The Local Europe reports
One of Germany's top universities wants to ditch German and switch almost all of its master's programmes to English in the next six years, prompting fears that the academic standing of the German language is under serious threat.
Munich's Technical University (TU), one of the highest ranked in Germany, already uses English in 30 of its 99 master's courses. Now the board of trustees has followed a recommendation by the university's president, Wolfgang Herrmann, to switch to English for most other master's modules by 2020.
"English is the lingua franca in academia and of the economy," Herrmann told the Suddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday. He said it was important to prepare students for a professional life in which they would be expected to speak English.
Herrmann also said he wanted to send a "strong signal" that would allow TU to compete for the brightest master's students globally.
A spokesman for the university told The Local the TU did not have a target for the number of modules it would offer in English. He added the plans were based on demands from students.
"We want to expand our offers in English. This will not affect all modules," the spokesman said.
The university declined to give further details.
Students sceptical
But Sebastian Biermann, chair of TU's student parliament, disputed that students had called for English across the board.
"This came from the university's management, not from students or the university's departments," he told The Local.
While Biermann said student representatives were open to more English, "generally switching all master's degrees to English is something we view rather critically".
Biermann said the reform made sense for some departments like computer sciences, where English is already common. It was not the right solution for courses like constructional engineering, he said, where textbooks and legal requirements were mostly in German.
Switching TU master's programmes to English also requires fluency among academic and administrative staff and more language support for students. Biermann said students doubted this could be achieved by 2020.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hubie on Tuesday July 29 2014, @03:27PM
If I had to wager, it has much more to do with the second item than the first item. If German universities work like most universities in the US, in-state students pay a lower tuition rate than the other students, so your profit margin is larger the more out-of-state and foreign students you matriculate. Foreign students, in particular, are nice because they typically are on the hook for the full rate.
When I was in graduate school for physics, for a while there was a desire by a number of faculty to admit as many Chinese students as possible because their academic test scores, such as the GRE [ets.org] were much higher than everyone else. These professors (who, not surprisingly, were theorists) felt the department would look much more prestigious if they could advertise how they attract so many top-rate students.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Theophrastus on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:01PM
spot on (as the Brits would say in English). I taught bioinformatics (in English) at a German University and the vast majority of the students in my class were Chinese or Indian. they paid significantly higher tuition than the German students enrolled: cha-ching. I knew local German students who wanted to enroll in my class but were turned away because the class was already "full" when there was every indication that they were holding open slots for the more lucrative foreign students.
Yet it should be loudly said, that the German Universities are still a generation away from American Universities in terms of seeing all the dubious profit angles. zB, no "amateur" sports there to speak of.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:07PM
I'll play devils advocate that its a "tech school" aka STEM. Locally in the USA that means jobs that are permanently offshoring to China and India, so in the USA it would be a waste of money and time to teach the locals.
Why train a dude from Munich to be a programmer or engineer if those jobs are permanently moving to China/India anyway? May as well just focus on the Chinese / Indian students.
The real question is why they're switching to English instead of Mandarin or Hindi. Maybe its a compromise to avoid offending our new global economic overlords?
(Score: 1) by Adamsjas on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:51PM
Even the Chinese and Indians speak English, since that is what their employers speak.
The interesting thing is that the world is pretty much deciding this focus on english without (often in spite of) government pressure. (Note: World does not include France in this instance.)
When I was in school as a teenager, someone proposed that Russian be added as a foreign language choice along side of French, or Spanish, or Latin. I recall many of the science teachers of the time pushing this idea. It never attracted many students, but at least three of my friends ended up working for the State Department, recruited after college due to their continued study of Russian. One of them said there were more dialects of Russian than of English.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:43PM
Because it is not the school's place to make that decision. If anything, the local student should get preference because presumably the lower rate is a result of state funding or other assistance the school is already getting. Refusing the local student is biting the hand that feeds it, and then spitting in its face. Not that a foreign student should be bumped by late registrations of local students, but holding places open against them is outrageous. I understand taking the "most qualified" students, but if it's all about the money... for shame.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:31PM
"Because it is not the school's place to make that decision."
