why English use as an international Language

Factual Questions
21

Sorry, still not quite right. A small percentage of the Chinese characters do indeed qualify as ideograms, but most are not. The Chinese writing system is logographic - each character directly represents a word - not a picture, not an idea. 90+% of the characters are formed from radical/phonetic combination: a radical (their are 214 in the traditional count, though there’s a certain fuzziness in the enumeration for reasons I don’t care to discuss) plus another, simpler character that’s used to hint at the sound of the word. The radical provides a clue as to the meaning - common ones represent people, or wood, or metal, or speech - and the phonetic part suggests the sound (though the characters were largely formed so long ago that the correspondence sometimes no longer exists.) This is a completely different principle than an ideogram, which tries to suggest at a concept using a sort of symbolic representation - for instance, a “region” enclosed by a “border”, which represents “country” or “kingdom” (guó in Mandarin Chinese.) Like I said, this is a fairly small subset of the characters. Radical-phonetic characters are not ideograms.

Further, again, “letter-based” is a nonsensical description of a language. There is no inherent coupling between a language and its writing system, and there are various different ways to write Chinese without using hanzi. If Chinese was in such a political position as to be useful as a world language, it would be, though most likely international use would use a romanization rather than hanzi.

You’re mistaking effect and cause here. English is used in virtually every country on earth, and as such it has to import foreign words. Great Britain as world-spanning empire historically imported a great number of foreign words; the United States, being one of the most culturally diverse countries on the planet (and debatably also a world-spanning empire) continues this tradition. English has more cause than most languages to import foreign words, because English-speakers, collectively, run into a lot of foreign concepts. This has nothing to do with any inherent characteristic of the language, as any language used as widely as English would by necessity do the same thing. Besides, other languages do import foreign words, in enormous numbers, and you’d be hard-pressed to prove that English does so any more than any other widely-used language. These relatively new foreign words that pop up in English are used in other languages as well. If a foreign concept becomes relevant, a word will arise to fill that need.

22

Actually, the simplification of the Germanic case system (I’m guessing that’s what you’re referring to when you say it “simplified its grammar”) was a process underway before 1066. I’m not conversant enough in the history of English to know what the linguistic cause of it was, but it certainly preceded the massive contact with Norman French that began towards the beginning of the second millenium. It’s most definitely not a “Germanic-Romance” language as a result; this is a misconception spread by people that don’t really understand linguistics. All of the hundred most-common words in English are Germanic in origin; every grammatical morpheme in English is Germanic. Its grammar has lost certain typically Germanic characteristics (the case system being one of them) but the grammar of English is still very typically Germanic, and draws practically nothing from the Romance languages. (The decline in the case system could also be supposed to be a continuation of the Germanic languages’ collective loss of much of the Indo-European case system, which is one of the branch’s distinguishing characteristics.)

It’s true that English imported an enormous amount of vocabulary from French, but this is not at all atypical. Japanese has a grammar very different from Chinese and certainly could not be considered a descendent or creole of Chinese, yet somewhere around three quarters of its vocabulary is Chinese in origin. Many of the Dravidian languages of southern India imported enormous amounts of vocabulary from Sanskrit despite being completely unrelated - but that doesn’t make them hybrid languages, as the grammar is still Dravidian and not Indo-European in origin.

The closest you could come to grammatical borrowings from French was the (short-lived) development of a parallel T-V distinction (essentially, grammaticalization of formality, along the lines of the French tu and vous) and a certain amount of derivational morphology. Neither of these things reflected any sort of fundamental change to English.

You say that as though the Académie Française has any effect on how French speakers speak. :slight_smile: The French will still send les emails to discuss getting together on le week-end, no matter how many French academics become furious at the thought.

I don’t see what evidence there is to suggest that English borrows from everywhere while most languages don’t do so. A language that’s used by an isolated population, or only used within homes and unofficial circumstances, probably won’t import words for foreign concepts, but only because they’re not relevant. I would challenge you to find words for foreign ideas or objects imported into English that haven’t been imported into, for instance, French or German, or any language used in international circles.

