Hacker News Reader

Comment by gerdesj | Hacker News Reader

I think it is absolutely vital that we preserve minority languages.

We engage, enhance and preserve our culture through language: spoken and written. Each language is shaped via its environment and is different as a result from all others.

English is often called French (lingua Franca - the language of the Franks). It is routinely used as an intermediary language because it is very simply structured and can take quite a lot of abuse and still remain intelligible.

  * No diacritics (accents etc)
  * Vowels can be mispronounced but the meaning remains
  * Word order can be fluid: Nominally: subject object verb but not enforced and can be broken for effect
  * Borrow words are actively encouraged
  * English *can* sound beautiful, if you put your back into it

Well that's nice but English isn't the way that (think of a non English speaking poet) thinks or speaks.

Let's go Scottish (no, not Pictish) and consider Mr Burns: and we should start here - https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/mouse/

  Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
  O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
  Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Now that is the way to make English sound a bit sexy. It's not really English and nor is it full on Gallic.

"Oh what a panic is in your heart" is genius.

This is so obviously a bloke who is looking at a mouse. So few words and yet so much meaning - that's genius.

View on HN

That is not why English is used as a lingua franca. There have always been such languages, often with none of those features.

English is a lasting lingua franca because two world-dominating powers in a row - the United Kingdom and the United States - were English-speaking, producing a run of more than a century with an important trading partner and diplomatic contact speaking that language.

It's gotten deeply enough embedded that it will probably survive fading US (relative) power, but inserting theories about the nature of the language itself doesn't add any explanatory power over just looking at the history

> English is a lasting lingua franca because two world-dominating powers in a row - the United Kingdom and the United States - were English-speaking, producing a run of more than a century with an important trading partner and diplomatic contact speaking that language.

I'd say that it's mostly the US that counted. At least in Europe, before US dominance became clear (say before 1930), the French language was lingua franca and hardly anyone spoke English.

There was a shift to Anglo-Saxon culture already after World War 1 because of the outcome of the war. As an example you can see that in first names of people born in the 1920s

As an aside I always find it strange when people call the Anglophonic world “Anglo-Saxon”. The original Anglo-Saxons were a very different people with a very different language (mutually unintelligible) than modern Anglophones. Of course I understand that terms become overloaded and so on, but it seems interesting and pertinent considering we’re discussing language and identity.

True, bad choice of words considering the topic, not much left of Anglo-Saxon identity today.

When I grew up (Sweden) I remember that Anglo-Saxon as a term was much more commonly used in daily press and books than today.

Reading the Wikipedia entry it seems like the my use of the term Anglo-Saxon is more common in the non-Anglophonic world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxons#Legacy

Yeah, I had a French friend call me “Anglo-Saxon” and I was very confused. Most Americans aren’t even nominally familiar with the term and I only knew it in its historical sense.

"At least in Europe" is the important part; British influence made it the lingua franca by 1900 or 1920 in South and Southeast Asia, eastern and southern Africa, most of the Mashriq, &c &c. (To this day local varieties of English in many of these places retain Britishisms.)

But yes, AFAIU English has only really become the Big One in the EU in the last 50 years or so.

I'll disagree:

Languages are tools for communication. In a world where everyone can easily talk to anyone else, that tool can't be 6000 separate languages.

Old people don't like it, but languages are always changing. Latin became ~20 different languages after Rome fell. If someone had enforced a "no language left behind" policy, French or Spanish would never have been spoken.

What's important is that we can talk to each other, not what vocabulary and grammar we happen to use.

[I wrote this in my second language]

It’s interesting to think of the USA breaking up & having the plains riders of Kansaston speaking a different language than the hill people of Coloradona.

Overall, English has the same sprawl that Latin had. I suspect that frequent written communication has made drifts more subtle

I think the best argument for keeping dying languages "alive" is to be able to study the way they make meaning. Some words and phrases are not directly translatable to certain languages because that is not how those speakers think about the world. This is fascinating and possibly useful. When languages die we lose these ideas and ways of thinking and the bounds of consciousness become ever so slightly smaller.

Linguistics is an important and fascinating science. I'm all for studying dead and dying languages in all ways possible.

What I'm strongly against is forcing kids to learn an impractical language because old people can't let go of the past and/or want to win political battles.

I am not advocating for the last one but what if the kid actually liked learning that language? What if local TV had memorable cartoons and more nice things (books, songs,etc)?

This is the Catalan case. Grey-ish as life I guess.

