Driving on the right
Speaking English
The metric system
The 2024-06-09 date format
The Celsius scale
The 24-hour clockIf you mean teaching english as a second language, I can agree. If you mean switching over to it as the primary language I hard disagree.
It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language.
Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
Where did I say that everyone should speak only English? I do not care what language people speak.
> Are you trying to make a point or..?
Why are you being unkind? Or hostile, or whatever this is?
I was asking a question. I understand that people think they will lose something if they speak a different language. My native language is not the same as any of my ancestors from just a few generations ago, and I want to know what difference it makes?
However, that pales in comparison to what the transition means, not speaking the same language as your grandparents. You get a huge gulf of distance from relatives who, for the majority of humanity, are some of their most beloved and close relationships.
And it doesn't matter what your ancestors spoke, of course. But it does matter what those around you speak, now. Neither the person you originally responded to or me have mentioned ancestors.
If you have multiple, that's fine, but your disregarding the reality for 90%+ of people if you don't think most people have a language that is their "primary".
> It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it?
For most people language is tied to their culture and history. I'm just saying that we should not mandate that people use a certain language as their "primary". It would be nice if we had a global way to passably communicate though.
Very few in my generation speak three languages, even in my rather international field. Yet my older colleagues speak french, German and Spanish like it is nothing. And my international colleagues often speak 4+ languages.
I am fine with English being a de facto Lingua Franca, but I can't help feeling something has been lost.
I have always been curious about French internet culture as well. It seems like the French internet is a bubble I will never have access to.
I just think that people are more worried about the homogenization of language than they need to be. In fact, with how quickly culture is homogenizing around the world, I think that it is even possible that language differences outlast cultural differences over the medium term. Teenagers in a lot of the world I have been to in the past years dress/behave/express themselves ... not very differently.
Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
That seems like a very reductive take. Of course trends and culture is more global since we now communicate globally, but there are definitely regional cultures and values and those are expressed many different ways.
If I travel from my small european city to a city in the american midwest or a city in nigeria that are going to be massive differences regardless if the teens are doing the same tiktok dance or whatever metric of homogenization you pick. But in all of those places I almost everyone I will meet can speak english.
Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications.
Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
First languages do change with time so it does happen, and it can be induced to happen. My grandparents all spoke English as a first language, but if you go back a few more generations only one of my great (or possibly great great) grandparents ancestors would have done.
I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
This is really rude of them, and it's something management should work very hard to fix. Because as you say, in addition to being rude it's terribly inefficient for the company. If they employ people from all over the world, they should probably mandate English as the only allowed language in just about any situation.
If you have speakers of different languages in a conversation or group, it's just common sense to use a language everyone can understand and use.
Yes, it's easier for Danes to speak Danish when four out of five in the group understand it, but standing around there being the fifth person who can't understand a word of what's being said is not a nice experience.
I had that happen on occasion, every time it felt pretty exclusionary and somewhat rude, so I tried to always speak in english if that was the only common language among people tangentially involved in a conversation.
But even that is certainly not ideal, it has been pretty clear to me that, even though I have absolutely no problem speaking and understanding English, talking to a native speaker in my native language leads to much quicker and clearer communication.
Driving on the left
Speaking creole
The metric system
The 09/06/2024 date format
The Kelvin scale
The french decimal time system
The AuthaGraph projectionIt's economics: https://seekingalpha.com/article/564881-how-germany-benefite...
https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0...
More people in India drive on the left than North America and Europe put together.
Nassim Taleb wrote about this in https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict....
The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
Let's standardize that to the Newspeak version of English for clarity and to make hackers happy.
No daylight savings time
Seriously, I think the planet has bigger problems than discussing about DST.
On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
In terms of working or traveling between time zones, it seem like it would be much harder to remember the fact that, for instance, people in New York stop work when the clock says 17:00 and people in LA work until 20:00, than to remember that they are three time zones apart.
It's like in the old days before railroads when every town had it's own time, but even worse.
Did it happen last month?
Did it happen last year?
I feel like that's the order I ask questions if wonder when something happened.
That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
Up until WWII, a huge part of the scientific discourse was held in German. The language's relevance had waned a bit by 1933, but it was still a widely spoken and understood language in Europe, much more so than today.
Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of press between countries should be eliminated (quite the contrary!), only that diversity of languages should be preserved. In my opinion, this does two things:
1. Allows more diverse ideas to come into being, as language directly affects on one's way of thinking.
2. Slows the spread of dangerous ideas, due to some of their appeal (or the charisma of their advocates) being lost in translation.
For argument 1, that is known as the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis, is mostly discredited, at least in its stronger versions. By and large, people speaking the same language have a huge variety of differences of ideas, but you can also find areas with remarkable cultural similarity between people speaking different languages.
