Posted: May 24, 2011 5:29 am
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.