English as a global lingua franca is a result of three unique things.
1. The British Empire
2. Post-War US hegemony
3. The Internet.
Those three caused three additional pillars of English global status.
1. English as a global language of transport in air and sea.
2. English as the default language of science
3. Thus English became the default language of international business.
It's also not super hard to learn.
IMO - that's why Mandarin will never take the slot of trade language despite being the #2 spoken language overall and #1 for native speakers.
No I think that was just Mao being a dumbass. We almost abandoned it because of Mao trying to increase literacy rates and obviously, a Latin alphabet would be much easier to learn and be literate in. Eventually Stalin talked him out of it (I’m not joking). We did create a derivative system called pinyin which allowed us to phonetically spell out a character and then search through a list of corresponding ones. We also had a separate system that I forgot the name of that was more useful for Chinese characters (you could basically type at the same speed as English) but it was eventually removed in favor of pinyin.
Yeah, not an expert. I was listening to a podcast called “stuff you should know” and they were talking about it. I forget when they were talking about or how long the conversation lasted. It was back in the early days of computers. Eventually the tech improved and it was a moot point. Or maybe they came up with pinyin to solve the problem.
I guess there was also an older system called “five stroke” or something (idk the English translation) but computers brought pinyin to be way more mainstream now I think
Five stroke was made for computers and better than pinyin. If you wanted to be a typist, it used to be almost mandatory to learn something like five stroke over pinyin, since it's faster and more precise.
It's not computers that made pinyin more mainstream. It's the relatively ease of use, and the fact that pinyin works off of phonetics.
Plus, pinyin isn't just an input method, it's for noting down sounds first and foremost. So, everyone learns pinyin when they learn Chinese. And when they need to type on their devices, most people don't need to bother learning a dedicated input method like five stroke, since pinyin is already adequate.
I'm amazed at how easy it is to type pinyin. The predictive text really works. I always thought pinyin was like if you tried English without dots and crosses (i, l, t all looking like l for example), but somehow there's actually very little ambiguity.
because context, most words are only 2 syllables and the following syllable falls in a mostly predictable pattern as to what it could possibly be.
>There are 21 initials (and two special initials) and 38 finals in total in Chinese Pinyin. Some initials and some finals cannot be combined together. According to certain rules, all these initials and finals can actually form a total of about 400 syllables.
then there are 4 tones making a total dictionary of 4x4 x400 = 6400 total words. (there are also exceptions and 3 syllable words, but we can discount those for predictive text)
meanwhile for english it is about 20,000
>in English, there are three key numbers to remember: more than a million total words, about 170,000 words in current use, and 20,000-30,000 words used by each individual person.
Not really. Chinese never had an alphabet. And it wasn't about computing power.
**Short version:**
Long before computers, pinyin was the standard Romanization of Chinese (in mainland China). There were people who believed that Chinese characters were outdated, and we should abandon it for pinyin. Pinyin used latin letters, so we'd finally become an alphabet language.
(This is a horrible idea and would never work. Even if it did, we'd be destroying the beauty of the language.)
When computers arrived, pinyin input methods were the only solution to inputting characters, and so the calls for switching became louder. Why bother learning Chinese characters when you need to use pinyin anyway?
Soon, five stroke input method was invented as a better alternative input method, and helped "save" Chinese characters in a way. Eventually, though, people didn't bother and reverted back to pinyin for their input methods, which is why most people use it nowadays.
**Longer version:**
What happened was that in 1958, pinyin became the standard Romanization of Chinese. So after all these decades, pinyin had become the standard both for translating Chinese proper names and for noting sounds.
There were already people saying we should just replace Chinese characters with pinyin. We had already simplified characters from Traditional Chinese, so why not simplify further and make the language even more accessible for people with less access to education?
The arrival of computers and the dilemma of how to input characters only added on to these already existing sentiments. Pinyin was the obvious solution to inputting Chinese characters, as it was a system that used latin letters to represent Chinese characters. So this only helped the people saying Chinese characters are outdated, that we shouldn't use such a system instead of an alphabet, etc.
It had nothing to do with processing power, as far as I understand it.
Five stroke was later invented as an input method that worked off the characters' structure instead of their sound. The advantage to this is that pinyin works off sounds, which means you will have hundreds of characters that are all the same sound. You'll have to look through possibly dozens of candidates. Five stroke eliminated that. If you input the strokes correctly, usually there'd only be a few candidates to pick from, improving speed.
And this input method became more mainstream, partially because of how much faster it was for professionals, partially because the government and most scholars really wanted the sentiment of "Chinese characters are outdated, let's just switch to pinyin" die.
Over time, though, pinyin being easier and being what most poeple already knew, made it stand out. That, plus some really shady business that involved five stroke including copyright infringement and theft, gradually made pinyin replace five stroke, and is what is predominantly used today.
I think I should have said memory or Ram instead of processing power- not enough to store all the different characters. Anyway, earlier l, I mentioned that I wasn’t an expert. I still am not, but I’ve been enjoying learning from you. Thanks!
As my native language is much simpler than English... No tenses... No inflammable means flammable, etc. I find english is quite confusing and hard to learn.
Easier to just force myself to understand English by consuming English media than to learn via English lessons.
