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Comment by haywirez | Hacker News Reader

I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers, especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be important for the EU to be able to vote for representatives regardless of your primary jurisdiction.

Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.

Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.

[0]: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024

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I find that unlikely to believe. Yes, the de-facto working languages in Bruxelles are English and French, but chances are everyone knows both (or even English better). If you send material to MEPs of any country, they will be able to read it if they want - there are dedicated translation services, as you might imagine in an org working with dozens of different ethnicities.

Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments.

In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).

Correct - this proposal is coming from the EPP, the largest party in the EU parliament. Predictably, most of their MEPs will just blindly vote for it along party lines. Language barriers are crucial in terms of their constituency universe (plus the older demographic skew). Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English and this issue is nowhere near their radars.

> Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English

That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.

Language barriers are overplayed. If they were so important then EU institutions would simply not work...

Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).

This is the reason that all proposals to the EU are translated to the native language of every nation. As of writing this the documents are available in 24 languages.

> adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.

This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.

> Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.

TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts.

Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.

This is why we need Esperanto.

We already have a common language that's widely known across Europe (English), it just doesn't have the reach that the native language does.

Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).

Feels like the same in the UK media, except s/Catalonia/Brexit/g.

It's quite different. The UK hasn't sent police to stop the Scottish referendum and beat up voters and the EU has not sought the extradition of Nigel Farage.

I believe the poster was meaning that the UK press is insular and doesn't report on wider European issues like the Spanish press and not commenting on Catalonia or making a comparison with Scotland.

Or English as the officially recognised global language

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

With Britain leaving the EU there is sadly a lot less reason for English to be the official language.

Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage.

It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).

> Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage.

There’s still the Irish.

True, but Ireland is less than 5M, 13 seats in the EU parliament. They are not seen as a competition to anyone. The UK is 66M with 73 seats in the parliament, member of G7 and one of the most important economies in the EU.

Surely the case for English as a working language is now stronger. Previously it could have been seen as unfair to use one member state's language over another...

Ireland is still in.

Also Malta. But neither really have a hope of overshadowing the big ones, even with their language as official.

Which one can replace it? Either French or German will face obstacles.

Or, on the contrary, there is less reason against it (no more perceived advantage or "cultural capitulation" to the Brits)

Why not Mandarin?

Because English is one of the simplest languages to learn.

A better question is why not Spanish?

Please stop with this fiction. I bet you never had to learn English as a second language. It's very hard.

I'm not a native speaker, so I did learn it.

However I'm just looking at my kids that are tri-lingual at the moment with fourth in the works and they prefer to use English even though we actively force them to speak my wife's and my native languages at home... which are of European group too, so not even close in complexity to Chinese or Arabic. English has less exceptions, there is no conjugation, no gender-specific adjective forms, not that many verb tenses, etc. It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.

What's spoken where you live?

EDIT: You edited your comment, so:

> English has less exceptions

Where? Verb tenses form essentially at random.

> It's just that - it's an uncomplicated language.

I disagree. It might not have conjugation, genders, etc, but it managed to more than make up for the lack of complexity with superb amounts of complexity in spelling, phrasal verbs, irregular verbs, etc.

English is a second language for me and compared to many other languages it's comparatively very simple, or at least you can start to understand and speak it at very basic level incredibly quickly. The biggest issue with English is completely inconsistent and illogical pronunciation, you can have two words that have the same spelling but different meaning depending on how they are pronounced - read and read for example. But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.

> But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.

This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.

Yet it's the language with - the most available teaching services - the most available free teaching resources - highest percent of use-cases in the world - easiest methods of finding a training companion anywhere in the world

It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.

English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.

I could speak and understand decent English when I was less than 10 or so due to watching so many subtitled shows and playing video games.

My native language is Finnish. Which is farther from English than Hindi (Which is in indo-european language tree unlike Finnish).

The biggest obstacle to using something like Mandarin is the writing system. Hieroglyphs are imho just fundamentally inferior to systems using alphabets.

>English is pretty easy due to the insane amounts of English media we consume.

As an American, I've been studying German for about 15 years, but although I've never officially studied Spanish, I speak and understand casual Spanish better then I do German. I wouldn't be able to read a Spanish novel like I can in German, but I can understand Spanish speakers and text message Spanish speakers far better than I can in German. All of this is from picking up the language through media, listening to Spanish speakers in my town, and hearing some of my wife's family speaking Spanish to each other.

German, on the other hand, is very difficult for me to encounter on the street and nearly as difficult to find cultural material to consume (Amazon carries German-language Harry Potter, 50 Shades of Grey, and that's about it).

There is a lot to be said about passively learning a language just from hearing it constantly.

I spoke German and Italian before learning English, and English didn't seem that terribly hard. Most words have the same stem as latin or germanic languages so it's easy to remember the vocabulary. The grammar isn't very complex. And there aren't special letters in the alphabet. Only the pronounciation is complex, because things are often spoken differently than how they are written.

You basically spoke the two languages English is made of, so naturally it was easy to remember the vocabulary for you. Special letters in the alphabet is only hard when you're trying to write the words, but English spelling being mostly unrelated to pronunciation is a major source of pain for learners. Tenses are formed irregularly, much of the language is phrasal verbs which there's no way around learning, and since English is basically two languages you have double the difficulty because words only relate to their half.

On the other hand you don't need to worry about cases, gender etc with English, as it jettisoned those features. No need to memorise what gender a table is, or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.

Every language is irregular because humans are irregular, but I don't think it is justified to paint English as somehow more difficult than other languages. The difficulty of a language just depends on the languages you already know, prior exposure, available resources to learn it etc - and the last two of these are typically much better for English than most other languages.

> No need to memorise what gender a table is,

Male

> or wondering which one of 14 cases to use.

14 cases (rules) are much easier to remember that thousands of specific cases.

I'm not saying English is more difficult than other languages, I'm saying it's not "very easy".

English is indeed one of the simplest languages to learn, as is Mandarin. English, Mandarin, and Latin are the standard examples for the theory in linguistics that simplicity in a language is caused by absorbing a large number of speakers who had to learn as adults.

Mandarin and Spanish are harder.

For whom?

I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of picking up a highly tonal language like Mandarin, if only exposed to the 44 phonemes of English well into adulthood...

- Because Mandarin is the official language only of China (and Taiwan)?

- Because English already has a great momentum (with the number of speakers of English as a second language, pop culture and the Internet)?

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