Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words
cnn.com
cnn.com
On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No offence meant to the Americans here, but I detest the exportation of American culture to Europe. I don't mean music and films, but rather the way of thinking about the world. I suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.
One of the key takeaways was that speaking and thinking are interrelated. When you are thinking, the same area of the vocal chords are activated but with a lower intensity compared to when you are speaking.
This means that what you cannot speak, you cannot think. By prioritising Italian, they are scientifically enabling the population to think more like Italians.
I don’t care about the ban though, it doesn’t affect me.
(aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
What the previous poster if describing is a strong, deterministic relationship between language and thought (the idea that, by banning certain uses of language, they can control how Italians think). This is essentially nonsense: Italians are Italian, regardless of whether they work in a company run by a CEO or an "amministratore delegato".
This is false.
As an American who has lived in the US my whole life, it can be tough to see outside the box, so to speak. What parts of the US worldview are being exported? How does it differ with traditional attitudes?
Your far-right political movements, especially religious movements, are actively trying to export themselves to Europe, with varying success depending on the specific trend.
A large part of corporate culture, as people in EU management still long for an idealized version of what exists in the US.
Outside of a few pockets, EU entertainment has more or less completely been wiped out now, so any culture borne by entertainment is mostly US now.
What are the evidence of this? Has there been an uptick in American right-wings activities in Europe?
https://www.politico.eu/article/roe-vs-wade-us-the-european-...
A nit - it seems the US far-right is adopting tactics from European far-right history and not the other way around. Trump literally used the words "blood and soil" at some point and Fox is mastering the art of propaganda.
Because I'm talking of a recent trend, and this timeframe offers a relevant context.
Please explain, in detail, what part of Golden Dawn was actively exported from the US.
> As an American who has lived in the US my whole life, it can be tough to see outside the box, so to speak. What parts of the US worldview are being exported? How does it differ with traditional attitudes?
Your evangelicals export homophobia and prosperity gospel to Africa. And other not so nice things that were kept in check by church-state separation on your soil, but developing nations don't have mechanism to defend themselves against. Tobacco industry floods poor nations with cigarettes using marketing and legal threats. Your puritanism shoved into everyones throat, can watch violence all day, but saw a nipple? End of the world. YouTube no swear rule was/is ridiculous. The land of the free, my ass. And the idea that culture can be owned by corporations. Disney much?
Sounds funny on the surface, but it's more consequential than that.
A legit/legal Asian paid porn site that I used to visit was shut down because American credit card companies decided they didn't want to get involved in that business. It's the kind of things that drives people to crypto (disclaimer: I never owned any crypto), and it's not just because of ideological or scammy reasons, sometimes it's just to get away from American hegemony in the finance sector.
There are other similar but more sinister things like these: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing-ba...
It's fine by me if America is just enforcing their morals within their own borders, but given that the USD is the de-facto world currency, these policies get exported everywhere.
The way most people experience this is partisan ideological fighting that spills out into the rest of the world, especially left wing social movements. This is how you get people yelling "hands up don't shoot" at unarmed British police, and BLM marches in central European cities where there's no history of slavery and famously civilized police. It makes no sense in the local cultural context but people are bored and copy what they see on TV and social media.
Does the pendulum really ever settle in the middle with anything society?
I wouldn't class this as anywhere on the pendulum as its not an economic policy and social issues are a bit of a fudge into the classical left/right spectrum.
I would argue that signalling fascist virtues is still a form of virtue signalling. It just depends on what you consider to be a virtue. But yea, any attempts at cultural renaissance are vulnerable to nationalist and even fascist tendencies.
The idea that their army is the coolest and will save us from aliens, that their bilionaires (oligarchs) are secretly superheroes, that foreign leaders are crooks secretly plotting to conquer the world and so on.
These are Projections
Nothing more American than this example of how an oft-derided-in-the-rest-of-the-US bunch of coastal Hollywood elites constantly put out a bunch of movies glorifying guns, violence, capitalism, and the USA.
Also it's not just about this over-the-top movies that are completely out of touch with reality. Often the propaganda is subtle and even unintentional, made by victims of propaganda themselves.
There have been occasional British TV shows/movies with this premise as well. That's not American culture, that's "what would happen if aliens invaded and we make a movie about that" culture.
The reason you think it's American is that only the Americans seem to make sci-fi these days. I don't know if that's budget or culture or what. On HN we talk a lot about how impoverished the Euro tech scene is vs the USA but it's not just tech. Italians use a lot of English words because the Euro movie/TV scene is also out to lunch. What was the last mega-franchise that came out of Europe? Probably Harry Potter? So, Europe but not EU. And Harry Potter was created in the UK but actually brought to worldwide attention thanks to investment by ... Americans.
My guess is it's due to the dominance of government funded media firms. What's the best known European sci-fi franchise? Dr Who? A relic that dates to the 50s. The BBC lost interest in sci fi and fantasy a long time ago. Too expensive, only popular with unpopular demographics. Far better to make yet another 1800s period drama.
I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. While its fine for lulz, I worry that you're being sincere. Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it.
On paper there is absolutely nothing wrong with cultures seeking to preserve the use of their own language, however it is fair for us to argue that restrictive and punitive measures such as this are not helpful.
Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;). Would English then be a "relic" to you?
Well. My first language is Polish, and there are some of us who call it "superpowers". If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to, and possibly that one passer by, who is also Polish or Ukrainian.
That is, unless we start to curse. Then we are probably well understood.
But I got a new greek buddy recently, and when she talks on the phone, my ears cannot lock on anything.
Edit: completely unrelated, but I saw your username on lobster on a dead man switch thread (I use Shamir’s Secret for treasure hunts to I thought the DMS idea was cool). Do you happen to have invites? I started to write again, and wanted to post something but I don't have any account.
I think I have some invites, can you email me about it?
Cheers.
Slovenia being small, we had already met years ago at a local meetup or something.
I'd be careful about that. I've overheard others making nasty remarks thinking I wouldn't know what they were saying. Seinfeld had a pretty funny episode about that.
I've watched Polish movies. It doesn't take long before one gets the hang of what others are saying.
We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.
And when I talk about work it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.
"Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"
But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball
Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"
> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication
But also one might consider, or seek the word, that certain way of spitting, tells some peeps we fam.
Language isn't just about communicating meaning but also cultural content, identity and social markers. This is part of what drives its frequent development and also part of why some people want to preserve their way of speaking even if its merely a creole or a "dying" language.
If everybody in Italy understands "computer", calling it "calcolatore" is outright against communication (that word in italian is closer to "device to do math operations", which is technically correct, but not what people imagine)
The root "comput-" comes from latin "computo" while "calcolatore" comes from the latin "calculo" which is a rough latin synonym of "computo". The form "comput-" transformed in Italian into "cont-" like in "conto" (English count), "contante" (cash) etc.
So perhaps "contatore" (counter) instead of "computer" would make more etymological sense.
It was picked over the word "calculateur" which is the French equivalent of "calculatore" after IBM France shared a letter wondering if "calculateur" was too restrictive and didn't properly express the machine capabilities. To which Jacques Perret answered "why not ordinateur?"
The problem is the interpretation people give to the word. If I say computer, people think of something with keyboard + mouse and a screen, or maybe a laptop (funny enough, they will not think of their phone).
If I say "calcolatore", we envision one of those devices to do math operations, used in school (are those still a thing?)
In Hebrew we have "tachless" that comes from yiddish "tachless", that comes from Hebrew "tachlit" but now tachless and tachlit have different meanings and different grammar roles
I grew up in the UK and prefer British-English to American-English, both in terms of spelling and pronunciation.
That said English has terrible spelling compared to other languages, it's impossible to know how to pronounce a word just looking at the spelling.
I don't need to give examples, as it is well-known already. I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is pretty good, and include sound files of the old vs new pronunciations.
English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.
This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.
("I could have read the red book, because I like to read." is just one example of inconsistent pronounciation. Spelling is non-obvious to people learning the language, again as a result of unusual and inconsistent pronounciation.)
Different languages have different features which make them harder to different populations. A better description of English would be: English is one of the languages to learn. English has no complex case system. We do not have grammatical gender. Our use of grammatical number is limited and consistent (except in certain loan words). There are exceptions to these, but they are largely words which are so common as to be part of the foundational learning -- pronouns, primarily, where we preserve gender and where case goes beyond "add an apostrophe-s." Because case is not especially important, word order is important, which can be challenging for people from cultures with a different standard word order. Spelling is challenging due to both the vowel shift and the number of languages which have acted as input to English (at a minimum: native Celtic languages in Britain; Anglo-Frisian and its antecedents; French, both Norman and more southern dialects; and Latin and Greek pulled in by the early natural philosophers of the early modern period).
English does have an unusually high number of irregular verbs, which, combined with the spelling and pronunciation, can make it seem inconsistent; but there are many other ways in which English is startlingly simple compared to highly-inflected languages.
But Finnish is easier than English in the sense that pronounciation is 100% regular and predictable - that's the metric I've been using in this thread to say "English is hard". (I understand the reasons behind that, the mixture of influences, loan-words, and voewl shifting.)
In a lot of ways English is easy, and even bad English is understandable.
floor
cooperation
coopThe people pushing for this do, in fact remember that the primary purpose of language is communication.
Imagine being an aging Italian, or Quebecer, who has spoken Italian, or French all your life, do not have a good grasp of English, only to become unable to understand much of the discourse in your own mother country.
I, myself, am not super keen on seeing Spanish, Mandarin, or Esperanto become the lingua franca of my area.