Isn't the nature of their work to be in the social engineering business? Deciding who gets to be a "winner" by allocating credentials based on demographic entrance quotas? Depending on the school and the nation, they'd have to scrap a whole lot more than just citizen/foreigner quotas to be demographic blind in admissions. Racial quotas, gender quotas, etc.
Another aspect is marketing / PR hiring statistics. As a private business, they might maximize total return by not flooding the market with grads who can't be hired because there's no jobs. What I'm getting at is locally we graduate about 1.5 to 2 edu grads per job opening. So around a third to a half of all teacher grads end up bartending, waitressing, etc. It would only be worse with open enrollment. If that stat craters to maybe only 10% of grads working in the field, that might finally trip a trigger point and in four years they'll be no .edu grads at all. And the school districts would hate that because they'd have to start paying living wages, having decent mgmt, etc.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:14AM
Are you referring to private schools? 'cause according to here [sorry, no English link] [studieren.de], Germany is really expensive in comparison to British or American schools, where you usually pay at least 1k per course/semester. Not.
(Only a few of the states have fees and even those that do only require those for long-term students. This doesn't mean it's Free, but the fees are so minuscule in comparison to US and UK that they're basically negligible.)
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:01AM
They don't. The fees for Munich are 111 Euros [www.tum.de] (that's THREE digits!) and include a (restricted - 6pm to 6am [how stupid is that?]) public transportation ticket, with the option to buy an unrestricted for an additional E150
For comparison, the fees at Berlin Tech are around E300 and include an unrestricted public transport ticket (eat that, London!), but the rent's (still) cheaper.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2014, @12:58PM
Also note that those 111 Euros do not go to the university, but to the student's union (Studentenwerk; they e.g. operate the canteens and student's homes) and to the traffic company for the ticket (the latter I think is the biggest part of it).
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Saturday August 02 2014, @02:27AM
Yep, student union: E52, public transportation: E59, as per the link in my post.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 29 2014, @03:40PM
Yes, English has indeed become the international language, displacing French. However, too many European universities are trying to capitalize on English to become big international players. They often put courses in English to the cost of their local students, in the vain hope that they will attract international students.
Meanwhile, who is addressing the local market? Most German students in engineering and the sciences speak passable English, but they are not generally fluent. This erects a language barrier that they have to overcome, in addition to the normal difficulties of their course of study.
Munich Technical University is sending a simple message: they are no longer terribly interested in offering Masters Degrees to students from Munich. They want to play on the international stage instead. Maybe this is right for MTU, I don't know. However, the same trend exists - ever more courses in English - in many European universities. This is driven by ambitious university administrators, unhappy at their traditional role of educating local students.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday July 29 2014, @03:45PM
This is happening in the U.S. as well, except that universities are admitting more and more foreign and out-of-state students as a percentage of the student body.
Here it has nothing to do with "competing on the international stage" or "diversity," no matter what they tell you -- it's simply a matter of making more money, since tuition rates are higher for out-of-staters and even still higher for foreign students. American universities have long been businesses rather than institutions of higher-learning. In a state like California where admissions are tight and competitive, this has the effect of denying the opportunity of "affordable" higher-education to the locals.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Lazarus on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:50PM
This seems odd considering that the British empire collapsed long ago, and American influence abroad is in decline. Focusing on Mandarin might be a better bet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:16PM
Unlike ze german and la french empires?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday July 29 2014, @09:19PM
I have met many people who started their English language education by watching movies. I'm certain that is still continuing. The internet certainly doesn't revolve around the English language but damn is there are lot english language sites. You are correct though that it is in "decline" as in it is expanding far less than others. However it is still growing in size. Check it out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet [wikipedia.org]
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 29 2014, @03:44PM
I'm betting you won't find France doing this.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:05PM
I am betting that you can't say "top French technical university" without at least a chuckle.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:15PM
France has a decent reputation for science, but they seem to have a tendency to put their language above all else. Have a look at online conversations. People will general default to making comments on an English posting in English, but French speakers seem to frequently post comments in French. Speakers of other languages don't seem to do that, or at least not to anywhere near the same degree.