"I'm all for studying dead and dying languages in all ways possible. What I'm strongly against is forcing kids to learn an impractical language because old people can't let go of the past and/or want to win political battles."

You are basically "strongly against" new generations inheriting most of their parents' identity. That is not OK, however you spin it.

I would make a distinction between “forced to learn” (i.e., top down by government or social pressure) and “learning naturally in the home”. The latter isn’t “forced” in any useful sense of the term (or else everyone is “forced” to learn their native language). I can be against one and not the other. Not sure if that’s what the OP was intending, however.

Kids will automatically speak the language their parents speak.

You've misunderstood.

Or another perspective: latin itself was part of larger group of languages spoken in the area, which wiped out a lot of local languages as the republic and later the empire expanded.

Umbrian, Oscan, Picene, Etruscan. Then Ligurian, Venedic, Liburnian, Illyiric, then Gaulish, Aquitanian.

The list goes on. They did live a trace in the romance languages that then spawned after latin dominance was over, but it's hard to quantify as in many (not all) of these languages shared a common ancestry with latin.

The main forces that drove the creation of romance languages out of latin however do not lie in this substrate, but to a combination of natural language drift and the admixture of the languages of the new rulers and immigrants (e.g. Germanic tribes like the Franks, Longobards, Vandals, Visigoths, ...).

In most cases their influence was not strong enough (or lasted enough) to fully displace the latin culture present throughout southern Europe.

But had latin been left to just naturally diverge into many dialects without foreign rulers, the character of the romance languages we have today would have been likely quite difference. They could have perhaps ended up being a more similar between each other, but the lack of a unified central power and cultural attractor means they would probably have diverged anyway.

Keep in mind that Latin was still used (written and spoken) as a culture language for a long time after the fall of the Roman empire. This relieved the local languages from the pressure of being mutually intelligible with people from other parts of Europe the elites, merchants, clergy etc had to interact with.

Minor correction: Romance languages are evolved out of Vulgar Latin, not Latin itself.

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

Vulgar Latin is quite hard to study because people didn't write that down. They wrote a written language approximating Classical Latin, which was just the language of Rome around 100 BC, and probably also just the prestige dialect of the patricians at that time.

What people actually spoke in daily life was... different.

First there is the huge influence of Greek and the languages of the peoples the Romans conquered.

Then, one has to consider that the immigrants coming to Rome (forced or otherwise) had to learn Vulgar Latin as well, which always contributes tendencies to simplify.

Ultimately, people were probably fine talking to each other in a mix of languages, both each using a separate language, or by forming creoles, as long as they got to understand each other. Records and contracts then got written down in Latin.

I'll always argue that the more diverse our languages are and are allowed to be: the better. Some of the words my mum used were pretty descriptive, just like the Burns (Scottish geezer) poem.

My mum was a Devon girl, born in 1942 on a farm, near Dartmouth. She experienced things like German PoWs working on the land and then married a soldier, oh and she was a soldier herself - I still have her commissioning certificate on the wall. My parents were both Captains.

Most of what she had to say was just the usual stuff with a few changes (and an accent that was gorgeous to listen to but nearly unintelligible if she wanted it to be) but sometimes she would trot out a word that painted a vivid picture that English didn't cater for properly without some help or a borrow word.

You only have to go back one or two generations when things get sticky.

"What's important is that we can talk to each other" - I totally agree but I'd like to see some richness in the discussion. "lol stuff" and "awks" etc are not very usefull.

The Franks were not French, and the original Lingua Franca, as another commenter noted, was called Sabir, a pidgin language of the eastern Mediterranean from the 11th through the 19th centuries. [1]

Furthermore, English is our current lingua franca not because of its grammar or linguistic quirks, but rather because it has been the primary language of two consecutive world superpowers starting in the 18th century.

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

Thank you, that was bothering me. The Franks spoke Frankish which is a Germanic language. Their vassals spoke a dialect of Vulgar Latin which would eventually become French.

The Franks were French, after the 7th c. or so. By the time of Fredegarius, their Germanic origins were all but forgotten. For nearly the entirety of the Middle Ages, « Frank » meant a Catholic of Gaul who's cultural language is Latin or a Catholic, depending on the context.

Yes, for a time, there was some overlap, but regardless, the terms "Frank" and "French" are not synonymous.

The two names indicate different cultures, languages, and ethnic origins. The OP's comment is misleading.

