Hacker News Reader

Comment by BerislavLopac | Hacker News Reader

Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion -- French, Spanish.

View on HN

> Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc

The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names.

> Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process

There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England (though there are of course lots of English-based pidgins/creoles). There does, interestingly, seem to be some truth in there being an increased 'simplification' as languages gain more speakers, but mainly at the level of morphology, and not necessarily in syntax/semantics or phonology. (For instance, English still retains /θ/ and /ð/, which are really rare sounds crosslinguistically, especially having both of them.)

Hindi is actually not so dissimilar to English in having been impacted by lots of different languages. Just as English is at its core a Western Germanic language (closely related to the Germanic languages of the low countries and neighbours), Hindi is at its core a northern Indo-Aryan language. But just as English was impacted by other Germanic languages (e.g. Norse) and then Norman French (itself a Romance variety acquired by Germanic speakers), and so forth, modern Hindi reflects the influence of a number of languages around the area of Delhi, including Punjabi, as well as heavy Persian influence (where Persian itself was already impacted by Arabic), and even retains some Turkic words carried into India by the Persianised Mughals, and then later on Portuguese and English.

English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.

> English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.

Exactly. Not to mention that ease of learning is an extremely relative thing, and often comes down to what a person's native language is. Mandarin speakers would likely find Cantonese easier than English, for instance. And of course interest and necessity play a part in it as well; I actually met someone from Japan once who I could only communicate with through __Irish__. He found it much easier to learn because he was genuinely interested in it, so he could stick with it and focus on it.

> There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England

Actually, there's a plenty.

"Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff." [0]

As this article shows in more detail (and as I can confirm, being nearly bilingual), English is, grammatically, significantly simpler than most of the other (not only Indo-European) languages. (On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies. The proverbial example is "ough"; also, in some cases spelling was forcibly changed for political reasons, like "queen".)

[0] https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-differe...

Except it's not a creole, nor nowhere near it. For instance, a lot of the changes that we see in Middle English were already underway and documented even in our Old English texts. It's definitely outside academic consensus to consider the language a creole.

I'm aware of the arguments. There's at least two things worth unpacking here: (1) creolisation =/= pidginisation, (2) not all language contact effects are the same thing as either of these.

English isn't uniquely weird, at least no more so than any other language, in any linguistic sense.

> On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies

Sure, in addition to typically keeping the spelling of words borrowed from other languages, even though those follow different conventions than does English spelling.

But orthography and writing systems are a bolted on thing, they're not part of 'language' in any deep sense.

Sure, that might be one factor, but the global imperialism of the British and United States is another huge factor.

Or even just the cultural exports due to British and US media (BBC, Hollywood, etc) or the desire to do business in wealthier markets.

Many of the “cultural exports” are, however, essentially propaganda to glorify the power and righteousness of the American empire.

History has proven that this “soft power” approach to be incredibly effective. After all, we still study and celebrate similar texts from the Greek and Roman empires, even though they’re 1000s of years dead. Much less so those who they conquered, exploited, and enslaved.

While Hollywood definitely takes into consideration foreign markets when making films, the idea that their agenda is to propagandize the rest of the world is laughable. They make what sells, because all they care about is making money.

Hollywood has in the past made films that were pretty explicitly propaganda. Look at all of the propaganda films of World War II, and those weren't forced production by the US government. Granted, at that point, the propaganda was for domestic consumption, not foreign consumption.

Furthermore, other countries definitely use films and film exports for propaganda--China really comes to mind here.

I’m not familiar with such films. Are you positing that propagandist films are the norm or the exception?

Laughable, huh?

>Files we obtained, mainly through the US Freedom of Information Act, show that between 1911 and 2017, more than 800 feature films received support from the US Government’s Department of Defence (DoD), a significantly higher figure than previous estimates indicate. These included blockbuster franchises such as Transformers, Iron Man, and The Terminator.

On television, we found over 1,100 titles received Pentagon backing – 900 of them since 2005, from Flight 93 to Ice Road Truckers to Army Wives.

...

When the CIA established an entertainment liaison office in 1996, it made up for lost time, most emphatically on the Al Pacino film The Recruit and the Osama bin Laden assassination movie Zero Dark Thirty. Leaked private memos published by our colleague Tricia Jenkins in 2016, and other memos published in 2013 by the mainstream media, indicate that each of these productions was heavily influenced by government officials. Both heightened or inflated real-world threats and dampened down government malfeasance.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hollywood-cia-washingto...

The idea that Hollywood films are propaganda is a historical fact.

On the other hand, global imperialism has always played a role in forging a lingua franca in many ages, just like Classical Greek in the Hellenistic period and Latin in Roman Empire. (Disclaimer: I'm not judging the morality of imperialism, just stating the fact.)

During the peak of British colonialism, French was the...lingua franca... of the diplomatic and academic world.

yes, I agree British colonialism is not a sufficient condition for making English the dominant language. that does not invalidate my original statement.

I can’t imagine imperialism was a significant factor. Relatively few people need to interface with the imperialist power; but the new wealthy market imperialism makes available to you incentivizes you to learn the language of that market.

Imperialism was most definitely a huge factor - that's the sole reason so many countries have English as an official language.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll

Also (unusually?) English retains some semblance of the original spelling of words borrowed from numerous other languages and dialects

The crazy thing about English is that some of the various crazy spellings were decided on a long time ago as a way to distinguish the linguistic origin of words (Greek vs. Latin vs. French, basically) for a reading audience that was highly educated, and in the 800 years since then nobody ever engaged in a systematic campaign of spelling reform.

In some ways, I think this reveals a lot about Anglosphere culture.

To be fair, several people actually have tried to reform English spelling [1]. Perhaps the most famous of these, at least in America, was Noah Webster (of Webster's Dictionary fame) in the 1800s. He's actually the reason Americans use 'color' over 'colour' and 'center' over 'centre'.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

You're forgetting Webster, responsible for American spellings like colour vs color, centre vs center, gaol vs jail.

Not just that -- in some cases spelling of original English words was changed to align with certain political requirements. My favourite example is "queen": it was originally a perfectly norman Anglo-Saxon (i.e. Old English) word, "cwene" (pronounced more or less kweh-neh). When the French-speaking Normans conquered England, they accepted the local word for political reasons, but their scribes used the French way of spelling this group of sounds, that is using "que" like in Latin.

A few fun examples of mine on this:

debt [1]: Originally spelled 'dette' in Middle English; the <b> was added to make it more Latin-like.

isle [2]: Originally spelled 'ile, yle', the <s> was added to make it more Latin-like. Funnily enough, in this case, the <s> was also added to the native English word 'iland', under influence from the new <isle>. [3]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/debt

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/isle#Etymology

[3]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/island#English

In previous centuries French and Spanish were dominate. English emerged in the last century for political reasons, not because it was easy to speak/learn.

I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.

> I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.

It is a fact. From wiki:

"During the time of the Hellenistic civilization and Roman Empire, the lingua francas were Koine Greek and Latin. During the Middle Ages, the lingua franca was Greek in the parts of Europe, Middle East and Northern Africa where the Byzantine Empire held hegemony, and Latin was primarily used in the rest of Europe. Latin, for a significant portion of the expansion of the Roman Catholic Church, was the universal language of prayer and worship"

Also the new testament was written in greek.

> In previous centuries French and Spanish were dominate.

‘dominant’. I dominate; I am dominant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com