Given that, this goes against the "preserve communication" argument. After all, this is how Italian was born (at least that's what we studied in school), there was Greek, there was Latin, somewhere the language got distorted by common people all the way until it became Italian and got shared by many, many people.
The language was not defined, it evolved with how people used it.
This process has been going on forever, I don't see why it should change now with artificial constraints.
For what is worth, official documents should be allowed in English language for the entire country, given we are part of the EU, there is a whole money-sucking machine (and time-sucking!) to translate things in English when interacting with other EU countries.
I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.
It would be like using your English to converse in Dutch.
Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.
History and historical culture, on their own, are a bad reason to do something (ie learning from history makes sense. Doing something for no other reason than the length of time its been does not)
The rest is just about which language and who chooses.
The only thing this sort of bill does is make it harder to get to a better state. At least here they are not pretending it's helpful to do it
Would it? It would matter which language. It'd benefit those most familiar with it today.
People have been laughed at for their accents when learning a language. How does this help?
You can't just flip a switch. It'd create a huge inequality divide moreso than today.
Some countries are surviving because they use a different language that's not English i.e. less impact from globalization.
That is no reason not to make progress.
As for practicallness: In a world of 8 billion people, literally anything you do (something, nothing, whatever) will cause hardship for someone. It's not even an interesting goal to try. Doing nothing causing hardship. Moving forward causes hardship.
Combine this with the fact that the unfortunate reality of humans is that one of the main ways that change happens writ large is through seeing the suffering (and success!) of others. I don't think you will change that part of our psychology anytime soon.
The sad truth is we don't all get a perfect, or even good, life. You can't make progress on this, either, without causing hardship to some. Does that mean you should not try?
Because you will never make progress in steps that are only positive for everyone, or even often get the chance to choose who it gets to be negative for.
It wouldn't last. Within years it would devolve into various creoles and with centuries; almost entirely different languages. Language is not merely functional but cultural and has purpose outside of meaning (e.g. identity).
Language-as-identity as a way of separating people has no meaningful use case that is positive for society.
That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.
Lingua Franca is a phrase in the most dominant language 2000 years ago, about the most dominante language 1000 years ago, used in the dominant language now. All of those languages used tons of loanwords as well. Someday Mandarin or Hindu may become the most dominant and they will use loanwords, and phrases from those languages will slip into English speech.
But those changes won’t be because English in unique in some way, it will be because that’s how languages work.
This isn't true. English is easily the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, and it's not just because of Anglophone nation power, it's because English is an easily-learned language. I live in Japan, and while Japanese borrows a lot of foreign words (mostly from English), it's not ever going to become dominant because it's just too hard to learn. It's the same with Chinese. Any language that requires you to learn thousands of glyphs just to be fluent in the written version isn't going to go far worldwide compared to a language that uses 26 (and shares those with a large array of other languages).
English is a uniquely simple language to learn compared to the languages of other powerful nations (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German); some of those have extremely baroque writing systems (or simply unique and different, for Cyrillic), and all of them have very complicated grammar rules. By contrast, any idiot can learn a little basic English quickly and speak it well enough to be understood, even if it's technically incorrect.
The only way you could possibly believe that is because you are a native speaker and didn’t have to learn it as a second language. English is notorious for being difficult to learn. Especially the abomination of our written language. Try learning Spanish to see what a truly easily-learned language looks like.
English isn't "notorious" for being difficult to learn at all. Citation needed. It's spoken all over the world. It's known for being difficult to become extremely proficient in, but it's very easy to learn to a basic level. It's much like learning to play guitar: any moron can learn to play some power chords on a guitar, and learning some more chords isn't that hard; playing decent-sounding songs with a handful of chords doesn't take long to learn. Playing at the level of a master like Malmsteen or Vai is something entirely different, and very few guitarists can reach that level of proficiency. It's much easier to learn enough on a guitar to play some simple song than on a piano, or worse something like a trombone for instance, but the guitar has a much greater range of ability (the difference between what a beginner can do and what a master can express with it) than most instruments.
All this tells me is that you haven’t learned either Spanish or English as a second language learner. Spanish is incredibly consistent. Unlike English, once you learn the alphabet, you can read everything in Spanish correctly.
> It's spoken all over the world.
That has zero to do with how hard or easy it is to learn. There is absolutely no correlation. It is spoken all over the world because of British colonialism, American cultural exports, and it being the lingua franca. Not because anyone actually would choose to learn it if they had any other choice.
Linguists categorize languages according to how hard they are for people to learn. Spanish is a category 1 language (the easiest to learn). English is a category 4-5 language (out of 5).
“Is English the hardest language to learn?
Given what we’ve already noted, you might be wondering if English is deserving of an equivalent ranking as one of the hardest languages to learn. Well, that too is a very subjective opinion. After all, people who are already fluent in languages that are related to English—particularly the Germanic and Romance language families—probably won’t find English to be that bad. However, English has a lot going on that could make it very frustrating to learn, even for a person fluent in one of these languages. Here are some of the commonly cited reasons that English is often considered to be a very hard language to learn:
English is an unusual mix of Germanic and Romance languages. Many English words are taken directly from Latin and Greek without changing their form or meaning at all.
The rules of grammar, pronunciation, and spelling in English are largely inconsistent and sometimes make no sense at all. For example, the past tense of ask is asked, but the past tense of take is took. Additionally, there are tons of exceptions to these rules that need to be memorized. For example, the beloved “I before E except after C” goes right out the window when we run into a word like weird.
English is full of homophones that are pronounced identically but have different spellings and meanings, such as the words way and weigh.
Often, English synonyms can’t be used interchangeably. For example, you often mean two different things when you say that someone is clever or when you say that someone is sly. The order of adjectives is often based on what “sounds right” rather than a formal set of rules. Often, native English speakers know the “correct” order of adjectives without even actually learning it.
All of the above issues cause problems even for native English speakers when trying to use proper grammar and spelling. Needless to say, a new learner is likely to struggle quite a bit when trying to wrap their head around the ridiculous rules—or lack thereof—of English. We may not be able to say for certain that English is the hardest language to learn, but we think it definitely makes a serious claim for the title.”
English the same word can be pronounced differently based on tense:
"Did you read the same book I read?"
Besides confusing I don't know what to even call a thing like that.
No it doesn't. It's not even close. Spanish has rules and generally follows those rules. English has rules and almost as many exceptions to those rules.
The Indo-European gender difference still survives in the distinction between he, she, and it.
More interestingly, English is in the process of developing a gender distinction between people and non-people, reflected in the use of the relativizer who for people and which for non-people. (The words do not otherwise differ; this is a purely grammatical distinction!) This incipient gender distinction is absorbing the old one, leading to the feeling that it expresses that the referent is not a person.
And English grammar is really not that simple - for example, few other languages have the distinction between continuous and perfect forms of a tense, but foreign speakers can simply avoid it in English ("I read the docs" instead of "I am reading the docs" for a really basic speaker).
One advantage you may mean by "grammar" is that English has relatively little variance for a verb or noun form - once you learn the root, there's not that many variations to account for tense, plurals etc. But Mandarin Chinese for example is much simpler from this point of view: there are basically 0 variations.
Phonetics are more of a problem. Chinese would be very hard to pick up in much of the world simply because tone is a very foreign phonetical feature, and people who haven't experienced it growing up are unlikely to even realize it is meaningful just by listening to speech.
However, even that doesn't matter too much. French is also a phonetically difficult language, with many very similar syllables being important for distinguishing words (for example the distinction between -n as a consonant vs a nasalized vowel). But, that didn't stop virtually all of Europe from adopting it as an international language at some point, not to mention much of north Africa.
I can't really tell what you mean. "I am reading the docs" is an example of a form that is generally called "continuous", yes. "Continuous" is an aspect, not a tense.
The same is true of "perfect", but the larger problem is that you haven't provided a perfect form. (Finite) perfect constructions in English are marked by auxiliary have, "I have read the docs". "I read the docs" uses what is generally called the "plain form" (the name describes the form, not the meaning that calls for the form), and it expresses that the verb is stative[1], describing a fact about the subject ("I am the kind of person who reads the docs") rather than describing an event that takes place at a particular time.
> Chinese would be very hard to pick up in much of the world simply because tone is a very foreign phonetical feature
This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjpnslsuA2g
So the exotic phonetic phenomenon that makes it so difficult for English speakers to learn Chinese is... something that English speakers are natively aware enough of to make and appreciate jokes about. (Not to mention objecting to people who are doing it wrong - check out "uptalk", which people spontaneously punctuated with question marks because the phenomenon was so obvious to them that they felt obligated to indicate it in writing even though the writing system has no provision for it.)
"Perfect" was the wrong word for what I meant, you're right. I was referring to the difference between the continuous form and the plain form, which doesn't exist in many other languages. For example, in French, "je lis les docs" can mean either "I am reading the docs" or "I read the docs (in general)". My point is, even though a native English speaker (or anyone past B1 or so) understands the difference between these two phrases, many foreign speakers actually don't, and would use them more or less interchangeably, relying on context.
Lots of grammar is like this: it helps reduce the amount of context necessary, but it's not critical to text comprehension. If you speak French while using the wrong genders for nouns, people will still understand exactly what you mean - it will just sound strange and maybe make certain complex phrases more confusing than they're used to. This happens very commonly when a language is picked up as a lingua franca by many foreign speakers.
> This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them
Tone exists in all human communication, but it is used very differently in tonal languages. In almost all non-tonal languages, a rising tone indicates a question, a flat tone indicates a statement, and certain other tones indicate the mood of the speaker.
