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Comment by psychoslave | Hacker News Reader

Having French as mother tongue, I always find fascinating when the French and German official bodies go postal about such a topic. It’s like looking some parents complaining of the retro-influence of some common bastard children. :P

Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_endangered_languages

There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.

To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.

Fun fact, Germany has a city where street names and many other things are translated in Esperanto: https://uea.facila.org/artikoloj/movado/la-esperanto-urbo-r3...

View on HN

Esperanto is still frustratingly complex with regard to phonemes for an international language. I think most speakers of many European languages don't realize just how complex their phonologies are on average. Slavic languages probably take the cake there with stuff like 5-consonant clusters that can even include sequences of plosives and affricates, but then you also have Germanic languages (and French!) with their insanely large vowel inventories. Compared to that, Esperanto is relatively simple, but when you look outside of Europe, having 3-consonant clusters or phonemic contrast between plosives and affricates at the same place of articulation (e.g. "t" vs "t͡s") is very unhelpful.

That said, it's still a massive improvement on English phonologically. Even if you only consider the simpler American varieties, the three-way æ/ɐ/ɑ distinction alone (as in bat vs but vs bar) is a huge WTF for anyone coming from a typical 5-vowel system. And then you have consonants like θ and ð that don't have clear 1:1 counterparts in most other languages, often not even as allophones of something else that you could point at.

Still, if you want to see what a more modern take on the concept might look like, I believe Globasa (https://www.globasa.net/eng) is the most active project along those lines. Of course, realistically, the likelihood of it actually being adopted as the universal language is effectively nil, but then that's also the case for Esperanto.

The problem of consonant clusters is a bit overstated IMO. I once saw some English speaker complaining about how difficult it is to pronounce Russian, like take a phrase "на встрече" — there are 4 consonants at the start of that second word, wtf! — even though that cluster is exactly the same as the one in the English phrase "of strength"; this cluster even undergoes essentially the same simplification/reduction in both languages.

But I agree that overly large phonemic inventory is a problem. On the other hand, it seems that languages either have a complex consonant system but a simple vowel system; or a simple consonant system but a complex vowel system; I haven't yet seen a language where both systems are simple (Japanese vowels have tonality, so it's not a simple system IMHO), probably because the words in such a language would have to be quite long.

Learned phonotactics matters, though, and many languages distinguish between what's allowed on word or morpheme boundaries vs what's allowed within a single syllable - so even if phonemically it's the same cluster, it can still be difficult to learn to pronounce it correctly in the second case.

There are quite a few languages where both vowel and consonant systems are simple - just look at Polynesian languages such as Māori. The latter's vowel system is 5-vowel, and "long vowels" are phonemically vowel sequences that span moras. But, yes, it does mean that you end up with long words such as "whakararurarutia". That said, it's a rather extreme case, and one can still construct fairly simple but rich consonant systems in practice, because it's basically combinatorics - adding just one more bit of information doubles the domain space! So e.g. if you start with a strict CV consonant system and allow C(l/r)V, that's almost 4x as many contrasting syllables. Make it C(l/r/w/y)V(C) like in Globasa, and even with considerable restrictions on clustering stops etc this is enough for most words to be 3 syllables or less, and for most function words to be 1 syllable.

Yes sure, there are a lot of things were Esperanto is not an ideal of linguistic easy-to-learn and easy-to-use fully-neutral perfection communication mean.

Now, the real success of Esperanto is that it does have an over 1 century international active community that does produce it’s own cultural artifacts, using Esperanto as a communication mean. All that without a bound army to back it at any point, that’s probably an unique feat in human history. Also to make it clear, it was not meant to be a universal language, but an international one.

Personally, I love that projects like Globasa comes to live. On a pragmatic level, large scale adoption is unlikely, but that is the case of any human endeavor. Let’s make sure that grandiloquence result likeliness never inhibit beautiful dreams being pursued.

Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it. For Quebec this has always been a threat.

I live in Germany now. There are 10-15 times more German speakers in the DACH area than there are French speakers in Quebec. Even then, it’s weird that companies no longer bother translating their ads and slogans for the German-speaking market. It’s somewhat sad that every culture is slowly becoming a vaguely American, California-based culture.

