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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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English is King but Technology May Trump All
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Fraud is the homage that force pays to reason.
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(Score: 5, Interesting) by Dr Spin on Sunday January 27 2019, @10:30PM (23 children)
There are very good reasons why English leads the pack -
It has the largest vocabulary by a very wide margin
- you can be far more specific if you have a lager vocabulary
- if you have access to a larger vocabulary,, you will be in the habit of being more specific
It is very easy to speak English badly - to the extent that "broken" or "pigin" English can be spoken with a tiny vocabulary and no grammar at all and can be understood by people who do not share a first language over much of the world (with the help of massive hand-waving, and ignoring complete gaffes).
English is associated with Freedom in many of parts of the world where they are oppressed by people speaking another language.
Hollywood movies have taught a lot of the world "English" - and probably also racism and violent behaviour (do your own Google search). They are digitalised and freely available anywhere the MAFIAA's grip is feeble - and will outlast VHS even in remote parts of the 3rd world.
None of this discounts the benefits of being bi-lingual. I use Google translate almost daily but mostly a bilingual 5 year old can do a lot better.
I doubt that machine translation will be reliable in the next 50 years, and I won't live that long.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by Bot on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:25PM (5 children)
> It has the largest vocabulary by a very wide margin
maybe that is partially a consequence of its success, IMHO English has two advantages
1. it is already a bastard language, You say English but you mean American English, which has come in contact with a lot of other european and now world languages.
2. it is so full of inconsistencies that less errors stand out (fewer LOL).
The big disadvantage is no clear and consistent rules of pronunciation, but much of this has been overcome by beefy AI.
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(Score: 2) by RamiK on Monday January 28 2019, @12:07AM
That's not a bug. That's the feature. You can read my other post to get the gist of it. But specifically to foreign countries deciding on which 2nd language to teach, English is preferred exactly because the students won't be able to transfer their reading and writing skills easily to speech so there's less of a lower-middle class brain drain risk.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Monday January 28 2019, @07:44AM (3 children)
You say English but you mean American English,
No I bloody well don't.
I speak several variants of English, and American ain't one of them! English English is entirely built from other European languages, although there are also bits of Arabic and various Indian languages. In London you find the youth using Vietnamese words too.
In reality there are, and have been since 1066, two main Englishes - French/Latin based - spoken by the educated, and German (Saxon) based English, traditionally spoken by the uneducated. Since universal free education (1949, I think) the uneducated have
largely died out, but that form of English is still widely used. Our rate of literacy is way higher than America's - most illiterates are recent immigrants from countries where they don't use the Latin alphabet.
There are also regional variants which differ quite considerably, although the differences are fading in most places.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @08:05AM
Compulsory education was a Victorian initiative, courtesy of a series of acts from 1870 to 1893 [www.bl.uk]. Though I wouldn't say this invalidates the rest of your statement. The separation of "school" English and "home" English is an interesting topic.
In my particular corner of the UK, the home language would usually have been Welsh (with English being the language of tuition at school). The decline in numbers of Welsh speakers in the 19th and 20th centuries may parallel the decline of the Saxon-based English you describe.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @03:41PM
This has literally never been true. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cross-country-literacy-rates?year=1960&country=USA+GBR [ourworldindata.org]
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday January 30 2019, @08:12AM
Oi! you got a loicense for that English-English, chum?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Sunday January 27 2019, @11:34PM (1 child)
Yes and no. While you're right about English having a huge vocabulary. you're wrong about what it mean. In practice, it creates a language you can translate-to with a fair bit of accuracy, but typically can't translate-from properly since the target language lacks certain distinctions. Chinese has a similar "feature" where the written letters carry a lot of complicated connotations since they express different words so that can only be understood by literate Chinese readers or much of the subtext will be lost so you're forced to learned it literally "to the letter" in order to use it properly.
It's why computing is dominated by C++: A good language is well defined and easy to port in and out of. So, over time, the market slowly fills up with C++ since all it takes is one horrible decision to convert to an awful language like C++ which can't typically be undone realistically.
Effectively it's Peter principle being applied to human and computing languages.