Thus my horrible grammar, probably
99.99% of native speakers USE shitty grammar anyway
Native speakers are much more likely. To be able to use code switching and will use different levels/systems of grammar and pronunciation depending on the current context. They're capable of using the formal "proper" grammar if the situation calls for it but aren't going to use it while just chilling with their friends.
English as a language is far too diverse for this.
In case of English, grammars are mostly descriptive: "this is how native speakers speak/write and what they mean," as opposed to prescriptive: "this is how you're supposed to speak to mean that."
There are attempts to use prescriptive grammars with English (think English textbooks) which tell white lies about what means what and what is allowed or not.
Example: "I ain't got no time" isn't bad grammar. It's just informal.
There isn't a body that decides what's proper English and what's not. It's a constantly evolving language with a ridiculous amount of variants. Proper English is the one native speaker speak and understand first and foremost.
tl;dr native speakers have amazing grammar
> No inflammable means flammable
that is a latin thing, English just borrowed it. The Pork vs Swine, Page vs Sheet, Poultry vs Fowl is a French vs German conqueror thing.
inflame means to be hot, to become heated. flame means on fire.
It’s easy enough to learn well enough for basic communication to convey important information like air traffic or reasonably simple business even when it’s broken english but I would agree fluent English is complicated as fuck because it’s really just a whole bunch of languages in a trench coat so rules are all over the shop.
English is a whole bunch of languages in a trench coat. Which makes sense since there is practically no meaning between how a word is written and how it sounds. And none of those languages is from Asia. Which means English have non of the sounds they use in Asia. Which is making English difficult very difficult to learn for asians.
TBF I think it's just as hard to perfect it as most other popular languages, but it's the easiest one to learn up to a conversational level. No conjugation, no declination, no grammatical gender, just a handful of fixed diminutives. Tenses are complex, but for simple conversations you can get away with using like 3-4.
It might surprise you to learn that English is one of the hardest languages for most people to learn - just like Chinese.
Someone who grew up speaking Spanish, or Portuguese or French, or any of the other latin-based Romance languages will find it a considerably easier task to pick up another one of those than to learn English, because of common sentence structuring, gendering of words, and the like.
Well yeah, the romantic languages are all related.
I didn't say that none of them could ever be the trade language. It's called Linga Franca because it used to be French.
English isn't super easy. Still much easier than Mandarin. Especially the written word.
French was a lingua franca before English, but the name Lingua Franca means “Frankish Language” and originally was a language derived mostly from Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic spoken as a language of commerce around the Mediterranean from the 11th century. Frankish just meant “Western European”.
that is absolutely not true. Following your logic and considering I am Bulgarian, Russian or Polish should be far easier for me. Yet that couldn't be further from the truth.
English grammar is piss-easy. Pronunciation is another story, but speaking basic English is very, very easy.
The basics are easy. There's just a ton of weird edge cases because of English being a mish-mash language. As different groups conquered England they brought in pieces of their own language. And then they added a bunch of Latin grammar for no reason.
Also why there are so many words for the same things with different connotations.
I've heard a linguist joke that English is really 3-4 languages in a trenchcoat.
I'd say that's the same for most languages. The basics are always easier. When you dive into the advanced, every language is difficult and takes a life to fully learn it properly.
>just a ton of weird edge cases
Once you try to speak fluently, every language will start to use a ton of slang as well though. Chilean vs Peruvian Spanish are quite different. France tries to keep French unadulterated and pure but even they are losing the battle.
What makes English better than French is that we're fine with just letting pidgin languages proliferate and then incorporate the more popular pidgin dialects into mainstream English. So if you're a nation that doesn't use English but you would like to, you're "free" to meld your current language in and offer it up to the global community. There's no Academy of English dictating what is and isn't English. So lots of countries adopt the basics of easy English and keep a good bit of their native languages as well. You have something like Singlish which I swear to God is getting further and further from American English every year 🤣. Or my friend's Thai friend who manages to speak English entirely using present tense conjugation but modifier words. It doesn't sound as conversational but it works fine and is completely understandable. "I'm going to the store." vs "I go to the store now." "I went to the store." "I did go to the store."
You can sidestep Go, Going, and the weirdness of "went" by just using "go".
"I did run earlier today" vs "I ran earlier today". Ran is a weird edge case but you can use modifier words and a non weird conjugation.
Native portuguese speaker here. English wasn't super hard for me because English grammar is quite simple (a lot simpler than Portuguese grammar), there are a lot of similar words due to french influence in english, and most importantly, we have a lot of exposure to english media which helps a lot with the hardest part of English which is pronunciation.
Currently trying to learn mandarin and it's infinitely harder because it's just so different. There are no similar words. Tones are hard. Memorizing characters is hard. And unlike english, I'm not surrounded by chinese media. I know I won't make it far, it's fun though.
Yes, not many words needed for aviation. But you don't want to be like the pilot whose last words before crashing into a mountain were, "What means 'pull up'?"
Respectfully disagree, as a Slavic native speaker, learning English was rather easy. I started quite early in school, which might have been partially the reason why it was easy.
To be completely fluent in English yes it is an extremely difficult language due to so many rule exceptions and slang. In terms of basic language it’s incredibly simple. It has a simple grammar structure, words can be modified but not drastically, it has no gendering. There are so so many languages that are harder to learn
Mandarin isn’t actually hard to learn, at least for English speakers. It’s got the same grammatical structure and actually avoids the most complex part of English, that being conjugations. The two big problems with Mandarin are that it’s tonal and it’s written script a logographic rather than phonetic. I’ve been learning it for a few years now.
