I love the English language. It is expressive, it is the language of great literature, and it is in no way „bullying“, no, it brings people all over the world together. There would be no way to talk to a Chinese for me (German) if he had only learned Japanese because Japan is the neighbour and if I had only learned French or Polish because those are our big neighbours. No, English brings us all together, it makes me communicate with ordinary people without a translator anywhere on the planet. I do not care if everyone speaks English, German, Hindi or Esperanto. But if English has the noble power to bring people together, regardless of nation, religion or race, I applaud it, because this is just a wonderful use for this little language that was once only spoken on a medium sized Island in the Northern Sea.
Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.
In many European countries, you cannot get a good job (like one with an international company) unless you can communicate in English at CEFRL B1 proficiency [1].
China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].
It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.
In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis.
> It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.
The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer.
I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.
I once visited a customer in Finland. In the office, they spoke english around me. Curious, I asked if they were just being polite by speaking english instead of Finnish when I was present.
They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.
Both Chinese and English are interesting and relatively unique in how lossy they can be and still convey information. And I think that's a significant benefit in being a lingua franca.
And chinese can be learned - see any trader in a nation on the Chinese border. Tonality isn't that bad, actually - especially when the language isn't unintelligible when the tones are wrong - same as how English isn't unintelligable when vowels are wrong (unlike Japanese for example).
Written Chinese is, however, a big stumbling block to its universality. Though, given how rarely I even write English without a computer aiding me, that distinction is becoming less meaningful.
I've come to see most everyone knows three languages: that of their parents, that of their state, and English. The advantages of having those three be the same are significant.
This is what's left unmentioned in most articles excoriating the rise of English -- the benefits of a lingua franca far outweigh the detriments of English intrusion on other languages and cultures.
Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.
EU has/is failing? I guess - in a glass-half-empty way - like everyone around the world is dying.
EU deliberately promotes multilingualism and, I'd argue, successfully[1]. English is (deservingly and also ironically) the most common language spoken in EU.
Is that true? Chinese has tones but English has a huge number of distinct vowel sounds to distinguish between and often has syllables with both two consonants in front and two in back, like "thrones". In terms of bits per syllable they're both near the top, in contrast to languages like Spanish or Japanese.
That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.
>China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].
Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.
Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?
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.
"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.
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.
Citrine (https://citrine-lang.org/ I am the author) tried to change this with respect to coding (it is a programming language that allows everyone to code in their own language and translate between parties). However, it has been ignored, ridiculed and hated (even death threats). So it has failed and I realize that (I continue to finish it until 0.9 though, because I cant stop in the middle - I am a very neurotic person). It's hard for me. I feel hatred but I realize it just wasnt meant to be (but for some reason if something like this happens and you read an article like this the hate burns...). There is probably not even a way to save European languages anyway. So I just wanted to share this comment to let you know I was working on a technology that at least for coding tried to counter the influence of the English language and allows people to write code in their own language. However I also wrote this comment because I am very emotional because of the failure of this project. When I read an article like this - it's just ...unspeakable. Maybe I was too arrogant. Maybe the problem is too difficult. Maybe I interefered with some globalist agenda, maybe it's just Don Quixottish. Who knows? Anyway I had to share this train of thought. Maybe people just deserve to have their language (and culture) taken from them. Maybe it's just the way it is.
Death threats? Sorry to hear that. The project looks awesome!
European languages won’t die just because English is around, there are millions of people in Europe that don’t interact on a national or international scale, and are quite happy to continue with their language as it stands, that won’t change for a long time.
I think your project is a really great idea! Code often doesn’t translate well when variable and object names are poorly suggested due to translation issues, and there must be billions of lines of code that are limited to specific languages, which are locked out to non-speakers. Can I suggest you focus more on the language benefits on the home page? Did you think about applying this technique as a transpiler to an existing programming language instead of a new language?
If anything your project would help the gobalist agenda... I've seen so many companies dismantle their dev teams and outsource the coding to cheap labour in brasil.
My guess is such a system, no matter how noble the idea behind its creation, would only lead to management finding the cheapest bloke anywhere on the planet to write their code.
Some team at the end of the world who don't even speak english and barely enough $lang to code themselves out of a situation if their lives depend on it.
