EU must adopt ‘EU English’ as its official working language after Brexit (2017)
european-views.com
european-views.com
A "neutral" language like Esperanto is a nice idea, and I would also like Latin as the EU language, as it can be argued to be the language that historically shaped Europe the most. But let's not fool ourselves, no one is going to stand for learning a new language from scratch (even if it's easy) when English pretty much Just Works(tm), and provides a lot of utility also outside the EU.
Personally, I'm from Spain and I'm not annoyed or upset about English being the lingua franca. I think we should abandon the idea of English "belonging" to its native speakers. When I talk to people from Germany, from China, or from Vietnam, for example our common language is almost always English, even if neither of us are natives. English is useful for us and belongs to us, as much as to someone from Gloucestershire.
It would be like deja veni vidi vici all over again.
Examples:
Mi aeroglissator es plen de anguillas.
Multo ben, gratias. E vos?
Contente de facer vostre cognoscentia!
Il es un placer facer vostre cognoscentia!
Amarea vos dansar con me?
Parla plus lentemente, per favor
Patre nostre, qui es in le celos, que tu nomine sia sanctificate; que tu regno veni; que tu voluntate sia facite como in le celo, etiam super le terra.
Speakers of romance languages probably feel the same way about Folkspraak:
> All mensklik wesings âre boren frî on' gelîk in werđigheid on' rejte. Đê âre begifted mid ferstand on' gewitt on' skulde behandele êlkên in en gêst av brôđerhêd.
Surprisingly, the language has been invented after the invention of keyboards with finite space for diacritics. In so far as it actually has been developed at all.
I wonder to what extent coming up with a new name for it would help adoption.
The English tend to speak English better and have better grammar than Americans in my experience, but I do prefer American spelling (disclaimer: I'm American)
There is a well recognized concept of mastering a language, you can claim (and I would agree) that dialects are respectable languages and AAVE is a proper English. Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.
Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals and that some language are inherently "better" than others. Both are positions I would not like were they to become mainstream.
In linguistics, there is a difference between errors and mistakes. Making an ungrammatical utterance is only an error if it's because the speaker's model of the language is wrong, i.e. because it differs from the one of a native speaker. This cannot happen to an adult speaker, except maybe in pathological cases or to children. Mistakes, however, happen all the time and to everyone.
> Still some native speakers in any language cannot understand long sentences or know how to express complex information.
That is true. I thought it was clear that I was referring to native speakers' grammar when I replied to GP's claim that Americans have worse grammar.
Not being able to understand certain sentences isn't something that only applies to "some" native speakers either:
> A man that a woman that a child that a bird that I heard saw knows loves.
Of course, a sentence like this is unacceptable[1] despite being grammatical.
> Otherwise if we go with the truism "everyone speaks their native language perfectly" we simply end up essentially saying that languages are fragmented to the level of individuals
I'm sorry to disappoint but that is the mainstream view. The language spoken by an individual is called an idiolect.
> and that some language are inherently "better" than others.
I can't follow. Why does the existence of idiolects imply that?
[1] That's the technical term for an utterance humans can't parse (except of course "manually" by analyzing it). This example demonstrates center embeddings. The brain probably fails to parse it because its stack overflows.
The main difference is the accent (when I was staying in California as an Englishman they couldn't understand me when I said "Kettle" and their pronunciation sounded more like "Keddle")
But accents will always be an issue regardless of which language is chosen.
I think they should continue using English as it's pragmatic but also introduce Esperanto as another working language and encourage its use (I used to speak Esperanto and my Grandfather is fluent so I'm a bit biased I suppose)
Agreed. The EU should do the needful.
("Do the needful" is Indian English)
Why is there an absolute must to only have one official language? Why not chose several most widely spoken ones, including English, and let each speaker chose the one that suits them best?
I live in a country where we have 4 national languages and 3 official ones. Our members of parliament can express themselves in the language of their choosing and their speech/intervention is translated for the rest. That way people can express themselves in the language they are most comfortable in (that is often not English, unless it's their mother tongue) and that does not put older generations (who never learnt English) at a disadvantage.
Having one single language in a multicultural setting can be tricky.
Romansh is spoken only in one of our "provinces" (Canton Graubünden) thus is considered too tiny to be supported on the national scale for official purposes.
We have this in Canada, and outside of Quebec, nobody cares about the French language. In fact, many manufacturers specifically avoid Canada in some cases due to the requirement to put both English and French on the packaging. All government communication has to be written twice. Government employees must have fluency in both languages.
All that waste, and for what? A language that nobody else uses.
Canada is a tiny market by comparison, so it's often not worth the expense of designing separate multi-language packaging just for them.
If your only argument against doing business in a country because of the language requirements, you aren't a good businessman/woman. Because you are sacrificing a market share for something that can be easily done: translate once, print indefinitely.
You can call it good/bad business practice all you want. Real manufacturers do make conscious decisions to avoid the Canadian market due to these costs. The reality is that we suffer because of this policy.
There is one silver lining, however: Online retailers like Amazon seem to be exempt.
[1] http://blog.generalmills.com/wp-content/uploads/Honey-Nut-Ch...
