• archchan@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    A unifed global language is one of the characteristics of a type 1 civilization and right now English happens to be in a position to become that language. But whether or not English is the optimal option is a whole different can of worms. Since language and culture are so intertwined, the idea of the cultures, beliefs, and “mindsets” of entire groups of people being slowly erased, dominated, and assimilated by the anglosphere mind is a concerning long term problem. You lose out on potentially beautiful things only people of that culture and “mind” are capable of creating/conceiving or nurturing. Also America’s dominance of cultural exports is insane.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      English is a shit laguage but all the computers are programmed in it so fuck it we ball

        • stockRot@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Everyone is “bad” at their first language. No one speaks in a prim and proper way all the time. Slang forms, grammar is eschewed for convenience. If you are able to get your point across such that another competent speaker is able to understand, then you are good at speaking a language.

          • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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            1 year ago

            It’s pretty uncool to call them surrender monkeys when Christopher Nolan did you the favor of explaining how the French Army held the line so the English could run away.

      • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Computers are programmed in programming languages. They do (most of the time) have English words as keywords, but changing them is trivially easy. You could have a “Esperanto C” working in a day. And changing a C program to Esperanto C would be trivially easy. The only problem would be the new keywords being used in the old program, but that’s easy to find and replace with a new identifier.

    • Snoopy@jlai.lu
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      1 year ago

      I disagree. When i organised an international deaf week. It was very hard because i couldn’t speak with people from different countries in international sign language.

      So if it doesn’t exist, people will either create a new one or use the dominant one. As for the culture, it depends.

    • BottleOfAlkahest@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That there should be a global language not directly tied to a culture is one of the main arguments for an artificial launague being adopted as the global lingua franca. Not to say there isn’t issues with that either since the most popular constructed languages are heavily adapted from European languages (looking at you esperanto).

      • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I would really love an international language with consistent spelling and where the spelling matches the pronunciation. For me the chosen language doesn’t have to be artificial, but the selection process should be: a scientific choice based on consistency, ease of learning, clarity in meaning, … Everyone who knows a few languages, knows English is probably the worst choice when it comes to these objective criteria.

        It’s like the system of measurement: leave it to the people and we’d all still be using wacky thumbs, feet and elbows for measuring, but smart people came together in France (a few times) and now we have an easy to understand consistent system of measurement.

      • steeznson@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Arguably there have been languages like this such as polari which was spoken as a lingua franca amongst sailors at every port around the world.

        Controversially would also suggest Modern London English and Pidgin English could also be modern examples.

    • Naz@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      A true blended language would probably be something like Esperanto. Personally, I prefer the Latin alphabet because it’s easier to write than the Oriental alphabet, or the Cyrillic, which creates so many curves in cursive that you might as well just be writing “mmmmmmm” (the word “teacher” in Russian cursive is a great example).

      Higher K-Scale Civilizations have obviated the need for discrete languages entirely and communicate using brain waves/telepathy. No misinterpretation of any idea is possible when you literally present the exact thought form to another. The speed is also unparalleled: communication occurs at the speed of thought - no need to translate, encode, parse, decode, and conceptualize before information is transferred.

      Refrigerator.

  • lugal@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    SPRICH DEUTSCH DU HURENSOHN!

    context

    Edit: since this gets quite a few downvotes, it’s an insider from a German subreddit and meant as a joke. I get how it can come across offensive without context, sorry for that. I hope I provided enough context now.

      • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Parler français c’est cool, je parle aussi italien, reste que l’anglais est plus pratique sur mon continent et pas mal dans tout les autres pays ou j’ai voyagé.

  • grue@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Je suis Americain et j’apprend le francais parce que je veux faire le tour du monde en volier, et la France d’outre-mer a beaucoup d’iles practiques.

    (I only used DDG’s translator a little bit on that!)

    • Taniwha420@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’ve heard that if you already speak English, then French is the best global second language to get because you can get by in so many Spanish speaking countries with English.

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s also part of the reason why I picked it, although I’ve had a hard time finding the right data to support that hypothesis. It’s not as easy as asking what the most commonly-spoken languages are; instead, you’ve got to ask which language to learn next gets you the largest increment of being able to talk to more folks. That means you’ve got to subtract out the folks that speak language X but also language Y that you already accounted for, so to do it properly the data set you start with has to tell you which set of languages each individual person in the world speaks.

        (Also, it’s almost certainly true that French is beaten out by Mandarin Chinese in terms of being the second language with the largest increment, but I picked French instead of Chinese to learn first because French speakers are distributed throughout the world, whereas most Chinese speakers are in China. And as you already noted for Spanish, it and Hindi lost out because even though they have more total speakers than French, the increment might not be as large because so many of them also speak English.)

