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Comment by vearwhershuh | Hacker News Reader

Hillaire Belloc made the interesting claim that it was thanks to Latin that the various European languages were able to develop so freely: you could always communicate in Latin when you traveled.

He also noted that the various lingua francas since Latin was lost have tended to suffer from becoming the world language. Looking at English today one is hard pressed to disagree.

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In school, one of our teachers was also a priest, and he told us that his job once required him to travel to the (former) Soviet Union.

His Russian colleague did not speak German, and he did not speak Russian. Latin was the only language in which they could communicate, and the first question by the Russian priest was:

re publica missus?

i.e., "[Were you] sent by the state?"

Primo Levi managed to use Latin to communicate with a Polish priest with whom he didn't have any other language in common.

> After World War II the Italian writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was walking back to Italy from Poland. Tired and starving, he met a priest, who spoke neither French, or German, or Italian. Ubi est mensa pauperorum? Levi asked. Where is the table for paupers?

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-jul-21-bk-chamb...

(I have also used Latin to communicate with a priest with whom I didn't share any other language, although it was less surprising because it was at a spoken Latin event.)

Recently Liliana Segre, an Italian Auschwitz survivor and senator for life, was heavily criticized by (some) Italian politicians for proposing that the Parliament should set up a committee to investigate racism, anti-semitism and hate speech.

Since some critics were saying that she did not "love her country" (or something to that effect), she replied by recalling a brief conversation she had at Auschwitz with a prisoner from Eastern Europe. Both were teenagers and they were only able to communicate thanks to Latin. Patria mia pulchra est; Familia mea dulcis est; Cor meum et anima mea tristes sunt. (My motherland is beautiful; My family is sweet; My heart and soul are sad). She was still attached to the same country that sent her there.

(Full text in italian: https://www.corriere.it/politica/19_novembre_01/io-non-amere...)

How has English suffered from becoming the world language? I don't see it.

I suppose one could argue that the people who come to English as a world language are not that great at the language, and thus they are not capable of helping it improve. (this is however belied by evidence that often those authors who have most helped English develop have been at the periphery of the culture)

I often see something that could inspire this argument when I travel, people have made a native and English version of a sign or some sort of text. The English is riddled with laughable errors - why? Because everyone knows English and why would you ever hire a translator, just get Jules down in accounting to do it, he's great! (only it turns out Jules is not great)

I will now, at the end of my explanation of how I think someone might want to make the argument, explain that I myself am not a supporter of the argument (nor do I know if this is indeed what Belloc supposed) and hope not to get one of those responses telling me how wrong I am in believing what I do not have a particular belief in.

I'm inclined to suggest the blame lies the other way around: some of the more stupid, ugly and arbitrary grammatical quirks which ought to be dropped from the English language or made optional and context sensitive persist only because they act as a means to identify the writer is a native speaker and/or sufficiently highly educated.

Can I have examples of what you mean by this?

Words which for usually fairly arbitrary reasons have the same plural and singular form are a particular irritant of mine, not least because of how awkward I feel having to correct them on colleagues' client proposals and presentations when I'd really rather be suggesting more useful changes. We've got a number of other nonstandard pluralizations and conjugations from ancient Germanic and modern loanwords alike, which wouldn't be missed if they were um... losed

But taken further down the path of how the language could evolve to remove grammatical forms not actually conveying anything useful, I think we could happily make articles optional and preferred only when an a/the distinction actually matters; many ESL speakers communicate perfectly lucidly without them at all. Normally if don't include article in sentence it's not problem; except if I write business email like this people think I'm foreigner.

Before English was a global language [and before the printing press tbf] Middle English managed to lose an entire set of grammatical gender markers affecting nearly every word, after the printing press we lost the thee/thou distinction [outside Shakespeare, the KJV and a few regional dialects], and yet we've still got grammar guides insistent on preserving 'whom' and claiming that despite how people actually speak the language one shouldn't really use 'you' as generic third party pronoun

I suspect that every language has just as many weird quirks as English, and you're only aware of English's because it's the language you speak/write best.

The interesting part of that to me, too, is how many of them roundabout derive from eras where erudite and highly educated English speakers were forced to learn Latin as well, and in so doing apply Latin grammar rules to English that don't apply to natural English. The most obvious example being "never end a sentence with a preposition", which is a very clear grammar violation in Latin, but natural English has ended sentences with prepositions for a very long time.

To a lesser extent I think it is also Latin education's fault why the "objective" case continues to linger in English, despite being so mostly dead, as it acts as an education marker. `Whom` is a zombie only insisted upon by certain educations and should just be buried and put out of its misery. The confusion around `me` versus `I` and which scenarios to use which probably will only get worse.

