Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
*Ahem*
Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.
You are are literally describing a "lingua franca" here.
And there's no evidence that English is special in it's ability serve as a lingua franca. In previous eras, other languages held this role (e.g, French, hence the term "lingua franca").
The dominance of English can be far more certainly attributed to the geopolitical dominance of english-speaking nations...
Agree with your main point, but Lingua Franca doesn't refer to French but to "Mediterranean Lingua Franca", an actual trade language of its own which was a mix of a bunch of things. It had that name because it was "the language of the Frankish" (traders) but what they (eastern sea/Muslim traders) meant by "Franks" was any western European.
What evidence are you looking for? No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages. You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about. There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status. It’s got a phonetic alphabet. It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.
You need to provide evidence that “built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal” compared to other languages, because you can communicate with simple words and broken grammar just fine in every language I know.
> Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
Pretty easy to “translate” that to a broken yet still understandable version of other languages.
Evidence? I was the one asking for evidence. I question the (very dubious) claim in the post I was responding to, that English is inherently suited to a role as a lingua franca.
Also, separately, your counterclaims are kind of... untrue? None of them are true of (e.g.) Mandarin which definitely served as a lingua franca for the ancient far east.
> No despot on Earth has managed to stamp it out, unlike countless other languages.
Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
> You can say things like lingua franca and everyone knows what you’re talking about.
Considering that the phrase is Latin, I am not sure what your point is.
> There aren’t any pronouns that depend on social status.
And many other quirks that are as alien to a native Japanese speaker than this is to you, however.
> It’s got a phonetic alphabet
What? Are we still talking about English here? FFS.
> It’s just a natural choice for commerce and knowledge-sharing.
It’s really not. Like all languages that ended up in similar situation (e.g. French, Arabic, Mandarin, or Latin), it is a combination of good old fashioned imperialism and commercial links.
> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
Brazil had a couple of instances of that. In the 18th century, the Marquis of Pombal implemented a program to extinguish usage of Tupi as the national language and replace it with Portuguese. That was successful. And then a second iteration when the Italian, German and Japanese communities of speakers in South Brazil were prevented from speaking their languages around the time of World War 2. This was successful too.
Police document declaring it illegal to speak German, Italian and Japanese in public:
> Any evidence of a language being stamped out by a despot?
Oh the irony!
The English tried to wipe out Gaelic use in Cornwall, Scotland, the Isle of Man and Ireland for centuries. Schools were told to punish children for speaking Gaelic, and to only speak English to their students. We succeeded in wiping out Cornish as a living language (sorry!). Manx and Irish Gaelic survived, though you can argue about Manx Gaelic (there was a revival around the time the last native speaker died).
Quite the opposite, English has been the source of many such pressures, e.g. post Norman invasion, but it simply adapted in borg-like fashion to redefine what English was; retaining some of the previous language and moulding itself to fit in some of the new language.
Rather than rigidly fight against new influence, it took new words while retaining some of it's own. It does this constantly.
Even Chaucer's English is difficult to decipher for a modern English speaker, and that isn't even that old.
> Quite the opposite, English has been the source of many such pressures, e.g. post Norman invasion, but it simply adapted in borg-like fashion to redefine what English was
What you are describing is the standard process by which languages change. It's not accurate to equate this with the systematic elimination of a linguistic group through ethnic cleansing, something which English has never experienced.
English actually has terrible "error correction" on account of extensively using word order to indicate grammatical constructs, rather than inflection. You move the order of words around and it gets an entirely different meaning.
Plus its orthography is ridiculously inconsistent, and a learner is never sure if they've got the right pronunciation when looking at a word because it's been caked over with N layers of different systems (Anglo-Saxon + Norse +
Norman French + Latin + Greek etc)
I'll take a guess. It's been a while since I've looked for ally at another language. But English has fewer cases of verbs, and a more rigid sentence structure.
We have more special cases of past tense verbs and weird pronunciation, but I think it's easier to duck up and still make sense in English? Maybe.
English famously has relatively complex verb conjugation. What we don't have are cases (only a few words decline). German has cases for example, but much simpler verb conjugation.
I think I was being vague in my terminology. I wanted to say more broadly that German verbs are generally simpler than English ones because there are fewer tenses and aspects. There are however a greater number of strong verbs in German than in English.
I'm not familiar enough with German to evaluate. But when I think of Spanish, you've got 6 conjugations for every tense, and a whole bunch of different tenses. That makes for many dozens of different inflections, just for verbs.
English does have a rich ecosystem of compound verbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), but if this is taken to be part of the complexity of English verbs, I don't know how this stacks up to other languages.
English is mostly unique in its vocabulary size. We have redundant words for nearly every concept. We often shift registers by using different vocab--Latin-origin words for more formal/respectable registers. The ability to speak it in broken fashion and be understood is not unique.
many languages have this feature. For example Russian or German. You can put in the words, with most words missing, in any order and somehow someone will get it. France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.
Russian is a heavily inflected language, so the order of words matters less. For example, in English you can say "the cat ate the bird", but if you reversed "cat" and "bird" this would be a different sentence entirely. In Russian "cat" would have the nominative case and "bird" accusative, so you can swap the words around and it would mean the same, though perhaps with different emphasis.
French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.
> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.
Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.
Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.
Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.
Yes yes. I English speak very easy. I English hear too very easy. Easy understand. Can talk each other good just simple words. English very good.
*Ahem*
Basically, the built-in error correction functionality in English is bloody phenomenal. Literally anyone with a passing understanding and skill in English can use it to communicate effectively. This feature is seldom seen in most other languages let alone lingua francas.