That's a dichotomy that's fairly recent in historiography, and doesn't at all fit with historical usage. If memory serves right and came about in the wake of the rise of the Bourgeoisie and the French Revolution, with the need to conveniently give the nobility a foreign tint.

Moreover the Germanicity of the so-called barbarian tribes, including Pre-Merovingian Franks, has to be reassessed now with what we know about identity politics in the Late Roman and Post-Roman World. People might have played at being barbarians a lot more than actually being it, in a very comparable way you see Americans pretending to be this or that.

> Word order can be fluid: Nominally: subject object verb but not enforced and can be broken for effect

this sentence wrote fact from, think then, English truly different language studied experience exist no, my guess correct?

word order English grammar among absolute nightmare is!

(In plain English: Considering what you wrote, I guess that you never studied a language truly different from English, am I right?)

I’m curious to know: which language is that a literal translation from? (Given the V-final word order, postpositions and use of ‘exist’, I’d guess either Korean or Japanese.)

I don't know about the grandparent comment but many languages that have cases markers have a much more fluid word order, since the function of each word is already tagged by the case ending. The word order is then used to carry emphasis. Wikipedia has examples where the same sentence is written in half a dozen different word orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_order#Hungarian

Loosely based on Korean, but I "fixed" some words so that they match an equivalent English usage, because otherwise it's cheating. :)

Ah, thanks for clarifying! A further question: which words did you ‘fix’?

What I wrote can be "translated" word-by-word to an acceptable Korean passage, but if I wrote it natively, the end result would be something like:

이런("like this") 문장을(sentence) 쓰신(wrote) 걸로(thing + with/from) 볼(see) 때(time/when), 영어와(English + with) 정말로(truly) 다른(different) 언어를(language) 공부해(study) 보신("see" or try) 적이(time) 없는(not exist) 것(thing) 같네요(similar), 맞습니까(correct + question marker)?

Of course it's more or less gibberish, unless you already know, e.g., verb "see" also means "try" and "similar" means "that's my guess".

OK, this really did seem like complete gibberish at first, to a far greater extent than I was expecting. But after staring at it for a while (and reading through a Korean reference grammar I had lying around), I think I can mostly see how this corresponds to the English translation:

• 이런 문장을 쓰신 ‘like.this sentence wrote’ = ‘[you] wrote a sentence like that’, remembering that Korean is generally head-final. IIRC most East Asian languages allow elision of verbal arguments; I’m assuming this clause omits ‘you’.

• 이런 문장을 쓰신 걸로 볼 때 ‘like.this sentence wrote thing-WITH see when’ = ‘since [I] saw [you] wrote a sentence like that…’. I’m assuming here that 이런 문장을 쓰신 is acting as some sort of subordinate clause, and that 때 ‘when’ is not purely temporal but also has some sort of resultative meaning, as with English ‘since’. But I’m not at all sure what role 걸로 ‘thing-WITH’ is playing in this clause.

• 영어와 정말로 다른 언어를 ‘English-WITH truly different language’ = ‘a language truly different from English’. This puzzled me for a while until I remembered that relative clauses in Korean go before the noun. English requires a different adposition here than Korean does, but that’s very normal.

• 영어와 정말로 다른 언어를 공부해 보신 ‘English-WITH truly different language study try’ = ‘try to study a language truly different from English’.

• 영어와 정말로 다른 언어를 공부해 보신 적이 없는 ‘English-WITH truly different language study try time not.exist’ = ‘the time doesn’t exist when [you] tried to study a language truly different from English’.

• 것 같네요, 맞습니까 ‘thing similar, correct-Q’ = ‘[this] thing is my guess, correct?’

Thus, a literal translation would be: ‘Since [I] saw [you] wrote a sentence like that, the time doesn’t exist when [you] tried to study a language truly different from English, [this] thing is my guess, correct?’

Is my analysis at all correct? If so, the only thing I’m still confused about is the purpose of 걸로 in the first clause, and I’d be interested to know if there’s an explanation for that.

(Incidentally, I find it really amazing how many ways different languages have to say the same thing, and how a perfectly grammatical sentence in one language can become complete gibberish in another.)

lol never thought I'd tutor Korean in HN, but why not... :)

> But I’m not at all sure what role 걸로 ‘thing-WITH’ is playing in this clause.

It's a bit cheating, because 것 "thing" is kinda special and combines with the preceding verbal clause to create a noun clause. A better translation (if I were to teach Korean) would be "that". So, "이런 문장을 쓰신 것" is "that [you] wrote a sentence like this".