Language and culture are intertwined. I feel that with the globalisation of both, something of value is lost. It’s only right to feel concerned about it.

>> Coming from Quebec, I understand why people are worried about their language being strangled out and their culture dying with it.

One of the most fascinating things I learned about language in college when I was working towards my degree in Anthropology, a graduate student who was my class did their Master's on the linguistic differences between European French and the French Canadian (specifically the Quebec version) versions of the language. She did extensive research on the origins of the language and why they diverged.

Absolutely fascinating work.

On a lighter note, I happened to play hockey with many, many Canadian players. My best friend was from Ottawa and everybody asked him if he spoke French and said he did and said, "Its like here, you feel like you're speaking French with a Kentucky accent." which always got a good laugh from our teammates.

ok, great teaser, were is the mémoire? :)

Pt'être que demain ca ira mieux :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TncdhLGjFTE

The story I heard about how Rumantsch (~40k L1) became the 4th language of switzerland is that one day toward the middle of last century, after Mussolini said that rumantsch speakers were just a bunch of farmers who didn't know how to speak proper italian, the swiss people essentially said « Esti d'épais à marde ! » by voting to make it official.

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjoCmyhTSBU

Yes but actually the use is still going down, because so many people from those regions are moving to Zürich and larger cities. There are more speakers in Zürich now.

I know some people that talk to there parents in Rumantsch that but most likely wont teach it to their children.

It will survive but its not really thriving either. Other languages is a great way to push against an 'enemy' language, like the revival of Gaulish in Ireland.

But we will get pretty good AI of it since there is so much official documentation in it.

Quebec French has almost 8m speakers, including L1 use in urban agglos, so (pace the simpatics giuvens of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n9OPhX6GYw ) it's in a much better position.

(after all, even Gian and Giachen speak german)

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxMuCyzXgC4

I wonder if the spread of English is because it's like a barycenter pulled by multiple languages, so not too far afield if coming from any of those languages.

I think it has a lot more to do with the global British Empire pre-WWI followed by American dominance post WWII. Perhaps there's an argument that the success of both had at least a small contribution from the characteristics of the language.

My thoughts are that any language that can embed other languages in it has the capacity to be a global lingua franca. English was firstest with the mostest.

seems plausible.

English being an amalgamated language and thus uniquely flexible is part of its power. We have options in style choices many languages formally don’t permit, e.g. when to italicise or, if quoting, whether to “exclude punctuation”, or “include it.” (As well as comma use.)

As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)

Is English just badly pronounced French?[1] I wish English would’ve adopted conjugation and other patterns the Romance languages use. I doubt it would’ve fit correctly. But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.

[1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...

English is a Germanic language with a Latin alphabet, as spoken by Celts, after being ruled by people from France who were originally from Norway (or maybe Denmark)

> Is English just badly pronounced French?

No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.

Boy have they atrophied. Even as a German speaker in whose first language these words have current equivalents I'm not 100% certain when to use thou, thee, thy, thine etc. that still were part of the language at Shakespeare's time and have since been simplified into you/your/yours etc. But it's true, English takes this stuff in stride, with modernisms e.g. "sick" meaning something good gradually being incorporated into the mainstream, rather than fought against by language purists.

thou/you is formal and informal and the distinction largely depending on your relationship with the person and respective social ranks. There were times when one person (social superior) would use thou (informal) while the other (social inferior) was expected to use you (formal). So yeah, no hard and fast grammar rule on when to do it but would depend entirely on the culture and the speaker and listeners social position inside of it.

No, initially thou was simply the singular, with you as the plural second person pronoun. You'd address one person as thou, a group of people as you (like some speakers use you vs y'all today). Thou, my friend vs You, my friends.

Then, under French influence probably, the plural, you, started being used as a polite form as well (in French, like most romance languages, formal/polite language uses the plural form of pronouns and verbs when addressing a single person). Thou, my friend VS You, sir; similar to "toi, mon ami" vs "vous, monsieur".

Then, this polite form using singular you became so widely used that thou was almost entirely dropped, especially since English also had little distinction between singular and plural in verbs in general. You, my friend, you, my friends.

Then, as thou became more foreign to regular speakers, it briefly started being used as a polite form, essentially reversing the original meanings. You, my friend VS Thou, sir.

