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posted by martyb on Sunday January 27 2019, @08:50PM   Printer-friendly
from the You-will-be-assimilated dept.

English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.

Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.

Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:20PM (19 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:20PM (#792742)

    Whoever wrote the above is not an anonymous coward, they are an anonymous IDIOT.

    .
    .

    Esperanto did not take the place of English, and no other "made up language" will either.

    Various forms of Chinese WILL become increasingly important. These changes occur due primarily due to economic forces.

    Please, no more "articles" from anonymous idiots. It's just a waste of space and time.

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  • (Score: 2) by bart9h on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:31PM (6 children)

    by bart9h (767) on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:31PM (#792746)

    Also, automatic translation still sucks. big time.

    These changes occur due primarily due to economic forces.

    Cultural forces are more important than economic ones.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:43PM (#792751)

      Military forces are more powerful than cultural ones.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:49PM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:49PM (#792767)

      "Cultural forces are more important than economic ones."

      -

      The above is so naive it is tragic.

      You need to do more traveling and see the world.

      As of today you don't have a clue what the real world is about.

      Economic activity is what drives the world.

      Culture is along for the ride, only if it can make money. And that's how the real world works, son.

      • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09AM (3 children)

        by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09AM (#792865) Homepage Journal

        There’s a book whose author and title I’ve sadly forgotten as I’ve wanted to read it for years

        It’s about how Coffee, Tea, Cacao, Opium and Coca changed the world

        --
        Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
        • (Score: 2) by deimtee on Monday January 28 2019, @04:49AM (2 children)

          by deimtee (3272) on Monday January 28 2019, @04:49AM (#792882) Journal

          Could it be "A History of the World in 6 Glasses" by Tom Standage ?

          I would also recommend "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond as an interesting read.

          --
          If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
          • (Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:23PM (1 child)

            by MichaelDavidCrawford (2339) Subscriber Badge <mdcrawford@gmail.com> on Monday January 28 2019, @04:23PM (#793064) Homepage Journal

            From my army doctor grandfather

            But I’ll never read it as it’s all about how wars are won or lost by public health problems. Consider that not Cortez but smallpox that conquered the Aztecs.

            --
            Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:28PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 29 2019, @01:28PM (#793526)

              This is very true. Up until the 19th century the biggest threat to a large army was disease. There are stories about how WW1 and WW2 were so different due to supply lines and better insect repellent soaked cloth.

              In order for an empire to spread it has to win wars.

  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:44PM (7 children)

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:44PM (#792753) Homepage Journal

    All languages are made up. They wouldn't exist otherwise.

    --
    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:52PM (#792755)

      No Intelligent Design

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:32PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:32PM (#792764)
      Natural languages continuously adapt to the needs of the speakers, while having no central authority. Artificial languages are a design of a person [miresperanto.com]. (An interesting read for those who are curious about languages.)
    • (Score: 5, Funny) by Bot on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:16PM (1 child)

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:16PM (#792772) Journal

      Except perl.
      Perl comes from /dev/random

      --
      Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:37AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @01:37AM (#792812)

    Chinese will never be important to the rest of the world. The time investment to reading the language is way too high.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @08:18AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @08:18AM (#792927)

      I was going to say the same. Chinese, with the writing systems they have, will never be the universal language like English is. Either Chinese will have a latin script version (like the Japanese have rōmaji) which would then have to be used by most of the Chinese or basically Chinese has no chance of being international.

      I've always found it funny, when people start arguing about what language is the most used in the world. But the question is incorrectly formated. It's what language is most widely used in the world, and that's English by far. You go to any country and most likely you will find larger number of people speaking English than of any other language (obviously not including the local language(s) in that particular country).

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Whoever on Monday January 28 2019, @01:55AM

    by Whoever (4524) on Monday January 28 2019, @01:55AM (#792819) Journal

    Whoever wrote the above

    I can assure you that I did not write the above.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Monday January 28 2019, @04:09PM (#793053) Journal

    Chinese will not become increasingly important, unless China winds up colonizing a portion of the Earth's surface equivalent to the British Empire, and then holding on to that territory for several centuries.

    Chinese has significant barriers for non-speakers to overcome, such as 4 tones, characters, and many mutually-unintelligible dialects (eg. Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghainese, etc). Chinese is also not closely related to other major languages around it. Korean and Japanese are somewhat similar to each other, but they are much different from Chinese. In other words a French speaker has a leg up in English because there is a lot of commonality there, but that's not true for Chinese and neighboring languages.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.