(* note: this is not based on any scientific or statistical studies)
(Score: 2) by hubie on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:30PM
In the 80's, a French-Canadian colleague of mine was at an international conference in Paris. A group went out to dinner and they had him handle talking to the waiter. Because my colleague was speaking the obviously inferior Canadian French, the waiter would only talk back to him in English. My colleague was certainly offended (as he should have been); however, any Canadian who lives outside of Quebec would appreciate the irony of the situation.
(Score: 1) by Bill Dimm on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:43PM
Maybe the waiter was speaking in English for the benefit of the others at the table?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:51PM
No, people that speak proper French frequently have a poor opinion of those speaking Quebecois French. It's like 'Hillbilly English', except that hillbillies aren't generally fiercely proud of their language.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:44PM
The solution to the classic "Parisian Waiter" problem is to come out of left field. A Parisian waiter once snubbed my passable French by replying in his execrable English. I responded in Mandarin, then in Japanese, and then in German to ask if he would prefer one of those to my French and his English; he chose French as the least worst option. But the look on his face as I, an American, rotated through those other languages was priceless.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday July 29 2014, @04:53PM
Just a tendency? They are downright arrogant about their language. Go to any other country in Europe - Germany, Spain, etc. - and they will be pleased if you try to speak their language; if you speak it well, they will be hugely appreciative. Go to France, speak good-but-not-fluent French, and you will get backhanded compliments: how nice that you speak a little bit of French, making it perfectly clear that you really ought to do better.
Possibly they don't mean it that way, or maybe they are unaware how they come across, but it is seriously irritating.
Of course, for the Americans in the crowd, some of your fellow citizens don't help. I remember being in a chocolate shop in a countryside town in France. The woman at the counter spoke no English, nor could you really expect it out in the countryside like that. An American woman wanted to know how much some chocolates costs. She was apparently convince that, if she only repeated herself ever more loudly in English, the woman would understand her. By the end, she was literally shouting, but the poor clerk still didn't understand English.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:20PM
A colleague of mine went to a trip around Europe a couple of years ago; he learned to say "excuse me, can you help me?" and "do you speak English?" in the countries' native language he would be visiting prior to his trip.
When he was in France he tried to ask something about a train to a man waiting at the station; the man didn't seem to understand his butchered attempt at French, so he said it again, in English. The man became angry, cursed at him in French, and finished up with something along "how dare you talk to me in English without permission" before walking away.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:21PM
I am betting that you can't say "top French technical university" without at least a chuckle.
Yeah! Fourier and Fermat were such poseurs! And they only have the 4th most Nobel prizes on the planet. What a bunch of losers!
(Score: 4, Informative) by No.Limit on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:03PM
Given that this is Munich's Technical University it absolutely makes sense. It's simply a reality that English is the language of the STEM subjects.
I'm in fact surprised that only 30/99 master's courses are in English at the moment.
I'm currently studying computer science at ETHZ [wikipedia.org], which too is a high reputation technical university in Europe (Switzerland).
I've quickly checked the cs master's courses languages and well over 90% are in English.
In the bachelor degree there is a gradual change from German (first year nearly completely in German) to English so that at the end students are well prepared for the English in the master's courses (students can also take English courses as part of their studies offered by the university).
And this has nothing to do with foreign student's tuition, since they've been paying exactly the same as Swiss students for years (ca 640 USD per Semester). Only recently there have been discussions about raising the tuition for foreign students. However the students' organization has been pushing hard against this.
So I think this is absolutely legitimate for any technical university.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:53PM
Eh... maybe. I moved to Germany about a year and a half ago to be closer to my wife's family and I'm a programmer. I didn't speak any German back then. I've been told by everyone not offering a job that I shouldn't have a problem finding a job because I know computers and English is spoken by everyone. However, those who have jobs to offer tell me that because I don't know German, they won't hire me. I've spoken to a lot of people in the computer industry over the past several months and the idea is pretty much the same across the board. They want bilingual but in a pinch, they'll pick the person who speaks only German. As for a guy who is native in English and learning German, they won't touch with a ten foot pole.
