Beyond English, the language of the future | Hacker News Reader

Beyond English, the language of the future

salon.com

9 pointsrjknight6 comments

The most salient point I got from the article: an increasing number of people learning English are using it only to speak to others who do not speak it natively. A couple of illustrations:

- I have witnessed one student from Hong Kong and one student from Beijing use English to bridge the gap between Cantonese and Mandarin (as well as pen & paper).

- My French is very poor, so the only people that I can converse with in French are those with a really bad English accent. I can well imagine that English is worse, what with its crazy spelling and idioms.

I post and correct on a language exchange site. One day, one of my Japanese friends there received a correction from someone with the worst English I have ever seen on that site, including that of people learning English. She immediately stated that she only wanted corrections from people who were fluent in English, and asked that he not correct her entries any more.

He blew up. He claimed he WAS fluent.

After a huge row, it turned out that everyone in his village in China speaks English like that and they are convinced they are fluent. I can only assume that's because they use it with each other, and don't try to communicate with people who are natively fluent.

And that's why there's so many variant of English, including the broken ones. Manglish (Malaysian English), Singlish (Singaporean English) and much more.

Though not biology, I think this is how language evolves. For example in China, you have so many dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc). And if you drill down to a dialect itself there are slight differences. You can roughly identify which part of province that person is from.

Problem is that English is the language of Globalization, power and gun.

If only it had a consistent pronounciation, speech recognition would be so much more widely used.

The scripts from India has very consistent reading or pronunciation system.

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