I’m serious here when I say this: English’s wealth of borrowings is greater than that of other languages, but not to a significant degree, and only as a result of circumstance. If everyone decided to conduct international diplomacy in Mordvinian, those words would develop right quick. Borrowing is not a difficult process - it happens very quickly whenever it needs to.

23

The main cause was the Danish invasion. English grammar was simplified along the “Danelaw,” the border that separated the Anglo-Saxon and Danish-ruled territories.

24

In this list, the commonest English words derived from French are “number” (82), “people” (86), “part” (104), and “very” (127). That’s two in the first 100, and a couple more not very far outside.

Yes, a lot happened in English before 1066 because of the mixing of several different Germanic cultures, but the Norman invasion had a profound influence on the English vocabulary – so much so, that French borrows back English “roast beef” as “ros bif” without noticing that both parts were originally French!

I appreciate that technically this does not make English a hybrid – rather, it is a Germanic language with a large part of its vocabulary taken from Romance sources – but having so much of the vocabulary borrowed from French & Latin does make it easier for Romance language speakers to learn it.

I also understand that an official academy cannot completely control borrowings from foreign languages, but there clearly is an influence there.

25

i don’t see that happening. chinese is more of a writing system than anything. without hanzi it isn’t chinese anymore. assuming that it’s accepted as the world language in the first place, it’ll make more sense to adopt hanzi while retaining local pronunciations.

the english language will retire as soon as we convince people to do away with qwerty keyboards.

26

Regarding the possibility that some other language might supplant English as an international language: there’s precedent for a fair amount of inertia in trade languages. Latin, for example, never did supplant Koine Greek as the trade language for the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire. It did, however, become the lingua franca of the West; which seems to have had no previous “international” language. (Inter-tribal would perhaps be a better term.)
It’s certainly not impossible to knock out an existing lingua franca; Koine did eventually fade out as the eastern shared language. But I wonder if, to get that result, you might need either a collapse of international contact or else a reshuffling of trade routes so that cultures find themselves enmeshed with a new network?

27

It may depend upon who ordered them - determining the frequency of words in a language is nontrivial. This is something I was taught in an introductory linguistics class, perhaps I should have confirmed it myself.

All the Western European languages share a large amount of vocabulary, especially in technical or specialized fields. It’s interesting to contrast with Chinese, since the phonetic systems of the Chinese languages don’t accomodate these words, and thus they are all derived from native roots. And English and French indeed have a particular intimacy, which no doubt helps encourage English usage among speakers of Romance languages. I think that’s a relatively minor piece of the puzzle, though, since English shows up in plenty of areas outside of those with significant shared vocabulary. And it certainly doesn’t indicate any special willingness to borrow words, which is the point I was making.

Okay, referring to “the Chinese language” in the abstract is deceptive. To a great extent, the Chinese languages share a writing system, although one shouldn’t overstate this point: there’s substantial amount of vocabulary in many of the Chinese languages with no corresponding characters, and there are characters that are used in some of the languages and not others. Mandarin, however, is a language (and certainly the only Chinese language with a significant number of foreign learners; it’s difficult to find classes to study Cantonese in the U.S., and I doubt there are any universities that offer courses in the other Chinese languages in the U.S. at all.)

Hanzi would not be useful in international usage, though, and I’m not sure what you’re envisioning when you say “adopt hanzi while retaining local pronunciations” because we were discussing the role of English as an international language. Are you suggesting that speakers of other languages use hanzi to write them? I can’t even begin to enumerate the ways in which this is impossible. And I’m not sure what that has to do with the status of English as an international language, or the possible use of Mandarin as one. They seem like entirely unrelated ideas. :confused:

28

Cite or evidences for english being the “most flexible language”?

29

“International languages” only if you take in account only european countries.

30

But it could gain much more presence in the close future, with chinese economical power growing. Businessmen in asia might feel the use of learning Mandarin, and it could eventually become the business lingua franca in Asia, for instance. It could be learnt more and more people in western countries too, for the same reason.
There might be no real international lingua franca at some point in the future. For instance, the whole south-american continent could become more and more appealing, and trying to do business in english instead of spanish there could eventually become a bad idea. A handful of “dominant international languages” could replace the current english dominance.

