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Comment by Juliate | Hacker News Reader

It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself - and it borrowed/borrows from other languages as well.

English has taken over because, in our local history so far, because it's been the official language of the last two main world military (hence cultural & business) powers: UK for 19th century, US for 20th century - boosted by WW I & II & furthering globalization.

It's been also shaped by this globalization worldwide.

In 1, or 2 centuries, it very well may be that another language will have taken over.

https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-languages/english-...

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> It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself

Well, English is a pretty simple language, grammatically. Compared to its Germanic neighbours, it doesn't have gendered nouns, it doesn't have the funky word order of German, nor the funky word order of the V2 Scandinavian languages. It has fewer letters in its alphabet, and it has fewer phonemes.

It does have a very large vocabulary, mostly due to the French influence, and it's in dire need of a spelling reform to fix all the accumulated crap, but those are hurdles for writing English or mastering English. When it comes to speaking simple English, the bar is lower than what is required for speaking simple German, or simple Norwegian, for example.

It's also pretty forgiving when it comes to word order, which means understanding bad English is also easier. So I think there's some sort of lowest common denominator merit to it that made it easier for it to take over.

That's seen through your own lens.

Just compare the delicacies of the differences between British English & American English, if not only for the different understated meanings.

The "funky word order" of German makes sense from a German perspective (and back to ancient Latin & Greek).

Mandarin is not simple, comparatively to English. Yet, you can be quite assured that, would China, for instance, get the military & cultural influence UK/US had for 2 centuries, by 2200 they wouldn't have spread something else than a globalized Mandarin worldwide (as it happened for English; and French and Spanish before them).

Besides vocabulary/characters, in what sense is Mandarin not simple?

Tones

Which is a massive sense in which it is not simple! For any non-native speakers, (I'm a native English speaker), tones were nearly impossible to master, and I still have a terrible grasp of them I think. It requires a complete rewiring of the way you speak language, sure, but it also requires a complete rewiring of how you hear it too!

Tones are simple (in the sense of being governed by linguistic rules), just foreign.

> they wouldn't have spread something else than a globalized Mandarin worldwide

For sure, but my point was that the simpler (relatively, comparatively) a lingua franca is, the less pidgin you get, and the more of the actual language you get instead. And that's a merit of the language itself, not the powers that back it.

The language of the dominant culture will prevail. I don't see why we should invent other reasons.

> English is a pretty simple language, grammatically.

Compared to Indo-European languages. Look at other language families, and our insistence on articles, inflection for tenses, plurality, and case (in the case of pronouns) looks unnecessarily complicated.

And then there is the insane polysemy of English words. "get" has a wide variety of meanings, some of which are completely opposite from one another!

> When it comes to speaking simple English

I should also point out that English has relatively complex phonotactics. A word like "strengths" is excruciating for anyone whose phonology doesn't have consonant clusters in the first place.

I think while English is really tough to speak perfectly, it's pretty easy to muddle through. "It suhrengz is" that you can drop all inflections, butcher pronunciations, and ignore the chaotic spelling, and still be able to communicate pretty reliably.

Getting English right is a fractal of traditions and exceptions, but its MVP is very forgiving.

> but its MVP is very forgiving.

Yes, that was exactly my original point, thanks for explaining it more hacker-news-y than me. :-)

wait, isn't english the international language of science as well? i thought it was...

Like, Arabic was about 10 centuries ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_in_the_medieval_Islami...

Or Greek before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_in_classica...

Or Chinese? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_and_technol...

Isn't the difference here that science has become a global institution, and far more complex than it was in any of those societies?

Science is a placeholder here, in the context of which language being used to express and articulate complex thoughts.

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