This didn't last very long, so finally we ended up with the current state, where there is no polite form and you is the only second person pronoun. Except of course some speakers have started using y'all for a plural form, but that doesn't seem to be gaining any popularity outside a few areas.

There are purists that complain. Importantly, we don’t let them edit the dictionaries.

English is a barbarian language with French nouns, as a result of the Norman conquest of England.

Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).

Or stuff like "cow" (from Old English) vs "beef" (from Old French). Which kinda makes sense when you consider who grew meet vs who ate it.

It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.

Cutlery (fr), silverware (de)

I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.

All non-Greek languages are barbarian, since apparently it sounds like we are saying barbarbar to the ancient Greeks.

Imagine how those Greeks resented scribes trying to separate words and phrases with spaces on precious vellum!

Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts with vowels... You're just supposed to know them!

Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills dripping until someone put a positive spin on it.

What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English

> Is English just badly pronounced French?

Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup."

> But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.

They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin

0. The book you linked to is a joke.

1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of political agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people. It’s just a cultural element formed over hundreds of years of government policy.

2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many words in English derived from French. But today they’re English words, with a French history. There are many more words that are not French in origin, so it’s quite disingenuous to call English an “incorrect” or “mispronounced” French. Why is it not an “evolved” or “improved” French? (See point 1).

3. English is conjugated, it’s just different than French. “I am, you are, he is”. “I look, you look, he looks”. Or more obviously “I jump, I jumped, I am jumping”. Most of the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.

My whole comment was a joke. Whoosh. Lots of replies, I should’ve put /s.

While English certainly has thousands of words that came from French, it is far from being a "badly pronounced" version of French.

It's not a conjugation issue. "Champagne" is letter-for-letter identical in both languages, but pronounced differently for phonotactic reasons

It's a typical French loanword in German too: "Champagner" isn't pronounced with standard German prounciation rules. Even localized ones, e.g. in my childhood a sidewalk was called a "Trottoir" in the French pronunciation. For some reason nobody gets exited about French loanwords.

Just this morning I came across a guy called Mr Techpedia on YouTube and I was really surprised because I heard a lot of English phrases but also phrases that are in a different language or a dialect of English I’m not familiar with. It was actually really cool. It also reminds me of a time when I heard someone codeswitch from US Midwestern English to Malaysian English - there was a clear difference in word choice and pronunciation. Global/Internet English as a concept is really cool as well. I often (accidentally) adopt grammatical constructions from Global English that I believe come from that particular speaker’s native tongue.

Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I’m glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.

I am Spanish native, but the way I structure my sentence seems a google translation from chinese. People around me often don't understand the meaning, so I have to speak slower to structure my sentence in a more proper Spanish way.

I suppose languages evolve around the way their corresponding population brains work. People can still learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but there is a language way that is the best fit to some people which is related to biology.

There is no evidence for "biological inclination" towards certain languages. Take a Spanish kid and raise them on Chinese, and they'll speak it natively just fine, and vice versa.

However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories.

There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.

But this is not even about language, it's about spelling. For some reason, people forget that these are entirely different things. We are currently communicating in a language where there's often times no relation between the written and spoken word at all.

A more accurate statement is that English is a language where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than phonetics.

There's always a relation between a spoken word and its written representation, they're the same thing in different mediums.

That's not uncommon in general, but English is a particularly bad instance of that, partly because it has so many prominent source languages with widely different spellings, and partly because of the lack of any significant spelling reforms for a very long time.

There was an interesting study (https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/) where they evaluated phonemicity of various language orthographies by training a neural net and then seeing how accurately it could predict things. Of two dozen languages they had there, the only ones that scored worse for writing are French and Chinese, but most notably, English is the only one that scored below 50% accuracy for reading, and with a significant gap at that. This is very unfortunate for an international language, since reading is kind of the most basic practical thing you can usually do with a second language.

If we're going for accuracy, your statement would have to explain how it goes for other situations, for instance:

- words spoken by toddlers: what's the spelling of a word that doesn't exist outside of a kid's brain ? In particular parents can accept it as a word without ever setting an associated writing.

- written words that don't have a pronounciation: typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it.

That's without going into words with phonems unrelated to their written form (XIV as fourteen for instance) and I assume there will be words that exchange spelling and pronounciation with others.