But in a tonal language, particularly one with absolute tones like Mandarin Chinese, tones are more similar to vowels, consonants, or stress accent: they are an intrinsic part of words or syllables. The difference between "mā" (high tone) and "má" (rising tone) is not one of intention, they are simply two completely unrelated syllables/words (the first means "mother", the second means "numb"). There are three more words that use what would be the same syllable in a non-tonal language (transliterated as mà, falling tone, mǎ, falling then rising tone, and ma, neutral tone).
Even worse, moving from a neutral tone syllable to a high tone syllable may sound like, which to a Mandarin Chinese speaker would be equivalent to moving between a syalble using "a" to one using "e" would be interpreted as a rising tone (and thus a question) by a non-tonal language speaker.
The major currency is USD... Most English speaking countries are of British origin... Non-English speaking countries trade with the largest partner(s), which are of English origins...
I don't think it's the features of the language that are at play here.
That's one perspective. Another is trade. Trade is what caused my parents to learn English in the 40's and the 50's because it made them more employable.
Sure we can assume we just want to trade peacefully. History has said otherwise. We want to trade with the biggest trading partners and a lot of them grew by raiding others.
There was a clear plan to create an addiction and even as it was banned to smuggle more and more into the country.
A lot of things don't happen by chance. So does a certain country not actually have "weapons of mass destruction" etc.
European merchants didn't like this because its far more efficient to profit on every leg and the first leg of hauling silver was a loss with a mostly empty hold, so were seeking a product to sell to the Chinese market that would have pull that they could fill cargo holds with. Due to their lack of scruples, they discovered that opium was such a product and set in motion the very events that still plague us to today of growing opium across Asia to sell to China.
As a flood of cheap opium entered the market through the criminal gangs at the time (who were buying the opium through profitable liaisons with the British) the Chinese authorities set about cracking down on the trade in the interests of its people. Eventually this brought them into conflict with the British and in interests of keeping the ports open to the opium trade the first of two opium wars was declared.
The wikipedia article probably puts it better than I have [1].
> They created this difficulty to find a chance to invade.
If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century (although it would have still been a significant challenge given the might of China's manpower at the time). The British were a brutal force but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation, wealth was more of a primary motivator. So its much like US foreign policy today which is typically flexed to promote interests relevant to American GDP. It remains ugly when its flexed but its arguably a kinder aim than that of a fully imperialistic force such as say: the Mongols of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Think about why the British even introduced Opium to China and who controlled most of the production. Do you really believe they weren't plotting anything here?
> If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century
There are lots of ways to invade. It doesn't have to be via military might. It can be via the church, opium as we're discussing here or other factors before the actual fight.
> but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation
Are we rewriting history here? What happened to Vietnam, Iraq, etc etc? More like the media tries to paint it another way. You're free to not believe in it. I doubt it's all for the GDP.
Please respect my language choices. What I wanted to impart is that the map of the world is not smeared with the word "USA" like Imperialism would otherwise desire. I feel like you're treating all war as conquest and I feel like there's more nuance.
> Right, because we're going to believe Wikipedia + a recount of events...
Well you're welcome to add your own sources to the discussion as opposed to idle speculation or axe grinding.
You believe what you want but its clear that trade _was_ an element that contributed to the opium war. Most conflicts have numerous competing interests and a wide variety of competing actors. The European age of colonialism made this all the more complex given the lack of effective telecommunications and travel distances. This resulted in more competing interests having more agency which makes conflict all the more complicated and introduces more opportunity for half-truths and subterfuge.
I would discourage this apparent idea you have that the entire British Empire was perfectly controlled by some entirely malicious, autocratic and bloodthirsty hand in some sort of 80's action film with an entirely clear distinction between good and evil. The British Empire _was_ brutish, callous and avaricious and its a better world now without it, but to paint it with the same hand as one might any historic conqueror is to render history into a black and white pastiche.
Like we say "it was a bloody Sunday" to generically mean a massacre.
"Lingua franca" was a language, did you know that?
> That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.
It has been at least since the XI century. Long before tomatoes were a thing in England.
> English is the most international language in the world
Which English?
Because British and American English aren't.
And probably right now Mandarin Chinese is even more business oriented than English.
I'm such a person. I realize that any kind of preference I have for the language that I grew up with is an accident of birth. It helps to be part of a country that is so small as to be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Life doesn't stop at the border and if you want to be active at all then you're going to have to interact with people speaking different languages. English, German and French to begin with, and maybe Spanish, Chinese and one of the Slavic languages after that.
I think English is here to stay in a way that Latin never was, the digital repository of English text is absolutely massive, unless you want to limit yourself you simply have to speak English. When there was no internet that meant books and once the printing press was invented and books were no longer in very limited circulation (and reading and writing became more common skills) written culture really took off. The Roman empire is what drove the spread of Latin and once the empire collapsed it took Latin with it, with the exception of some niche uses (science, mostly, and religious texts).
> I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias.
Counter point: I’m German. We currently have a lot of discussions about gender-fication of the German language. This has nothing to do with an Anglo-centric bias and still, we have exactly the same talking points.
On the one hand, it’s preserving language how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years, on the other hand, it’s about the biases in the language and how to overcome them.
make it more like 1 thousand years.
The point is culture and language evolve naturally and organically, so the language is not biased, people are. Discussing on how to remove biased from a language is the same think as to say "someone wants to put their biases in". It's true that it is happening, in the richest western countries only though, it is also true that it is because the Anglo-centric bias is predominant in the west when it's about social networks and influence on younger generations.
In China kids are restricted from using social networks and consequentially are not exposed to "content creators" that are just trying to ride the indignation wave to profit. it is also a well know fact that Chinese kids test scores on average are much better than the average western kids ones. this is another bias we are importing from Anglo-centric World, that we aren't discussing enough.
https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-i...
I also don't see a reason why you would support the region you were born at all, if you like something else better. Tons of people move away and have zero regrets. Does reverse nationalism exist? :P
I‘m German, and I don‘t care for that language. It‘s unnecessarily complex.
But cultural preservation is a means and not an end, unlike you seem to be arguing. When made into its own end, Cultural preservation for the sake of cultural preservation simply exists to build barriers and differences between people.
That is literally the purpose when it is its own goal. To build a shared thing among a group that others do not have, so you can divide your group from them.
Cultural preservation only unites people by pitting them against an out group.
I'm honestly unsure how you can argue otherwise.
It has been the cause of many great atrocities precisely because it always creates an out group.
So yes, preserving culture for the sake of preserving culture is a net negative for society.
The rest simply becomes an argument that nobody should ever have change. Good luck with that. Change comes for us all. None of us live long enough that we should get to try to force future generations to abide our way of thinking.
I asked myself, and I said; 'meh'. Admittedly I speak English better than my first language now, and I'm also being deliberately facetious, but it's also true that I don't much care about my first language.
> Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;)
I used to think it was hilariously ironic too, but then I stumbled on the actual etymology one day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca?oldformat=true#E...
After all, Tu vuò fà l'americano is merely satire. https://youtu.be/BqlJwMFtMCs
I find that beautiful, but this law seems to be against it
For example just this evening I was listening to this Neapolitan (I think it's Neapolitan, definitely Southern) song Brigante se more [1] and I needed to see the written down lyrics to get a hold of it [2], as I couldn't understand almost anything at a first hearing. I know Italian pretty well, but I just couldn't parse the song when hearing it directly.
This is a funny example to use, because while the first tomato reached Europe in the early 16th century, it was not widely eaten in Italy until the mid-to-end of the nineteenth century. For a number of reasons, people (incorrectly) believed them to be poisonous.
Nitpick, but there was no such thing as "Italy" in the 1500s. There were several kingdoms and city states at war against one another. Modern Italy is a 19th century invention.
https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/italian-americans-and-th...
The only way to achieve this is with illiberal, authoritarian measures -- I.E. a centralized government forcing people to think and behave in a certain way. And not because such thoughts or behavior is harmful in any way, it's only because it's aesthetically displeasing. Not good.
Also, not all cultural homogenisation is created equal. It's good that all cultures have evolved to say that murder is a bad thing. That was cultural homogenisation, and it was good.
It is all smoke and mirrors to distract the public opinion from the government's failures.
OTOH the use of English words that have an equivalent in Italian has reached such high levels of stupidity that it has become a popular meme here, under the name "Milanese imbruttito" which roughly translates to "this is too much even for someone from Milan"
The actual way this gets exported is via the HR firms and executive picks of American corporations. That then affects the funding of movies, TV shows, video games and everything downstream of that.
And regarding attitudes toward women's bodies, one only needs to visit any beach in southern Spain and count up the topless women to notice those values are already Americanizing.
Some might say only non western or ex colonised countries should get protection and the ex colonisers culture should be left to rot (i.e. to be swallowed up by Disney). I think that's the neo liberal / left view. It's a bit biased in my opinion but it's certainly a common thing I've heard.
For example?
Just because some aspect of the commons would be lost to the pressures of market economics doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. If left to the tyranny of markets, we'd cut down every tree, dam every stream, catch every fish in the ocean, and the only culture you'd have would be drip-fed to you for $120/month by a television syndicate.
Also, even Americans aren't interested in leaving their culture up to the markets. Remember all the hoopalah about Disney and the NBA kowtowing to China, and how incensed people were that their culture was being changed by foreign sensibilities? The rest of the world gets to wear this shoe, a lot.
I also saw it happen over the course of maybe 4-5 years when I lived in Mexico City in 2013-2017.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of...
