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Comment by wallflower | Hacker News Reader

In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1].

China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].

It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.

In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis.

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

[2] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

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> It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.

The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer.

I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.

It's not directly pertinent, but the slow triumph of Greek culture over Roman culture after the conquest of Greece is one of the most fascinating parts of ancient history. The Roman elites not only spoke Greek, they sent their kids to learn in Greek schools, they regarded Greece as the center of drama, philosophy, medicine..it's really quite amazing how deeply enamored with Greece the upper echelons of Roman society became. And not just as a passing fad, but consistently over a period of centuries.

Latin was the language of the day-to-day humdrum masses, as you say it's what a patrician would use to order a soldier or guard or lawyer around before going back to discussing fine cheeses or what have you in Greek.

>Captive Greece took captive her fierce conqueror, and introduced her arts into rude Latium. Thus flowed off the rough Saturnian numbers, and delicacy expelled the rank venom: but for a long time there remained, and at this day remain traces of rusticity.

Book of the Epistles, Horace

I find your analysis and argument to the point!

I once visited a customer in Finland. In the office, they spoke english around me. Curious, I asked if they were just being polite by speaking english instead of Finnish when I was present.

They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.

Both Chinese and English are interesting and relatively unique in how lossy they can be and still convey information. And I think that's a significant benefit in being a lingua franca.

And chinese can be learned - see any trader in a nation on the Chinese border. Tonality isn't that bad, actually - especially when the language isn't unintelligible when the tones are wrong - same as how English isn't unintelligable when vowels are wrong (unlike Japanese for example).

Written Chinese is, however, a big stumbling block to its universality. Though, given how rarely I even write English without a computer aiding me, that distinction is becoming less meaningful.

I've come to see most everyone knows three languages: that of their parents, that of their state, and English. The advantages of having those three be the same are significant.

You're calling English and Chinese 'lossy' in terms of their (comparative) lack of morphology?

(Natural language is pretty 'lossy' overall.)

They were saying each is tolerant of loss.

I don't know what that means.

In my experience (English natively, Chinese, Japanese & Spanish conversationally, and an interest in the subject with knowledge of about a diversity of other languages), English and Chinese can tolerate a lot of "error" and still maintain strong communication. You can mix up the order of words, you can use the "wrong" vowel for a given word, and there are a lot of different words that mean similar things, but are close enough. All of these aspects make the language understandable, even when the language skills of the speaker or listener are poor. Many different dialects of Chinese use tones very differently, have slightly different word meanings, and have different word orders - and communication in the language persists fairly well even when one speaker has a very different syntax, emphasis, and even vocabulary.

This idea is not really true for languages like Japanese, where mixing up a vowel can render the entire sentence confusing to a listener. And word order is fairly strict (if still expressively diverse). You can't just smash together some ideas and expect someone to really understand you. Similar is true for other more strict romantic languages (Latin is like that as well).

And so both English and Chinese seem to make be amenable to trying out and playing with not just new vocabulary, but new syntax, grammars, and phenomes.

I find that a somewhat odd evaluation. English is comparatively intolerant of changes in word order compared to a lot of languages.

For 'proper' language, maybe, but for intelligibility, not so much. Especially when spoken.

"I want food", "Food, I want it.", "I am wanting food.", "Food for me; hungry.", "Want food.", "Me want food." Are all completely intelligible to most speakers, if many are not proper grammar. You can drop or add all sorts of articles and pronouns in there without really affecting basic intelligibility either.

The first three are grammatical, not so much the last three. I agree most speakers of English (native or otherwise) could figure out what someone saying the last three intends. But you're saying that this is a special fact about English. That if I attempt to speak in 'broken Spanish' or 'broken Japanese' and produce the equivalent of 'me want food' in Spanish or Japanese, that Spanish and Japanese speaker would just shrug their shoulders and say 'who knows what he means'?

It's a general property of natural language that speakers can produce ungrammatical sentences and yet be understood by other (perhaps more fluent) speakers. English isn't special that way.

I can't comment on Japanese, but broken Spanish can be confusing (to me) due to verb conjugations. Conjugations are also a major sticking point for new learners of the language since they have a big impact on meaning but can be hard to remember.

For example, changing a single letter in "quiero" ("I want") can have a big impact on its meaning by becoming "quiere" ("He/she wants") and "quieres" ("you want").

