The best point that the article touches on is that English is a good "neutral" language for countries like Sudan and entities like the EU with many different languages spoken. There is a bit of a snowball effect where any language having the advantage of being spoken as a cross-cultural communication language further incentivizes learning that language for people wishing to communicate in that manner. I think such a universal language existing is good for the world, it's just somewhat unfair how such a language gets chosen. English is an adaptable language, but I think much more importantly, English has been native language of one superpower or another for the past 200 years
I completely understand how someone would feel attacked by the fact that their children or grandchildren may not fluently speak the same language due to the influence of English. But at the same time, though the author somewhat dismisses it, this seems pretty nationalistic - though we shouldn't ignore that promoting English due to chauvinistic nationalism is just as silly.
I do think in the end, people will glad if in X*100 years the vast majority of the world will be able to communicate with each other in one language. The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination
I'm a native (British) English speaker, and I actually can find it quite hard to communicate with non-native speakers, because they don't understand my accent. It's not particularly strong as British accents go (nothing like Glaswegian or Geordie for example), but it really caused problems when I moved to a research group which was made up of primarily English-as-a-second-language speakers. The other thing I found was that while their speaking ability was good, their written grammar was generally poor; I'm the resident proof reader in each of the places I've worked.
Many of the people spoke what is apparently described as 'Euro-English' which has many borrowed phrases from other languages, or what native English speakers would see as mistakes but which are relatively easy to understand between non-native speakers.
I’m a British native that works almost entirely with people with English as their second language, mostly remotely. To be effective you need to adapt your language and accent to fit the global English style, and adapt to individual dialects on a country by country basis. It seems a little counter intuitive, but English is genuinely a global language and not owned by the English anymore, so it’s important to adapt to fit that if you want to be understood.
US native here, so perhaps I'm just failing to see past the absence of leftovers from Noah Webster's efforts to violently excise any evidence of French influence from the language, but, to me, Southern English English seems about right for that description.
I'd say that it's basically just the lowest common denominator of English. Imagine an English where any accent is acceptable as long as you're consistent and any regional vocabulary is okay so long as it's well known (e.g. either "torch" or "flashlight" is okay, "soda" is okay but "pop" is not). You then have "global" English.
I’m American and I certainly don’t think “torch” to mean flashlight is well-known. The overwhelming majority of people in the US would not understand it.
Tolerance towards misuse of tense/plural, would be my guess. For example, oral Chinese doesn't distinguish between He/She/It, so we often mis{gender} people during conversation, though under the right context, it is clear what actual meaning is thus isn't really blocking effective conversation, but is not correct either.
I guess that does say something about English being a "good" international language. Native speakers, too, often have extremely hard time understanding foreign accents and even some "almost-native" accents; mutual understanding is an even more difficult problem for non-native speakers. This has to do with the unusual character of English vowels compared to the "continental" languages. For example, if you hear an English speaker read Latin, you would never guess it is Latin: the "say it right" guides tell one to pronounce 'e' as 'ay' etc.
I wonder if "Singlish" is the future. It's a dialect of English spoken in Singapore, but due to the Chinese influence, it is sometimes stripped of all tenses, for example.
The opposite extreme happens too, many English/Australians have trouble distinguishing Canadian and American accents (especially North-eastern US). Conversely Americans may have trouble distinguishing New Zealand and Australian accents.
I don't think there is such thing as Euro-English, but a French-English, Spanish-English, Dutch-English, because every non-native speaker will make grammar/vocab/pronunciation mistakes depending on his/her primary language.
as Americans, my wife and I laugh when we watch British TV shows because we can't understand half of what they are saying. Fortunately we have a DVR so we can repeat things 4 or 5 times to figure it out.
"The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination"
These things choose language, geography, and culture for virtually everyone on the globe. The entirety of the Americas south of the US border speak the languages they do because of the rape and genocide of their ancestors on a colossal scale.
