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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: 2) by kazzie on Monday January 28 2019, @08:05AM

    by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Monday January 28 2019, @08:05AM (#792923)

    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.

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