And corporate will be like "hey they are shit but they're the cheapest! and because our code is language and coder independent we can always move to the next emerging country once the current folks demands a pay raise! evil laugh"
I'd argue almost no one is having their language and culture taken from them (that was certainly the case in other times in history, but I find it difficult to find one today). There's nothing stopping you from learning another language, or using another language 50-70% of the time.
This is a completely transactional phenomenon. You want to communicate with more people, and be understood in almost any part of the world, and possibly make more money doing just about any job? Speak English.
Also, I notice the web page to your project is written in English, I imagine it was done for mass appeal right? That's kind of the point.
I was surprised that such an in-depth article about linguistic dominance had so little to say about Latin. Historically, Latin in Europe seems to have filled a very similar role to that of English today, though not at the same scale perhaps. Even languages that weren't full-on adaptations of Latin have adapted Latin alphabets and words. The modern English we speak today has funny little relics of Latin grammar norms that had been adopted for no apparent reason other than to improve the "status" of English by making it more latinized (things like, not ending sentences in prepositions).
Also, it's interesting that the author proposed
> What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools?
Because I recall actually reading an article about how some schools in France were just now allowing the local language "Occitan" to be taught in some schools again, but historically they were very harsh on not allowing it. The fear back then was that if schools were allowed to teach in languages besides French, that the students would never bother learning French and would not be able to function as citizens. I think they've eased up, but I've seen that China has many of the same concerns about Mandarin adoption, especially in the far west portion.
I'm all for learning weird languages for the heck of it though. It's not like most people can actually recall and use the Spanish or French they learned in high school, so might as well teach something interesting to examine linguistic principles in general. I'm a fan of Esperanto for this because it's so easy, but every language has interesting differences (often with cultural implications) that learners can enjoy. But again, this is coming from a perspective of living in a country with the privilege of having English as the most common native tongue.
Occitan is all over the place in the South of France. Even city signs are in both French and Occitan. In some towns, even the street signs are bilingual, though I actually never heard anyone actually speak it. I was determined to learn it when I lived in Avignon, but I couldn’t find anyone to actually use it with! I had much more luck with just focusing on the southern French accent instead. My kids speak with a distinctive Avignonaise accent, saying “le pang” instead of “le pain” for instance. But to your point Occitan is apparently being taught in French schools in the South, but I think it’s an elective if I remember correctly.
The internet is mentioned in passing, but the reason that English is dominating is that the vast majority of science, engineering and academia in general is published in English, and then is quickly added to the English language Wikipedia. If you want to be at the cutting edge of global technology, it is just easier (and sometimes important) to be able to read English directly. Translations can be problematic, particularly for technical subject matter.
As others have mentioned, other languages have played this role in the past, and probably will in the future.
Interesting -- do you think translators will slowly become obsolete before software "solves" the translation problem? Do you ever think there will be a point in the future where everyone can speak fluent English? It would seem the path of least resistance would be to eliminate the need for translators, and I'm not sure we'll live in a future where everyone speaks N languages, and just uses an app to translate between people.
The article is incorrect in its description of South Korean children increasingly having their tongues snipped in order to pronounce English words better.
That procedure was only done rarely, as far as I can tell from about 2002 to 2004. Immediately attracting heavy news attention there was even a government-sponsored video to scare people away from the procedure, which is virtually non-existent today. Fret not, there are still plenty of other opportunities for plastic surgeons in South Korea...
One thing to notice, however, is that Korean people would even consider that their tongues aren't naturally suited for speaking English, that's to say that their tongues could be different from other tongues. The idea of minjok (민족, 民族), meaning ethnicity or race -- the word itself a loan from fascist Japan during the Japanese Empire when Korea was annexed, though most Koreans are unaware of this --, is so strong in South Korea that indeed it might not seem strange for Koreans to believe foreign pronunciation naturally unsuited to Korean tongues. Similarly I recently saw Korean packaging that portrayed Korean digestive tracts as longer and more complex than those of "foreigners". In the South this "race"-based consciousness is fading away, in part surely because of English, the language that allows South Koreans to connect to the world. In North Korea it is far far stronger. There, along with the cult of the leader, the minjok really is the national religion, adapted from fascist Japan, which itself learned it from the German military (which trained the Japanese Army, which occupied and ruled Korea) and more generally the racist West of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Not that they didn't have their own home-grown prejudices in the region. Far from it, sadly.
Edit: All this said, it's both hopeful and ironic that even in North Korea the kids study English.