See this page for the 142 possible conjugations of the verb querer: http://www.spanishdict.com/conjugate/querer

But you can't say "Food want me". Whereas in Old English, the grammar had so many markings that poets could weave distinct phrases together and still convey their meaning. In practice, that would still be awkward for typical speech, but it's cool all the same.

That is one thing I like about Latin - you can (to a degree) completely rearrange the words in a sentence and still make sense of it.

Aye.

"Man chased the woman" and "woman chased the man" have completely different meanings in English. In many languages, switching around the two nouns like that wouldn't necessarily change the meaning, and in others you'd at least be able to pick out that something had gone wrong.

The original statement was playing off of "lossy compression" as in computer science. The concrete meaning here is that Chinese and English both have enough redundancy to convey meaning even if some information is lost. So, in a noisy room you could still understand someone, for example.

I don't agree or disagree with that statement, because I speak 1.5 languages and the other is closely related to English. It's an interesting thought though.

I understand that. But I don't know what the linguistic equivalence of 'lossy compression' is.

All natural languages use a good bit of 'lossy compression' in a sense: we use a lot of shared world knowledge and context to 'get' meaning of things people say/write.

I would agree that English is more redundant than Japanese. Knowing both, a mispronunciation is a much bigger deal in Japanese than in English.

Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.

Vowel sounds in general are also more approximate in English, and differences are often chalked up to different accents.

Words commonly misinterpreted due to mispronunciation by non-native speakers include "kawaii" (cute) and "kowai" (scary), as well as "sawatte" (touch it) and "suwatte" (sit down).

It's _much_ more common for people to stare at you in confusion when you slightly mess up a pronunciation in Japan than in the US.

> Japanese has significant vowel length, which English doesn't. In Japanese, "un" means "yes", and "uun" means "no". Imagine if "yes" and "yesssss" meant opposite things in English.

That's sort of true, but you also have to realise that English underwent a sound change that changed the purely quantitative (vowel length) distinction into a qualitative one, changing Middle English long vowels into diphthongs. [And for things that sound very similar but where one means 'yes' and one means 'no', think about English 'un-huh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-huh#English ) and 'unh-uh' ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/uh-uh#English ). See the links for both audio files and IPA transcription.]

That just means in modern English vowel length isn't distinctive, but it is in Japanese. English on the other hand has a distinction between /r/ and /l/ that Japanese doesn't ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perception_of_English_/r/_and_... ).

In other languages (like Tamil), voicing distinctions in stops aren't phonemic (so 'log' and 'lock' would be non-distinct). And so on.

If as a non-native English speaker you produced 'rog' when your intended meaning was "lock", people would stare at you in confusion too.

The language isn't using lossy compression, but rather it's robust to loss. Sort of the opposite of compression.

This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures.

Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.

> Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.

Quite. As I have observed before, The Guardian is all too often The Daily Mail for leftie intellectuals. These days, even as something of a leftie intellectual, I find myself often unable to tolerate it at all. And in general I have less and less patience with overly polemic or political points of view - it honestly just gets boring and doesn't make the world any better for anyone.

EU has/is failing? I guess - in a glass-half-empty way - like everyone around the world is dying.

EU deliberately promotes multilingualism and, I'd argue, successfully[1]. English is (deservingly and also ironically) the most common language spoken in EU.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/26/europe...

No, the EU is failing. Merkel has spearheaded the importation of millions of people who (along with their descendants) will NEVER thrive in the information economy, and who will accelerate their fiscal demise as their native population ages.

I mean that’s pretty much straight-up, no-ambiguity racism my friend. Kindly take it elsewhere.

While i disagree with OP, I fail to see any mention of race or inferiority/superiority of any culture in his or her comment.

Stating that social integration will fail is definitly not racism. It's forecast, and it has in the past.

It's important to take into account integration if you want the new comers to be happy as well.

Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese.

That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.

There are some things easier in Mandarin, but I still think it's far more difficult than English.

The number of homophones is much higher than English.

IMHO spoken Chinese is not so bad. The grammar is simpler than English (no verb conjugation is a big one), and with the exception of tones, the phonetic inventory is fairly straightforward to learn. Although individual characters are frequently homophonic, treating groups of them as words (as you do in English) reduces the number of homophones significantly. If you're only going to learn Mandarin without the written language, it's very much doable, and possibly even easy depending on how quickly you pick up on the tones.