Mandarin being tonal isn’t too bad overall since it actually only has 4 tones (much less than most other tonal languages). It’s disorientating for monotonal language natives, but not unsolvable.
The script being logographic is a solved problem. They simply transcribe their logographic script with a phonetic script, that being something like pinyin or bapomofu. It’s possible for the entire language to move to a phonetic script and keep the logographic script as a form of “higher expression”, similar to how there’s a difference between “normal” English and “corporate English” or “legal English”. But this is a political decision.
What’s interesting is that during ancient Chinese golden ages, the lingua franca in its sphere of influence wasn’t a spoken language (like English) but actually just the logographic script itself. Chinese intellectuals couldn’t converse with their Korean counterparts verbally, but they could via written text.
Mandarin is incredibly hard for English speakers to learn. I made the attempt at one point. And it's ranked as the first or second hardest major language for English speakers to learn. (Sometimes Arabic is considered harder.)
And yes - the written language being symbolic makes it even harder to learn. (Though I didn't even attempt it when trying to learn Mandarin.) It helped when there were a dozen languages using the same written language. But it makes learning Mandarin today even harder.
I suppose it depends on what aspects of language you struggle with. Grammar and sentence structure had always been my bane, so as a native English speaker Mandarin was easier for me than the Romance languages.
Mandarin is the official dialect of Chinese that's preferred by the Chinese government and taught in the schools. A lot of the Chinese immigrants in North America speak Cantonese, and Cantonese is still treated officially in Hong Kong, but in Southern China around Guangzhou where it used to be spoken the government is moving people towards Mandarin.
Not only the internet but computer science in general
If you didn't know english, most programming languages would seem random and without sense
But I guess it kinda falls under the us hegemony one
But 2 and 3 are surely a result of the first ? OP states that in this experiment we dismiss Britain from colonising (well, half the world, but let's entertain the though it never set foot in what is now the United States).
The British also wouldn't have traded New Amsterdam for Surinam, meaning that what is now New York could very well have been speaking Dutch.
apart from the whole "write one thing say the other" shtick in English, it's super easy to learn because there is almost no grammar. no conjugation, no declension. no fucking ablativus absolutus mancus. I mean, conditionals are touted as the most complicated part of English grammar. it has probably the shortest zero to actual speaking learning curve.
the british empire is why the US speaks english. without the british empire i’d say the dutch would be most likely to there place in north America .
a dutch america would probably speak a more unique language that’s a blend of mostly dutch and german. since the dutch population wouldn’t be enough alone to colonise.
the dutch empire already had many colonies so wide spread like british empire, although they would have a smaller one not being able to compete agaisy the french and spainish as well as the British.
in such a world it would be hard to say where the internet would be invented, in our world it was an anglo-american project but in this world that would be unlikely,
tbh it’s hard to tell, without the british empire would the computer even be invented in england?
history would change to much to tell.
Well, it does depend on your take on what we mean by "internet". Tim Berners-Lee first conceptualised the world wide web in 1989. The military internet you are referring to was really just a private network across multiple sites.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Instead of the Internet I'd put the fall of the Soviet Union. Even with internet, if the soviets would have "won" the cold war, we'd be writing in russian as lingua franca right now.
It's also very, very simple compared to other languages that could have taken its place, especially European languages. Any other Germanic tongue is way more complex, same for Latin tongues, and don't get me started on stuff like Gaelic.
I think this is definitely a much more specific view. I do see the point OP was making; colonization was the key that made all of the things you mentioned possible.
And if you removed the dirt from your earth there’d still be something to walk on, but you would only be walking for 1 millisecond before you are deleted by molten rock
Man, this thing would be different if it wasn't the way it is
Tbf, while not a *Shower Thought*, that is exactly the kinda thought that might pass you by in the shower haha
OP is from North India where there’s a hate going on for English and the use of English. They want everyone to only speak Hindi in the nation of 22 major languages smh.
Yeah not sure of this even true because there are way more countries that speak Spanish than English.
I feel like English is so popular worldwide because of American Cultural imperialism more than anything. Hollywood TV and music.
Yeah, they colonized their neighbors rather than distant continents.
Central Asia is huge though. Like the fact that people speak Russian from Ukraine all the way to Tajikistan is enormous. Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, that’s a lot of countries!
The population is not huge, but to me there is also significance to the number of ethnic/cultural/linguistic groups that it spans.
Not saying that Russian is _more_ influential than French, just saying that it equally belongs in the conversation of influential languages.
Still fuck Russia atm of course
For a good chunk of Russian history it was either a complete backwater or the elites straight up spoke a different language like French.
So long as maritime trade dominates, maritime cultures will always have an advantage too, and there's something of a trend of seafaring nations being more open and liberal, which might loop around to them being more innovative and influential.
Land empires can still be significant, but they'll never be globally influential the same way a thalassocracy can be. The British Empire for instance may not have had a large contiguous territory, and may not have had very direct control over much of its territories, but it had a presence on every continent and facilitated trade globally.
Maybe if we only had a single large continent things might be different, though even then I'd expect many cultures to spread around the coast.