A counter to this is the Académie Française [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
Which happens to be the laughing stock of the rest of the world, good call.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/le-la-covid-co...
I’m not sure I know what you mean. Can you elaborate on this world view that you say American culture is exporting?
I think music and film are actually the primary way that this American culture is exported. Think about the whole culture surrounding movies - much of it is controlled and inspired by Hollywood.
I agree that it would be nice if the rest of the world wouldn't become so Americanized, but I think that's only viable if the population doesn't learn English en masse.
In a small European country's facebook I can't have a day without a payed onlyfans advertisement hidden in a story about a poor teacher who became rich instantly after she started a side job.
Also, language is different compared to cuisine. Not saying that cuisine isn't important in defining a nation's "character", because it is, but language is quintessential when it comes to nation-building.
They're a mild form of isolationism and nationalism and they can but do not have to be the first stage of a country moving further away from the center rather than a pendulum swing. With a pendulum the assumption is that it will move back but this sort of thing can easily move a country to the right and then ultra right, of which history carries a fair number of examples.
Italian is a descendant of the Latin language, which itself borrowed extensively from Greek. What is so special about today's Italian language that it should by all means be preserved in it's current form without continuing to borrow from foreign languages?
European languages borrow from English because the US offers so much that we voluntarily adopt in Europe. If most good movies, music, streaming services, computer hardware, computer software, Internet, electric cars, smartphones, AI, business ideas etc. were Italian, the English language would adopt more Italian words.
The example in the article (bru-shetta/bru-sketta) highlights the absurd pedantic nature of this proposal.
I truly weep for the world which we seem to have created.
Current italian government is 100% USA's puppet with no shame.
The provision in the proposal to force every public meeting to be held in italian is crazy… it'd kill holding scientific conferences in italy.
To be honest I'd want them to push it as an internal memo for the national tv. There is this trend to insert english words (mostly wrongly, just like americans use italian words mostly incorrectly as well) to sound cool. If this was eliminated from TV, I'd imagine it would go a long way already.
Pointing fingers is a bit hypocritical when most cultures will do it given the circumstances.
Are these two mutually exclusive?
If more people realized this, they'd be less rigid to the idea of new - or indeed, old - culture being re-told - or not. The fact is, if you don't use a language - it dies.
Italians are merely trying to protect the lies that they prefer to be re-told..
What the world needs is more people willing to protect cultures which are not their own. There is no one culture more superior to any other - ALL cultures are subject to total loss when the natural fallacies that make up that culture stop being re-told as human truths ..
There followed a highly entertaining (if you like that sort of thing) debate in the UK House of Commons as to whether to retaliate by banning French words[1][2]. The difference being, they were only joking while the French were deadly serious.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH0wvkZmGKQ&t=70
[2] https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/1994-07-05/debates/8a1...
One elderly gentleman left the meeting, it turned out that he didn't speak English and was the one that had insisted the meeting be in French and after that we got along just fine.
This is an observation rather than a criticism as I don't know whether this is 'good' or 'bad' but it is noticeable phenomena manifest through language, and probably an unintended consequence of the dependency of Europe on US communication technology, leading to the import of US communication styles, political priorities and cultural values.
France have always been conscious of this, no doubt as a result of their centuries old conflict with England, but it is interesting now to see Italian nationalists responding similarly. It's futile of course, as neither Italians, French nor any combination of European countries can or will make an internet independent of the US
I guess driven by significant emigration from Italy to USA. Here in Portugal, we also have some... Issues... With France emigrants who return to the country.
It's worth noting that a variation of language collapse may be occurring. The English speaking part of the US is imploding (aging demographics, fentynal, Covid, mediocre healthcare for the bottom 1/2, etc), the Spanish speaking part of the US is rapidly taking marketshare (immigration being the only thing keeping the US population afloat). You can expect some decline in US cultural power accordingly, as Spanish is less popular globally than English (and far less potent as an entertainment, media force).
The EU will indeed end up more or less making their own Internet. That's happening gradually. Their own rules, laws, beliefs are increasingly governing their slice of cyberspace (and anything in tech broadly). That separation will only get wider. Over time, the laws governing the EU Internet end up making it quite distinct from the US Internet, from the Chinese Internet, from the Russian Internet, and so on (as different as the physical spaces are today, at least).
It's like people are more involved in US politics than their national politics.
Now, in some ways the impact of racism is lesser in Europe, because there's less police violence generally and typically a much stronger social safety net.
https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-de...
It would be like them protesting Asians being treated unfairly on University acceptance, another American form of racism, that is also not applicable to Sweden.
Protesting your government on issues that don’t exist and they therefore cannot address is odd, and unless I’m missing something, extremely stupid
Let me get this correct, because your comment is baffling to me. People often protest the actions of other countries, usually by protesting in their home country at the embassy of the other country that is doing something they want to protest. For example, people in countries around the world routinely protest against the Chinese government's treatment of Uyghurs by protesting in their country at the local Chinese embassy. Their goal is ostensibly to get the Chinese government to change their policies, or at least generate media coverage to raise awareness about the issue.
I'm assuming this is the event you're referring to in Mumbai, and I'll use a source that holds as cynical of a view as you do in covering it: https://www.indiatoday.in/lifestyle/what-s-hot/story/mumbaik...
The protesters assembled at the US Consulate in Mumbai to protest policies by the US government that are directly leading to innocent people in the US being murdered almost every day in mass shootings. In the same way that Chinese government treatment of Uyghurs is not an issue outside of China, US government policies around guns is not an issue outside of the US (even though it actually is, because the US is a major supplier of guns around the world). How is this any different than protesting at the Chinese embassy over internal Chinese government policy?
I'll also say that if you felt an urge to use physical violence to respond to someone expressing a political opinion, then you need to get mental health treatment immediately.
Indian and American societies are link way deeper than political relations show.
Ever gone on Reddit and looked at what Swedes say about refugees and immigrants (post ~2014 or so; in 2015 they were burning refugee camps)? The racist, anti-non-Swede, nationalism type is only going to get a lot worse there. The integration of refugees into Swedish society has been a complete failure, which you can see in the crime and employment outcomes. If it were the US, the blame would be squarely placed on racist behavior / dominant culture preventing the refugees from thriving.
Like in the UK the Prime Minister, Home Secretary, and Scottish First Minister are all from immigrant family backgrounds.
As for the refugees, it's not so much racism as just a very difficult situation - a nation can't accept literally millions of young men with no language skills or qualifications and expect things to work out well.
The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.
Europe is not less racist than the US. However, Europeans are much less used to reflecting on and taking about racism in their own countries than Americans are.
That reluctance to talk about race is exacerbated by the fact that, in many European counties (Sweden being one of them), it is either difficult or impossible to legally collect meaningful data about race, making it impossible to actually report on objective racial disparities and issues.
> The real question is why Europe has to deal with it when it was the USA which started the wars.
I see Europeans express sentiments like this quite often, and it's quite amusing. Racism isn't something foreign to Europe - Europe is literally the birthplace of white supremacist ideology, and racism has been ingrained in European society for centuries. It's quite ludicrous to pretend that it somehow evaporated overnight without cause, and even more absurd to make that assertion when there's copious evidence of direct and overt racism in across Europe literally every day.
That's not to deny that American racial categories are either inapplicable or less central to personal identity in most European countries; but let's also not pretend that the roughly equivalent concept is some kind of bloodless bureaucratic idea of 'nationality'.
An apt choice of words, given that almost all European countries practice jus sanguinis - literally "right of the blood". In contrast to how citizenship works in most of North and South America, people who are born in European countries do not automatically get citizenship (nationality) of the country of birth. Instead, citizenship is inherited.
This system became popular in many European countries in part because it provided a way to avoid automatically granting citizenship to immigrants from the now-former colonies, instead creating an extra barrier.
The UK is also closer to having an open conversation around race than many other European countries, and tends to be more directly influenced by US political movements.
As the sibling comment says, it is extraordinary how many Europeans seem to think that racism is a problem that exists only in the USA. Gary Younge wrote an excellent article touching on this topic in the Guardian recently. Key point:
>This ability to unsee what is before our eyes is not confined to the past. The latter-day version of this selective myopia is the repeated insistence that Britain must not “import American race politics” – as if racism is an artisanal product of the US, like French champagne or Italian parmigiano reggiano. When protests erupted on the streets of British cities in 2020 under the banner of Black Lives Matter, many commentators smugly declared that this was an imitation of American fashions – even as the statue of a very English slave trader, Edward Colston, was dumped into Bristol’s harbour.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/ng-interactive/2023/mar/29/...
Europeans are less race oriented in the same way Russia is a peaceful country and Russian invasion of Ukraine is not an invasion but "special military operation" to majority of Russians living there; we simply don't hear, or want to hear it, and shun people who talk about it.
You're, unsurprisingly, getting downvoted for this comment, but you are entirely correct. Racism is actually far more overt in Europe than it is in the US - the difference is that it's so widely accepted that people literally do not recognize it as racism even when it's plain as day.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Zwarte Piete, the annual Dutch blackface tradition, which as of 2011 was supported by 93% of Dutch people. 2020, unsurprisingly, marked the first year when "only" 47% people (less than a majority) supported the practice, but even then it's an incredible contradiction between collective self-perception and actual practice.
Ahistorical excuses for it vary ("it's not racist", "Blackface is an American thing; we don't have that in the Netherlands", or my personal favorite "it's not blackface, because it's just soot"). All are incorrect: blackface is always racist, and blackface/minstrelry as a form of entertainment was actually popular in Europe longer than it was in the US, and portraying Black people as "dirty" from soot is a common minstrel trope.