And honestly, I'm a little tired of seeing my language and my culture jammed down other culture's throats in their own country. I don't want Germany to be a second America. I want it to be unique and distinct. I had a friend of the family over last week who is 100% German and speaks limited English. (Great opportunity for me to practice and learn German.) He was really grouchy about his older sister who is resorting to speaking only English at home and I can't blame him.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:26PM
... and I'm sick of seeing so many people from European countries that speak English better than many people who graduate from universities here. It's depressing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:58PM
So instead of english, everyone should learn german? There has to be some international language. English is that language so germans and french and russians and everyone trying to think their language is so superior, that they don't want to learn the international language, are the ones losing. The rest of the europe has been able to keep their own languages and communicate with english in international needs for a long time now. To me the unwillingness to learn english seems more like arrogance of which yanks are always critisized about. Selfcentered bullshit. Ask 100 people in all the countries help in english and you will most likely find someone who speaks atleast a few words in each of them. Do that same with any other language and you will probably not find that many countries where someone can speak it.
Nobody has said that germans have to start speaking english in their own homes, but when you do international business, you use international language and that language happens to be english.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:06PM
That is not what I said nor is it what I implied.
I feel like I'm being trolled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:51PM
"And honestly, I'm a little tired of seeing my language and my culture jammed down other culture's throats in their own country. I don't want Germany to be a second America. I want it to be unique and distinct... ...He was really grouchy about his older sister who is resorting to speaking only English at home and I can't blame him."
That's what you said, but no one is jamming english to anyone's throat. My native language is not english, but that's the international language, so i need it to do international business. What i'm critizing is the fact that germans and french etc are so self centered, that they think english is some kind of a boogie man and refuse to learn it. Sure, i guess germans are maybe getting into the idea, so thumbs up for them. First step should be to stop dubbing the tv and movies.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 31 2014, @01:07PM
How would that not be jamming English to anyone's throat?
Oh, I understand, you think we should do it the American way, that is instead of dubbing the original, we film a native remake which generally is worse than the original, and show that instead.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:24AM
Time to move out from that village you obviously live in and move your family to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich or Frankfurt. It's really hard to believe what you're saying from my experience here and the amount of open positions for programmers.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:02PM
I live in Hamburg -- second largest city in Germany and one of the top ten in Europe. If you live in Hamburg, I'd be happy to buy you a beer and find out what I'm doing wrong. I don't profess to be the greatest at job hunting, but I'd be happy to hear your ideas about how I can more easily find a job with my current skill set.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday July 30 2014, @08:54PM
I can only speak from my experience in Berlin, where there are many companies with English as their official language and without the requirement for German for (at least some categories of their) employees. Anecdotal evidence from people I have met suggests that M, F, and HH are similar, as they all found jobs there.
I personally prefer to work project-wise and had some good (some less so) experience with craigslist and several freelancer-oriented sites out there, also, the universities (usually) have job-boards.
If I would be looking for a permanent position, I'd find potential companies I'd like to work for and just call them up and talk to them personally.
Apparently, Germany is lacking 100k+ STEM "specialists" currently (http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/mint-faecher-deutschland-will-auslaendische-studenten-anlocken-a-967772.html) which is in line with what I've heard from one of the former board members from SAP at a lecture a couple of years ago (he suggested ca. 50k).
Chances are you'll find a job this way.
If you're in Berlin, message me and we'll go for a Beer here as I'm not planning on going to Hamburg any time soon : )
BTW, I also regularly get interview requests through linkedIn, maybe that's worth a try as well, and, finally, use your language skills to your advantage at multi-nationals, who need English-speaking people, like DHL for instance (though they're in Bonn, which I consider a village).
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday August 31 2014, @02:08PM
Is that lacking the ability to lower salaries or lack of STEM people to hire? (usually at high rate..)
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:01PM
That's a good question, I guess it's a little bit of both. There are a quite a few opportunities to get (shitty, but livable) pay + shares at startups, I've seen in recent weeks again. Also, Wimdu is looking for *a lot* of people from CTO, to engineers. You might want to contact them and see if you can convince them to pay for relocation, or a second apartment in Berlin, which is quite close to Hamburg, if you think about it.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Sunday August 31 2014, @11:03PM
Sorry, I mistook you for Common Joe. : )
(Score: 2) by No.Limit on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:19AM
I agree with you. There is even a term for this phenomena 'Denglisch', when Germans us English words in half of their sentences (Denglisch = Deutsch + Englisch, but with more Englisch).