Where I live (Switzerland) the minimum to have is the information text translated (the one at the back). But the brand itself can remain as it is. Usually however, you do see a bit more translated, such as subtitles or things like what type of product that is, like "whole-grained bread" and things like that.
Also we're lucky to be in the middle of Europe, so companies that export to France and Germany tend to create one double translated product for both countries and it's imported to Switzerland as well.
But yea, if you force double work on the companies without any rational reason behind, then they might try to reduce costs by simply avoiding the market altogether.
It's not about whether anybody cares about a specific language anywhere outside of a province. It's about maintaining a language as one of the elements of the culture and country's identity.
If only criterion to keep or strike a language as official one was whether it's spoken by a majority or a minority, then you'd be living in a dictatorship of the masses (where majority decides for everybody else).
Learning a second or a third language is not a burden. It's an opportunity. An opportunity to immerse one self into a different culture, different world view... It should be seen as gift to widen one's perspective and not a financial burden.
And using the money as an argument against this or that is a dangerous slippery slope. Because with the same argument one could argue against a lot of other things: "Why maintain a universal healthcare, it costs too much!", "What? Maintain free education? Who needs that, it costs too much!"... And so forth, and so forth.
However, I also believe that bureaucracy should be minimized, especially at the federal level. And when it actively impedes the flow of goods and services (as it does in Canada because it's such a small market), you're throwing away far more than you gain.
having labels in a language people can understand is not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy would be having to compile every document in both languages.
A problem with multiple national languages (I have small experience of this living on the border between Germany and France and medium-short permanence in Benelux) is that if you have to write everything in two/three languages there is no space left for English to accommodate tourists.
On the other hand, if there is already an translation infrastructure it can maybe be adapted to one more language more easily....
Anyway globalization need to be respectful of local identities. It is one of the tenets of a multicultural society. By insisting that population leave behind their local languages you are either fragmenting countries or cooking up a dangerous backlash.
It really won't, especially the French.
Maybe. Definitely not to the extent France will.
At least Spanish is spoken by an order of magnitude more people than German, though (Latin America, and nowadays a third of USA as well)
We have a huge inferiority complex, and our own cainistic version of the black legend, that makes us revere anything foreign as better than the local version. We have petty fights re. official languages about whether traffic signs should read “A coruña” or “La coruña”; or whether the national news anchor should say “Gerona” or “Girona” when speaking in spanish. We have regional governments that push spanish out of their regions. We as a nation obsess over english; we dream of speaking it better, we make it sound cool in the ads. We mock our leaders for not speaking it properly.
No one seriously pushes in a coordinated manner for spanish being used in the EU as seriously as the french or german do. At most, we aspire to be the proxy for latin america relationships.
As soon as anyone proposes to use english, we will see it as the opportunity to not have half of europe speak in french.
> After a brief introduction in French, M. Seillière, the [French] president of the EU employers' federation, said he would speak in English because it was the international business language. Without saying a word, the French President left with the French foreign minister and finance minister. He only returned when the president of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, began speaking in French.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/outraged-by-...
Anyone who thinks that EU skepticism is exclusive to the Brits is in for a nasty nasty surprise.
Around 25 percent of Americans want their state to secede (1). A lot of Italians want Northern Italy to part with Southern Italy. Spain has Catalan and Basque separatists. The UK has Scotland, and perhaps even Northern Ireland.
There are many people in many places that think they would be better off in a more (formally) independent state.
For now, the EU skeptics are a small minority in most EU countries. I for one hope it stays like that. The EU has shown remarkable unity when met with Brexit.
1: http://blogs.reuters.com/jamesrgaines/2014/09/19/one-in-four...
False dichotomy. Surely the same level of integration, or even a slightly lower level of integration, will not necessarily lead to war. EU members were already quite peaceful before the adoption of the Lisbon treaty, for instance.
And you should also at least entertain the possibility that integrating populations further than they're willing to go increases the odds of conflict.
The EU made several critical mistakes in the way they approached their growth and integration issues and those in turn could very well lead to a final desintegration or split of the bloc. The UK leaving is a very bad sign, given that they already had one of the most exceptional positions within the EU.
Time will tell.
Of course the integration 'by force' (Maastricht for one, Lisbon for another) was utterly dumb, it feels to me as though they thought 'now or never' not realizing that they may be planting the seeds for the eventual dismantling of the union.
- British state doctrine has always been: We are the empire, the natural rulers of the world. We only live by chance near the rest of Europe, so we have to interact with the continent at bit more
- Britain was a net payer. We may strive for that to not be relevant, but if you pay you have influence
- Britain got many exceptions to the usual rules that allowed them to further their position
No other country has that combination, so the EU "skepticism" of others countries is less important, though there's still danger. We'll see how that plays out in the end, but still: GBs position was in many ways unique. Even if GB rejoined in a few years it probably wouldn't be the same.
Can you explain what you mean?
The economic and monetary union (the euro), Schengen, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and "the area of freedom, security and justice".
Even among very pro-EU political parties and countries across Europe, there has been no appetite for a new EU treaty since the Lisbon treaty. I'm willing to bet that there will be no further EU treaties for a decade or more.
And without a new treaty, there is little or no scope for further EU integration. The EU is a highly legalistic construct where powers are strictly defined by its multi-lateral treaties.