If you want an interesting trip, dig up some Dutch news reports from 2019 when Trudeau and Northam were caught in their blackface scandals. Dutch-language international media actually had a hard time covering it, because the average Dutch person at the time literally could not understand why it was even an issue in the first place. They had to dedicate extra time/space to very elaborate explanations of why blackface is considered offensive, whereas most American media could just report it as-is, leaving any explanation for the final filler paragraphs (if at all).
Sure, I, and many people in my country, had a reaction against it, very conservative in nature. But now, over a few years and seeing some reasonable people explain to me that zwarte piet hurts them and that the hair, the lips, the earrings, the slave-like behavior in songs is really quite racist. I, and many others changed their mind. It also helped when I talked to people that held the opinion that I am/was not a despicable person for taking part in this old tradition, there was no "original sin" that I should feel for the rest of my life.
And so a lot of people in my country changed their mind. Sinterklaas is a kids party/holiday and it should be inclusive. Kids couldn't care less about the color of zwarte piet of course. I and everybody I now know is glad we changed course, or rather are still changing course. Mostly smaller villages defiantly keep the old black face, but it will rot away, as it should, over time. It takes time to convince those people, or perhaps they are too stuck in their ways. My grandma lived through WW2 and still always said horribly racist things (i.e. a common saying was that if a river was dirty, "the Turkish people swim in there."). You really couldn't change her anymore. She also lived in constant fear that Islamic people will come to our country and, "since they all live together in small houses, they will come and live with us in our houses if we don't protect our country".
I also cringe at children's books like Pinkeltje (first part published 1939) that I have lying around from my own youth and read to my children until I hit parts that I really couldn't read anymore. Parts are pure racism, i.e. in Africa Pinkeltje is basically battling small black devils, really portayed as sub-human. It takes time for people to see it, to see it as people of other races experience these texts.
I'm 100% on your side now, and I reason with people that aren't and I try not to judge. Easy for me to do of course, when you are at the receiving end I can imagine screaming "Racist!" at a kids party feels, and perhaps is, the only way towards change.
Btw, I also cringe at our still very popular "Jip and Janneke", Jip is the boy, always dirty and mischievous. Janneke the girl: Always clean and vacuuming with her mother and doing the laundry. They also get candy for anything they do well. I tell my daughter she can be a knight, does not have to be the princess. But these things run deep in our culture, and we should get rid of them.
I know it does not really make sense, but I apologize to you and to people that felt hurt. I didn't see it. Thank you for your sustained effort to make me see it as it is and how you experienced it. The world our kids grow up in will be better because of it.
Sad part is that we as Europeans worked/working really really hard to make it impossible for them to find a place in our communities/societies. And before that we did similar things with Jews. There is one word that explains it all "pogrom". How such short word can contain so much...
That one was the celebrity-hungry Norwegian Nobel Committee's fault. They award the peace prize.
First not being Bush wrote a lot of checks he couldn't cash. People believed for some reason that he was leftist, and later discovered how much to the right, American "left" is. And American media also distorted a bit what was actually happening. Neither democratic nor republican media would show their beloved leaders(you can guess which media support which president) in bad light.
What nonsense. That US Democratic Party politics often leans more right than many popular European parties on the left is not some modern post-Obama discovery, and was widely understood long before Obama's presidency. Literally read any political memoir or history by a left-leaning European politician who interacted with the US and Democratic party leadership prior to Obama and you will pick up a sense of this.
I can accept arguments Obama may have been treated with much more interest and excitement than perhaps he warranted in European media at that time, but I see little evidence this was because his politics were misunderstood - Obama's policy positions were generally easy to articulate. I think a simpler explanation might well lie in the obvious historic nature of the event; he was the first black man to hold the office, and the first Democratic president after two terms of Bush. These facts alone are "newsworthy" by the standards of modern media.
"leftist" is an absolutely terrible classification to use in any debate about politics, given its generally only ever used reductively and is almost devoid of any actual meaning.
The UK had to leave the entire thing to try and get immigration under control and have still totally failed - they can't even deport illegal immigrants because the EU Court of Human Rights decided that deportation is against human rights. So now maybe the UK has to leave that too except, ah ha, supporters of that system wrote membership into various other agreements and so on. Same way it's always done in Europe. Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.
Brexit is the headliner of populism fest, of course the whole thing is sponsored by Dunning-Kruger. everyone with more than a fistful of minimally calibrated brain cells have saw through the "wages are bad because immigrants, EU bad, must leave EU"
> Everything is made to depend on everything else as a way to disempower the electorate.
Yes, the electorate. The famously well represented electorate. In the so well empowered UK elections.
Please.
There are plenty of completely valid and important problems of integration of various migrant groups, similarly there is a literal endless list of problems with the EU, as it's big complex and there's always going to be problems. And it's true of borders, inequality, elections and so on.
By gesturing at the problems and then loudly proclaiming the UK has to leave the ECHR, and that it can't really, and that everything is forced on the poor powerless groups "same way it's always done in Europe" is silly and just muddies the waters.
The UK and any other groups can as sovereign states can exit those agreements. Maybe other states will be disappointed, as no one welcomes complexity and paperwork, but those exact states are the ones that are going to respect the sovereignty that makes this possible.
And just as a small datapoint for anyone else reading. The EU typically goes very great lengths to make sure all members are represented, their needs heard, and as possible taken care of. Usually it's a shitshow, because how do you make a fair judgement between two members? Usually you don't, but make sure the weaker, smaller ones are not trampled by the bigger ones, and hope for the best. But then look at the border issue between Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The EU put its foot down because it's the whole point that there cannot be a border between its members. So the UK wanted out, they had to give. It's the same thing with those pesky agreements and courts and rights.
On one hand there seems to be a strong sentiment of what swedish culture is and is not, on the other there is also an unusual higher permeability to american culture compared to other EU countries.
Why?? This drives me crazy. They are not part of my country's history and we have plenty of local heroes.
In my country (Brazil if you must know) the cultural avalanche that comes from the US is such that some people genuinely admire the US civil rights movement and its leaders, but will not tolerate anything similar locally. Such is the power of propaganda: you get tied up in the problems of the US and ignore your own.
America is good at one thing: being very loud, when everyone else isn't. It's a pity that we therefore associate being loud as being American...
I read about the histories of many countries. Didn't you? England in particular, all of Europe, China .... How can you understand the world without knowing about more than your own corner? Why would you limit yourself?
I couldn't even tell you what kind of government the Netherlands has lol could be a monarchy for all is know hah
The same people went to the same engineering uni as me, which had a lot of middle eastern and east Asian classmates that they couldn't give a single fuck about how they subtly mistreated them.
US focus also serves as a convenient denial of our own daily misdeeds here. I'm still to this day shocked to meet a lot of (continental) Europeans that think (systematic) racism is a US thing, and can't possibly be happening here.
You know when someone is incessantly speaking louder than others, drowning their conversations? ... yeah.
There have been Italian language wars in border regions but they fizzle once non-locals get involved.
For example, South Tyrol has a large German speaking population. The Italian government has historically encouraged adoption of Italian.
But South Tyrol has (had?) a large Sicilian population that supported the local German speakers.
I think it's great if local languages and identifies can continue to thrive, but I don't think it can be said that Italian nationalism isn't a thing though - it has explicitly been a thing as the suppression of regional dialects and the 'making of Italians' was a stated objective of Italian nationalists immediately after the unification of Italy.
btw this does not make Italy exceptional in any way, the way modern 'nation states' were built followed exactly this pattern - suppression of regional languages - 'cultural genocide' - and the creation a new national identity to replace them
It’s always been touch and go.
Garbaldi and Mussolini placed a strong emphasis on “nationalism,” but other leaders were more focused on a building coalitions.
Can you give me the names of some Italian nationalist parties?
I was told by my Sicilian family the only reason Sicily is a part of Italy is Garibaldis ship was blown off course during a storm.
No idea if that’s true.
Same with modern French, which is basically Parisian, modern Spanish essentially Castillian. There is never an neutral language, it is linguistic supremacism one over the other. I absolutely respect Sicilians (and other regional groups) for resisting 'Florentine cultural imperialism'
Control over the Church was rarely as useful within Italy as outside of it. The papacy always had strong enemies on the peninsula. Much of its policy was dedicated to keep them divided and to ensure that those didn't ally with outside powers.
My personal experience also corroborates this. In common usage, Castilian is the same language as Spanish and in fact I hear people from Spain refer to the language as Castilian, even when talking about the language as spoken in Latin America, regardless of the Academy's prescription.
French was normalized as a written language around the great feudal courts of Northern France, at the time Paris wasn't particularly influential culturally. Parisian French was itself quite distinct from "government French" until recently.
Italian is not a northern but rather a central Italian language.
> Can you give me the names of some Italian nationalist parties?
Movimento Sociale Italiano, was a nationalist neofascist party that became Fratelli d’Italia, the current governing party. FdI gets more votes in the south than in the north. Lega is a weird beast, sometimes anti-southern now nationalist and anti-immigration.
> I was told by my Sicilian family the only reason Sicily is a part of Italy is Garibaldis ship was blown off course during a storm.
Was Garibaldi trying to annex Algeria and went off course? Your Sicilian family is not well versed in Italian history.
They stopped doing that decades ago, before I was born. The language of the German minority is protected and their representation in Parliament is guaranteed by the constitution. The Autonomous Province of Bolzano has a high level of self-government and a special fiscal regime.