When it comes to technical subjects I don't mind it so much (because it makes sense to use English there), but otherwise I usually try not to mix in English words when speaking German.
But I have so many Swiss friends that regularly use 'cool', 'dude', 'bro', 'random', 'f*ck', 'sh*t' and many other English words. I believe the reason for this is that most 'cool' stuff comes from English speaking countries (mostly the US and also the UK), so young people take those words over from their 'idols'.
Here's an example where I mixed in some German words for people who can't imagine what it must be like:
(Score: 4, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:11PM
Would have been funny if we could have conducted this entire thread in German. Ah well, never mind.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Common Joe on Tuesday July 29 2014, @05:33PM
Nee. Fuer mich ist es nicht so Spass dass wir in Deutsch sprechen. Ich kann nicht so gut buchstabieren und es gibt kein electronisch Woerterbuch wann ich in mein Scheisswebbrowser schreiben. Und Soylent News koennen nicht umlaute nehmen.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:00PM
Die Tisch ist zu klein, aber die Toiletten sind sehr sauber.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:07PM
Frau Tisch hat es satt, dass immer alle auf ihrer Körpergröße herumhacken! ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by turgid on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:44PM
Es wirdt besser sein, wenn meine Unterhoese brennt. Ich glaube... Aber Morgen gehe ich einkaufen.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:04PM
Sö yöü think Söylent News döesn't süppört Ümläüts? Sö höw dö yü think I've written this? ;-)
(Hint: HTML entities)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by richtopia on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:11PM
Ich mochte ein beir bitte.
Got me through Germany just fine.
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:13PM
Excellent point. I'd prefer not to use HTML entities, though. (I type on a German keyboard and I'm lazy.) Perhaps it is something else I'm not aware of when I type into the text box?
(Score: 4, Informative) by No.Limit on Tuesday July 29 2014, @06:05PM
Ach was, scheiss auf Umlaute, kannst ja einfach ae, ue und oe benutzen (mach ich auch immer auf meiner englischen Tastatur).
Hast du schon leo [leo.org] versucht? Ich find die Uebersetzungen dort ziemlich gut und ich benutze es auch regelmaesig.
Oder meinst du eine Autokorrektur beim eingeben von Text? Ich glaube wenn man den Browser in der richtigen Sprache installiert klappt das auch ganz gut, wobei ich mir nicht sicher bin, da ich meine PC Sachen grundsaetzlich immer auf englisch installiere.
(Score: 2) by Geotti on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:27AM
A GAZILLION TIMES THIS!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @10:38AM
emmm ... MIT Firefox kann man ganz viele woerterbuecher installieren. wenn amn dann text in einem eingabe feld eingibt, dann kann man einfach rechts-klicken und dann ein woerterbuch auswaehlen. geht uebrigens auch ganz gut im email program Thunderbird. hingegen wie ich eine Deutsche tastatur und rechtschreibung in CyanogenMod fertig bringe, ist mir ein raetsel. [witzig die auto korrektur]
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday July 30 2014, @12:29PM
I'll use English to answer your questions. (German is still very new to me so writing German is a hard and long endeavor for me. I'm also prone to not make sense.)
I don't like the ae, ue, and oe spellings of words. It's a personal thing -- probably because I'm so used to seeing and reading with umlauts. (My keyboard is German and therefore also has the umlauts as well.) Relying on the "extra e" at the end of the words is an extra headache in a long list of headaches that plague me every time I use German.
The problem with typing umlauts into Soylent News can best be expressed as an example. Here's a three letter word: für. That's "fur" but the u is an umlaut. You can see how Soylent News expresses it. I'm not sure what's causing that. I suspect it is some setting in Soylent News somewhere, but I'm not sure. I think they are currently testing the UTF-8 stuff in development right now.
As for Leo, it is one of my two best friends. I also use Google Translate for large blocks of text that I need in English quickly. What it doesn't translate correctly, I can usually figure out.