The idea that the EU civil service (commission) can just grab powers from national governments is anti-EU fud. Even within areas judged to be within the competence of the EU, the principle of subsidiarity (that power should remain with national governments unless absolutely necessary) is explicity a general principle of EU law.
For example removing the 'U' from words like Colour.
Ireland is also an English speaking country in the EU.
And I don't know how much of the sentiment of "Let's Americanise!" Would be popular.
[1] https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dicti...
I'm not sure it is actually an issue, it just feels weird as a French person to discover that French is not even required in your own country.
And why should it be? In big cities people tend to be more adaptive towards this than outside. If you go outside to the country side the situation will rapidly change.
But in every major European capital it is most likely possible to get around on just English.
I always make an effort when in France, Germany and Poland to speak the local language but more often than not the locals speak English much better than I speak their language and after a sentence or two the switch is made. Of course making an effort is appreciated anyway but there definitely is no expectation of being able to hold a full conversation in the language of the place you visit.
Again, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but this realisation was quite surprising to me
A friend of mine has lived in NL for 3 decades now and still does not speak Dutch, I'm sure he's an exception but he does not seem in any way hindered by this particular inability.
I'm not OP, but also at a Berlin tech company. I always say I'm glad I learned German (in a much smaller city elsewhere in Germany) before moving here. You absolutely can learn German here, and I know people who have, but I also know people who've lived here for years and don't know enough to buy a loaf of bread in a bakery. The problem is that you can get away with it: your colleagues can all speak English (and some of them can't speak Germany, in some workplaces, including mine); as an expat, you probably live in a neighborhood with lots of other expats, where the staff in restaurants and shops speak English (and it's not uncommon for waiters to be unable to speak German); you can make your friends exclusively in expat communities, and if you arrive in Berlin speaking no German, that's a lot easier than integrating into the local community without yet knowing its language. It's especially bad if your accent gives away that English is your native language.
It sucks, because it's harder to learn German, because you don't use it on daily basis. Myself including. But I find it ridiculous that some people after many years are not able to handle A1. Come on.
Watercooler talk is usually english unless I am around a group of people where I know that they all speak good german, but that rarely happens tbh. It's more likely to hear another group talking portuguese, spanish or arabic :)
We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?
The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other.
Everyone learning a new language that will just substitute English would be an immense waste of time.
It's extremely offensive to suggest that English is progress and other languages are a 'regression'.
Note that the author stealthily added a precision to his comment (which originally ended at "why regress?") since then to make clear it was about having a common language. But he has not removed the offending part.
I am a French native speaker and I also think we should just use English and move on as a species. Interpersonnal communication is hard enough that we don't need artificial complications. Let's tackle more interesting problems. Same reason we should use a single measurement units system, mains current standard, a single currency, etc.
A language carries with it a whole culture and history. Diversity enriches everyone.
Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.
If this were the reason, then English should already have been the lingua franca in 1900. But it wasn't.
But the previous spreading of the English language by the English Empire certainly helped when the US emerged as one of the main beneficiary of WW2.
Even at its peak, English language wasn't as widespread as now. The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin.
After WW2, US absolutely dominated the world coming off as the only victor in WW2 (that's my personal opinion) and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world (over time), undisputed. The end of the cold war cemented this even further.
We can argue that British imperialism helped somewhat, that I agree with.
I doubt it was intentional. Seems like it was a nice side-effect at most.
If that doesn't show intent, then I don't know what would :)
Don't get me wrong, I am actually impressed by it and gotta hand it to Reagan - winning a war without even firing a single shot.
Edit: I don't want to downplay the factor of oil and, but I feel like it's off topic here so that's why I don't mention it.
Hence the use of the Latin term “lingua franca”
The British Empire dominated large parts of the world, but it never dominated continental Europe. English was not widely spoken or taught in Europe until the end of WW2, when American culture became highly influential (although the UK did have its part through pop music).
The final push for English came with the internet and thus again from the US, I think. In many European countries there is a big divide in terms of English proficiency between people who grew up in pre or post internet era.
But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately?
This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well.
Universities degrees are already offered in English, and at the very least fluency in the language is required to study most courses, since all of the articles, case studies and reference materials are in that language. It is time that that same flexibility was extended to the earlier years of education.
I've seen children do this repeatedly and without any issue whatsoever, it is the adults that struggle.
Imagine it was the other way around. There is a single language humans speak and someone suggests we should instead split in hundreds of non mutually intelligible ones. Why would any one want that?
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7735/865e2ea8fd8d9662f3916f...
This already exists in many places. European countries are used to offering education in multiple languages. Multilingual schools or schools teaching in something other than the local language have existed for hundreds of years.
And tomorrows language is mandarin. Let's not write off that 1.1B speakers. With the rate China is expanding its influence in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years not speaking mandarin wouldn't look a bit odd.
But I think you were downvoted for the wrong reasons, since otherwise the argument is fairly sound. Chinese influence is continually increasing world-wide. It's mainly the writing system that prevents a wider spreading of Mandarin, and the Chinese cannot give it up because it unifies their nation. Another possible scenario is that other languages of China die out even more quickly than they already do now, thus paving the way to full mutual comprehensibility via Mandarin, which would then allow a drastic reform of the writing system. However, this seems unlikely to occur within the next 100 years.