Languages are plenty weird, we should embrace their weirdity IMHO.

> typically Latin is dead and how any of it is pronounced is up to how we feel about it.

How words were pronounced can be deduced from poetry.

That gives an hint on which words had similar endings, but there's still a chance we're wrong about how these endings sound in the first place.

> but there's still a chance we're wrong

Of course. But it's not like we know nothing about it.

> A more accurate statement is that English is a language where spelling often reflects history and etymology, rather than phonetics.

I hate that the past tense of "stay" is "stayed", but "say" is "said" and "pay" is "paid", which is often misspelled as "payed", which IS a word, but is unrelated to transferring money from one person to another.

Then you got all the ways "-ough" is pronounced. Thorough, enough, cough, through, thought, dough, drought..."-ough" is now looking like a completely nonsense letter sequence.

I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;)

(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...)

There are specific subsets of English that are used in certain domains that have standards bodies behind them, like Simplified Technical English for aviation. It even has a working group! [0]

VOA also have a Learning English spec for broadcast english [1] but that seems to be a lot looser of a spec.

So it's definitely not impossible. The funny thing, is I remember being told in grade school that in English Canada, I was to write numbers with a space as the thousands separator. `$10 000.00`, instead of `$10,000.00`. This is because french Canada uses a comma as a decimal point, `10 000.00 $`, so a space is non ambiguous. I have rarely ever seen the English space format in use here. I don't think English speakers would respect any authority if it wasn't as domain-scoped as Aviation or Learning english.

[0] https://www.asd-ste100.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_English_(version_of_E...

FWIW while comma vs period for decimal fractions is a point of significant variability globally, the use of comma to group digits is fairly uncommon, whereas period is universally understood as a decimal separator even in countries where comma is normally used for that purpose (thanks to calculators and computers). And, on the other hand, space-separated groups are self-explanatory for those used to comma for that purpose. So using spaces for grouping + period for fractions is indeed the way to go to maximum readability worldwide.

The use of a space as a thousands separator has been around since the 1940s as recommended by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures and it was what we used when I was a kid at school in the UK. They specified it should be a thin (half) space.

https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/28433818/working-docume...

No I know, it's also part of the French standard. Just more so commenting on how uncommon it is from Canadian English speakers despite it being the Canadian English "standard" recommend by a Canadian entity similar to the French or German standards bodies.

It's interesting now to see more and more programming languages using an underscore as the thousands separator to allow for easier reading without trying to get into a mess of commas or full-stops as separators.

> So it's definitely not impossible.

Well, it's definitely not impossible to publish a document declaring itself the standard form of english.

But I'm pretty sure it would be impossible to get english speakers to comply - or even to get any countries to make the standard legally binding.

Imagine either England or the USA accepting to vary their language towards a common standard. I expect strong opposition would stem from pride.

Judging from how well adopting SI went (is going in the UK?) sadly it seems impossible :(

The beauty of English is that it is controlled by the speakers and not by some pompous authority. It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.

>It's even flexible enough to allow for regional differences, which allows my fellow Americans and I to spell words correctly like color and theater.

As I recall, the American spelling of color and other words like that was actually dictated by a "pompous authority", namely Noah Webster, who wrote the dictionary bearing his name. He wanted to simplify some spellings he saw as overly complicated. I happen to agree with him, but this wasn't because of regular, everyday people in different regions.

For what it's worth, French is also controlled by speakers. The pompous authority is just lagging behind.

There is not authority for french, it's a myth.

The Académie has no authority whatsoever, it's little more than a club for writers. The Education Ministry has authority for school programs and what is accepted in French language classes, but only in France. It only ever allows new uses, never forbids previously allowed things.

The OQLF (and French language Ministry) has a broader authority within Québec, but only for Québec.

The Ministry of Culture has some authority within the Brussels-Wallonia federation but it's quite limited.

No idea what it's like in Switzerland.

But there is no global authority for the French language (unlike German or Dutch for example). The language evolves by consensus.

Yes... let's let all the users controll the language... and some may decide: https://www.davidpbrown.co.uk/jokes/european-commission.html ;)

You do realize that what people actually speak (in France) differs quite a bit from the Académie Française. email vs. courriel for example is a good one, but you'll stand out in most places if you don't know l'argot (slang).