I love Korea, but it is literally the most racist and nationalistic place I have ever been. Japan might be just as racist, but in my experience, they are exceptionally polite about it.
Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process, it's only logical that it is adopted far more easily than other languages with even more speakers -- Chinese, Hindi, Arabic -- or that were expanded around the globe in a similar fashion -- French, Spanish.
The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names.
> Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process
There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England (though there are of course lots of English-based pidgins/creoles). There does, interestingly, seem to be some truth in there being an increased 'simplification' as languages gain more speakers, but mainly at the level of morphology, and not necessarily in syntax/semantics or phonology. (For instance, English still retains /θ/ and /ð/, which are really rare sounds crosslinguistically, especially having both of them.)
Hindi is actually not so dissimilar to English in having been impacted by lots of different languages. Just as English is at its core a Western Germanic language (closely related to the Germanic languages of the low countries and neighbours), Hindi is at its core a northern Indo-Aryan language. But just as English was impacted by other Germanic languages (e.g. Norse) and then Norman French (itself a Romance variety acquired by Germanic speakers), and so forth, modern Hindi reflects the influence of a number of languages around the area of Delhi, including Punjabi, as well as heavy Persian influence (where Persian itself was already impacted by Arabic), and even retains some Turkic words carried into India by the Persianised Mughals, and then later on Portuguese and English.
English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James Nicoll
In previous centuries French and Spanish were dominate. English emerged in the last century for political reasons, not because it was easy to speak/learn.
I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.
The article glosses over the fact that the US (and to a lesser extent UK) is a great exporter of its culture and language through movies, TV, and music. This is aided by the fact that the US has a values-based society where you don't need to be of a particular race or ethnicity to identify with it. I can't tell you how many people I've met traveling abroad who learned English by watching American shows and films.
English has also spread due to the enormous influence of English-speaking TV, film, radio and popular music. The internet has only accelerated this. But it's not all in one direction. People also have much more exposure to non-English media too.
I think many native English speakers probably don't realise just how smaller the internet feels when you're browsing in a language with a much smaller number of speakers than English.
English is also nice in that there is no "baked in" formal or informal use of the language. I think it breaks down barriers in conversations with a superior or a random stranger. I wonder if this has any larger scale effects...
The article laments the loss of oral languages as if this was a modern phenomenon. Oral languages were always being lost, for the simple reason that they drift. It's doubtful an oral language would be intelligible to its descendants after only a century or two.
Writing slows this down a lot, but what really slowed it down was the advent of the printing press.
It's still drifting. New words like "sexting" appear, and just read some Shakespeare for lost words.
The influence still goes both ways--I read that American movie studios cut out dialogue that they don't think foreign viewers will understand because of English-specific wordplay or culture-specific references. (See https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-01-10/saving-ho...)
It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.
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)
English: Diverse, comprised of many elements from many languages, lots of little quirks, ability to express the same thing multiple ways, far from perfect but totally dominant.
Thought experiment, or maybe just a crazy thought: what if the European Union would prefer to stop using English after a hard Brexit and starts looking for an alternative lingua franca.
What if a EU directive was then issued, mandating Esperanto as a de jure national language in each of the member states, in addition to the existing national languages. Schools all over the EU start to offer it as the first choice for a second language to learn. Cultural works in Esperanto are subsidized.
Having established a big base of speakers and being constructed to be very easy to learn, the language then spreads virally and becomes the new global lingua franca.
One complaint about English is that double negatives are not grammatically correct. The word "not" is so important it should be re-enforced in someway. Spanish supports double negatives. The French add redundancy with "ne" and "pas".
It's worth noting that American gangsters often talk with double negatives and the U.S. military use the phrase "repeat NOT" since their discussions are often mission critical. But I am certain their are countless examples of harm because someone in a hurry, omitted the word 'not' in a discussion or email.
[+] [-] geff82|7 years ago|reply
Let‘s appreciate English, let us embrace it even a bit more, let us try to speak it better each day for a world of mutual understanding. Maybe English can be a driver for peace, at least to a certain degree.
[+] [-] wallflower|7 years ago|reply
China may very well become the largest economy in the world, and there is no way that Chinese, as a multi-toned, symbolic language, will ever become the Lingua franca, as it is near impossible for most adults to learn, in contrast to English [2].