A Geordie accent on a British broadcast tv show (Auf Wiedersehen Pet) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o
That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge.
I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.
I would like this EU English to evolve in the direction of keeping a simple grammar and going towards a more regular pronunciation. Basically it would become a new form of Esperanto, except that differently from Esperanto it would actually have a viable path for many people to learn it.
I know I like to dream, but maybe...
"English is the JavaScript of natural languages: easy to begin with, entirely bonkers, but used so widely you can't really avoid it."
[1] https://twitter.com/aerotwist/status/1129820477667586051
I'd much rather have the common language of the EU be English even without an English representation in the EU than to have to parse EU legal documents in French or German. The occasional contract is bad enough. At least with English there is a level playing field.
I don't see any major influence of either common law or the Napoleonic civil code on the EU legislation, though the court process arguably has been influenced strongly by those principles.
Is it? All EU laws are published in the official languages of all members. Legally, there are no translations but 22 texts that have equal status and the same meaning.
Don't ask me what happens if the meanings turn out not to match exactly in a relevant way.
TLDR: That's why the EUCJ primarily relies on the intent of a law.
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/legal_service/seminars/agjacobs_summ... ("How to interpret legislation which is equally authentic in twenty languages")
People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently" and diversity of thought is absolutely essential to humanity progressing.
It's been positied that "Asians are better at math" because their languages have a more logical naming system for numbers giving many a small early advantage that accumulates over time. Other languges possess other attributes that impart such advantages or disadvanges giving us diversity of thought so that we can have new ideas about things and new perspectives.
This is obviously not a very popular opinion of mine...
Just contemplate how if someone suggested all computer languges should be just become C because things would be easier.
It's even more important that we have diversity for natual languages imo -- after all onece you've a Turing Complete language one is the same as the next but we know how silly and inconvenient that would really be.
Computer languages are more about building a machine than communicating a human idea. Human languages are more about human things. We're all human and therefore should speak the same language.
Computer languages are sometimes so similar and help you build a similar type of machine. Think of ruby, JS, python, etc. All work very similar internally. I really wish we could pick one language (in a particular domain, say scripting) and have a monoculture. It saddens me when libraries need to be rewritten N times. I don't think there's anything silly about it. Web browsers could have picked python instead of JS, Rails could have picked python, and we would have been better off for it.
It's just a silly accident of history that we have what we have today.
I say this as a monoglot English speaker. I have some French and Irish but both are very poor.
This widely held belief is absolutely not a proven fact. It's called linguistic relativity or linguistic determinism [1] and the strong form (language determines thought) has not been taken seriously by researchers in the field for a while.
The weak form (language can have somewhat of an impact on the way you think) has not been proven or disproven and is a topic of debate. You just state it as if it was known, even though the causal relationship of most examples you could name can easily be the other way around (culture / thinking affects how a language develops).
I'd argue that everyone learning and speaking the same language would have immense benefits for a global society. You can keep recordings in museums and linguistic researchers to keep a historical record of languages, just like we have for other tools and methods that we no longer have any use for.
"We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.
Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers.
I take that as a powerful argument against granting it any official preference: English is doing fine with or without being forced upon anybody. That would just provoke organized resistance.
If you really want to alienate the EU from the average EU citizen, make English its official language. And adopt a version only a tiny minority really speaks too, just to salt the wound! I'm not sure whether to be scared or laugh.
The fact that the EU has 24 official languages isn't meant to make its proceedings cumbersome or to necessarily facilitate national pride (although, it's certainly also that!), but to make it available to the general public. The official nature of all the member states' languages means you can submit documents in all those languages.
Everyone on Hacker News speak English, but it's not a majority in the EU who speaks or understands English comfortably. But it's easy to forget our privilege. Even as younger generations get more and more accustomed to learning, reading and speaking English around Europe, most are still more comfortable reading technical, political and legal texts in their own language.
They may understand the dialogue in Game of Thrones well enough, but can an Estonian farmer understand an EU agriculture subsidy determination, if it was written in English?
But a majority is comfortable with German or French?
Also, I can promise you that at least for Sweden, a vast majority of population would prefer English being the official language of the EU to something like French. We may not always be completely comfortable speaking English, but it's a language just about anyone will understand with a little effort.
Also, I would rather propose using Irish English as an official EU English dialect after Brexit. Not as boring as the American one.
UPDATE: just checked, Ubuntu's United Kingdom uses Metric system actually, no idea why was I thinking it'd be Imperial before.
If countries offered Government services including education in English, it would hugely assist the movement of people and capital throughout the continent.
Consider: you are from Spain, and have been offered a job at a great company in Germany. You will speak English at the office and probably get around the city speaking English. But: your children need to learn German, fluently and immediately, in order to continue their schooling?
An official EU English would help pave the way for National Governments to offer services in both the local language and English.
If on the other hand you want all services to be available in English everywhere, then I don't think that's a realistic expectation, since it would require all public-facing government employees to speak decent English.
Being able to classify europeans in first class (allowed to work), and second class EU citizens (PIGs, yellow jackets,... etc), probably.