        • Taniwha420@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Hmm … Think it might depend if you want the largest instrument of people or destinations. Mandarin might add a large instrument of people, but it’s not going to be that useful outside of China … and there are more English speakers in China than in the rest of the world.

      • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I speak English, French and Italian. English is still by far the language that helped me most in South America.

        • samus12345@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Funny that it’s so widespread that a Germanic language was more useful than a fellow Romance one.

      • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I guess it depends on your plans. If you plan on spending your time in Latin America then Spanish is still the obvious choice (spoken as French/English bilingual).

  • Camus (il, lui)@jlai.lu
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    1 year ago

    C’est assez amusant vu que l’accent britannique est assez difficile à comprendre pour des personnes qui ne sont pas natifs en anglais.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Je me souviens en Erasmus en république Tchèque on avait des cours d’aérodynamique en anglais.

      Tout le monde arrivait à suivre sans trop de problème sauf une personne qui est allé se plaindre de la difficulté à suivre les cours à cause de la langue.

      C’était un britannique, il avait réellement du mal à suivre le cours par un prof qui parlait du broken english avec un accent tchèque. En tant que français par contre aucun problème pour comprendre, je comprenait beaucoup plus facilement le prof tcheque que le britannique qui avait un fort accent londonien.

      • Alfredo Natale
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        1 year ago

        Je suis italien et je comprends l’anglais mieux quand il est parlé par un français ou un autre locuteur non natif.

      • Snoopy@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        Moi c’etait la canadienne. Je voulais découvrir son accent, l’entendre, la comprendre (je suis sourd). Donc je lui ais posé une question. 😁 J’ai pas compris 😰 je lui ais demandé de repéter ☺️ puis j’ai abandonné et demandé d’écrire 🥺😭

        C’était une sorte de franglais. 😅

  • SereneHurricane@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    We live in English speaking Australia. My son is learning French and Arabic.

    There’s not many countries where you can’t get away with one of those languages, to my understanding.

  • Throwaway@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Well if France wanted to have French be universal, they should’ve had a powerful culture!

        • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          As a French speaker, we could do away with accents and absolute tons of silent vowels and consonants and French would still work exactly as well. People complain about English because more people learn it as a second language and these forums are anglo-centric, but French is just as much of a grammatical mess.

          • zaphod@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            Trust me, French is a different kind of mess. It’s mostly consistent in its messiness, English is exceptions from exceptions from exceptions. The really hard part about French is listening because it all sounds the same thanks to all the silent letters, but even then they still make reading easier.

            • pseudo@jlai.lu
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              1 year ago

              Still. Thought 200 years of effort, french was made pretty uniformus. There is mosty minor accent difference that change across the french-speaking world. But during the same time the way we write stop to change even though the language evolved. So we have everyone how speak french the same way but write it in a way that obsolete since at least 150 years.

  • u/unhappy_grapefruit_2@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Har-har I out colonised you har-har toi parle anglais beacoup muhhahhahahahahahahahahhahahahHHahahahahahahahahhHahahahhHahhHHHHahahahahhahahahahahahahhHHa

  • Snoopy@jlai.lu
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    1 year ago

    Et dans l’anglais on y retrouve des mots du vieux francais. Sinon ya la version espagnol ? 😁

    Speak spanish, visit Spain ? 😁

      • drcobaltjedi@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        A coworker of mine suggested that Dutch is the easiest language to learn for native English speakers, so I’ve been learning it on the side for the past few months.

        • Snoopy@jlai.lu
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          1 year ago

          So is it easier ? I admit seeing dutch’s sentence is kinda overwhelming. I lend toward spanish or italiano 😅

              • Obi@sopuli.xyz
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                1 year ago

                Just the way sentences are constructed, the vocabulary, the fine nuances etc. Not to mention the pronunciation (though that’s where I’m personally doing the least bad).

                Furthermore, there is a widely known issue with immigrants to the country never really learning the language due to a plethora of factors from the fact most Dutch people speak great English (so you don’t get practice), English being used as internal company language, and all the “infrastructure” stuff like taxes, administration etc being translated.

                • Snoopy@jlai.lu
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                  1 year ago

                  And how is immigrants integrations ? Do they find a pace in their society ?

      • Snoopy@jlai.lu
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        1 year ago

        So the message should be : learn old french and old Dutch > visit the world ☺️

    • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Does French have an entire continent that speaks their language? South America would like a word.