My Sicilian family (who are historically challenged) say there quite a few there before WWII.
I don't think you've paid much attention to the last 25 years of Italian politics. Italian nationalists are definitely a thing, and they are winning. The current government is led by openly-avowed post-fascists. The last time fascists were in power, Superman became "Nembo Kid", Internazionale Milano became "Ambrosiana Inter", and people with foreign surnames had to italianize them or risk ostracism (how do I know? My great-grandmother was one of them). One of the reasons Italian national identity is so traditionally weak in the postwar period is that its period of unabashed strength was so clearly associated with an unpresentable regime; the latest move by this government is an explicit bridge to that period, a dog whistling exercise that will work very well with their electorate.
However, there's already an English translation of that book. It's published under the ttitle _Civilization: How we All Became American_, and was translated by David Fernbach.
Anyway, thanks again for pointing out this book. I'll be looking into it thanks to your suggestion.
It has always seemed like a losing battle to me. Basque people might speak more Basque, but they still see Netflix, listen to international bands via Spotify and immerse themselves in international trends via Instagram and Tiktok.
My conclusion is that the government does this because language is the one part of culture the government can legislate around.
The only way to effectively fight this homogenisation is to use authoritarian measures that force people into compliance. And that's when you are bordering on literal fascism, using force on your own people to ensure conformity to cultural and national norms. Cultural homogenisation is a natural process that will happen when you integrate people with trade, the internet, transport, and communications. You can't fight these processes without significant and unreasonable amounts of force applied to people.
I suggest they also forbid every cultural aspect of the Italian culture that came from America/England: Italian Rock & Pop, Spaghetti Western, Il Calcio (invented by the British),...
And, btw, the food historian Alberto Grandi has been claiming that even pasta Carbonara is an American born dish...
Yes, database is base di dati but it's seldom used as such. Calcolatore is the calculator app nowadays :-)
And indeed if you say "calcolatore", I interpret that as the calculator app (or any small math-only calculators used in school)
Italian words must have a gender, there is no neutral. Computer, mouse, touchscreen and touchpad are male. Power unit is female even if its Italian counterpart alimentatore is male: il power unit sounds bad, la power unit sounds good. Motherboard is female and its translation scheda madre is also female. Bug, bit and byte are male.
The rule is that loan words enter Italian with their singular form and they don't change at the plural. This might have funny consequences.
Medium / media (radio, TV, etc) entered Italian from English which got them from Latin. The plural of medium in Italian is still medium and pluralizing it as media as in English and Latin is a grammatical error. Media is becoming more common as more people read them in English sentences, not because they are studying Latin :-)
Gender is decided case by case as the word fits better in Italian. Medium is male (il / i, un)
As far as preferring the use of local words - or made up words based on the current language - it's something you find in many other countries/languages other than the ones you mention. Or tell you more, some of their languages did not change for centuries thanks to or because of their prolific written tradition. Everything proves that English doesn't have to be present within every language.
I agree they could have just made a silent transition without making a bill and imposing fines, but in the end the decision doesn't sound very controversial to me.
You're bragging about your language being poorer.
other countries' perceptions of Americans, for some weird reason
https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/italian-language-and-fasc...
German and italian are in the 15-20% range, french and spanish in the 30% area, english north of 90%.
When you have 27 different EU nationals in a room, there is just one language they can practically speak among themselves. The EU will not go anywhere if its countries resist adopting english.
Now that UK is gone it can't be seen as unfairly promoting one country.
I think the example of Switzerland shows that there is no problem if spoken language is different from official language.
Although loosely related, they are two different languages.
Edit: these dialect are commonly used in court, public offices, and often on TV. They have a vastly stronger role in public life than in other German-speaking countries.
I think my point stands that it's a distinct language from the official one. It definitely feels like that in practice where a lot swiss people feel like they have to wear their official hat when speaking regular German and they prefer to have casual beer conversation in English rather than high German.
Mid 40s here and wouldn’t mind at all to start learning Italian if it was the common language of EU.
Also, like everything in Italy, phrases used depend on the region.
Most Swiss speak at least two of their four official languages. It's actually an example of how having multiple official languages isn't expensive nor hard to achieve (and the country is on top of most human index charts).
But the EU should make Latin it's official language.
Edit: since most English speakers in the EU speak it as a second language, it would be an opportunity to adopt a radical, pronunciation-based spelling system. It would massively simplify efforts to learn it, and if it works well enough, it could spread outside the EU as well. It would be ironic if the deliverance of English from its broken ortography would come from the EU.
[0] https://eca.europa.eu/other%20publications/en_terminology_pu...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noah_Webster#Blue-backed_spell...
It feels like a random non-educated person in the city speaks at least German and French. Any person working is services like a supermarket cashier normally speaks 3+ languages (which you know as they usually are indicated on their badges).
Note that this is British English as much or perhaps more than US English - many Europeans have studied or worked in the UK, and their native English speaking contacts are likely to be British.
I'm not saying it's bad or good. But I wish we have less Hollywood, less Netflix, less american music, less american videogames, less imported american culture topics etc when actual local music, movies, books, games exist.
In my country, immediately after the last US backed coup, the new 'democratic' government literally ditched French and German for foreign language education from all education institutions and pushed English in every level of education. As a result, I, like millions of youth in my generation, had to learn English as a foreign language. At this point it must be noted that a decent amount of the coup leaders were military men who received additional training in the US, 'School of Americas' style.
In addition to that, the US-backed government first jailed or banned all the artists who used to create content in national, traditional formats, and instead promoted literally American music - one reason for this was the majority of those artists were left-wing, pro-people artists who opposed US corporate interests so they were detrimental to the 'new order'. Those who were not banned refused to appear in state-run channels in protest. Naturally private channels also excluded them because they were seen as 'hostile' to privatization and other US-backed policies. What was left of the creative space was wiped out by private TV and radio channels who were founded by US-friendly capital or direct US-connected investments, run by those who were educated in Angloamerican institutions, pushing either directly American artists or their imitators. It was a literal takeover of an entire country's culture.
Result? Literally a decade of uncontested American movies, series, songs in tv and radio and recorded medium, culturally imperializing around two generations and slapping a weird layer of 'American' on top of their actual cultural identity. These generations still did not recover from this cultural rape, and they are unable to fit in in their own society, leave aside anywhere abroad.
This is what happened in every other US-backed regime. Even in Europe, US-backed parties and capital literally Americanized their societies methodically by either through the local friendly capital or literally US-linked interests buying out local channels. Even in the country that I now live in, the biggest media group is still owned by a corporation that is owned by an American-German dual citizen. Leaving aside it pushes entirely American content with a few national ones sprinkled in, the news that it shoves into its programming is literally US corporate news, pushing literally the policies of the US itself.
You would think that this would be something related to the US foreign policy, mostly affecting people abroad. It was not. It was a concerted, persistent policy that targeted Americans at home as well as it targeted foreigners.
https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/democracy/the-lewis-powell-me...
The 1971 US Chamber of Commerce Lewis-Powell memo said that the then-existing popular movements like the antiwar movement etc were pushing Americans away from the 'American way of life'. And the rich who own the media and education corporations should use their corporations to condition the people back into 'the American way'. The result is the concentrated, lying corporate propaganda machine that not only pushed wars like 2003 Iraq War, but also destroyed all the humane behaviors and traditions in the US to maximize corporate profit.
...
Then there is this thing about the monetization of entire world's resources that was started by Nixon, forcing everyone to trade in dollars and providing unending capital that was created from zero-interest money inflating everything in the US economy, leading to the corporate takeover of everything abroad by US interests as well as creating phenonenon like Silicon Valley and allowing business-model-free companies that ran on endless investor cash cornering all angles of the Internet and killing off their competition including the domestic independent players, forcing everything to revolve around Silicon Valley.
Which is precisely why many non-Americans here not only speak English aside from the above cultural imperialism reasons, but also post in this forum.
But no worries - as the zero-interest economy goes away, things will change.
> I challenge anybody who downvoted this post to provide any other explanation for their decision.
Let me provide one:
A lot of Americans dont think that anyone could do a concerted, systematic sociopathy like the one I told in my post. Simply because they themselves wouldnt do such a thing, they think that those with whom they identify also wouldnt do that. Anything bad that happened to others or anything bad that is done by their establishment must be some 'coincidence' or a mistake.
This mentality is strengthened by two things: The Just World Theory and lingering Christian behavior patterns that still dominate the American public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
The just world theory is utilized by people who need to escape reality to avoid cognitive dissonance. Because not doing so and acknowledging the evil and the evildoers in their own society would make living in that society very demoralizing and kill hopes for the future. So, any bad deed must have an explanation, any victim must have 'deserved' it, and everything must be alright with the world.
And lingering religious behavior patterns, because in Christianity, the Christian god and the faithful can do no wrong. They are the good ones. Whereas all evil is done by the unbelievers, heretics and other gods. This belief is translated to modern culture as 'being on the good side' whereas anyone else that is not 'with them' are evil. And so, Americans can do no evil whereas any evil can only be done by others. The manifestations of this can be seen in how every incident like the 2003 Iraq war is interpreted as 'a mistake', or 'an ill advised war', and in things like every US enemy being Hitler.
And these behavior patterns poison the minds of the well-intentioned Americans. Additionally a lot of Americans just flat-out keep the late 19th century manifest destiny white supremacist belief patterns - like how 'brown people' etc not being 'that important' and any bad thing happening in such countries being something unimportant even if it is done by their own establishment, hence it can be ignored.