Because you're not only learning the language you study, but also the culture, norms, and values of the people speaking the language. One might be able to translate "Gezellig" (Dutch, cozy) of "Fika" (Swedish, afternoon tea) into English, but context and understanding will be lost in the process unless the English listener knows these distinctive words and their meaning within the cultural context.
Dutch and Swedish are still closely related to English by language as well as culture, imagine languages with no relation to English whatsoever; this "lost-in-translation" effect will be more pronounced.
A future universal translator might be incredibly good at translating, but will never be a substitute for human cultural understanding without having to explain every caveat and cultural intricacies to the user.
By all learning English, we can have a shared language, we're all able to understand each other in real-time, without technology, with less cultural ambiguity when interpreting.
And why wouldn't we learn English? Learning a second language is very achievable when you're taught in school as a child, and Engish seems like a good compromise between Romance languages and Germanic languages since English has a shared vocabulary with both.
Finally, I'm of course biased towards learning English, coming from a country where English is a mandatory subject in school. That being said; I assure you that no matter how good the translator; Seinfeld sucks in German.
- a language that is nobody's mother tongue: YEEEY!
- language that is not attached to any one culture: 10x YEEY!
Think about it! This could help global not just European unity: all the people of Asian and African origin who already speak fluent English could instantly embrace and join in and start building the new pan-European culture that will grow into a new and rich global culture. Freed from the tyranny of national-language-culture, this could be the first truly global culture Humanity has the chance to produce!
One thing Globalism 1.0 did wrong was trying to destroy culture. We know now that this leaves a void that attracts trash like racism, xenophobia and isolationism to get filled by these - culture too abhors vacuum! Now Globalism 2.0 can start right in the EU by constructing a new culture around a language that is nobody's own, at least on the cultural front. If this would ever work it will coagulate around it a new literature, then media etc. And finally we'd have a non-trash global culture that will be able to keep us united enough to properly address global issues like pollution and climate change!
</dream>
Could you expand on this, I'm not sure what you're referring to?
You need to CREATE ideas/stuff etc., and be occasionally violent/offensive with them (just be sure to offend everyone), otherwise unifomization and standardization will just destroy whatever is there to start with by diluting it out of existence.
The "globalism destroys culture" is a fav meme of the "other side" now, but it's not without base! If you pour water into wine, or if you mix all wines in equal proportions, you basically "destroy" wine. What you want is an authentically new kind of wine! And you can only build this on some neutral / owned-by-nobody foundation, otherwise everyone will want "wine 2.0" to be their style of wine, and you'll end up with some "designed by democratic committee" crap, instead of something designed by individual creative geniuses competing among themselves and building on top of this new neutral foundation.
"Thanks for giving us this tongue that has allowed us to transcend as humans, now GTFO"
(Though, tbh, "international high-English" as spoken has a very latin vocabulary, with non-native-English speakers often choosing the latin variant of words instead of the "native UK/US" phrasal verbs and such, eg. "we're accelerating" instead of "we're speeding up" or "we're gaining up speed", "inadequate" instead of "unfit", "superfluous" instead of "useless" etc. Not sure if to love or hate it, mostly loving myself it I think, but it's interesting and sort of contributes to more precise/explicit communication.)
But my point was (typing on mobile so maybe I skipped a beat there) that although I like these languages, I think they are indeed impractical and we should just adopt English or Mandarin.
Edit: also, where does that statement 'horrible to learn' come from? Honest question; I'm not sure how it works; not trolling here. We (the Dutch) are quite lenient with languages and I know why I am anyway; my German is as good as my English and my French and it did not take much effort learning these. I was not a very smart or particularly hard working student but when I grew up there was UK television, German television (the best of the bunch), Dutch television, Belgian television (was very good and original compared to Dutch tv as well, and with shows like Undercover very much back in the game) and French television; I learned most of my practical languages from watching scifi and horror when I was a kid.
I had French, English, German, and Dutch in school. I'm a native Dutch speaker. English was easier than any other language. I'm pretty sure my English grammar is better than my Dutch right now. I mostly understand the d/t rules in Dutch by now, but I'm not always certain. French, German, and Dutch classes kept introducing lots of random rules that serve no purpose. At the end of high school, the only language I could hold a grammatically correct conversation in was English and my native language, and write a grammatically correct text only in English (not Dutch, or at least not without avoiding certain rules by rewriting sentences).
English classes also introduced some silly random rules at first, but once you get beyond the a/an, learn a hundred or so irregular verbs, and a few other such things, you're mostly done and it's just vocabulary and expressions/sayings left. You can't really get around the latter, but the former can be kept as small as possible (only the useful features like indicating possessiveness or plurals, not differentiating between whether the object you're speaking about is {male, female, neuter} × {active, idle, giving, modifier}). And the German sentence structure is more convoluted than necessary (I forgot most of my French, maybe theirs too), plac[1] the second part of a split verb so far at the end of the sentence with lots of words and qualifications in between that you lost track of what came before when you finally reach the end of the sentence especially if you can't really read German fluently [1]ing, but maybe that just takes some getting used to.
Would trade putting genres into english if I could also get the German consistency in spelling any day, though.