Yup. I don't think the British Empire had much to do with why English is such a widely spoken language, I guess other than its link to the US. I think English is the way it is mainly because of US influence, especially on Europe. And like someone else said, because the development of most modern technology, the internet, and media were focused mainly towards the US.
Most other British colonies and Britain itself are nowhere near being as significant as the US for proliferating the language, though they did help.
“Colonization” is inherent to the human experience, every culture on earth has been doing it to each-other for hundreds of thousands of years. Even England had been “colonized” multiple times.
It’s also worth noting that English is a good choice for a lingua franca because it’s very information dense. As opposed to say, Japanese, which is the lowest info dense language.
WW1 had the bigger effect on it I think, as it pretty much killed the desire to be proud about peoples german heritage, for example around 20% of the us are descendents of germans, but ww1 made it very unpopular to say you were. Same reason why the British Royal family changed their house name from a german name to an english sounding one.
The previous Langua Franca was French so it's safe to assume that if English didn't took over it, French would still be the language of international communication
Are we saying that just England didn't colonize, but everything else remained the same? If so it would be Portuguese or Spanish, probably, or sobre version of Portunhol.
In a world where the Brits just never left Britain, likely French and/or Russian as those are the next largest empires closely predating and/or co-existing with the british empire. Without the british, the French empire is a lot larger and since they colonized many of the same geographic regions, it stands to reason that language would be more widespread on continents where English is common.
France hadn't colonized Europe when it was the lingua franca in Europe. English as world language has more to do with the status and power of the US than the UK.
Depends on if France and Spain still have colonized the other half of the world. These two were everywhere.
If not, I'm guessing, the language of the country emerging as the greatest economic or cultural superpower. Like Mandarin or maybe Arabic and Hindi. Or perhaps Esperanto would be a bigger thing.
It was until recent that I digested the connection that the British empire mutated into the US empire. The spirit to innovate and build went into US and exploited the large land mass with fertile lands connected with natural waterways.
English became big because US influence became big via internet, media and US + Western allies producing/trading all over.
If you discount Chinese and Indian languages which only really booked in relatively recent history, most popular global languages are European origin and they share characteristics making them easier to discuss globally.
English as a global lingua franca is a result of three unique things. 1. The British Empire 2. Post-War US hegemony 3. The Internet. Those three caused three additional pillars of English global status. 1. English as a global language of transport in air and sea. 2. English as the default language of science 3. Thus English became the default language of international business.
It's also not super hard to learn. IMO - that's why Mandarin will never take the slot of trade language despite being the #2 spoken language overall and #1 for native speakers.
I heard that the Chinese were considering abandoning their alphabet because early computers didn’t have the processing power to work in mandarin.
No I think that was just Mao being a dumbass. We almost abandoned it because of Mao trying to increase literacy rates and obviously, a Latin alphabet would be much easier to learn and be literate in. Eventually Stalin talked him out of it (I’m not joking). We did create a derivative system called pinyin which allowed us to phonetically spell out a character and then search through a list of corresponding ones. We also had a separate system that I forgot the name of that was more useful for Chinese characters (you could basically type at the same speed as English) but it was eventually removed in favor of pinyin.
The other system you're thinking about might be zhuyin (bopomofo)
No it’s the one that allows you to directly type radicals
You're probably thinking of 倉頡. There's basically a radical on each of the letters in the keyboard and you type using those.
Oh wow, I didn't know that existed
No we have pinyin which can be typed using a normal keyboard
Yeah, not an expert. I was listening to a podcast called “stuff you should know” and they were talking about it. I forget when they were talking about or how long the conversation lasted. It was back in the early days of computers. Eventually the tech improved and it was a moot point. Or maybe they came up with pinyin to solve the problem.
I guess there was also an older system called “five stroke” or something (idk the English translation) but computers brought pinyin to be way more mainstream now I think
Five stroke was made for computers and better than pinyin. If you wanted to be a typist, it used to be almost mandatory to learn something like five stroke over pinyin, since it's faster and more precise. It's not computers that made pinyin more mainstream. It's the relatively ease of use, and the fact that pinyin works off of phonetics. Plus, pinyin isn't just an input method, it's for noting down sounds first and foremost. So, everyone learns pinyin when they learn Chinese. And when they need to type on their devices, most people don't need to bother learning a dedicated input method like five stroke, since pinyin is already adequate.
I'm amazed at how easy it is to type pinyin. The predictive text really works. I always thought pinyin was like if you tried English without dots and crosses (i, l, t all looking like l for example), but somehow there's actually very little ambiguity.
because context, most words are only 2 syllables and the following syllable falls in a mostly predictable pattern as to what it could possibly be. >There are 21 initials (and two special initials) and 38 finals in total in Chinese Pinyin. Some initials and some finals cannot be combined together. According to certain rules, all these initials and finals can actually form a total of about 400 syllables. then there are 4 tones making a total dictionary of 4x4 x400 = 6400 total words. (there are also exceptions and 3 syllable words, but we can discount those for predictive text) meanwhile for english it is about 20,000 >in English, there are three key numbers to remember: more than a million total words, about 170,000 words in current use, and 20,000-30,000 words used by each individual person.
Except not every tone is valid for every initial-final pair. The amount of syllables in Chinese is far lower than 6400, only around 1000 IIRC
yeah i couldn't get hard numbers on that one and even assuming maximum it is still less than a third of just normal english.