I've been using Leo a lot more recently as I'm trying to read more German. There's a hard-back comic book called Spass Trek [amazon.de] that I'm going through. Despite the sparse (and hilarious) front cover, the inside is still quite difficult for me to read. I use Leo to translate the words I don't know and I do everything else manually myself. It takes me a long time to do only a few pages and I still have to have people explain what I'm doing wrong, but it's finding the gaps in my grammar knowledge. Google Translate isn't a good tool to help me learn that kind of stuff.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Buck Feta on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:22PM
The European Commission has announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU, rather than German, which was the other contender. Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had room for improvement and has therefore accepted a five-year phasing in of "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k", Which should klear up some konfusion and allow one key less on keyboards.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f", making words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e" is disgrasful.
By the fourth yer, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and everivun vil find it ezi to understand ech ozer. ZE DREM VIL FINALI COM TRU!
Herr Schmidt
- fractious political commentary goes here -
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:50PM
you joke, but I would love to see English spelling simplified - it's a fucking mess. I have a 3 year old who is starting to learn to read. she knows all the letters and the basic sounds. she can sound out simple words like cat and pig and dog. to go further we basically have to start introducing her to exceptions to the rules she's learned, and she will be learning more and more of those exceptions for years to come: 'a' sounds like in 'hat', except when it's like 'cake', except when in words like 'paw', or 'father', or if it's with another vowel like in throat or caught... why should 'c' sometimes sound like 's'? what's the point? why doesn't cough rhyme with through? or though? or plough or rough?
I'd happily swap to your germanised spelling, but ideally I think we should adopt Italian spelling. we'd need to modify it a bit for the sounds they don't use, but if you've ever studied italian you realise how unnecessarily complicated our spelling is, and how much of our education could be spent on something useful. like learning German.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:23AM
Because English is a hybrid of a Germanic language (Anglo-Saxon, a.k.a. Old English) and a Romance language (French). It wound up inheriting two incompatible sets of spelling rules.
I've decided to blame the Irish for those, since their spelling is even more fucked up than the English. My theory is not widely believed among linguists, but give it time.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:20AM
> Because English is a hybrid of a Germanic language (Anglo-Saxon, a.k.a. Old English) and a Romance language (French). It wound up inheriting two incompatible sets of spelling rules.
Please, come over to my house and explain all that to my 3 year old.
(Score: 1) by watusimoto on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:00PM
I used to want simplified English spelling as well, but then it occurred to me that if you want to use pronunciation as a guide for spelling reform, whose pronounciation would you use? One of the accents from Britian? America? India? Australia?
I think that ship has sailed, and we are stuck with what we've got.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Wednesday July 30 2014, @03:11PM
Well, we'd all use my accent as the root pronunciation, obviously.
Actually it doesn't matter. "A" will be "a" as in "cat", no matter how you choose to pronounce "cat". "Ae" will be as in "cake", no matter how you pronounce "cake", and so on.
Alternatively, different people could spell things differently depending on how they choose to pronounce it, so a Londoner would write "kaarsl" (castle) while a yorkshireman would write "kassl". This couldn't be any more confusing than what we are putting up with today, and has the added bonus of embedding extra metadata (ie the writer's accent) in to the text.
(Score: 1) by panachocala on Thursday July 31 2014, @03:30PM
Phonemes. Our new alphabet: http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/phonemic-chart [teachingenglish.org.uk]
(Score: 1) by panachocala on Thursday July 31 2014, @03:33PM
By the way, the a in cake becomes ei :) The ae is already taken for the a in apple.
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Tuesday July 29 2014, @07:28PM
There is a touch of irony in that statement, to say the least.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 29 2014, @08:19PM
To a degree, but it also explains a lot. Latin died because it didn't adapt quickly enough. English is (too) quick to change, becoming the language of science and commerce despite its inconsistencies. It's Kind of like the JavaScript of the spoken language world.
French is going the way of Latin for the same reasons Latin died.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday July 29 2014, @11:35PM
Don't be so sure about the reasons: the most used language is the language of those cultures that "endured" the history.
