arugula wrote:

Blackadder wrote:The point is, that is more efficient than trying to translate every language into every other language in real time.

cavarka9 wrote:clearly you cannot read what you just said. You said you did not see people agitating for translational softwares, it takes one to throw that out.

No.


He said it's more efficient to communicate in a common language than to (persistently) translate many languages. That is not equivalent to saying that people do not "agitate" for such translation software. And by "not equivalent", I mean they are two very different meanings. And by "different", I mean not the same.

I don't see them agitating for portable software to translate Hindi into Malayalam, to take just one example

This was his quote, his example. They can also use common language to inter translate many languages.

arugula wrote:

cavarka9 wrote:In short, you do not advocate english as the sole prominent language of the world, which is fine by me, second, you agree that conquest was the primary reason, which I agree and others before you have skipped that issue by trivializing it as though it didnt matter. Third, I am assuming you advocate use of technology. The other guy from whom you quoted wasnt satisfied by that.He wanted more.

I would like for all languages to be preserved somehow, in some way, and be accessible to all of us who want access to them - but that will be a tiny minority of us who happen to be interested in languages, and their cultural content. Those others (like yourself) who want specific languages to persevere for practical use, are expressing a different normative stance. I identified your particular motive as a resentment deeply entrenched in anti-colonialism (not that there's anything wrong with resenting colonialism... it essentially destroyed my country, for example). For others, the motive to 'oppose' English might be aesthetic, for others still it might have to do with the irritation of having to adapt to 'another' language. There are many motivations for wanting to preserve a language, but the list of motivations for wanting to prop up specific languages against specific other languages, that list is more narrow.

And it is here I claim that the motives for preserving a languages if respected must be done consistently and technology can be used for this.
But if you wish to continue, I will claim that preservation of languages has a lot to do with economy. Improve the economy while preserving the languages then it will make the difference.

ok fine, I do take this oppurtunity to apologize,
Here is my point.

most people are lazy, they dont learn others languages for nothing. They do it for jobs, jobs depend on economy and economy on science and business. In simple, people will go to learn the languages of those who have a greater success in science, In case of english, 2 empires successively had english language. Britain where thermodynamics, electromagnetism(which changed the world in fundamental ways) and computers took their birth also the first industrialized country in the world and USA, where it was taken to a new level.All the while their economies grew and people grew accustomed to deal with them in their language.
All the while, demand existed for learning of science in other countries, it only required translations, which werent much and arent much even now in most countries.The whole point is that scientists might need to have a common language for discussion, but after their discussions, could this not be translated in their languages?.
It takes one translation to help millions, instead millions are asked to learn one language. Not to mention that if one works in one language, then what is the use of their native languages?, can people remain intellectually capable in both their languages at the same time, one in their work, the other in rest?.I claim no, I have seen enough people who can discuss and debate in english but their intellectual level drops to a 12yrold or 16yr old because they never needed to know the words they are using in english to also know in their mother tongue. If that is the case, as time goes on and science invades most spaces of life, their vocabulary in their own languages shall drop to a minimum.

I therefore conclude that translations on science and technology along with computers is good enough to preserve the diversity of the world and their languages and also improve scientific literacy and hence also the economy.
Now for global language, which could be many, why one?. Well because people in general do not like diversity as it is beyond their influence in either gengeral ordinary persons wish to talk to many or otherwise, instead they wish to collapse the world in manageable proportions, which is unnecessary, one only needs enough to live happily, work happily and collaborate happily which can all be done with many languages and translations and give all the languages the respect they deserve.
Languages are to communicate. Communication is possible through translations. why ask more?. Efficiency is needed in better ways to live. As it is, even if people know one language, they are not going to solve their problems or their differences any sooner. Because that still depends on their motives and their brains which are similar.

arugula wrote:My disagreement in the first response was one of emphasis. I think you overlook, or underplay, that crucial facet of English which I described before. Unlike what you claimed, English actually is "speshul" because it's a mongrel possibly unlike any other mongrel. All languages are amalgams in some way - English is a particularly incongruous, amorphous, non-homogenous amalgam. Its two largest halves (Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman) are still in conflict just beneath the surface, and have been for centuries. This makes it naturally a flexible, constantly malleable form, which absorbs new content more readily perhaps than most other languages.

I would argue that this has absolutely nothing to do with it. Are there any examples in history of a language being official not based on its real, sociological, power and instead on some non-existent criterion of "malleability"? All languages are just as malleable as each other, the fact that English is relatively more mixed compared to other European languages just reflects the sociological factors which influenced its growth (i.e., that the English-speaking world borders and has historically had much contact with the Romance-speaking world, that for 400 years speakers of Oïl/'Old French' formed the upper-class in England, and that Latin was Europe's main lingua franca for century).