Written Chinese is, of course, a totally different matter.

On the bright side (and I am saying this genuinely) if you enjoy wordplay, puns, and double-meanings, Mandarin is hilariously awesome at it, even compared to English, which is no slouch itself.

>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].

Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.

Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?

> I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.

I've always wanted to know if this is true or not, but I've never found a good answer. I know the FSI rates Chinese at roughly 2000 hours of instruction to their definition of fluency (compared to 500 for other european languages like french or german), but I haven't found a similar comparison for chinese speakers.

Link: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...

The answer is no, English is easier to learn for Chinese-speakers than Chinese is for English speakers. Chinese and Japanese are objectively much harder, because of how kanji/hanzi work.

http://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-china-mandarin-20160...

(English is, in turn, harder than languages such as Spanish because of its spelling weirdnesses.)

The early weirdnesses stop mattering pretty quickly. Stuff like irregular verbs, you just get used to. The things that make languages hard are things that still trip you up years into learning the language.

In English, that'd be spelling. We have spelling bees! For a lot of languages, the idea of a spelling bee is unthinkable, because spelling is just not a problem. But in English, we have spellcheck on computers, we have native speakers constantly correcting each others' spelling.

In Chinese, that'd be reading/writing characters. At least in English, if you forget how to spell a word, you can just spell it out phonetically. In Chinese, there are thousands of characters, and if you forget how to write one, you're screwed. In a famous essay, someone forgot how to write "sneeze" in Chinese, and asked his friends at the Chinese equivalent of Harvard, and none of his friends could remember, either (we're talking native Chinese speakers in the PhD program for Chinese).

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

A good case but I'm looking for something more objective, like actual studies counting the hours. Moser is a famous text that gets posted on HN a lot but this is basically the most critical text there is, and it gets to the point where he's unfair and contrived, since it's written to be comical as opposed to accurate.

'Why x is so damn hard' can be written for any other language. All language are equally complex. chinese writing might be hard but it makes up in other area.

You can't make such a strong claim as "all languages are equally complex" with zero evidence, especially if you're replying to a comment that gives plenty of evidence that Chinese is harder.

I will grant that Chinese is easy in some ways and hard in others. I'm saying that most differences in difficulty fade away, years into learning a language. The things that remain are disproportionately worse, for Chinese.

In China, everyone takes compulsory English courses from a fairly young age. Due to the importance of it as a school subject, preschool children are regularly placed into English classes to help them get an early leg up on the language.

In the US of A and most other English speaking countries, nobody bothers learning anything but English; the minority of people who do learn a second language tend to go for something relatively easy like French or Spanish.

While this says nothing about the inherent difficulty of learning these languages, it does speak to the differing language learning priorities at a national level.

FWIW Chinese (Mandarin) is my native language and I still found it harder to learn than English. But that’s because I consumed mainly English media and pop culture growing up.

> English media and pop culture

That has a distinct advantage, though - I practically learned English by osmosis. I had to look up words very often in the beginning, but it felt so effortless and natural. (Native German speaker) DVDs helped a lot, because for US and British movies, they usually contain two audio tracks, the German translation and the original.

Yeah, it feels like gradually transitioning to English as the primary language would be the one of the best ways to improve the economy in most EU countries (as well as non-EU countries to some extent) since it would dramatically boost skilled immigration, and also make their citizens more educated and make communication with foreigner easier.

The French would lose their mind if they read your comment. It seems like France has a very strong linguistic inferiority complex compared to all other EU countries. English proficiency in France is among the lowest in the EU.

I blame mandatory dubbing. I found it very difficult to find English movies in English, while in countries where subtitling is standard, English proficiency is higher.

French here. It's true and it's a huge problem. People confuse accepting another language in your life and abandoning yours.

They are very attached to their language, it's part of their identity. Some part of france even still have a few people trying to protect a local dialect like the nissart or the breton.

All in all, the ability to speak english is pretty low in france, and I think it hurts the country more than it helps it.

We have our own world for computer... So what ?

It's time for europe to make english an official second language for all countries.

People can speak theit own language as much as they want, but they should all be able to communicate together. Vote together, build together, fill the same forms and share cooking receipes in an easy way.

Having a democracy in 25 languages is too much of a challenge.

Ha, I can see the headlines now...