"never end a sentence with a preposition" is not a grammatical feature of English (from a scientific perspective where "English" is what we observe as being spoken by the community of native speakers, as opposed to something grammar books invented), and does not serve to distinguish native from non-native English speakers, at all.

I don't think this was the sort of thing GP was thinking of.

Edit: I didn't even intend for the previous sentence to be an example of a native English speaker producing sentences that end with prepositions, but by happy coincidence it is.

There are still teachers today that teach "never end a sentence with a preposition" in a long chain game to some early English grammarians that tried to reapply the rule from Latin back onto English (to every native speaker's chagrin). It still impacts the way that many people write. Much of English "formal writing" still tends to soft require the rule and definitely in writing it can be used to distinguish someone that learned English writing rules in a formal educational setting versus those that did not. It very rarely filters into a way to distinguish someone's speech, but it's still a very living distinguishing characteristic in writing.

> it can be used to distinguish someone that learned English writing rules in a formal educational setting versus those that did not.

Sure, this might be true, and I'm aware that it's what you meant, but it's not the same as being a way to distinguish native from non-native speakers (or even writers).

Many, many non-native speakers got to quite advanced levels of formal English writing via formal schooling, especially in places like Northern Europe. I suspect people like that are actually more likely to avoid ending sentences with propositions than native speakers are.

I think what the person who started this sub-thread was referring to is stuff that really is intuitive for every cognitively normal native speaker, like the difference in meaning between "the dog bit the man" and "a dog bit the man". Practically every native speaker, including illiterates, would agree on whether "the", "a"/"an", or no article at all is correct in any given situation, whereas it's very difficult for many even highly educated non-native learners.

I am unfamiliar with objective. Are you referring collectively to the accusative and dative?

English doesn't have an accusative or dative case. There are a few different names for the two different cases of English pronouns; "nominative" (I/he/she) vs. "oblique" (me/him/her) and "subjective" vs. "objective" are both reasonably common.

From Wikipedia:

> An objective case is marked on the English personal pronouns and as such serves the role of the accusative and dative cases that other Indo-European languages employ.

English merged accusative and dative centuries ago as it dropped most other cases, and this merged almost-a-case is generally called the "objective case" by English grammarians. Though the more accurate from the point of view of Latin grammarians name for the case is that English has an "oblique case".

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

Many years ago there was an article in the Economist about the global ubiquity of English. Apart from the political history of the British Empire and American hegemony, one of the broad reasons for its success was that no one really cares if you speak it poorly.

Surely people care, but people are able to understand you or will try their darndest.

This ability to understand is completely missing from Danish, for example, because (I believe) of the many different vowel sounds and other pronunciation quirks - the result is if you do not speak Danish well most Danes will shut down trying to understand you. Thank God for English in that circumstance.

Indeed my teacher used to joke that the most common phrase in Danish is "Hvad siger du" (what are you saying) because it is so difficult for Danes to even correctly understand each other - a funny Norwegian video on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-mOy8VUEBk

Euro English is one example I can think of. The semantic shifts can make the language more ambiguous when used between different groups of speakers.

Greek did, that's for sure...

Wherever there are catholic priests, you'll find latin speakers. That's certainly a plus, though I really think that English surpassed its spread in so many ways.

The global English we, non-native, use is a simplified one. It is its main appeal: an easy-to-learn language, a simple alphabet, many words of the modern world already phonetically transcribed in many languages.

Latin is too rigid to still be used. Too hard to learn, especially by non-westerners and a culture of not allowing "incorrect" grammar (notwithstanding the fact that ancient Romans frequently were 'creative' in that respect)

But yes, global English is much simplified. I consider myself fairly fluent in that dialect yet I have British friends who are able to converse in a vocabulary that makes me incapable of following their discussion. I guess that would be like me using old French and aged expressions.

Latin is easier to learn than English. A lot fewer edge cases and ad-hoc grammatical constructions

Latin has been the language of erudite and priests but most of middle age had different languages used as trade linguo.

The common latin root of many probably helped though.

Do you have examples of languages that didn't "develop freely"? If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific.

(In fact, what does it even mean for a language to "develop"?)

There are many languages around the world that have followed their national evolution despite no contact with Latin, or even with literacy at all.

> If not, this is totally unfalsifiable and unscientific.

I don't think that's a particularly good standard to judge recalling an observation made by Belloc.

Let me be more clear: I suspect that regardless of whether Belloc believed it, the assertion is either false or meaningless. The correct way to judge whether I'm write or Belloc is involves pinning down what we mean in a scientific way.

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