Hell, English itself was borne out of repeated conquests, first the Celts, then the Romans, then the Anglo-Saxons, then the Normans.
Trying to disentangle yourself from the brutality of history is a losing battle.
>The entirety of the Americas south of the US border speak the languages they do because of the rape and genocide of their ancestors on a colossal scale.
Binary is the universal language of classic computers based on electromagnetic physics.
Assuming quantum computing or some other unforeseen technology doesn’t replace other forms of computing then we will likely all be relying on binary in one way or another.
Isn’t that like saying pressure waves are the universal spoken language, so it doesn’t matter if English wins, it’s all pressure waves at the end of the day.
Google translate does a just about acceptable job on Indo European languages. Diverge a little further and it often descends into comically poor.
One of the most enjoyable things I used to find about travel was experiencing and dipping into other cultures and trying out a little local language picked up from phrase books etc. These days people seem to prefer practising their English on me as I'm a native English speaker.
I miss those global differences more and more as everyone adopts English and global brands.
Google translate is really bad. Greek to English is terrible plainly. German to English the same -- was trying to prove a point about the meaning of a phrase and speed typed skipping umlaut. To this day I am not sure what the inference is to result in such a distant translation if you forget a single Umlaut. Every time I have to correct a friend's/family's work that used Google translate I facepalm. I suggest people learn to use dictionaries again (type of dictionary depends on application).
I wouldn't trust my life on Google translate, i.e. while traveling.
Native German speakers do not usually forget umlauts (since they are separate keys) and so Google translate won't have the necessary training data to robustly handle German without umlauts. The output appears as gibberish because the language model can't distinguish the input from gibberish. That becomes more obvious if you intentionally input nonsense: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=35120
True. However, I claim Google translate is a lot of times used by non-conversant level German speakers, who don't have the right layout. I would expect Google translate to be trained somewhat adversarially. Example:
"Ich werde Bücher lesen" translates just fine. If we skip the Umlaut Google translate "forgets" the meaning of books. If we change the tense to present everything translates just fine.
Probably because it doesn't have full official status at the EU. Google has a ton of data for EU languages because documents have to be translated between them all.
It's an official language, but not a full _working_ language, something which seems to be slated to change within the next few years.
In my personal opinion, however, knowing the quality of "Irish" [1] that the translators will have, is that it still won't really help translation all that much if you wish to actually communicate with native speakers.
[1] There's a huge rift forming in Irish between the "Gaelscoilis" or "Urban Irish" that is learnt and passed on by non-native speakers and that which is passed on in the traditional areas. Unfortunately, there's also a lack of communication between the two areas, partly because they struggle to understand each other; natives from the traditional area often have to translate the non-traditional speakers' Irish to English in order to understand the meaning, for instance.
There's also the fact that the people creating the legal terms for the language often don't really have a firm grasp on the history or nuances of various words or the language, and are often themselves not native speakers. This led to a funny incident where they translated "dental hygienist" as "toothed hygienist" in the official dictionary of new terms. It's also likely to lead to a "Neo-Irish" that is completely divorced from the language as used in the Gaeltachtaí (traditional speaking areas); one linguist has even gone so far as to say it'll be "Irish in English drag", which looks truer and truer when you look at the errors they make and pass on.
I hope this will not be the case, because it would be yet another way in which we'd become dependent on computers and would be royally fucked if skynet would happen. Which probably wouldn't be too unrealistic if computers are smart enough to really understand and translate human languages with all their nuances and concepts like wordplays, humor and sarcasm.
I completely understand how someone would feel attacked by the fact that their children or grandchildren may not fluently speak the same language due to the influence of English. But at the same time, though the author somewhat dismisses it, this seems pretty nationalistic - though we shouldn't ignore that promoting English due to chauvinistic nationalism is just as silly.
I do think in the end, people will glad if in X*100 years the vast majority of the world will be able to communicate with each other in one language. The main unfairness is that the way that language was chosen (assuming it is English) was through militaristic and economic domination