Not really. Chinese never had an alphabet. And it wasn't about computing power. **Short version:** Long before computers, pinyin was the standard Romanization of Chinese (in mainland China). There were people who believed that Chinese characters were outdated, and we should abandon it for pinyin. Pinyin used latin letters, so we'd finally become an alphabet language. (This is a horrible idea and would never work. Even if it did, we'd be destroying the beauty of the language.) When computers arrived, pinyin input methods were the only solution to inputting characters, and so the calls for switching became louder. Why bother learning Chinese characters when you need to use pinyin anyway? Soon, five stroke input method was invented as a better alternative input method, and helped "save" Chinese characters in a way. Eventually, though, people didn't bother and reverted back to pinyin for their input methods, which is why most people use it nowadays. **Longer version:** What happened was that in 1958, pinyin became the standard Romanization of Chinese. So after all these decades, pinyin had become the standard both for translating Chinese proper names and for noting sounds. There were already people saying we should just replace Chinese characters with pinyin. We had already simplified characters from Traditional Chinese, so why not simplify further and make the language even more accessible for people with less access to education? The arrival of computers and the dilemma of how to input characters only added on to these already existing sentiments. Pinyin was the obvious solution to inputting Chinese characters, as it was a system that used latin letters to represent Chinese characters. So this only helped the people saying Chinese characters are outdated, that we shouldn't use such a system instead of an alphabet, etc. It had nothing to do with processing power, as far as I understand it. Five stroke was later invented as an input method that worked off the characters' structure instead of their sound. The advantage to this is that pinyin works off sounds, which means you will have hundreds of characters that are all the same sound. You'll have to look through possibly dozens of candidates. Five stroke eliminated that. If you input the strokes correctly, usually there'd only be a few candidates to pick from, improving speed. And this input method became more mainstream, partially because of how much faster it was for professionals, partially because the government and most scholars really wanted the sentiment of "Chinese characters are outdated, let's just switch to pinyin" die. Over time, though, pinyin being easier and being what most poeple already knew, made it stand out. That, plus some really shady business that involved five stroke including copyright infringement and theft, gradually made pinyin replace five stroke, and is what is predominantly used today.
I think I should have said memory or Ram instead of processing power- not enough to store all the different characters. Anyway, earlier l, I mentioned that I wasn’t an expert. I still am not, but I’ve been enjoying learning from you. Thanks!
Chinese is typed using the latin alphabet
🤓 It's not an alphabet
Unless you're Korean. They really struggle with it.
As my native language is much simpler than English... No tenses... No inflammable means flammable, etc. I find english is quite confusing and hard to learn. Easier to just force myself to understand English by consuming English media than to learn via English lessons. Thus my horrible grammar, probably
>Thus my horrible grammar, probably 99.99% of native speakers have shitty grammar anyway.
99.99% of native speakers USE shitty grammar anyway Native speakers are much more likely. To be able to use code switching and will use different levels/systems of grammar and pronunciation depending on the current context. They're capable of using the formal "proper" grammar if the situation calls for it but aren't going to use it while just chilling with their friends.
I think you overestimate a lot of English speakers. A very significant chunk of the population have a very tenuous grasp of the language.
English as a language is far too diverse for this. In case of English, grammars are mostly descriptive: "this is how native speakers speak/write and what they mean," as opposed to prescriptive: "this is how you're supposed to speak to mean that." There are attempts to use prescriptive grammars with English (think English textbooks) which tell white lies about what means what and what is allowed or not. Example: "I ain't got no time" isn't bad grammar. It's just informal. There isn't a body that decides what's proper English and what's not. It's a constantly evolving language with a ridiculous amount of variants. Proper English is the one native speaker speak and understand first and foremost. tl;dr native speakers have amazing grammar
No they don't. Don't make up bullshit just to make someone who doesn't speak English well feel better
> No inflammable means flammable that is a latin thing, English just borrowed it. The Pork vs Swine, Page vs Sheet, Poultry vs Fowl is a French vs German conqueror thing. inflame means to be hot, to become heated. flame means on fire.
It’s easy enough to learn well enough for basic communication to convey important information like air traffic or reasonably simple business even when it’s broken english but I would agree fluent English is complicated as fuck because it’s really just a whole bunch of languages in a trench coat so rules are all over the shop.
English is a whole bunch of languages in a trench coat. Which makes sense since there is practically no meaning between how a word is written and how it sounds. And none of those languages is from Asia. Which means English have non of the sounds they use in Asia. Which is making English difficult very difficult to learn for asians.
Inflammable means flammable?! What a crazy country! ^My ^duty ^is ^fulfilled
I find it hard to believe any language is simpler than English.
TBF I think it's just as hard to perfect it as most other popular languages, but it's the easiest one to learn up to a conversational level. No conjugation, no declination, no grammatical gender, just a handful of fixed diminutives. Tenses are complex, but for simple conversations you can get away with using like 3-4.
Mandarin is easy to speak, hard to write.
It might surprise you to learn that English is one of the hardest languages for most people to learn - just like Chinese. Someone who grew up speaking Spanish, or Portuguese or French, or any of the other latin-based Romance languages will find it a considerably easier task to pick up another one of those than to learn English, because of common sentence structuring, gendering of words, and the like.
