English is the PHP of languages. Good enough to solve your problem, and easy to understand, but not really elegant (and not without its quirks).
And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve.
And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers. (Japanese systems had support for Katakana later, Cyrilic wouldn't be so complicated and Arabic probably would have been harder, Korean would be hard and Kanji would just be plainly impossible in 8-bit systems)
I'd say JavaScript. PHP is a language that is used privately but JavaScript is the common language used publicly that everybody has to know regardless of your backend (native) language.
> And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve.
To be fair, they really don't have any effect on language as it's actually used. French people still say 'le week-end', despite how much the Académie raves about it. They still often drop the 'ne' in negative sentences as well, despite it being standard. Academies really only affect the written standards of a language, not how it's actually used daily.
> And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers.
Except movable type printing was available in China from the 11th century onwards, and solely printed the Hanzi [1]. And, likewise, if the other technology had been designed in China, it's likely support would have first existed for the Hanzi over the Latinate Alphabet. It's not really an intrinsic advantage as much a matter of coincidence on where things were developed.
"Although the Chinese were using woodblock printing many centuries earlier, with a complete printed book, made in 868, found in a cave in north-west China, movable type printing never became very popular in the East due to the importance of calligraphy, the complexity of hand-written Chinese and the large number of characters. Gutenberg’s press, however, was well suited to the European writing system, and its development was heavily influenced by the area from which it came."
It's more an issue of culture than anything. They preferred calligraphy, so not many things were done with moveable type (which did exist in China before Europe; it wasn't just woodblock printing). That said, there were still plenty of reports, up to the 19th century, of how widely things were printed and how cheaply they were available in China.
The bigger issue is what the culture valued more than anything.
The Gutenberg system used lead to cast the letters. As they wore down, they were easily remelted and recast. If you visit the Gutenberg museum in Mainz, they show how this works. It was a critical part of making the printing process efficient.
I don't know about French, but when I learned Danish in school we were definitely impacted by the standards body on the Danish language.
Sure, it doesn't change things overnight, but generation by generation these standard bodies can slowly but steadily push how grammar is taught in school and what language the is used in the media.
Yes, it impacts the standard that you will be taught in schools and hear on the media, as well as what you should use in formal situations. But, outside of the higher registers, it really doesn't impact it at all.
People rarely speak the standard as a native language, and we're much more likely to pick up our language from our peer group and parents. This does, of course, change with higher educated people, who are more used to using a higher register [1] of language that more closely follows the standard.
Also, not everyone speaks like they write; writing really should be divorced from language when talking about language change and such, as it's generally not indicative of how people talk since they're following set standards that are explicitly learnt, unlike language which is acquired naturally.
Since we're discussing language, I see this prefixed on several comments these days when the comment has nothing to do with "being fair". Its just added to a statement when making a counter point to not come across as hostile.
You're right; I'm definitely guilty of using it myself like that quite often (as above). It's mentioned in Collin's Dictionary [1] as well as in Wiktionary [2] as a replacement for 'in fairness' [3].
And maybe due to the fact that it didn't have a "standards body" (like the Académie Française) and much less "protection" than others meant it was more free to evolve.
And not only that, I suppose languages based on the latin alphabet have an intrinsic advantage. From the time of the printing press to the earliest 8-bit computers. (Japanese systems had support for Katakana later, Cyrilic wouldn't be so complicated and Arabic probably would have been harder, Korean would be hard and Kanji would just be plainly impossible in 8-bit systems)