I don't think an English standardization would change much in how people actually speak.

Well, loanwords is slightly different that completely inconsistent spelling - wouldn't you say?

Imagine some would stick with original "bonjour" (Qubec), other more progressive would simplify to "bojur" and whatnote.

You have the same with "colour" and "color". Or "night" and "nite". From my observatio where you have some language authority there is at least consisten spelling (and english spelling is all over the place)

And that's why we have language locale codes:

en_US vs. en_GB

fr_CA vs fr_FR

Yes, but imagine not having to deal with those ;)

Besides, in case of Spanish the spelling is more uniform. Aforementioned locales are mostly for GUIs and regional wording differences. And the thread started with "unifying english spelling" which is just a mess…

I jokingly suggest that, by definition, the only person who uses English properly and speaks without an accent is the King.

Hence the "Royal Academy of English" -> RAE, as in Real Academia Española.

If it's English because the King speaks it, how come the most famous document written in (modern) English tells the King to take a hike?

But the King is basically German. ~

Exeunt, bearing off the dead bodies; after which a peal of ordnance is shot off.

> I wouldn't mind for English to have "standardisation body" akin to French or German one (or RAE for Spanish) that could maybe get rid of backward, dumb spelling ;)

That's even less likely now than in the past, with the elite cultural trends in English-speaking countries favoring the adoption of foreign spellings and pronunciation. That just piles on the complexity to unmanageable levels.

IMHO, for instance, there's no excuse for the requirement that English newspaper readers know Pinyin [1], rather than some more English-friendly romanization system, to be able to read news about China, when Chinese speakers themselves use a completely different, non-roman writing system. What's next, just printing the Chinese characters without romanization? Pinyin has its uses, but writing things out for foreigners is not something it does well.

[1] which gives many letters very unexpected values (e.g. c = ts) and many vowels are impossible for an English-speaker to guess correctly.

"c" for "ts" has a very long history in Latin script - pretty much all Slavic languages and many other Eastern European languages that use Latin use it in this manner, as does German in many cases. That's why it also has this meaning in Esperanto.

I do agree that the currently dominant English convention of adopting spelling from other languages (or their standard Romanization system) as is - or worse yet, dropping all the diacritics but keeping everything else as is - is misguided. But it doesn't help that English spelling can get very unwieldy when trying to spell something phonetically, especially across many dialects of English due to considerable variability in how things are pronounced. This has also caused problems - for an example of that, look at the still-common Korean Romanization of names such as "Park" which does not accurately represent the actual pronunciation if you pronounce it as an American would ("r" is silent - it reflects the non-rhotic British pronunciation, and was put there because the more straightforward "Pak" would tend to be pronounced incorrectly by a Brit).

There are basically political reasons for this. Wade-Giles is associated with Taiwan, and is in fact mostly used when referring to Taiwanese subjects, I've always seen Kaohsiung for the city, never Gāoxióng.

The Mainlanders would find it very insulting to not use Pinyin when referring to subjects in the PRC, so understandably, American journalism goes along with that.

For what it's worth I think both systems have different disadvantages, in that neither does a good job of reflecting the actual pronunciation of Guoyu. Excuse me, Putonghua. Doing so with the English character set isn't actually possible.

It's not the character set that's the problem so much so as the set of phonemes. English just doesn't have the ʂ/ɕ distinction, and no amount of creative spelling choices can fix that. Other things are much more straightforward, tones aside.

For what it's worth CJK countries tend to give less weight to how foreign names are pronounced.

For instance the current PRC secretary name is pronounced accordingly to the characters' reading in Taiwan and Japan, and won't have much in common. Same way Chinese people will read Japanese name as the characters sound to them, without referring to the actual Japanese reading, even if in Japan these names have a designated original reading.

Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script. Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?

> Pinyin is pretty good at rendering Manderin in a Latin script.

It's pretty good for Mandarin speakers. It's terrible for English speakers.

> Can you elaborate on what you mean by “English-friendly”?

English friendly is something that will produce reasonably-close approximate pronunciations by an English reader without any extra foreign-language training. Basically, something that prioritizes following existing English orthography (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language.

Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.

I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

>Wades-Giles is closer to English-friendly, but it has a lot of flaws. It has no notion of intonations.