-으로 보다 (literally, "see with X") is an idiom meaning "considering X" - so "... 걸로(=것+으로) 볼 때" means literally "when [I] see that ...", or more naturally, "considering ..."

Also, the auxiliary verb 보다 (try - or "see" when used as a main verb) is a bit harder to explain but less forceful than English "try", which sometimes implies a lot of effort. Korean 보다 is similar to usages like "Please try this cookie!" or "Sure, I'll try walking next time." In our current sentence it's more like "[you] didn't have any experience studying ..."

Final "것 같네요" uses the same "thing/that" which takes the preceding clause, and "-것 같다" is an idiom meaning "I guess ...", i.e., "I guess that you haven't studied ..."

So, I guess you got most of the grammar right from very few clues. :)

> lol never thought I'd tutor Korean in HN, but why not... :)

And I never thought I’d learn Korean on HN either! But I appreciate anyone willing to talk to me about a topic of interest.

> It's a bit cheating, because 것 "thing" is kinda special and combines with the preceding verbal clause to create a noun clause. A better translation (if I were to teach Korean) would be "that". So, "이런 문장을 쓰신 것" is "that [you] wrote a sentence like this".

Huh, this is interesting! I haven’t come across this particular example of grammaticalisation before, but the World Lexicon of Grammaticalisation informs me that the same development has also occurred in Japanese (and apparently Ik as well), which makes me suspect areal factors.

> So, I guess you got most of the grammar right from very few clues. :)

Good to know! Though I must admit to ‘cheating’ as well… I’m very interested in linguistics, and Korean word order has many similarities to some other languages I’ve looked at. Also, I had to find a Korean reference grammar online before I could understand some parts :) But I’m still a bit surprised I was as successful as I was.

Why is it vital? What does it add to life, the universe, or anything?

Almost no-one in the world has any significance. Of the 7 billion people alive today, 6,990,000 of them will be utterly forgotten in 200 years time. It will be as if they didn't exist.

Why is one extremely niche language so important compared to those 6,990,000 actual, real life, people? It happened, it had no impact on human history, it was forgotten.

End of story, stop making a big deal about it. History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes.

My impression of this comment is that it is overgeneralizing, reductive, and pretty nihilist. That being said I do agree that minority languages, like our lives, are ultimately, in the fate of the great cosmic void, meaningless. But no, minority languages aren’t completely useless. Every language is a window into the structure of human language, which is something we are still trying to understand. Some people might tell you that sort of linguistics is also useless, but that’s a different conversation.

I would compare it to the sad loss of knowledge that results from another animal species going extinct. There are secrets in its genome that we will now never discover.

As someone who speaks a language that may be going the way of the dodo in a couple of years, watching his family back home decide not to pass it onto the next generation because it has no economic value and takes away from the rat race of school and jobs, and knowing there's no objection I can make because having grown up in a foreign country means I can't even speak it correctly, I'm afraid I have to agree with that bleak assessment. Waxing poetic about how minority languages should be preserved seems hollow when the minorities themselves don't see the point. Why do they have to shoulder the burden of carrying an outdated relic just so some English speaking aristocrats can feel blessed about how diverse their world is?

There are days when it feels like fighting a losing war. Digging up a few old movies to hear the sounds of a dying language and wondering if your kids will care enough to keep this game of broken telephone going into its final rounds, and why you have the right to impose that burden on them in the first place. Maybe it's better if they never know what they lost. I recently found out that my parents could have taught me two other languages that are also dying out, but they decided not to because who in the world would I use them with? Then I shrugged and went on with my day.

The HOA of my neighborhood allows 4 species of trees. They are very good trees, native to the area, and grow up to be very beautiful. At first glance while driving down the street, the neighborhood looks nice and practical.

I was looking at aerial shots of my home the other day for solar installation options, and when I looked at the broader picture, it was a bit soulless. Everything was optimized to be inoffensive and suit the lowest common denominator of taste. The yards and trees and landscaping of each house all are from the same list of plants everyone is familiar with, which are optimized for practicality (hard to kill, and look somewhat okay.)

My anecdote doesn’t fit this situation as an analogy but it shares a common thread in that limiting diversity reduces the humanity of the system, and makes the world more boring as a result. Not everything has to be min maxed and optimized. Some things that humanity has invented are worth dragging with us just so that the world does not slide further into hyper-optimization.

I think it’s a very effective analogy.

