic languages in the first millennium AD making the mixing of Norman French just more of the same??

So I'd say, "after two thousand years of this" ...

As a French, I've always enjoyed finding words in English coming from French, but I've never though about latin words coming from the roman occupation. Thank you for sharing!

Words like ffenestr and ysgol from Cymraeg show the adoption of Latin that you'd recognise in French (fenetre, ecole). Suggesting these words were already around in Old English from Latin.

It can be hard to tell the history though, eg sovereign came from French (rein) but got Latinised (regnare) in spelling reform.

One interesting thing for me was finding English loanwords in Cymraeg (former Welsh language) that are no longer used in English. I'll bet there are some French loanwords in English that aren't in French any more?

There are words adopted twice too, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Fre... has lots of examples. Giving us chief and chef in English with different meanings but based on a single French word (I gather) adopted at different times.

> I'll bet there are some French loanwords in English that aren't in French any more?

I don't know any and I don't think I'll be able to spot them since they aren't in French anymore.

But (from your link), there are words coming from Old French in English which then went back in French, but usually keeping the English pronunciation.

Aside from the spelling issue (which is an issue in many languages), English is one of the simplest languages by far (among languages spoken by 100k+ people).

If only the native speakers would understand international English is different from the language they use every day.

As a French people, I do feel disdain for the England, but I love the English language since it allow me to connect with the rest of the planet :).

even within English we have a ton of local and regional variances in everything from accent to connotation to words to the point that some variants aren't even intelligible. Check out the Ocracoke Brogue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csfyrRqc5TU and that's right in the heart of North America!

i'm no linguist but my familiarity with german/chinese and a smattering of other languages has led me to conclude that humans have an inbuilt tendency to just mess things up just because. If there's a grammar rule that can be broken or inverted, some language out there will do it. the tower of babel is encoded in our DNA. The Diryabal language even has a gender for vegetables and fruits. (http://www.superlinguo.com/post/5746695497/lady-nouns-and-ve... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyirbal_language)

One thing I like about Interligua is that... I can read it with just a bit of difficulty, despite not having learned it. I'm a native english speaker with high school french. I imagine native speakers of romance languages could read it fluently. That's a huge percentage of the worlds population right there.

It seems like a much better idea than esperanto.

We have english. Although not a technically great language, it s a savior in Europe. In fact, with the UK gone, i think EU should adopt it as primary lingua franca.

Still an official language in the EU because Ireland (and Cyprus and Malta, to an extent). Right?

Actually, Ireland chose Gaelic as their official language, and I think the same thing is true for Cyprus and Malta. So, when the UK leaves, there could be no member with English as its official language (the UK is still part of the EU until 2019).

In Ireland, both English and Irish (Gaeilge in Irish - not Gaelic) are our official languages, and both are also official languages of the EU.

English is also an official language in Malta, but not Cyprus.

Yes, but with the UK gone there will be less nagging from the french :)

No, we'll continue to nag, but about something else (we'll find something easily).

Still I think UE should keep English, since it's already in place and I don't think it would be useful to switch to French.

Agreed. If only we could fix the non-phonetic spelling...

there are 2 ways for that. I would go for changing the pronounciation rather than the writing

What's your linguistic background (eg mother tongue)?

I, naytiv British, wud go for speling reform in preference to pronouncing "wo-uh-ld" or "deb-t'", et cetera.

greek.

oh no don't do that! that's like british teenage slang. even their parents cannot understand tem!

English is a surprisingly versatile language. You can get your point across with pidgin english just fine, and it's the most spoken language in the world.

On the other hand you have people who master the language on a whole new level, like Douglas Adams.

Chinese is #1 according to Wikipedia.

That list comes with a fair warning about its reliability at the top though¹. English is indisputably the largest second language (L2) spoken in the world, and is vying for the position of most spoken language with Mandarin Chinese.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

"For example, English has about 400 million native speakers but, depending on the criterion chosen, can be said to have as many as 2 billion speakers."

So depending on how you choose you metric, English wins overall

Yeah, but it's all inside one region isn't it? Comprising of China (obv), HK/Macau, Taiwan and parts of Vietnam maybe (not sure). Like everyone likes citing this fact to me as though it is mind bending, but if that language is never going to spread out, then what's the point of counting it as a "widely" spoken language.

To my understanding, the problem is that the nuances and subtleties of natural languages are not possible (or not as easy to convey) in artificial languages, for a number of reasons. This makes it impractical for real use: imagine diplomats having to speak their mind instead of beating around the bush :)

But if you are interested in universal languages, I suggest you to check out Sol-re-sol [1]. I have read the story in Paul Collins' "Banvard's Folly" and have been fascinated by it ever since.

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

Esperanto is still growing; I wouldn't give up on it yet. It's only recently been added to Duolingo.

The main reason is that it's so much easier to learn than English, it can be taught "for free". Basically, instead of just teaching the target language, first teach Esperanto. At the end of a fixed time, students are better at the target language.

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

For me it is Lojban. But I haven't gotten around to learning it.

ui. mi darsygau do nu cilre fi lo lojbo

> Having a single common language spoken by everyone would be enormously useful

In the same way that having a single programming language would be, right? :)

Joking aside, I find having multiple languages part of the charm of being a homo sapiens. We would be missing some colour in our world if we all communicated in the same tongue and, indeed, I don't think it would solve many real-life issues around _miscommunication_.

Globish is one attempt at a simplified English.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globish_(Nerriere)

Lingo ain't, like, fixed, blood. Your spitting is tripping.

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