How could it? English is not a tonal language at all, so how could you possibly represent tonality with Latin characters, in a way that English speakers with no extra training could read such text and pronounce the Chinese word in an acceptable way? I don't think it's possible. It's just like trying to use Japanese characters to represent English names: a LOT is lost in translation, because there's simply no way to represent all English sounds in Japanese, since Japanese has far fewer possible sounds than English.

>It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

But it's not, English is, like it or not. If you want to communicate with someone in any random country in the world, you have a very good chance of doing so if you speak English, regardless of your or the listener's native language. The same isn't true for Mandarin.

> I think there is also the issue of cultural dominance. "English-friendly" means the foreign language is morphed to better suit English speakers. It could go the other way if Mandarin is the dominant trade language.

It's not an issue of cultural dominance, as no one would be forcing the Chinese to change their names or their pronunciations. It's basically just keeping English from being even more unmanageable, in a way many other languages do, including Chinese.

If an English name or other word is used in Chinese (or in Japanese, or many other languages) it gets localized. For instance, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix2xYvMcW2A. The Chinese speakers are mostly talking about Trump, but the only name I could actually pick out was Obama's (probably because "Trump" is hard to pronounce in Chinese).

Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."

Also, the English use of Pinyin can have some unfortunate effects. I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" almost 100% of the time (there was a strong preference for first-name use in the office, so it rarely happened to his face).

> Apparently the Xinhua decided to render "Trump" as 特朗普/Te Lang Pu (https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2017/01/25/china-d...), instead of doing the American/English thing of "You don't know their language? Well f-you then. No help from us."

Consider a rather unusual (but real nevertheless) Polish surname: «Brzęczyszczykiewicz». Most native English speakers, who are not well known for their patience with long and unusually looking non-native surnames, will instantly give up and shorten it to a mere «B». The most daring and adventurous ones will persevere and will likely arrive at something akin to «Brenshistishkevich», which is neither correct nor easily pronounceable for an English speaker anyway. The few English speakers who are acquainted with Polish, would render and pronounce «Brzęczyszczykiewicz» as «Bzhenchishchikyevich» which is closer to truth, yet it will confuse everyone else who will stick with «Brenshistishkevich» anyway.

Or consider an Icelandic surname of «Þórðarson». We would have «Thordarson» (as a naïve take) or «Thortharson» (somewhat closer to the actual Icelandic version).

Bonus point: Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, a Welsh surname, with the «colloquial» vocalisation of «Lanfarpwilgwingle» vs «Hlan-fair-pool-gwin-gith» (a more truthful rendition).

In all cases, with Brenshistishkevich, Thordarson and Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, we have arrived at the English equivalent of Te Lang Pu (Trump). In fact, there is no need to look at more extreme cases, it will suffice to consider a simple Vietnamese name of «Huy», which most English speakers will pronounce as «Hughey» whereas it is actually «Hwee» – it is still the case of the English Te Lang Pu.

In the case of Mandarin Chinese, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that the Chinese writing script is logographic and can't encode single consonants (single sounds in general, although there are Chinese characters that encode vowelled words, usually exclamations). Secondly (or firstly, in fact), all Chinese languages have a strict rule of a phoneme having the CV(C) structure (Consonant-Vowel(maybe another Consonant)), which makes the CCVCC (i.e. Trump) compound impossible and is completely against the phonetic rules of the language. And many, very many in fact, Chinese speakers neither know pinyin nor speak English. The same is true for many other non-Chinese languages.

It gets a bit better, e.g., in Japanese that, other than the logographic script, has two syllabaries that make it possible to represent Trump as something probably more like Tu-ru-mpu.

> I used to work with a man who's last name was Cao whose name was mispronounced "Cow" […]

Since you also earlier called out «[…] (e.g. do not use "c" for "ts", use the closest approximate for sounds that do no exist in English) instead of maximal fidelity to the foreign language», spelling Cao as Tsao (which is what they do in Taiwan but not in the mainland) is not going help as nearly all English speakers will drop the «t» and pronounce it as «Sao». And, since «ts» is one sound and not two, «Sao» is also the English Te Lang Pu.

I’ve seen similar suggestions but one of the best things about English is that we don’t have that nonsense. It would just be a source of annoyance and consternation adding more noise to news and politics in the Anglosphere.