"EU to make English official language, Brexit called off"

Language preservation is alive and well here too, parts of Wales are very keen on preserving the language, which interestingly is similar to the Breton language. Whilst living in Wales I once knew a French guy from Breton, he was able to pick up Welsh fairly quickly.

I've noticed this in Germany as well. Most people over the age of 40-50 have quite poor English skills, at least outside of the largest cities. Even young people in their 20s are markedly worse at English compared to young people in Denmark or Sweden, where dubbing is only used for cartoons and movies aimed at kids.

Maybe dubbing is the reason, or maybe it's simply due to living in a country of ~85 million people with one language. When you have so much content and research in your native language, you can get quite far without having to learn any foreign languages.

Boosting immigration isn't necessarily a desired outcome. Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated? Compared to, say, German or Chinese?

I agree with the benefit of English as the contemporary lingua franca, but these two reasons given don't make sense to me as a driver for "transitioning to English".

> Also, why would speaking English specifically make anyone more educated?

Because there is huge amount of content in English compared to any other language, starting from the majority of academic papers.

> there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English

While I agree it's unlikely that Chinese will usurp English's place as the global lingua franca (and the orthographic system is actually the main issue, but people could adopt Pinyin instead), it did function in this sort of role once in East Asia (look at the history of Japan, Korea, for instance).

It seems like it would be more accurate to say that the orthographic system was the lingua franca. The characters were used to communicate across vast distances between people that would not be able to talk at all to one another if sitting in the same room with their hands tied.

This is true these days but incredibly ahistorical; not sure where you got this impression.

> China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English

Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese?

On the other hand, I have known lots of Spanish and Chinese people who are utterly incapable of saying just a single English sentence which is somewhat comprehensible.

>Ok for multi-tonal, but what is "symbolic" about Chinese?

I think they are referring to the Chinese writing system being very loosely coupled to the pronunciation (in contrast to languages like Spanish or Korean).

Yes, I was referring to the writing system. It appears that the correct term to be used is "logosyllabic", not "symbolic".

> Chinese characters do not constitute an alphabet or a compact syllabary. Rather, the writing system is roughly logosyllabic; that is, a character generally represents one syllable of spoken Chinese and may be a word on its own or a part of a polysyllabic word. The characters themselves are often composed of parts that may represent physical objects, abstract notions, or pronunciation. Literacy requires the memorization of a great many characters: educated Chinese know about 4,000. The large number of Chinese characters has in part led to the adoption of Western alphabets as an auxiliary means of representing Chinese.

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

It's mildly interesting how you (and the article) use 'Lingua franca' (Latin) and not it's English meaning of 'common language'.

Edit: s/Italian/Latin/

'Lingua franca' is a Latin borrow phrase that literally mean "Frankish Tongue". It has a specific meaning and nuance in English, it doesn't mean Italian:

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

I never said it meant 'Italian', only that I (wrongly) thought it was Italian..

English is combination and splice of several languages. A few hundred years ago, writers found it much more extravegent to borrow French words, and Latin words, to say the same phrases. Usually, English is the most 'plain', then the French equivalent/derived, and then Latin is the most eloquent descriptor.

For example: Kingly (English), Royal (French), Regal (Latin)

We will borrow words from other languages with no problem - it just needs to become common enough. We have no "English Acedemy" that dictates the language - although you could argue that is a problem, given how it's been changed in America and abused by everyone, and has complex exceptions with no real decent rules (Although as an English native speaker, I'm not sure if that's just because I havent learnt those rules recently)

English speakers are not snobs; we borrow nice words and turns of phrase from wherever we encounter them. It's why English spelling is such a mess.

> English speakers are not snobs; we borrow nice words and turns of phrase from wherever we encounter them.

“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

Our orthography fits Middle English extremely well. It can’t be helped that that’s not the language you’re speaking.

Lingua franca in modern usage doesn't mean exactly the same thing as 'common language'.

The English would actually be 'common speech' - the word language is Latin.

But 'common' is derived from Latin, too! :P

Yes true (although it is from Old French) - let's go for 'shared speech' instead :)

And, I'm sure people have heard of it before, there's a semi-conlang that proposes to remove all Romance borrowings from English called Anglish [1]. There's also "Uncleftish Beholding" which tries to explain basic atomic theory using only native words [2].

[1] http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf

[2]https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language...

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