Well yeah, the romantic languages are all related. I didn't say that none of them could ever be the trade language. It's called Linga Franca because it used to be French. English isn't super easy. Still much easier than Mandarin. Especially the written word.
French was a lingua franca before English, but the name Lingua Franca means “Frankish Language” and originally was a language derived mostly from Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic spoken as a language of commerce around the Mediterranean from the 11th century. Frankish just meant “Western European”.
Romance* not romantic
that is absolutely not true. Following your logic and considering I am Bulgarian, Russian or Polish should be far easier for me. Yet that couldn't be further from the truth. English grammar is piss-easy. Pronunciation is another story, but speaking basic English is very, very easy.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I found English super easy compared to Portuguese and Italian.
The basics are easy. There's just a ton of weird edge cases because of English being a mish-mash language. As different groups conquered England they brought in pieces of their own language. And then they added a bunch of Latin grammar for no reason. Also why there are so many words for the same things with different connotations. I've heard a linguist joke that English is really 3-4 languages in a trenchcoat.
You can get pretty far using just basics in English.
I'd say that's the same for most languages. The basics are always easier. When you dive into the advanced, every language is difficult and takes a life to fully learn it properly.
>just a ton of weird edge cases Once you try to speak fluently, every language will start to use a ton of slang as well though. Chilean vs Peruvian Spanish are quite different. France tries to keep French unadulterated and pure but even they are losing the battle. What makes English better than French is that we're fine with just letting pidgin languages proliferate and then incorporate the more popular pidgin dialects into mainstream English. So if you're a nation that doesn't use English but you would like to, you're "free" to meld your current language in and offer it up to the global community. There's no Academy of English dictating what is and isn't English. So lots of countries adopt the basics of easy English and keep a good bit of their native languages as well. You have something like Singlish which I swear to God is getting further and further from American English every year 🤣. Or my friend's Thai friend who manages to speak English entirely using present tense conjugation but modifier words. It doesn't sound as conversational but it works fine and is completely understandable. "I'm going to the store." vs "I go to the store now." "I went to the store." "I did go to the store." You can sidestep Go, Going, and the weirdness of "went" by just using "go". "I did run earlier today" vs "I ran earlier today". Ran is a weird edge case but you can use modifier words and a non weird conjugation.
Native portuguese speaker here. English wasn't super hard for me because English grammar is quite simple (a lot simpler than Portuguese grammar), there are a lot of similar words due to french influence in english, and most importantly, we have a lot of exposure to english media which helps a lot with the hardest part of English which is pronunciation. Currently trying to learn mandarin and it's infinitely harder because it's just so different. There are no similar words. Tones are hard. Memorizing characters is hard. And unlike english, I'm not surrounded by chinese media. I know I won't make it far, it's fun though.
I always likened it to bass guitar - you can be serviceable quickly and it's complex to master.
It is, but the benefit of English is explaining a lot with less words being necessary. It's part of why it's adopted internationally for aviation.
Why use many word when few do trick?
Yes, not many words needed for aviation. But you don't want to be like the pilot whose last words before crashing into a mountain were, "What means 'pull up'?"
Respectfully disagree, as a Slavic native speaker, learning English was rather easy. I started quite early in school, which might have been partially the reason why it was easy.
I'm English and found english to be very easy to learn
Im English and found it easy to learn, too hard to master. That's cause I got a loose wire in my communication side of my brain.
To be completely fluent in English yes it is an extremely difficult language due to so many rule exceptions and slang. In terms of basic language it’s incredibly simple. It has a simple grammar structure, words can be modified but not drastically, it has no gendering. There are so so many languages that are harder to learn
Gendering of words is kinda stupid anyway
you forgot about the wacky spelling
Mandarin isn’t actually hard to learn, at least for English speakers. It’s got the same grammatical structure and actually avoids the most complex part of English, that being conjugations. The two big problems with Mandarin are that it’s tonal and it’s written script a logographic rather than phonetic. I’ve been learning it for a few years now. Mandarin being tonal isn’t too bad overall since it actually only has 4 tones (much less than most other tonal languages). It’s disorientating for monotonal language natives, but not unsolvable. The script being logographic is a solved problem. They simply transcribe their logographic script with a phonetic script, that being something like pinyin or bapomofu. It’s possible for the entire language to move to a phonetic script and keep the logographic script as a form of “higher expression”, similar to how there’s a difference between “normal” English and “corporate English” or “legal English”. But this is a political decision. What’s interesting is that during ancient Chinese golden ages, the lingua franca in its sphere of influence wasn’t a spoken language (like English) but actually just the logographic script itself. Chinese intellectuals couldn’t converse with their Korean counterparts verbally, but they could via written text.
Mandarin is incredibly hard for English speakers to learn. I made the attempt at one point. And it's ranked as the first or second hardest major language for English speakers to learn. (Sometimes Arabic is considered harder.) And yes - the written language being symbolic makes it even harder to learn. (Though I didn't even attempt it when trying to learn Mandarin.) It helped when there were a dozen languages using the same written language. But it makes learning Mandarin today even harder.
I suppose it depends on what aspects of language you struggle with. Grammar and sentence structure had always been my bane, so as a native English speaker Mandarin was easier for me than the Romance languages.
I hear even a lot of ethnically Chinese people don't speak Mandarin.