Dumb and inconsistent spelling is already a source of "annoyance" :P

Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.”

I honestly don’t care if someone uses “color” or “colour” or makes ghoti jokes at the English language’s expense.

> Yeah but we in the Anglosphere have this wonderful phrase for people that get too hung up on it: “get over it.”

Unfortunately for the rest of the world outside of your beloved "anglosphere" using wrong spelling results in said "anglosphereian" being utterly butthurt.

Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?

> your beloved

Don’t put words in my mouth.

> Maybe the whole world should adopt universal language with saner spelling and leave english to anglosphere?

The rest of the world could. They won’t. But they could. You could use this as part of your spelling reforms: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=81 :)

It won’t work. Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States. And this is when the metric system is vastly more straightforward, simply better, and universally adopted. The English language? No way any standardization would work. And that unlike the Imperial system the variations in English is probably a feature, not a bug.

>Just look at the mess of Imperial units in the United States.

The US doesn't use Imperial units; it uses "US Customary" units. They're not the same, though there is some overlap. Imperial units are used in the UK, which is why they're called "imperial" (from "empire"--the British Empire). Imperial inches, for instance, are the same as US inches (2.54cm), but UK/Imperial gallons are quite different from US gallons, which is why the miles-per-gallon ratings for cars are so different between the two countries.

And it is not just the US. In the UK from my limited experience visiting they use a mess of different units commonly. Certainly not all in on metric.

I think the article's wording

> guidelines issued by the body regulating the use of Standard High German orthography

gives a somewhat false impression regarding the influence and standing of this body. Orthography was traditionally what was written in the Duden dictionary/thesaurus. Only in 2004 or so there was a push for a moderate reform for German as taught in schools, and it was deemed necessary to have at least Austria and Switzerland join (hence the council isn't a natioval body), whereas neighbouring countries with German-speaking minorities such as Italy were not sitting at the table it seems.

One reason English is so popular (aside from pure economics) and that other countries quickly adopt English slang words is because we don't have such a thing.

Care to explain about "not having slang"?

From my observation adoption of english (and it's slang) is mostly due to "verbal colonialism" - pop culture mixed with "we work in english" spiced with "I'm cool so I'll drop this pointless slang from foreign language"...

But those standardisation bodies often get ignored by most of the speakers. Language is a living thing that evolves and changes in spite of the dictates of academies. Also, with global usage, any given body is not going to be able to do much, e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says or a Quebecois would probably laugh at what the French language academy dictates.

> e.g. a chilean spanish speaker won't care what the RAE says

Erm... curious that you brought that up as I lived in Chile for a couple of years and now in Spain. And while I agree that Chilean Spanish is wild it does follow RAE spelling guidelines, or at the very least I haven't seen any obvious deviations. Now there's a lot of modismos ("chilenismos", local words formed usually by borrowing from natives Mapuche in south or Quechua in the north) but they still tend to follow more-or-less spelling. Accent/pronounciation is yet another thing but that doesn't affect spelling all that much. And on top of that there is a lot of "mutilation" of words when using whatsapp (either being in a hurry or being from low social background) but even in even so slightly more formal setting people immediatelly fallback to official spelling.

(Spanish is more gracefull when it comes to spelling as "what you hear you write" and vice versa so maybe the problem is less pronounced)

Nah, such a body would surely be the beginning of the end. Anarchy in the UK, including its language!

France has the Académie Française. Well, no-one respects them. The first woman to enter it was Marguerite Yourcenar and she was strongly antifeminist; And they said to not use the Français.e.s spelling and rather keep the usual “Français(es)”, and suddenly all administrations started the dot-based version.

But which English? American and British English are substantially different. Spelling of many words, expressions, even the way quotation marks and periods are ordered.

I doubt either country will ever accept the other's version.

> There are also a measurable economical issues for non-English-native nations to have to use the de facto lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.

> To my knowledge, the only proposal that gained some modest but significant results on that side over the last century is Esperanto. You know, the language against which France has put its veto has it was proposed as language of communication in League of Nations (1920s) or UNESCO (1954) and still is unhelpful with its adoption in United Nations.