It may well be English will be displaced by Mandarin in the next century or so - especially if US continues down the path of losing economic relevance it took once their political class decided to waste huge amount of resources in meaningless and unwinnable wars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Wednesday July 30 2014, @06:17AM
To quote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Nicoll [wikiquote.org]
How will Mandarin expell English?
Sheer number of speakers?
More extensible or flexible?
More suitable?
Can Mandarin "eat" English?
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.
-
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday July 30 2014, @07:42AM
Yes, idk, idk respectively (idk=I don't know).
It doesn't matter: it can eat English or not, Mandarin can simply stop ignoring it once English can no longer be used to express something of importance (yes, this is a risk I consider as serious enough. One only need to let the US Bible-belt and/or NSA+minions prevail: science and art are not on their list of priorities, the quest for power is).
The same thing happened with Latin, you know? Together with the classic Greek, it was used as long as it was useful for keeping alive whatever some people (survivors anyway) thought as important - actually a bit longer [wikipedia.org] than that but not much, and only because those people really needed a lingua franca for their correspondence - mainly philosophy and "natural philosophy"(=science) in particular.
Once the civilization got on its feet enough to start saying new things, Latin was truly dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Saturday August 09 2014, @05:00AM
So, given that English is currently at the heart of Internet technology and computing it will take significant time and effort to dislodge.
German universities now have courses in English...
This said, if there is a better unified language for all of humanity I would be interested in using it
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday August 09 2014, @09:18PM
If you think of how much life/time a native English speaker wastes with spelling bees and what not, one imagines it can't be that hard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30 2014, @11:55AM
How will Mandarin expell English? Don't need to, English just slowly become ignored in international communications.
Sheer number of speakers? This isn't hard, Mandarin is the official language for 1/4 of the world's population, after all.
More extensible or flexible? Depends. Making up new words? English is easy. Making up new phrases for the same effect? Mandarin has no problem with that.
More suitable? By Mandarin speakers? Definitely.
Can Mandarin "eat" English? What a foolish thing to say. People just stop using English, that's how English will be replaced.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday July 30 2014, @01:59PM
No, no, no, and no.
I speak Mandarin. I like the language. But it will not replace English as the lingua franca of the world. Another language might some day, but not Mandarin. Consider the success Russian had becoming the lingua franca of the Warsaw Pact. It didn't. And that's despite universal education in Russian for satellite states and several countries like Yugoslavia that used Cyrillic. Mandarin is only spoken by Chinese, and only by Han Chinese at that. It's not even spoken by all Han Chinese, many of whom speak other dialects like Cantonese, Fukkienese, Shanghainese, etc, which are mostly mutually unintelligible. Mandarin itself was only made the official national language in 1988. So they have a ways to go before it's the lingua franca of just China. How Chinese who speak different dialects communicate now is through the common written language. But nobody else really uses Chinese characters apart from a few root characters in Japanese and Korean, both of which have their own alphabets (Japanese have hiragana and katakana, Koreans use the better designed system of hangul). And as a tonal language, the spoken form of Mandarin is a high hurdle for every Indo-European language speaker in the world.
So in other words, even if Chinese conquered the entire world and had Mandarin speaking cops on every corner and all governance was conducted in Mandarin, a very, very small percentage of the conquered peoples would learn to speak Mandarin as well.
But the Chinese won't conquer the world. If America and Europe are falling apart, China is a rolling disaster that's masquerading as a juggernaut. They might start a war in the next 20 years, but they won't win it. Chances are, they'll fall apart internally before then.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday July 30 2014, @04:05AM
Auch du Lieber! Shissen in der Hosen! (Excuse my spelling, native English speaker, which should be reason not (NEIN!) to require a second language in graduate study. I have ultimate respect for anyone who does graduate work in a second language, it is hard enough in a native language. But English? That conglomeration of German and French and various Celtic languages with an infusion of Latin and Greek (for those who can actually read)? OMG! Might as well go for that artificial language, what was it, Esperanto! Yeah! Let the fricking Sun set on Britannia, the nation of wankers that think they conquered the world by making me speak their fricking language! Oh, Christ, I do! Free Scotland! Recover the Stone! William Wallace was right!