It can be argued that the European Union has failed/is failing, at least partially, because of a lack of a common language. In the peak periods of the Roman Empire, Latin was the Lingua franca that enabled business transactions, along with Roman law, the precursors of civil law as a framework.
In many states in India, people speak many languages just to navigate life on a daily basis.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
[2] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
[+] [-] autocorr|7 years ago|reply
The interesting thing though is that the Roman Empire is a great example of a bilingual state. Greek was known to all Romans of class: for letters, art, learning, and rhetoric. It was the lingua franca and administrative language of the Eastern half of the empire, which contained around two thirds of the population and wealth. It was the language of the New Testament. If you wanted to do business in the East, you probably had to know Greek. Latin may not be that much of a help unless you were talking to a member of the army or lawyer.
I think we have blinders on the dominance of Latin because the Greek speaking portions of the Empire were conquered, the ruling class became Arabic speaking, and were taken them out of the cultural orbit of Christianity. It's a really a selection effect.
[+] [-] WalterBright|7 years ago|reply
They laughed, and said no, they spoke english because they came from all over europe and english was the only language they had in common.
[+] [-] toufka|7 years ago|reply
And chinese can be learned - see any trader in a nation on the Chinese border. Tonality isn't that bad, actually - especially when the language isn't unintelligible when the tones are wrong - same as how English isn't unintelligable when vowels are wrong (unlike Japanese for example).
Written Chinese is, however, a big stumbling block to its universality. Though, given how rarely I even write English without a computer aiding me, that distinction is becoming less meaningful.
I've come to see most everyone knows three languages: that of their parents, that of their state, and English. The advantages of having those three be the same are significant.
[+] [-] koboll|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately the parallels to colonization make polemic takes irresistible to outlets like The Guardian.
[+] [-] 627467|7 years ago|reply
EU deliberately promotes multilingualism and, I'd argue, successfully[1]. English is (deservingly and also ironically) the most common language spoken in EU.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/26/europe...
[+] [-] Symmetry|7 years ago|reply
That's just spoken Chinese though. Writing in a language that doesn't use an alphabet or syllabary is of course clearly much harder.
[+] [-] matz1|7 years ago|reply
Is this true? I would think that english is just as hard to for chinese speaker to learn.
Isn't all language has the same level difficulty? Is the preceived difficulty is mostly relative to how close it is to one native language?
[+] [-] opportune|7 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] physicsguy|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] bluecalm|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koboll|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|7 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gabordemooij|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albertgoeswoof|7 years ago|reply
European languages won’t die just because English is around, there are millions of people in Europe that don’t interact on a national or international scale, and are quite happy to continue with their language as it stands, that won’t change for a long time.
I think your project is a really great idea! Code often doesn’t translate well when variable and object names are poorly suggested due to translation issues, and there must be billions of lines of code that are limited to specific languages, which are locked out to non-speakers. Can I suggest you focus more on the language benefits on the home page? Did you think about applying this technique as a transpiler to an existing programming language instead of a new language?
[+] [-] type0|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j-pb|7 years ago|reply
And corporate will be like "hey they are shit but they're the cheapest! and because our code is language and coder independent we can always move to the next emerging country once the current folks demands a pay raise! evil laugh"
[+] [-] l9k|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvector|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ricankng787|7 years ago|reply
This is a completely transactional phenomenon. You want to communicate with more people, and be understood in almost any part of the world, and possibly make more money doing just about any job? Speak English.
Also, I notice the web page to your project is written in English, I imagine it was done for mass appeal right? That's kind of the point.
[+] [-] hitekker|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vorg|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sudosteph|7 years ago|reply
Also, it's interesting that the author proposed > What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools?
Because I recall actually reading an article about how some schools in France were just now allowing the local language "Occitan" to be taught in some schools again, but historically they were very harsh on not allowing it. The fear back then was that if schools were allowed to teach in languages besides French, that the students would never bother learning French and would not be able to function as citizens. I think they've eased up, but I've seen that China has many of the same concerns about Mandarin adoption, especially in the far west portion.
I'm all for learning weird languages for the heck of it though. It's not like most people can actually recall and use the Spanish or French they learned in high school, so might as well teach something interesting to examine linguistic principles in general. I'm a fan of Esperanto for this because it's so easy, but every language has interesting differences (often with cultural implications) that learners can enjoy. But again, this is coming from a perspective of living in a country with the privilege of having English as the most common native tongue.