But mainly, the obsession with being 'on the good side' and projecting every evil and ill to outside to escape cognitive dissonance totally poison the American mind and cause them to ignore even the biggest evils that are being committed in their own society - like how their country kills its own people if they cant pay for healthcare and so on....
This of course is caught up in the American conflation of religion and patriotism. It is taught that America is god's preferred country, evidenced by American global hegemony proving god is on America's side. One day of the week American children might pray in church, but five days a week American children swear their allegiance to the flag in a group ritual run by government schools, very often with the "one nation, under god" clause taught to them by their teachers. The few children who resist this group ritual will often be mocked by their peers and chewed out by their teachers.
- San Francisco housing crisis: This has been a frequent topic of discussion on HN but I don't think many people outside of San Francisco, let alone outside of USA care a lot about this
- The collapse of silicon valley bank was a huge topic on HN but it was more or less non-existent in the news in my country
- Posts about US politics, such as anything related to Trump or the American Supreme Court
- When a post is specific to a particular country, it's usually indicated in the title, except in the case of the USA
If you go to Brazil, for example, there's zero worry about American music. Brazilian music holds its own, and then some. If you go to India, their domestic cinema is obviously thriving.
Nobody's "pushing" American media on consumers around the world. Cultural imperialism is ultimately a false narrative -- consumers pick the things they like, as they should because that's their free choice. Switching the TV channel or the radio dial is the easiest thing ever.
I can't think of any industry that is more merit-driven than entertainment, and never more so than today -- both in terms of creation and distribution. A good movie is a good movie period. No amount of advertising and promotion can make people go watch a flop.
And if you think that there should be more support for their producers to compete with Hollywood budgets: Have you watched the credits of any European film or TV production recently? There are lots of government funds (EU and national/local) being spent on just that.
Also, Netflix has probably done more for both the funding and international distribution of European TV shows than all European streaming services combined.
Note that they also get a lot of subsidies from the local governments to film in their location. They are not doing it for charity.
Still, I think in this case it's a synergy. I don't think something like "Dark" would have existed without Netflix, for example, nor would I be able to watch Belgian, Spanish, Turkish, Japanese and many other productions in Europe or the US that easily.
Don't forget that Mercantilism and strict control of trade and information exchange was the rule until America forced "free trade" upon the world as a condition of entry into WW2.
We live in what is mathematically the exception, not the rule. The world didn't begin in 1945.
this marketiziation and individualism is as much a product of Anglosphere culture as the English language itself. It's kind of hilarious to demand that the only legitimate way for Italy to defend its culture is in the most American way possible, through the ideology of 'the customer is king'.
There's nothing strange about a society collectively, through governance, deciding how a nation's culture should be shaped, what an appropriate way of life is. It's how most societies on this planet operate.
I would argue that the US (and perhaps some other English-speaking countries) need more cultural diversity imported from other parts of the world.
Many Americans are unaware because they have not traveled outside of the US nor have they studied other languages, cultures, music, etc.
The Internet and the growth of global media has helped, but it's not the same as going to another place and meeting the people there.
Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants have shaped a lot of our urban culture. Before Irish and German immigration exploded, the US was a whisky country, then it switched to beer. Germans introduced social institutions like kindergarten and fraternal societies that included the working classes (which eventually evolved into things like the American Legion) and of course workers’ unions. The three cultures greatly changed the religious makeup of the US from one dominated by British Protestantism to a pluralistic mix of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. The US is the primary home of the world’s Jewish people (we have more Jewish people than Israel and the rest of the world combined, if you include mixed/secular Jews), and Jewish immigrants kickstarted the US’ involvement in industries like international banking and some kinds of manufacturing. Plus Jewish people have been hugely important in making US tertiary education and research some of the best in the world. Before these three groups immigrated, the US was agrarian and pretty homogenous, and these groups pushed the US towards cultural pluralism and assimilation.
In the modern day, Asian and Hispanic immigration are mixing things up too. I don’t have statistics but anecdotally I think Asian women are much more likely than other women to pursue careers in STEM, which has done a lot to make formerly male dominated jobs more gender inclusive. Spanish is basically a de facto co-official language in many areas. Americans outside these cultures are beginning to adopt multigenerational living (also because of cost of living) which is likely influenced by both of these. In almost all Asian countries, savings habits are very different than the default in the US, and I think you can see the effects of this in US areas with high numbers of Asian immigrants in things like property prices or a focus on value (like stores with lower margins and less marketing).
Basically none of these groups have been large enough to subsume American culture, but they’ve all contributed pieces on top of the base of Anglo Protestantism and culturally/actually genocided West Africans. And the sheer number of disparate immigrant groups have made the US the pluralistic society it is today, which is likely a big factor into why American culture easily exports to the rest of the world.
It’s a high bar to put capitalism (plus an obsolete concept and handwavy other things) as what immigrants need to overturn to have been considered influential to US culture, since in a lot of cases that is precisely what brings them to the country to begin with, and is like the main thing the US is known for.
Which of the 35 American countries are you referring to? ;)
Cultural exports and cultural homogenisation isn't imperialism. There is nothing in common between this, and when a country actually colonised another country and forced it to adopt its language (or indirectly forced it via neocolonial measures). One is voluntary adoption, the other is colonisation. So stop using concept creep in order to push a rhetorical point.
What we're seeing is largely the natural outcome of having a superpower economy, having communications technology, flight technology, free trade, etc. All this openness and integration coalesce to cause smaller countries to want to voluntarily adopt the status symbols, norms and entertainment of bigger countries that are culturally adjacent to them already.
Your argument structure is basically "this thing is really bad because I'm going to label it as really bad via concept creep, therefore it's good when far-right authoritarian measure X is implemented, even though X won't work at stopping really bad thing and much more extreme measures will be needed".
> I'm not saying it's bad or good.
Yeah you are?
Edit #1 with examples:
mescita = cafè/bar
acquavite = brandy/whisky.
tramezzino = sandwich
bevanda arlecchina = cocktail
torpedone = bus
Pellicola = film
And a bunch football terms
I personally like instead of “gangster” you say “malfattore”, which just sounds very funny.
Anyways here’s a link for those who are interested: https://www.archeome.it/approfondimento-le-parole-proibite-d...
Edit #2 they also changed famous peoples names
For example Louis Armstrong = “Luigi Braccioforte”
> existing bid by the government to protect the country’s
> cuisine.
> It has introduced legislation to ban so-called synthetic
> or cell-based cuisine due to the lack of scientific > studies on the effects of synthetic food, as well as “to
> safeguard our nation’s heritage and our agriculture based
> on the Mediterranean diet,” Meloni’s Health Minister
> Orazio Schillaci said in a press conference.
I hope they plan to do something about the "tomatomania" that has gripped Italian cuisine in recent centuries. It must have been crushing for their cuisine be corrupted by an invasive new-world fruit.
One example: "smart-working". At the beginning of the pandemic, when we all started to "work remotely" or "work from home", Italians decided to call it "Smart Working". The first time I heard this term from a relative I was very confused, I thought it was just young people trying to "be fancy" as usual, with their fancy english words, but no, it actually had become the official way to refer to "working from home"... people had it in their contracts.
IMO this usage of the English language doesn't benefit anybody. Italians are not getting any better at English in general, language purists keep getting angrier and it's just adding a lot of confusion.
One of English's greatest strengths as a language is its willingness to borrow wholesale from other languages when it comes up short. It would be pretty ironic for English to take issue with the way in which other languages adapt and use its words.
In theory “smart working” doesn’t mean just working remotely, but it implies flexible working patterns as well. Also, it has been used in British English (even though it didn’t become very popular): https://civilservice.blog.gov.uk/2016/01/21/smart-working-th...
Aside from that last one, people don’t generally seem to care
https://intimesgoneby.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/on-this-day-f...
Very roughly speaking, similar rules apply to all companies operating in Quebec with 25 or more employees, not just public officials.
For those who have not seen it:
I don't think Italian is in any danger of replacing it's vocabulary with English though - most speakers can't pronounce very common english sounds, like "h" in "hit".
I'm going to sweat next time I go to Italy. I suppose that asking pineapple on a pizza will be the equivalent of a lifetime sentence.
> requires anyone who holds an office in public administration to have “written and oral knowledge and mastery of the Italian language.” This might be useful, but it will be applied badly (as they do) so you get people that don't intermingle English words but the speak only in the local dialect or with an accent so thick that they might as well be speaking another language.
> It also prohibits use of English in official documentation, including “acronyms and names” of job roles in companies operating in the country.
I don't have great feeling about this as we have words that are correctly taken from another language because they did not had a counter part (mouse for example) so this will breed horrible new Italian versions of the English words: we will have to work with a "computatore" (remember nobody will remember that "calcolatore" already exists) and a "topo".
> Under the proposed law, the Culture Ministry would establish a committee whose remit would include “correct use of the Italian language and its pronunciation” in schools, media, commerce and advertising. The sentiment is good, the Italian language is a beautiful language, we need to learn to speak it correctly and help it evolve naturally, but I feel the approach is wrong and reminds me of a similar thing that the goverment did during the fascist regime where people where forced to even change their name because it sounded too foreign...
Jokes aside, I understand the fear of your own language erroding in front of you. I see how this plays into the sentiment of "these goddamn young people, polluting the language of my youth with words I don't understand!"
Yet, after calming down my own emotions, I realise that I cherish the Polish and German words in my own accent of Czech. I value immensely the work of Czech intellectuals fighting for my language against German "overlords" in the 19th century. However, I wouldn't want to give up the trace influence of German on own language. I hope future Italians feel the same way.