For an example of why this is not true in practice, look at Canada. The French speaking parts of Canada have far more in common with the rest of Canada and with the USA then they do with France, and even more so compared to Guinea or French Guiana.
The reason why language diversity should be preserved instead is that it gives access to a trove of cultural history that would be lost and forgotten, at least outside of scholarly circles, if it people could no longer understand it. This is by far the most problematic for oral cultural history, but even for written culture it is highly relevant.
For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.
As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.
One of the more infamous notions of purely cognitive S-W that dorm peddle that is entirely discredited is the idea that people who speak gendered languages tend to associate "feminine qualities" with feminine nouns describing even inanimate objects, and "masculine qualities" with the reverse. This has been measured in various ways and is simply false.
I would bet that your example of "foreigner hatred" vs "xenophobia" would also turn out to be wrong if studied. The much, much more likely reason Japanese people don't consider themselves xenophobic is that people don't typically think of themselves as holding bad views. I would bet lots of English-speaking white nationalists also don't consider themselves xenophobic for the same reason.
Finally, I think your outlook on the level to which Hitler manipulated the German people is highly optimistic about human nature. I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII, they wanted to do most of that and all they needed was someone who would allow and organize them. And to be clear, I'm not only speaking of the German people here - atrocities against Jewish people and other minorities were committed in many European countries where people didn't speak an ounce of German, they just needed to be let loose. Including, shamefully, my own country (Romania), to be clear that I'm not just pointing fingers at others.
That language affects thinking isn't the extraordinary claim, its contrary is. It is hard to believe that your method and efficiency of solving a problem is invariant to the format in which you represent that problem, especially when that format can be so varied.
> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII
They needed a decade of sophisticated propaganda and indoctrination, and even a change in the language itself, with words like "Übermensch" and "Lebensraum" being added to the dictionary. It didn't happen overnight.
I also don't know where you're getting the claim from that the countries where the Holocaust took place "didn't speak an ounce of German", given that a large part of it took place on former Austria-Hungary territory where German was presumably the most prevalent second language. But even supposing they didn't, how would that disprove my point? I'm not saying language barriers make you immune to mind-viruses, I'm saying they can slow down their spread. The effects of this one were devastating, but they could have been much more devastating without any language barrier whatsoever. Because one country I can realistically believe not to have spoken an ounce of German is the UK. And they had no shortage of like-minded individuals either, but the local moustache man, Mosley, while said to be a good orator, was no Hitler. I think the public having the ability to understand what Hitler was saying would have been demoralizing at best and galvanizing at worst. It definitely wouldn't have helped Churchill's cabinet, which at one point already had half the mind to strike a deal with him.
I'm aware that this is just a form of security through obscurity, but practice shows that security through obscurity often works. Might not be the strongest argument for preserving languages, but in my mind, a language monoculture is just like any other monoculture, with all its drawbacks.
However, in my opinion, the truth is that Hitler's ideas and the way they fit German culture at the time were far more powerful than his speech-giving skills. His speeches and style did not resonate with American or British or French audiences (to the extent that they didn't - he was in fact a pretty popular politician all over Europe before he began attacking them) not because they didn't understand German, but because they weren't Germans.
His speeches preyed on German bitterness after losing World War I, they preyed on German poverty because of the reparations, they preyed on German conceptions of national pride, and, of course, they preyed on German antisemitism and xenophobia more generally.
Many of those elements were not present in, say, France (who had defeated Germany in the recent war), so even if the French had spoken German, they certainly wouldn't have been swayed with arguments about how they had humiliated Germany, or about how Germany needs more "living space". The Spanish or the Polish would not have been swayed by Hitler's notion that blond blue-eyed Germans are the chosen people who rightfully rule the world. And the Japanese would have barely even understood what he was talking about, even if they had all been native German speakers.
And conversely, Hitler had no shortage of allies before and during WWII, not because Mussolini or Hirohito or Stalin were such fine speakers of German that they were mesmerized by his carefully crafted speeches, but because they liked his actual ideas and plans for conquest, regardless of language.
No thanks
> 2024-06-09 date format
That doesnt infer what you want. Are you saying you want YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM
Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
MM-DD-YYYY?
So it would stand to reason that an American commenter may be meaning
YYYY-DD-MM
And guessing based on todays date, tell that to commenters who check this post in 6 months
1970_01_01
2024_06_09
2024_12_31
16383_12_31
5 bits for DD [0, 31] + 4 bits for MM [0, 15] + 14 or more bits for year [0, 16_383] = 23 bits.
Some people just want to watch the world burn