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Comment by dgellow | Hacker News Reader

I really want to see a local Euro English[0] develop as an actual, recognized variant of English. Both because it would be really funny, but also as a way for Continental Europe to develop a common language we can shape our own way

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_English (we don't have to take the examples in this page as-is, we can definitely make better local oddities!)

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I think it's a bit quick to want that variant to be actual already, but eventual we might be able to make it work.

It's a weird broken import of French (could be because the EU Parliament) is in Brussels so highly French-speaking. It's also still very incoherent, it mixes up billion and trillion, and it mixes up milliard (the French equivalent) with billion. You absolutely do not want ambiguity there when you work professionally as a politician.

deadline supposed to come from delay but it is incorrect use in French. cabinet is toilet. etc

It's an artificial invented variant, like a kid would invent its own language to speak to other kids, not something that was born out of habit and unified. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto shares a similar issue but at least it's cute and more logical though.

AI would be good at creating an international language

I don't think it's just French. The million-billion distinction is different from English in many European languages - [1] lists basically every language other than English in the EU. And in my example, "actual" to mean "current" and "eventual" to mean "possibly" are at least also present in Dutch and sometimes used in that way in the EU.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_...

well done, took me a bit to notice :)

Works pretty well in Italian as well

> Euro English

I call it Eurospeak, for extra outrage - though that word currently has European Union civil service connotations (cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eurospeak)

Eurospeak is definitely the language of international corporate meetings !

I did not know "Euro English" was a thing. By the look of it, it isn't a language, it's just a euphemism for incorrect English as spoken by non-native speakers in Europe.

That's how a local language starts

I would much prefer French be used for that purpose as the brits clearly no longer want anything to do with the rest of Europe

ETA: Esperanto or Interlingua would also be acceptable

French would give France an advantage. The British don’t own English, and it is good for the common language to not be native from any member country, to avoid favoritism

How I long for an Esperanto-speaking Europe...

I love Esperanto and would love to see it more widely adopted, but I feel like Interlingua is better for the specific purpose of EU usage

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