If I couldn't convince an American native English speaking professor of literature Clean & Jerk wasn't slang for masturbation but a weightlifting maneuver without having to provide a footnote from a Kinesiology textbook, I doubt machine translation will ever become possible.
compiling...
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday January 28 2019, @12:11AM
Machine translation definitely is possible. I just translated my computer, clearly a machine, from one place to another. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by dvader on Monday January 28 2019, @12:21AM (9 children)
Largest vocabulary by a far margin? That's a myth.
https://www.economist.com/johnson/2010/06/23/the-biggest-vocabulary [economist.com]
In short, comparing languages isn't easy and there's no proper way to count words. Languages with on-the-fly word composition can create an almost infinite number of words (like wild life vs wildlife). But, at some point it's just a partial sentence without spaces. I don't speak Finnish or Turkish but I understand they have some extra spiffy rules for creating partial sentences without spaces (words). From the article above:
How do you compete with that? The article also discusses word roots and dictionaries. Read it, it is very interesting.
I doubt the expressiveness actually differs much between languages used in similar domains. Expressiveness is probably limited by hardware and not language. I have no proof of that though.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Monday January 28 2019, @03:12AM (3 children)
And lets not dismiss the fact that Mandarin has a BIG head start in terms of native speakers, with English lagging third behind Spanish. (wikipedia) [wikipedia.org]
Mandarin Chinese 908.7 million
Spanish 442.3 million
English 378.2 million
With China expanding rapidly into pretty much every corner of the world, and the US and Britain deciding to isolate themselves, it's inevitable that Chinese will be the language that grows rapidly. Around here Mandarin is the first choice for a second language, while a lot of Chinese speakers don't even bother learning English beyond the "buying a coffee" level.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:36PM (2 children)
Where is "around here"?
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Wednesday January 30 2019, @02:28AM (1 child)
Vancouver BC and environs.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @03:05PM
> Vancouver BC and environs.
Of course Mandarin is the most common second language. It's a Chinese exclave, bought and paid for.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday January 28 2019, @04:21AM
It’s a fascinating place to live as there are so many dialects there
It’s simply expected that if you can’t find the right word you just make one up
The Dictionary Of Newfoundland English is HUGE.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:14PM (1 child)
Sure, as an agglutinative language Turkish has that ability, but it's not common. German, though an Indo-European language, has that ability to string lots of words together into one term, but it's not used. In fact, it's only a rueful joke told by non-German speakers who struggle to learn that language.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 28 2019, @07:08PM
Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften?
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 29 2019, @07:35PM (1 child)
English as a language and culture absorbs new and foreign words and constructs much more readily than other languages. In that sense English has the largest vocabulary since it's the sum of all other languages, minus a few orders of magnitude. It's an ugly language, but a useful one.
For example, suicide is a noun. You could very easily appropriate it as a verb: Bob suicided. English verb conjugations can be sloppily applied to random verbs shanghaied from other languages. You may be spaghettified in a warpgate (spaghetti being an Italian noun). Kondo Marie has been making the rounds on the Internet for her self-help cleaning advice (and I expect to see it on SN in the near future), and you can verbify that too: Sally KonMaried her garage. The -gate suffix is another example of something jerryrigged into the language out of thin air and can be attached to pretty much anything.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday January 29 2019, @10:38PM
As Peter Naur said, "In English, any noun can be verbed."
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Monday January 28 2019, @03:51AM
Damn those French and their highly repressive regime.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday January 28 2019, @04:31AM (1 child)
True.
" - you can be far more specific if you have a lager vocabulary"
Theoretically.
" - if you have access to a larger vocabulary,, you will be in the habit of being more specific"
Maybe.
The problem is, that large vocabulary is only useful as long as we understand the distinctions between the similar words. As is nearly constantly impressed upon me here, this is not an expectation that others reliably meet. Poor dictionaries are only an excuse.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @08:08AM
Does it depend on how drunk you are?
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday January 28 2019, @11:20AM (1 child)
My fellow soylentil, all I really need is Bud Light.
--
Forget world peace. Visualize using your damned turn signal.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday January 28 2019, @04:16PM
Philistine.
Washington DC delenda est.