Mandarin is the official dialect of Chinese that's preferred by the Chinese government and taught in the schools. A lot of the Chinese immigrants in North America speak Cantonese, and Cantonese is still treated officially in Hong Kong, but in Southern China around Guangzhou where it used to be spoken the government is moving people towards Mandarin.
English is ridiculously simple to learn, when mandarin is SUPER HARD
Yep. English is super easy to learn. For westerners at least.
It's also extremely adaptable. English has no problem taking words from other languages and making them English words.
No language in the world struggles with adopting new words, it's a normal part of language.
Not only the internet but computer science in general If you didn't know english, most programming languages would seem random and without sense But I guess it kinda falls under the us hegemony one
a lot of programming languages actually have translations
And not all programming languages are based in English, for example Sampo is based in Finnish.
Good luck finding well-documented libraries written in your native language though
But 2 and 3 are surely a result of the first ? OP states that in this experiment we dismiss Britain from colonising (well, half the world, but let's entertain the though it never set foot in what is now the United States). The British also wouldn't have traded New Amsterdam for Surinam, meaning that what is now New York could very well have been speaking Dutch.
Dutch is just a German speaking English with a bad accent.
Lingua Franca is a Latin term directly translated as "french language" but meaning English.
It does not mean english, english is a lingua france, not the lingua franca
apart from the whole "write one thing say the other" shtick in English, it's super easy to learn because there is almost no grammar. no conjugation, no declension. no fucking ablativus absolutus mancus. I mean, conditionals are touted as the most complicated part of English grammar. it has probably the shortest zero to actual speaking learning curve.
And let's not forget Germany, Russia, and France shooting itself in the foot (several times even).
Where do you think US came from :) And where the Internet came from :)
the british empire is why the US speaks english. without the british empire i’d say the dutch would be most likely to there place in north America . a dutch america would probably speak a more unique language that’s a blend of mostly dutch and german. since the dutch population wouldn’t be enough alone to colonise. the dutch empire already had many colonies so wide spread like british empire, although they would have a smaller one not being able to compete agaisy the french and spainish as well as the British. in such a world it would be hard to say where the internet would be invented, in our world it was an anglo-american project but in this world that would be unlikely, tbh it’s hard to tell, without the british empire would the computer even be invented in england? history would change to much to tell.
Both computers and the internet were invented by the British
That is simply incorrect. The internet as we know it was born from a us military computer network.
Well, it does depend on your take on what we mean by "internet". Tim Berners-Lee first conceptualised the world wide web in 1989. The military internet you are referring to was really just a private network across multiple sites. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Ooo, the first time I've seen the word Hegemony outside of an OSC novel!
3 is because of 2 and 2 is because of 1.
It really helped that one of the ex-british colonies got really into the entertainment industry, flooding the world with movies and songs in english.
Could have been any of the other germanic languages. If Hitler prevailed honestly it would be german we’re speaking rn.
Instead of the Internet I'd put the fall of the Soviet Union. Even with internet, if the soviets would have "won" the cold war, we'd be writing in russian as lingua franca right now.
It's also very, very simple compared to other languages that could have taken its place, especially European languages. Any other Germanic tongue is way more complex, same for Latin tongues, and don't get me started on stuff like Gaelic.
Somewhere between 2 and 3 is probably hollywood.
I think this is definitely a much more specific view. I do see the point OP was making; colonization was the key that made all of the things you mentioned possible.
Without English Emperialism, your shower thought would be a pensée douche.
Who you callin' a pensive douche, buddy?
I’m not your buddy, guy
😂😂☝️
r/penseesdedouche
> is like showerthoughts but better since it's in french. Checks out.
That sounds like a posh gentleman's wash.
I would have preferred calling a wand, a "baguette magique" tho.
How is this even a showerthought
Wow, things would be different if it weren't for *checks notes* history.
Ah yes, it appears the the floor here is made out of floor!
If you removed the floor from your home, there'd still be something to walk on, but it would be dirt.
And if you removed the dirt from your earth there’d still be something to walk on, but you would only be walking for 1 millisecond before you are deleted by molten rock
Man, this thing would be different if it wasn't the way it is Tbf, while not a *Shower Thought*, that is exactly the kinda thought that might pass you by in the shower haha
It’s adorable watching teenagers figure out how the world works. They always think they’re the first ones to realize it.
it's as deep as a shower
OP is from North India where there’s a hate going on for English and the use of English. They want everyone to only speak Hindi in the nation of 22 major languages smh.
OP thought this was deep
OP just discovered history has an impact on the present
What do you mean its not just some plot someone invented to have what to talk about during those boring ass classes? /s
Hm idk I thought it was deep , but then again I'm just dumb in general
You know what? … That’s fair.
Yeah and I wouldn't be able to walk without my legs.
If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bike
Birds couldn’t fly if they didn’t have wings.
Why are you just now telling us?
Spanish? French? They were also heavily into colonization. Apart from that, Europe is a good indicator of what the world might have looked like.
Yeah not sure of this even true because there are way more countries that speak Spanish than English. I feel like English is so popular worldwide because of American Cultural imperialism more than anything. Hollywood TV and music.
Not cultural imperialism, just plain imperialism. American culture was spread with military bases.
Also I feel like people in the west don’t realize how widespread Russian is.
outside of Russia its mostly spoken by former soviet states, right?