Esperanto is not a "global international neutral language" either. While artificially constructed, it's functionally a Romance language, deriving over 80% of its vocabulary as well as the majority of its grammatical structure from Latin and/or Romance languages. The majority of the remainder comes from other European languages, primarily Germanic languages.

Esperanto is indeed not culturally neutral (and was never supposed to be), but it's still vastly better in practice than other European languages precisely because of this overemphasis on Latin (and Greek) roots - because those are exactly the "fancy" words that tended to be borrowed most often historically even across language families.

Also, interestingly enough, Esperanto attracted more interest in some Asian countries - most notably, Japan - than in much of Europe.

I think the bigger problem with Esperanto is phonology. It's too heavy on affricates, including some relatively rare ones (e.g. phonemic "ts"), and the consonant clusters get pretty bad. For someone coming from a simple CV language, those are likely to be a bigger challenge than the word list.

When I lived in Bordeaux I remember seeing billboards basically advising young people to not use "txt speak" and instead write "real French" to preserve the language.

It seems to me that today's French is not exactly the French of 50 years ago. Orally it does not look so different but when the same people write, the difference is apparent.

All languages evolve through time, but I think that a major factor of evolution was the fact that it was accepted ~20 years ago that it's OK to write phonetically at school. And now we have school teachers that learned that way so it's definitely a standard feature of the current French.

For example the following hilarious reader comment in the economic news website "La Tribune":

"plutot que dire 18 milliares de deficte pour faire les gros titres il serais plus interessant de dire d'ou vient le soit disant deficite . La secu ne serait elle pas victime de paiement de prestations qui ne la concerne pas . qui s'en richie sur son dos ? N y aurit il pas des acteurs economiques qui ne participeraient pas a son financement et par contre lui demanderait des presttions ? c'est cela que lon veut savoir un peut comme les retriates ou le regime generale eponge les déficites qui ne le concerne pas par ce que letat ne finance pas les retaites de la fonction publique a son juste niveau."

> Now, there are languages for which Globish can be part of an existential threat, but German and French are nowhere close to this.

While it may be accidental, maybe stemming the tide against Franglais will have a large secondary benefit for the minority language speakers of France. If your average native Gallo(e.g.) speaker needs to learn French in order to watch the news, that's one thing. If they then need to learn a bunch of English in order to speak French, well there's even less of a chance that they'll be able to spend a lot of their life speaking Gallo.

IDK maybe it will make no difference for those languages; French will crowd them out regardless of how much English there is in French.

Why invent Esperanto if Dutch already exists and is the most reasonable European language to learn.

Finally a modest proposal to unite the European people.

Living in Quebec, I see the perspective. It’s not that there is a particular hatred of english; there is simply an explicit exclusion of anything non-French. From such a perspective, it doesn’t matter if the One World Global Language is English or Cantonese or Esperanto, it must be fought against to preserve French

> lingua-franca

Aside: I used to assume the term referred to how French was once "the language of diplomacy", but it really comes from "Frankish", at a time when "Franks" was a broad term for peoples of what is now western Europe.

I don’t know but a very large and vocal portion of Americans would also flip out if something as basic as a new way to indicate possession was to be added to the English language. “Bending a knee to the _____________’s”

fun fact its English that is the bastard here...same way Creole was formed as language...i.e. borrowed from elsewhere in this case Danes(Anglo) and Saxon part of Germany...

and some minor contribution from the Normans of course...

No, English was not formed the same way as creoles are. A creole is a language that develops from a pidgin. That's a process of increasing complexity. English underwent _simplification_ due to significant contact with non-native speakers. That's the opposite process and gets referred to as "creolisation", which happens to languages all the time. Almost all the Romance languages underwent some degree of amount of it. Some pidgins and jargons might've developed along the way and influenced the change, but the key difference with creolisation is that the modern language didn't primarily develop out of these.

> lingua-franca of the day that is English. Of course neither German nor French would be a better alternative as a global international neutral language.

Being a linga-frinca has nothing to do with merits though.

Aside from "linga franca" being literally "French", it's a matter of which group of nations have a tremendously dominant position on the international scene. If China was to take hold of India and Russia and set the rules for the rest of the world, the defacto linga-frinca won't be English for long, however intricate people might feel about Chinese.

Mal: "We got work to do, dong ma?"

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