I agree, but I don't think it's exclusively about optimization. I look at language more or less as a communication protocol. The data flowing over the protocol takes the shape of thoughts and ideas. The diversity of these is not being limited. In fact, the diversity of your possible experiences is expanded as you can communicate meaningfully with people totally unlike you. In English I can communicate with native speakers who are subsistence farmers in Africa, programmers in Europe or rocket scientists in America. This is great!

If we all agree about the way we move our mouth parts it'll only serve to increase the diversity of ideas and people we can be exposed to. It's akin to various languages all adopting QWERTY, or the Latin alphabet before it. Nothing is lost due to lack of diversity in protocol.

Certain concepts are more difficult or less difficult to express depending on the language. I think somewhat differently in Korean than English. Translating existing text can be very difficult and nuanced because of how concepts can be expressed differently.

This also ignores the issue that the majority of the world would have to abandon their language, no matter what language is picked. And how do you pick a language? It’s entirely arbitrary. You can argue for Chinese just as well as you can for English.

There seems to be some confusion here. I don't think anyone is proposing that we shouldn't be able to communicate meaningfully with people totally unlike us. Knowing an additional language doesn't have that effect, believe it or not.

The view of language as "the way we move our mouthparts", a protocol for transparently transfering ideas is simplistic. Even if you ignore or discount linguistic relativity, languages have political and aesthetic functions.

Take a rhyme, for example. It can't easily be translated accurately because the language used is itself part of what it expresses. There's no simple onion model with distinct, unleaky layers for natural languages where words are a protocol and thoughts are the content; that's a reductionist misconception on your part.

> Knowing an additional language doesn't have that effect, believe it or not.

This seems absurd. Being able to have a conversation is orders of magnitude more effective than the mimicry and hand signals that must be resorted to when you truly don't speak the same language.

> languages have political and aesthetic functions.

Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language. It's really just a protocol. What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?

> Take a rhyme, for example

What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?

> a reductionist misconception on your part.

What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?

> This seems absurd. Being able to have a conversation is orders of magnitude more effective than the mimicry and hand signals that must be resorted to when you truly don't speak the same language.

How does my point contradict that? I am saying that knowing an additional language takes nothing away. I speak English to you because I understand that we both understand it. That hasn't made me forget my mother tongue. That is to say, knowing (and using) an additional language didn't have the effect on me that I couldn't communicate with people that don't understand my mother tongue.

> Right, but politics and aesthetics are also ideas that are transferred via language.

Point is that language itself can constitute a political message or an aesthetic expression.

> What was lost when most European languages adopted the Latin alphabet? Or when the Chinese empire standardized the writing system?

Writing is an expression in itself, hence things like calligraphy and type setting. We perceive it and meaning is derived from our impressions of it. What was lost, insofar that writing systems were actually lost, was probably many lifetimes' worth of calligraphic tradition, especially in China where calligraphy is considered a very important art form, though I'm sure many of these traditions are still maintained by enthusiasts.

> What additional information is transferred in a rhyme? What meaning?

I don't see how this question can come from anything but a position of total philistinism, so I probably misunderstand it. Rhyme and rhythm in general is rhetorically and aesthetically useful so as to make an expression impactful, evocative and memorable, or simply funny and delightful. You may have heard of music and poetry. What happens when you take away the meter and rhythm from song or poetry? Information is definitely lost. If I hear a limerick, and you here an prosaic retelling of the exact same circumstances, I know something which you don't. Whether this information is useful or actionable to you is another question.

Have you heard of puns? They get lost in translation. Perhaps to Siri and Alexa it didn't matter in the first place, but it did to me and (hopefully) you.

> What can you do with language that does not constitute the expression of a thought or an idea?

You misread me. My objection isn't with the notion that language is a tool to express thoughts and ideas, but with the notion that it's a transparent protocol for doing so rather than something that is inherently part of the expression. The thoughts and ideas can be—and frequently are—colored by the language itself. Because there is music and poetry in the English language that is basically inexpressible in other languages without great artistic license, if we forget English, that work is lost.

> The HOA of my neighborhood allows 4 species of trees.

WTF? What's the attraction of such a place. Cheap rent? No coloured people? Why would one choose to live in such an artificial place?

If you want to live in a newish build with decent schools, you have slim pickings in my area. Planning on flipping my house and moving to a rural area once the kids don’t need public schooling anymore. Probably once this solar loan is paid off.

Total stranger comments about the HOA's silly rules.

You: He's a racist.

