Date: Mon, 17 Nov 1997 01:26:22 -0800 (PST) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The Language Barrier [Was: Could FreeBSD be ...] Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971117002710.5225A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <24684.879743950@jkh.cdrom.com>
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On Sun, 16 Nov 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: > Actually, if anything I'd say that english has become more of a > "lingua franca" than ever. I haven't personally been to every single > country in the world (yet :) but it seems that there's almost none > where one can't find english spoken in some capacity if it's truly you > language of last resort. 100 years ago, that was also true for > French, so I think it's simply a shift in what people consider to be a > reasonably common language to learn if they wish to communicate across > borders. Esperanto was a nice try for this, but it appears that > few wish to really learn it (with the exception of a few die-hards > here and there who subscribe to Esperanto newsletters and such). > A pity since English, by comparison, is a cast-iron bitch to learn > if you're not a native speaker: cough, plough, dough, that sort > of berzerkness abounds in this language. ;) I think the spread of English as everyone's second language is pretty much a consequence of the outcome of the Second World War, after which English became the language of air traffic control, diplomacy, science, military matters (NATO), and so forth; and during these years the United States was (and still is) the world's largest single market for the exports of other countries. When the Soviet empire collapsed with the fall of the wall in 1989, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed at the end of 1991, English instead of Russian made a big jump in being the second language of the countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. There was a dramatic shift from Russian to English in hours taught in school, etc. Quite a few people, though, learned English secretly from the broadcasts of the BBC or Radio Liberty. Some students who played significant roles in the transition of Communist countries to capitalism and democracy learned their economics secretly from photocopies of textbooks in English. In other words, we won a couple of big ones, a hot one and a cold one. It's useful for people to agree on what they're going to use as a second language. Although English is difficult in some respects, it's also easier than some languages in terms of understanding the spoken language (easier than French, for example); it's extremely flexible in adoption of vocabulary and creating new words, and there are no "authorities" who object to such developments; and it is less inflected than many languages, using word order and additional words rather than word endings to indicate relationships (subject, object, indirect object, etc.), and may in this respect be relatively easier. Spelling, of course, is difficult. Verbs must be a nightmare. But-- I think native English speakers are quite willing to figure out what people using English as a second language are trying to say and are a lot nicer about such efforts than, say, the French are about French. As we should be. English is not only "everybody's second language" on the Internet and the language people use to talk about computers; but an arresting and really quite fundamental indicator of its dominance is that it's the language computers use to talk to each other. It seems the major computer languages are "in English"--if, else, while, for, do, continue, break-- this doesn't get translated into, say, French or Russian, does it? Then the compilers would also have to be translated....what a mess that would be. I bet no one did it more than once! And a French computer speaking SMTP still says HELO and not BONJOUR, I imagine, and has an operating system that's basically in English. (But maybe there are operating systems that were written in Russian or German or whatever; I have never seen such systems mentioned.) Maybe in 20 or 30 years the language we will all want to learn as a second language will be Chinese. Annelise
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