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NihilumExNil|7 years ago|reply
very interesting, that's something I'd really need to learn more about it.
But how much of that is common sense, or French influence?
[+] [-] _rpd|7 years ago|reply
As others have mentioned, other languages have played this role in the past, and probably will in the future.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] anonytrary|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malloryerik|7 years ago|reply
That procedure was only done rarely, as far as I can tell from about 2002 to 2004. Immediately attracting heavy news attention there was even a government-sponsored video to scare people away from the procedure, which is virtually non-existent today. Fret not, there are still plenty of other opportunities for plastic surgeons in South Korea...
One thing to notice, however, is that Korean people would even consider that their tongues aren't naturally suited for speaking English, that's to say that their tongues could be different from other tongues. The idea of minjok (민족, 民族), meaning ethnicity or race -- the word itself a loan from fascist Japan during the Japanese Empire when Korea was annexed, though most Koreans are unaware of this --, is so strong in South Korea that indeed it might not seem strange for Koreans to believe foreign pronunciation naturally unsuited to Korean tongues. Similarly I recently saw Korean packaging that portrayed Korean digestive tracts as longer and more complex than those of "foreigners". In the South this "race"-based consciousness is fading away, in part surely because of English, the language that allows South Koreans to connect to the world. In North Korea it is far far stronger. There, along with the cult of the leader, the minjok really is the national religion, adapted from fascist Japan, which itself learned it from the German military (which trained the Japanese Army, which occupied and ruled Korea) and more generally the racist West of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Not that they didn't have their own home-grown prejudices in the region. Far from it, sadly.
Edit: All this said, it's both hopeful and ironic that even in North Korea the kids study English.
[+] [-] briandear|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _emacsomancer_|7 years ago|reply
The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names.
> Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process
There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England (though there are of course lots of English-based pidgins/creoles). There does, interestingly, seem to be some truth in there being an increased 'simplification' as languages gain more speakers, but mainly at the level of morphology, and not necessarily in syntax/semantics or phonology. (For instance, English still retains /θ/ and /ð/, which are really rare sounds crosslinguistically, especially having both of them.)
Hindi is actually not so dissimilar to English in having been impacted by lots of different languages. Just as English is at its core a Western Germanic language (closely related to the Germanic languages of the low countries and neighbours), Hindi is at its core a northern Indo-Aryan language. But just as English was impacted by other Germanic languages (e.g. Norse) and then Norman French (itself a Romance variety acquired by Germanic speakers), and so forth, modern Hindi reflects the influence of a number of languages around the area of Delhi, including Punjabi, as well as heavy Persian influence (where Persian itself was already impacted by Arabic), and even retains some Turkic words carried into India by the Persianised Mughals, and then later on Portuguese and English.
English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.
[+] [-] blt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|7 years ago|reply
I'm pretty sure Greek and Latin filled a similar role, but I don't know my history well enough to claim it as a fact.
[+] [-] cafard|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkrisc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ochoseis|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanilla-almond|7 years ago|reply
I think many native English speakers probably don't realise just how smaller the internet feels when you're browsing in a language with a much smaller number of speakers than English.
[+] [-] saget|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterBright|7 years ago|reply
Writing slows this down a lot, but what really slowed it down was the advent of the printing press.
It's still drifting. New words like "sexting" appear, and just read some Shakespeare for lost words.
[+] [-] jejones3141|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devoply|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NegativeLatency|7 years ago|reply
It's a very interesting version of history as it relates specifically to the english language.
[+] [-] raverbashing|7 years ago|reply
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)
[+] [-] doitLP|7 years ago|reply
Javascript: ditto
[+] [-] wcoenen|7 years ago|reply
What if a EU directive was then issued, mandating Esperanto as a de jure national language in each of the member states, in addition to the existing national languages. Schools all over the EU start to offer it as the first choice for a second language to learn. Cultural works in Esperanto are subsidized.
Having established a big base of speakers and being constructed to be very easy to learn, the language then spreads virally and becomes the new global lingua franca.
Plausible?
[+] [-] louprado|7 years ago|reply
It's worth noting that American gangsters often talk with double negatives and the U.S. military use the phrase "repeat NOT" since their discussions are often mission critical. But I am certain their are countless examples of harm because someone in a hurry, omitted the word 'not' in a discussion or email.