Not everything is a race issue. If you think it is, get new friends and read more.

English, do you speak it?

I never said anything whatsoever about them. I asked a question.

Going by the what is implied, it stands to reason that everything is meaningless except for those that represents or aids in a significant improvement in our lives or change our fate as a human race.

This is neglecting how these developments came to be. We don't know when Einstein was born that he will go on to discover a world changing equation and theorem. If we don't give diversity such as these minority languages to thrive, we may simply be creating an environment that is so sterile and constant that any new innovations have little chance of happening from a lack of stimulation.

> It will be as if they didn't exist.

That is not how the world works. The fact that most people is not in the history books does not mean that they were not important.

> History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes.

But, minor footnotes have changed the history of empires. A disease that moves to one person to another, and one traveler, can spread it around changing the live of hundreds, millions a few generations later, all humanity after a few centuries.

That we do not have the capacity to understand the complexity of all human interactions does not mean that it is not important. History is presented as the act of a few chosen individuals because history is told to promote national feelings, and because humans relate easily to histories of families and power.

History is usually the process of deciding what's meaningful, to whom, and for what purpose.

> History is for the meaningful

I respectfully take exception to this, only because I realized for far too long that I felt under the thumb of this idea. If I do a thing, will it have meaning to enough people?

I mean, this is fine in the long-term when historians record history, but I could care less what the rest of the 7 billion people might think when I decide. for example, if I want to take up a course in the language of my grandparents, then neither the opinions of my grandparents, parents or whether it is useful should stop me. It might not be economically feasible (except in the country of its origin) but talking only about what is "meaningful" can pretty much also exclude most creative human effort, even if that effort only impresses upon a few individuals.

This is not an argument for "diversity", which is a non-goal for most people. Instead, this is simply not being locked down to the whims of a zeitgeist every time you ask whether something you find interesting, which can have some educational value, is actually a meaningful thing to pursue.

"History is for the meaningful, not the things that wouldn't even make the minor footnotes. "

History is the sum of everything that happened. Not just the few "glory" moments of some dudes, historians liked. (And it seems they mainly liked those with the highest kill count.)

"Almost no-one in the world has any significance"

Everything and everyone has significance to their own time and place. The world would not be complete and working like it is, if one thing is missing.

Now and as to why Elfdalian is specifically important? It is the closest alive language to old norse. Many people are trying to reconnect with their culture roots, after centuries of monocultural imperialism trying to cut them.

So yes, the world would move one without Elfdalian, but personally I like a colorful, vibrant culture. Where not every place looks and sounds the same - only then I would consider it all insignificant, as all is the same shit anyway. But it is not and I support efforts to fight against that and for rich local cultures.

> Nominally: subject object verb but not enforced and can be broken for effect

Nominal English word order is SVO, not SOV. :-)

> English is often called French (lingua Franca - the language of the Franks). It is routinely used as an intermediary language because it is very simply structured and can take quite a lot of abuse and still remain intelligible.

You didn't even for a second stop to think why English language uses a Latin term to call a language the language of the Francs?

Latin was the original "lingua franca" of Europe. For historical and traditional reasons.

Then France was the largest, baddest, most powerful country, and everyone wanted to be like France.

But in the past several centuries Britain and then the US were the biggest, baddest, most economically powerful countries, and it's beneficial to know and speak English.

People didn't use Latin or French because they were simpler. People don't use English because it's "simpler than French". If that was the case, everyone would've switched to Turkish, for example, as it's very, very, very simple compared to any European language.

Chinese was the lingua franca of Asia for centuries before English even became a thing in the 19th century. Because it was the biggest baddest empire around. Don't get too surprised if Chinese becomes the lingua franca of the world 20 years from now.

The original lingua franca was not French, but Sabir, a Romance-based pidgin.

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

I had to google half the words in that poem.

"sleekit" -> slick or sleek

"laith" -> loath

still haven't figured out what "na", "awa" and "sae" are

awa = away, sae = so

He’s saying the mouse needn’t leave so quickly.

Na should be "not."

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie! Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

"Translation"/update to more standard current English:

Small, sleek, cowering timorous beast

Oh, what a panic in your chest.

You need not start away so quickly.

Googling for short foreign words that look like misspelled English words is gonna be tough. I recommend something like the Online Scots Dictionary: https://www.scots-online.org/dictionary/scots_english.php

I am not competent to rate the linguistic quality of this translation, but it certainly is amusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQXpznIhT08 .

Reply on news.ycombinator.com