In many international business settings in Europe English is the norm. Why should politics be different?
This is exactly the reason why English (nor any other language) can be the EU official language.
That cannot happen and wont happen for at least a couple generations.
Unless you are bilingual the lost productivity of having to use non native language in business context would easily dwarf any cost savings, due to misunderstandings, miscommunication, not "Punkt genau" documentation etc ...
Heck, anyone can just try to do an IQ test in non-native language and see how the score drops.
Because politics is not business. Business is done with the criteria of efficiency, politics use the criteria of fairness. You should be able to speak to the EU institutions with whatever language you want. Not everybody speaks English.
Also, I don't know how many times you actually did business in an international context, and especially consumer facing stuff: you need to master the local language and good localization are often the key to success.
For example, the Spotify team did a great job customizing their product in different contexts, creating playlist that are clearly made by natives with the help and the insight of their data.
So it is absolutely not true that international business just happens in English: it might at a high level, but you need translations and cultural awareness to make it work.
Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language. Its benefits are clear, it only needs a political support to thrive.
> Esperanto is easier to learn than any naturally evolved language.
...only for many Indo-European speakers.
There are probably many cases where it would be easier for a native of some language to learn a specific similar language (i.e. for a Dutch speaker to learn German, or a Portuguese speaker to learn Spanish), but I would not be surprised if Esperanto minimizes the cost function for the net effort required for all native speakers/all second languages.
- The vocabulary is a big part of the language learning and it is hard to even begin with when the target vocabulary resembles nothing in your original tongues. It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.
- Rhotic consonants are particularly hard to pronounce correctly even for many ESL learners, and yet Esperanto retains them.
- Esperanto by itself does not have a word order, but it does have a preferred word order of Subject-Verb-Object which is equally probable as Subject-Object-Verb but much more familiar to Indo-Europeans.
- I think Esperanto, in spite of its original premise, has picked idioms and phrases up as well, as common in every old enough language.
It is now widely accepted that the difference between the native tongue and the target language greatly impacts the learning curve. If Esperanto does succeed, it would not be due to the easiness, because the easiness would be highly subjective.
While this is true for Esperanto, it is also true for any other language, natural or constructed. And the idea of Esperanto is to reduce the effort learning vocabulary not through familiarity, but by deriving its vocabulary from a minimal set of roots and a system of suffixes. In Esperanto, if you know the word for "big", you automatically know how to say "small", "huge" and "tiny". This is not the case in most natural languages.
Of course Esperanto will be much easier to learn for someone who already speaks some Germanic or Romance language than to anybody else on the planet. But even to a monolingual Chinese (or whatever) speaker, I believe building a working vocabulary in Esperanto is going to take less effort than in English, Spanish or German.
> It can be probably argued that ESL learners can learn Esperanto more quickly, but it still represents only about 1/4 of the total human population.
But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.
Oh? I have heard that "granda" means big, "giganta" or "kolosa" means huge and "eta" means tiny... :-)
Of course I know what you want to say. One can derive "malgranda" (non-big, i.e. small), "grandega" (more-big, i.e. huge) or "malgrandega" (tiny) from a single root "granda". But that alone does not explain all other words! For example, the Zamenhof's original dictionary [1] lists both "grand-" and "et-" as root words while "gigant-" or "kolos-" are missing (probably later additions, haven't checked). Why the heck do you need to know both "grand-" and "et-" when one is an antonym to the other? [2]
I'm not an esperantisto and I'm not able to discern the nuance behind all those different words, but I see a sign of the mature language here: once regular, now naturalized. It is not necessarily bad and the artificial origin can still help learning, but I would be rather careful to claim that it is "easier to learn than any naturally evolved language". And that leads to...
> But far more than 1/4 of the total population of _Europe_, which is the only thing that matters in the context of this discussion.
You have said universally, even though you didn't seem to realize it. And even when we concentrate to Europe, the actual number of ESL learners is not too different: 38% [3].
But yeah, most Europeans can speak either Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages [3] that form the Esperanto grammar and vocabulary. Still, in the same census most Europeans seem to be much more interested in ESL than others [4] and it would be very hard to convince them to learn Esperanto instead.
[1] http://www.akademio-de-esperanto.org/fundamento/universala_v...
[2] Of course, the answer is that it isn't. "et-" is described as "marque diminution, décroissance" i.e. "marks decrease or reduction" and not strictly an opposite of "grand-". It is therefore a fault of fellow esperantistos to use it as "tiny"! </joke>
[3] http://ec.europa.eu/commfrontoffice/publicopinion/archives/e... (2006, p. 4)
[4] Ibid., p. 9
None of those advantages only apply to Indo-Europeans. It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family. http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/europeanorasiat...
China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.
I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true. (I'm a native Korean speaker with a working knowledge of English as you can see. And I'm not even opposing to Esperanto in general.) It would be great to have concrete numbers to backup this claim; by comparison, it seems that the prior Esperanto knowledge actually helps learning European languages [1], which again indirectly shows the European influence to Esperanto.
> It's not even fair to say Esperanto fits in the European language family.