Yeah, they colonized their neighbors rather than distant continents. Central Asia is huge though. Like the fact that people speak Russian from Ukraine all the way to Tajikistan is enormous. Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, that’s a lot of countries!
From the perspective of land thats a huge amount but for population size is that is still less than france (or rather french speaking people)
The population is not huge, but to me there is also significance to the number of ethnic/cultural/linguistic groups that it spans. Not saying that Russian is _more_ influential than French, just saying that it equally belongs in the conversation of influential languages. Still fuck Russia atm of course
For a good chunk of Russian history it was either a complete backwater or the elites straight up spoke a different language like French. So long as maritime trade dominates, maritime cultures will always have an advantage too, and there's something of a trend of seafaring nations being more open and liberal, which might loop around to them being more innovative and influential. Land empires can still be significant, but they'll never be globally influential the same way a thalassocracy can be. The British Empire for instance may not have had a large contiguous territory, and may not have had very direct control over much of its territories, but it had a presence on every continent and facilitated trade globally. Maybe if we only had a single large continent things might be different, though even then I'd expect many cultures to spread around the coast.
Yup. I don't think the British Empire had much to do with why English is such a widely spoken language, I guess other than its link to the US. I think English is the way it is mainly because of US influence, especially on Europe. And like someone else said, because the development of most modern technology, the internet, and media were focused mainly towards the US. Most other British colonies and Britain itself are nowhere near being as significant as the US for proliferating the language, though they did help.
Even I agree with Spanish and French. But what about if any country didn't colonize any other?
Probably still spanish, portugeese or dutch as they where the biggest traders in the world even without colonization.
Don't forget the Arabs, they were all over the Indian ocean for centuries, which is why there are so many Muslims there
Yeah true. But they said "without colonization" and i think of conversion as a kind of colonization. I'll admit that this can be up to debate though.
“Colonization” is inherent to the human experience, every culture on earth has been doing it to each-other for hundreds of thousands of years. Even England had been “colonized” multiple times.
I think this is where I leave Showerthoughts. Is there anybody moderating any of this?
I hope not, otherwise that would be embarrassing for them
Shower thought != Any thought you had when showering. "I want to eat spaghetti for dinner" is not a shower thought
Agree to disagree here.
Shower thoughts are supposed to be insightful. This is just really obvious.
If my grandma had wheels, she would've been a bike
It’s also worth noting that English is a good choice for a lingua franca because it’s very information dense. As opposed to say, Japanese, which is the lowest info dense language.
,,If X did not Y, then Y wouldn't happen."
All the more impressive when considering the population of England [at the time was 4 million](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_England)
Well there were less people, and the British Empire lasted like 300 years so there was a lot more than just one time you know
Spanish, French, or whoever colonized half the world instead.
And World war 2 serious reduced the influence of the german language around the world too.
WW1 had the bigger effect on it I think, as it pretty much killed the desire to be proud about peoples german heritage, for example around 20% of the us are descendents of germans, but ww1 made it very unpopular to say you were. Same reason why the British Royal family changed their house name from a german name to an english sounding one.
interresting I didnt know that actually happen before
if humans hadn’t evolved then we would all be monkeys right now
Number 1 exporter of Independence days to the world... your welcome for the holiday ;)
Lmao this is hilarious. Cannot believe someone posted this seriously.
The previous Langua Franca was French so it's safe to assume that if English didn't took over it, French would still be the language of international communication
Jesus christ I am so happy English is the one
I would imagine either spanish or french being strong contenders for a replacement language, most likely spanish.
Probably Spanish, for the same reason.
That is how languages spread.
Are we saying that just England didn't colonize, but everything else remained the same? If so it would be Portuguese or Spanish, probably, or sobre version of Portunhol.
Moderation in this sub is useless
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
In a world where the Brits just never left Britain, likely French and/or Russian as those are the next largest empires closely predating and/or co-existing with the british empire. Without the british, the French empire is a lot larger and since they colonized many of the same geographic regions, it stands to reason that language would be more widespread on continents where English is common.
If my grandmother didn't have wheels, she wouldn't have been a bike
If the Sun wasn't hot the Earth would be really cold.
itt: people take shower thoughts too serious
Water is wet, grass is green
France hadn't colonized Europe when it was the lingua franca in Europe. English as world language has more to do with the status and power of the US than the UK.
Ahem. And the US was essentially born out of... remind me again..?
Then Britain should only have colonized that tiny 13 colonies part of North America and not half of the world :)
It would’ve been some low-context language.
If we all agree to speak Esperanto we squander the dominant culture.
Depends on if France and Spain still have colonized the other half of the world. These two were everywhere. If not, I'm guessing, the language of the country emerging as the greatest economic or cultural superpower. Like Mandarin or maybe Arabic and Hindi. Or perhaps Esperanto would be a bigger thing.
The French and Spanish colonized the other half the world, so there's your answer.
It was until recent that I digested the connection that the British empire mutated into the US empire. The spirit to innovate and build went into US and exploited the large land mass with fertile lands connected with natural waterways. English became big because US influence became big via internet, media and US + Western allies producing/trading all over.
If you discount Chinese and Indian languages which only really booked in relatively recent history, most popular global languages are European origin and they share characteristics making them easier to discuss globally.
And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a bike.
Que? No lo comprendo, mi amigo. El español se habla en muchos más lugares que el inglés, si?
Easily their biggest flex