I think about this general problematic often. My girlfriend and I are both Czech. Yet, considerable chunk of our conversation happens in English. We both intellectually grew and continue to grow with English, making it typically a more effective modus of discussion. But Czech has its unassailable place in our relationship. The fact that we use both languages and associated idioms, cultural baggage, ..., makes for a richer life.
Good luck to other non native speakers who have to ponder and navigate the same concerns about their identity.
How is it that I, an "Italian as a Third language" speaker, who only lived there for four years can immediately come up with the suitable, precise, and everyday Italian equivalent of an English word?
These folks are showing off that they speak [1] English to lord it over regular folk.
[1] typically very poorly. Italians are some of the worst English speakers in Europe.
> While the legislation encompasses all foreign languages, it is particularly geared at “Anglomania” or use of English words, which the draft states “demeans and mortifies” the Italian language, adding that it is even worse because the UK is no longer part of the EU.
This is comically disrespectful towards Ireland.
English wasn't dominant until late XIXth century.
As few of them have experience as leaders, all they can do is mimic fascism. I believe that many of these initiatives are personal, but no one is stopping them as these behaviors are praised in their environment. In the meantime they will lose money from the recovery and resiliency plan from Europe because of their incompetency, and they will fail to promote an European plan for immigration. They’ll probably even get more votes because of this as they master the art of choosing an enemy (Europe, immigrants) and ride people’s anger.
https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/man-spreche-deutsch-der-ka...
some good ones:
"Viertopfknallzertreibling" - 4-cylinder motor "Angströhre" - top hat
Goodness, have mercy. I do not understand the point of clinging to a language as if it were an essential part of life. Although Sanskrit is considered a god-given language by Hindus, it is barely used today. Similarly, many other languages are in decline. If even a god-given language cannot prevent its own disappearance, why waste time on such nonsense?
If a language, in whatever form it may take, can communicate your thoughts and ideas to the listener, that should be sufficient.
It is often said that history is taught in schools to help people avoid repeating past mistakes. However, while people may learn to avoid certain mistakes, they often do not learn about the natural decay of things.
For nationalists, English is one of those pests that just grows out of control. And the more they try to destroy it the more the young people flock to it.
It's a pointless exercise to try to preserve the status-quo, and it could be counter productive and isolationist. The language will change anyway.
Also, when do you freeze the language? Which words are you nostalgic about? The ones that were in common use when the legislators were young? Their grandparents? Current usage?
'This would mean that saying “bru-shetta” instead of “bru-sketta” could be a punishable offense.'
What is CNN's or the author's incentive to deliberately insert mud-slinging into an article about a country's politicians drafting laws?
Man, after the ChatGPT ban, looks like they're firing on all bad cylinders now!
https://www.amazon.es/Italiano-urgente-anglicismi-tradotti-i...
Urgent Italian: 500 English loanwords translated into Italian under an Spanish model.
I really hope that law won't pass the parliament scrutiny!
Not making a qualitative statement about whether that's a morally or economically right or wrong thing to do.
Ireland & Malta are so tired of being forgotten.
(Yes these countries have other languages, so does the UK.)
Good.
Europe is beautiful and its diversity in such a small area is beautiful. Be a bit chauvinist I say and conserve the things that define you. Don’t be tricked into becoming globalist, homogenized, generic culture.
Embrace beauty and your cultural aesthetic.
But japan is a good example- maybe that's what you're driving at - because the language is full of english loan words. That's a big part of what the katakana characters are for - fitting predominantly English words into the japanese syllables.
トイレ
ミーティング
ダンス
パーティ
フライドポテト
Etc. As you say, it doesn't impact the culture.
At the point where the game was supposed to handle CONTINUE, the comment was CONTINEKU. Another one was METARU GERU SORIDU (or GIRU, don't remember). and more than that... all in all though even with word-by-word translation I was able to get through (we were only 3 "interns" working on the project + our boss (lead)).
Also learned how well "C" can be written :)
When your country is on HN for all the wrong reasons (facepalm)
Just a pr stunt.
However, Churchill did not have to see how the English interpreted soccer matches in the 1970s and 1980s. Hooligans, for those too young, interpreted football games as wars. But not in the sense of passion for the sport, as they were killing fans of other teams in ways similar to wars.
Fortunately, things change over time.
It is also interesting how some ethnic groups or nations can be the object of ridicule without anyone protesting (all of Southern Europe, for example), while for other ethnic groups or nations there would be protests all over the world at the slightest hint of an attempt to ridicule them.
[0] https://richardlangworth.com/quotes-churchill-never-said-2
I, who have lived in the United States for decades, cringe when English words are used instead of those of my native language to give a sense of respectability to those words.
A global culture and a world homogenized in ways of living is a much less interesting world.
Maybe you missed the world "could" in this phrase. Actually, with a bit a critical thinking, you would realize this is a complete invention by the CNN author...
What is a "productive" use of the votes of the people is up for debate. I am not ashamed to say that I am all for strong regulations that preserve the use and dignity of local customs and traditions (when those customs and traditions don't affect the life and freedom of others, cruelty etc.).
What would people think if there was an american movement to stop using foreign loan words in English because they're diluting our culture?
I live in Quebec, Canada, where there is extreme policing of the French language, including various unconstitutional legislation to "preserve" French (the Canadian constitution has an override clause). It's a purely populist measure that does nothing for culture. I find it ironic but typical how much Quebec focuses on superficial cultural aspects (language) while hardly engaging at all with real questions of celebrating heritage - and other than the language, the culture is way closer to english canada than anything European.
Anyway, these language things are shallow populist measures to whip up a base, they're not about serious stewardship of cultural identity.
This is a bit provocative, but while we are there, we could also tear down the Colosseum, the Forum too since it is all rubbish, and build instead offices, or residential communities because who cares about those old buildings and "nationalists" and "traditionalists" or "whatever you want to call it".
There is often this idea that if you do one thing, you cannot do another, like there is some trade-offs between the use of the local language on official documents and the management of museums. But most of the time, there are no trade-offs, and the two actions are independent.
>> "What would people think if there was an american movement to stop using foreign loan words in English because they're diluting our culture?"
I am generally in favor. I mean, better to hear "ham" than "proskiuto" anyway.
Ham and prosciutto are very different foods.
If words come from another language and mean different things, let those words exist as they are. If a new native word is created from the foreign word, that is okay. That is how languages grow and evolve.
The law in question just says official documents and communications must be in Italian which makes perfect sense in Italy.
Other distinct cultures in Canada would be Newfoundland a separate nation for years. Plus all the First Nations across Canada and Inuit in the northern territories and Labrador goes without saying.
You could even add the 500,000 Ukrainians on the prairies a culture going back probably 150 years.
Chinese culture too first starting in the province of BC since probably 1800 older than my own Irish culture the majority who only came here in the mid 1800s to 1870s.
Quebec is one of the oldest cultures in the former British NA colonies. Say whatever you want about the Quebecois, they know how ti preserve their culture.
> Some data suggest there are perhaps 120,000 French speakers in the state, down from about 1 million just 60 years ago. Of those, perhaps 20,000 speak Cajun French, others traditional French.
Sounds like the culture is thriving.
The difference is that English is THE dominant global language, pushed by two global empires (first the British empire and now the American empire). It does not need protection, as it essentially like an invasive species at this point. It’s reasonable for counties to want to protect their native language(s). We’re already rapidly trending towards a global, American-flavored monoculture. Why make it worse?
I don't disagree that a homogeneous world is less interesting, but in a world where you can travel between every major city in less than 24 hours, and communication is unified and instantaneous, this is the natural outcome, and government word policing is a losing fight.
History could have been taken a million different trajectories and we, looking back at its course, would always be tempted to say that what's going on today was, overall, inevitable. If not for a very harsh winter decades ago, maybe German would be the lingua franca of today's Europe: "it was inevitable", many would say, "it all started with Bismarck".
And I don't see why the fact that we use the word "espresso" (or expresso :)) in the US should mean that, in the US, Italian, Greek, or French words should be used in official documents as liberally as English words are in other non-English speaking countries' official documents. Why should it be acceptable to use "governance" instead of the Italian words "governo" or "amministrazione"? Why "fiscal compact" instead of "patto di bilancio" where both combinations of words express the same concept but one in a foreign language and the other in the official language of the country?
Using "espresso" and not another (equivalent) English word makes sense, because the Italian word also denotes the origin of the product. Using "hip hop" makes sense in non-English speaking countries, like "rock" for the music (but not the stone). "Schadenfreude", on the other hand, still sounds quite ridiculous when said by non-German speaking people, a bit like using "I went to the Ville Lumière" instead of "I went to Paris, oh those croissants, mon dieu!". That language should not be regulated by any government, the ridiculousness of its use should just be common sense, which is unfortunately as scarce today as it was in the past. But a woman can dream.
Which brings me to the another component: concepts expressed in English tend to appear, in non-English speaking countries, as more respectable, more serious. "That's how they do in the US, the wealthiest countries in the world!".
But this is just smoke thrown into people's eyes.
On this side of the Atlantic, we have a catastrophic opioid epidemic, crumbling infrastructure, inflation and recession, failing national and state-level institutions, mass shootings, growing income inequality, race- and class-warfare, and out-of-control policing. But what are ~50% of our politicians currently focusing on? What genitals people have and what bathroom they should be allowed to go in.
Anyway, the subject was Italy's policies. As for your guess, there is actually a group of people whose role, among others, is to assess the correct amount of effort applied to solving a problem: they're called Italian voters.