The article correctly points out that the "European" or "Asiatic" labels are not necessarily good groupings, but that's only because those groupings completely disregard both the history and the linguistics. It is absurd to say that Esperanto is very different from other Indo-European languages because Esperanto is isolating and others are not [2]. When we are gauging simliarities the historical influence cannot and should not be dismissed.
> China is also one of the largest state supporters of Esperanto. You can take classes in it at University and Radio Peking has regular news broadcasts in it.
There are several Esperanto courses around the world, I'm aware of one in Korea, and that doesn't make the state a sort of supporter. Talking about China Radio International (CRI, originally known as Radio Peking), it is comparable to Voice of America (VOA) in such that both are propaganda broadcasts and target as much languages as possible. It is not special for them to have Esperanto versions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method
[2] That is, even after acknowledging the unusual statement that Esperanto is not agglutinative because its "affixes" can in fact freely move inside a word (and even concludes that Japanese is also not agglutinative to the similar extent). I think this is a fair assessment by its own, but it would be inappropriate to reframe the original question with a unusual definition.
> I had delved into Esperanto enough to see that this is not necessarily true.
Do you mean esperanto doesn't have those features (regular, small vocab, phonetic) or that those features don't make a language easier to learn?
Because either claim sounds farfetched.
But I'm sure there is no language (with at least 1 million speakers) which is easier than Esperanto to learn for the average Asian. It isn't a European thing.
Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code... English will never lose its position because of the amount of value that has been created with it.
How could English ever possibly change (in the way that Latin morphed into the various European languages after the fall of the Roman Empire), when we have access to perfect digital copies of how it is spoken and written?
I beg to differ. Compared to the Latin and French corpus, the body cultural works created in English is paltry and subpar. And that's the British ones, American ones, even less so. I can give you scientific and commercial if you feel any better.
>Why would we possibly switch to anything else, and lose 'access' to all that? All of the greatest movies and TV shows, the millions of scientific articles, the music, the computer code...
Yeah, pop music, movies, and TV shows. We'd lose Happy Days, I love Lucy, Breaking Bad, the Beatles, Michael Jackson, and Kanye West. OK, and Melvin and Henry James and Hemingway. Not much loss.
We would still have Racine, Rousseau, Rabelais, Rimbaud (and that's just part of the R).
Plus, all the huge variety and masterpieces of the peoples of the earth, before American commercial monoculture and its marketing power ate everything else.
Why do we all need to learn a new common language? We already have a perfectly serviceable one.
In any case, if we're going to go for a different common language then that really should be my native Greek because it's the language of the country who gave birth to European civilisation, and it was already the lingua franca of the people of Europe in ancient times, so there (i.e. everyone in Europe will have an argument to support their own language being the new common tongue).
___________
* And French and Italian and my native Greek
For example, compare the Interlingua wikipedia to the Esperanto one.
Both of these statements are not true, arguable at minimum.
Sorry for not explaining properly but if you do say something like this, is very likely that you are aware of the discussions around it and knows that this is very far from consensus in the linguistics field.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/studies-in-second-la...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_entities_w...
Please also combine anglic with a conservative spelling reform: color, beautyfull, burocracys, enouf, allready...
Basically look at the most common spelling mistakes and chose those variants which are more logical than the current spelling.
The language should be called Anglic/Anglish, after the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angles
It's already more of an ethnonym than a loconym. And ethnonym more in the sense of shared language and culture than common genes.
Also, whenever I write CSS and type 'color', I think, this was developed in America so they have complete right to spell it however they damn well please.
In some ways, it's a dilemma of where to draw the line between "this is a person who hasn't experienced enough language and therefore is deficient in its use" and between "this is a person who's language has adapted to his micro-cultural/social/etc. context".
I could go on and on about this. I think it's a fascinating, relevant subject.
Well just so you know, it was mainly developed on the Franco-Swiss border (at CERN) by Norwegian, Dutch and English citizens.
The largest role of America in CSS is influencing the spelling because of its cultural weight, but not developing the language.
Most of that revolution is attributed to Noah Webster. To give some example of how it just made sense, he favored "or" over the British "our" in words such as "color" and "odor", "ter" over "tre" in "theater" and "center", "z" over "s" in "civilization" and "analyze", "e" vs "ae" in "archeology" (Brits write it "archaeology") and "paleontology" ("Palaeontology"). And many more.
As for your other questions? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo.... Also feel free to look up specifically Noah Webster.
I'm from Belgium and speak Flemish, our neighboring country is the Netherlands. We officially speak the same language. We have the same spelling, same rules, etc. Of course there are dialect variations, but the official language is exactly the same.
I always wondered why other countries don't try to do the same. For example Slovakia and Czech Republic. It almost is exactly the same language, and I know Slovaks were able to understand Czech. But it seems newer generations are unable to do that. So it's weird that these languages evolve away from each other, instead of towards each other.
The world is becoming smaller every day, so why not try to standardize at least the English language, which is mostly used in international settings?
But I guess it's also an ego thing, where neither UK or US (No idea which official variant they use in Australia/New Zealand) want to adopt the other countries rules.
https://www.politico.eu/article/english-only-try-au-revoir-f...
Petty squabbles such as these diminish the EU.