1) I didn't claim that English-speakers do better with pronunciation - or even with vowel pronunciation, since vowels were my focus. I claimed that English-speakers, by virtue of having so many vowels in common usage, ought to benefit from it (though minutely) simply by being able to pronounce a large range of vowels.

I agree. English's lack of phonemic contrast in aspiration (the ts in 'stop' and 'top' are different sounds in Hindi), and its weird "r" sound (the 'rolled' and 'guttural' r sounds are much more common), among other things, means English-speakers still have their work cut out for them, though... English-speakers also seem to impose English-dipthongs onto monopthongs in other languages, pronouncing the Spanish "yo sé" as something like "yow sey".

byofrcs wrote:

Saim wrote:

byofrcs wrote:English is perfectly pukka for a nation like India that I think has prevented its Balkanization.

Yeah, if only they had a common language in the Balkans. Oh wait...

Balkanization is a term used to describe the segmentation into smaller countries each with their own silo mentality when it comes to how they relate to the other.

I know. My point is that having a common second language or even first language is not the . Look at the American Civil War - both sides had Anglophone majorities (albeit with different minorities - NJ Dutch and PA German in the North and Cajun French, Louisiana Creole, Gullah and Spanish in the Confederate states). What about, to talk of a more recent example, the Libyan Civil War? I think it has more to do with economics than cultural difference, even if cultural difference is exploited as a justification.

If you read the Wikipedia article you had linked to then you would see there is considerable confusion if you want to claim that it is a common language of the Balkans.

I don't need to read the Wikipedia article, I grew up speaking English and Serbo-Croatian bilingually and I know that it constitutes a single language. There's no 'confusion', more willful obfuscation. All the national standards of Serbo-Croatian are fully mutually intelligible; in fact, when I was growing up I read more things in Croatian than Serbian because I was more familiar with the Latin script. Something like 30% of Croatians speak a distinct language (look up Kajkavian and Chakavian if you want to learn more), but most of them speak (and all of them write with) dialects intelligible to my mum's Serbian. As I said, cultural differences are exploited and made to look wider than they actually are (by creating different national standards and asserting them as distinct languages, by refusing to use words originating in other regions) when the main motivation of conflict is actually economic.

The beauty of English is that no one actually cares about adding new words.

As opposed to what? Icelandic?

What about Hindi-Urdu, for example? It's replete with loanwords from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and English. Or Tagalog, with its Spanish and English borrowings? English is hardly the only example of a language with mixed origins. All languages incorporate loanwords.

Well I was thinking about the French. but equally there are a large number of Language regulators

English doesn't have a language regulator and IMHO it should never have one.

Hardly anyone actually follows these language regulators, though. How many French-speakers actually follow the French Academy's advice to use 'courriel' instead of 'email' in regular conversation? Just Canadians and extreme snobbish people, I hear. French was the main language of diplomacy at one point, so your point is moot. Or are you going to bring forth any evidence that suggests that l'Académie Française had something to do with its replacement with English?

All languages incorporate loanwords. Interestingly enough, most of these loanwords these days are coming from English. The Serbian word for "rapper" is reper, while the Spanish is rapero. Here are some other examples in Serbian, not to mention the Latin, Greek, German and Turkish loanwords. Is Serbian about to become an international lingua franca?

Actually languages do have a linguistic evolution.

http://www.sciencecodex.com/harvard_sci ... past_tense

This is linguistic change. This has nothing to do with why people choose certain languages over others, which is influenced entirely by sociological factors. It's not "survival of the fittest" and it's not "natural selection".

There are many other influences the largest of which is the British Commonwealth. The reason the US uses English is because of this influence. Until the US was a superpower then Britain ruled the world. The legacy is the US, and so the world speaks English.

Woo, another sociological factor! Thanks for the agreement.

The power of the printing press means that fonts have been developed for Latin script travel faster than other languages which have unique symbols. Fonts were expensive (still are) so any language with a smaller character set is going to win in the long run over one with many characters unique to its own language. Equally the freedom to print, either legally or illegally, and the ease of printing means that a smaller font set will win when it comes to the cost

English had a very low cost to print. The fonts were relatively cheap and the language itself is reasonably efficient. Obviously nowadays this is less of an issue but this ease-of-printing has had an influence right up to this day with the ASCII character set, UTF-8 and the late arrival of Unicode.

Explain why, then, that more is printed for the relatively complex Chinese script than for much easier to print and learn scripts like Devanagari, Arabic and Thai? Are we seeing Chinese people switching to any other language? Or even switching to Pinyin (Latinized Chinese)? No. Once again, the factors are entirely sociological - there are no inherent characteristics of English that helped it spread, instead its ubiquitousness is caused by the culture and political powers its associated with.