You left out one important word: "only". Traditionally, all important meetings and records in the EU are translated into the major languages, some of them are available in most, if not all official languages. That makes it easier for all european citizens to read the actual records. English might be widely spoken, but fluency varies massively among the population. There's an argument to be made that this makes sense. I certainly wouldn't trust quite a few german politicians to negotiate in english, given the lack of grasp on the language that some have repeatedly demonstrated.
To 'only use English' is not a dictate, if the French ambassador felt the need to have a French translation of the document then I'm sure he could have had one as fast as pens could write. The citizens of France have every right to access the proceedings but I really fail to see how they were denied that right by having the situation as sketched transpire. Besides that, leaving the meeting for sure had an effect against the French citizens' interest, effectively they were unrepresented and the damage of that action far outweighs the inconvenience of translation.
Meanwhile, Macron's proposal is impressively hypocritical(/real-political?), considering how much he has done to pump up English and diminish French...
I'd even go as far as to propose adopting English as the main language for legal matters, public administration, business and education in each of the EU member countries.
The language barrier is the predominant obstacle preventing a closer integration between EU countries and collaboration between businesses across borders.
A single, unified language over time could remedy that problem.
This is exactly the point the article makes.
English gives an unfair advantage to native english speakers not to mention that it has a lot of legacy stuff that makes it hard to learn. Non-native speakers will always be seen as outsiders/2nd class.
> Non-native speakers will always be seen as outsiders/2nd class.
Not in my experience. But how would you measure that; in my personal experience, the Spanish and Brits treat my wife and me like their own.
Of course you can measure that! Try to get a job where communication and/or "presentation" skills are important(i.e lawyer, PR, media, investment banker etc)and see how it goes. Even the accent may cost you the job. The language skills are a handicap for any non-native speaker in the job market and not only.
Esperanto is a nice idea, but I think too few people could be convinced to learn it, if the utility of it remains questionable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperant...
Hollywood movies and pop music already proved this after all. And for the youngsters, video games and memes.
Echt jetzt? Oh, really?
Why no fucking Esperanto, or Marain, Klingon, Elfish?
English is a global language due to its history (largely grounded in the British Empire's colonial history). Mandarin on the other hand in a global context as of today is still largely irrelevant because it's only spoken in one country, even as that country is as globally relevant as China.
That might change in the future but unless you specifically deal with China and Chinese businesses Mandarin is no more relevant on a global level than - say - Russian or German.
Chinese is not mandatory anywhere in Europe.
Reasons like "then it's fair for everyone" doesn't make any sense when the UK is gone anyway, it would make sense right now since one country has an advantage, but not after brexit.
> It will be taking advantage of [the current] situation [since it] is already spoken by pretty much everybody.
Is the author saying it's more difficult to read or write british english than it is to read an as-of-yet-undefined EU english?
> It will rid the French or the Germans of the temptation try to make their language the dominant one
Right, once we adopt a currently fictional en_EU, they'll know they lost the battle. But the same would be true if we adopt de_EU or fr_EU or keep en_UK. Whatever decision is made, it won't lessen any discussion until said decision has been made.
> It will rid the Europeans of some of the oddities of British English which make it a tiny bit more complex
You mean adding silent letters to words like 'color' (colour) or 'no' (know)? To make the letters match the pronunciation, it needs an overhaul quite a bit larger than switching away from british english.
> It will give the Europeans some “closure” with the Brits
frowns
> It will give the EU a chance [words words words] to finally make widely understood some of the terms and notions that are specifically EU / European but are nowhere to be found in British or American English.
Like what? I have no idea what the author is talking about.
> It will give the EU a chance [words words words] to gain a stronger popular culture position on the world stage.
I think our various languages add a lot of culture rather than forking English. (Though I'd personally rather be rid of all the languages: fewer language is more convenient than yet another language.)
> It will further enable the EU’s communication with the entire rest of the world
Surely you're joking. Speaking a different language just for the sake of it helps international communication how?
> because guess what (working) language they already speak[: English]
... precisely, so why change it?
> expressions, idioms, etc. can be too specific, or “too British” [words words words], quite often those might be misunderstood or even completely missed out. Occasionally, that might be true of American English as well, but to a substantially lesser extent.
This is approaching sense. So let's have some examples? Because I still have no idea what the author is talking about, even if 80% down the article I did find the first and only sensible reason, assuming the mentioned understood-by-the-British-only expressions, idioms, etc. exist.
I'm wondering if this post is satirical or serious. Could be that I'm playing amazingly deep on someone's joke, but the other comments seem to treat it as a serious idea... not sure.
The Wikipedia article isn't very clear on what the language officially is. I don't see where I can find a reference of the changes it makes, aside from a few examples of ways to make English mainly more like French. It honestly looks as though it is just an excuse for people to use words incorrectly just because they have words in their own language that sound similar but mean something else.
The EU will never officially name this "EU English". They will just name it "English", and at most they might point to a "guide" of what some commonly used phrases which differ from British English mean.
Nice- a little controversial barb hidden in a larger, already controversial (but less so) article. Who is this Ivan Dikov? He sounds like a man who likes to stir the pot just to watch it boil over.
(Not that I don't fully agree with him, mind- but it's still a controversial and rather mean opinion).