31

Could you explain the etimology of “very”? I can’t think of a somehow similar french word with a related meaning…

32

According to Merriam-Webster:

I don’t know anything about French, but it’s entirely possible that the word has disappeared from French since the middle ages.

33

I tend to think people are widely exagerating the influence of the academy, and don’t really get its role. It’s an academy of writers elected for life by their peers (each time an academician dies, someone is elected to the seat by the remaining members). So, the main interest of a french academy member would be expected to be litterature (and probably also honors). And for those academicians who actually involves themselves in the work done in the academy, they would probably mostly study grammar or such things…
The French Academy is actually the equivalent for letters to the academy of sciences, for instance (and actually, there are several other “academies”, each having its own domain : arts, moral and political sciences, etc…). It’s not a “vocabulary police” institution.
Giving advices to the governement about vocabulary when requested (for instance, on how to feminize job names, or about the wording of the french version of the EU “constitution”) is a minor aspect of their job. They also commonly include borrowed words (often from english) in their official dictionnary when there’s no french equivalent, or when the word is widespread. Essentially only when someone in the government is worried about loan words do they “create” french words (or borrow them from the Quebecois) to replace the english ones in…mostly official documents (I can’t remember at the moment the french word for “e-mail”, for instance).

34

Actually, no. “True” is translated by “vrai” in french. But I didn’t notice the similitudes, nor in meaning (“true” and “very”), nor in the spelling.

35

Not in this case. Very is the same as truly. French still uses the words vérité and véritable; compare to English verity and veritable. In English the word very can be used in this way, like vrai in French, but also in where a French person would say très or use words like super, extra. On the other hand, English words true, truth etc. come from the same root (no pun intended) as the word tree, maybe because verity was seen as firm and solid like wood.

36

There are three hundred million people learning English in China, right now. By the time Chinese is accepted as an international common tongue, it will have to absorb English, which, of course, it could. But that would change Chinese dramatcally.

However, there are another billion English speakers in Asia, not counting China at all. It is, after all, the official language of India. (Along with Hindi.) I’m not sure about Sri Lanka, Bangaladesh, and Pakistan, but I suspect that English is very strongly entrenched as a common language there. When you have six hundred native languages in common use, you try the most common one first. I listen to the common language of my foreign born coworkers daily, and can pick out the general drift of their conversations fairly often just from the interspersed English idioms.

I also think that English will continue to evolve, and change, but also to even out on a world wide basis, as audio-visual media begin to be ubiquitous. Americans already speak Television English, and the BBC version of English is pretty wide spread. When you sell stuff to folks, you talk the way they want you to talk. And after a while, the language will become much more common, rather than less common.

But, it’s commerce that causes languages to borrow, not the inherent nature of the language. Commerce is now moving back to the roots of language, and taking place in our homes, and our daily business lives. It’s happening while English is already the technological language of choice in more than half the world. It’s not because it’s better, it’s because it works, and accountants and fashion designers are not linguists. Neither are sailors, or soldiers, but they sent English around the world during the last century. Web geeks and advertising executives will send it around the world in the next. They will send lots of other languages as well, of course. It is the mixture that will become the dominant language of the next century.

I doubt that we will abandon the advantages of alphabetic notation for our language. We might well see the introduction of ideagrams as well, though, to convey attitudinal intent. :wink: Ya think?

Tris

“Language is not an abstract construction of the learned, or of dictionary makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground.” ~ Noah Webster ~

37

“Courielle” or something like that. It’s at least my impression that there’s some sort of organized effort to prevent English loanwords from becoming too common in French, though (apparently unlike the other poster) I recognize that they have no actual influence in most people’s lives. Am I still overstating it? Does the Académie not really care much about that sort of thing at all?
Borrowing is a linguistically interesting phenomenon. English has one advantage, anyway - compared to a lot of languages, we have pretty flexible syllable structure. As long as you can find a vaguely approximate sound, you can call it an English word. Not so in some languages. Chinese doesn’t eagerly borrow words, and the translation of brand names is particularly troublesome if one wants to approximate the original name and also suggest positive connotations. When “telephone” was originally used in Chinese, the sonic approximation “delüfeng” was used, which vaguely suggests the English word but had a nonsensical meaning. Later on, the term “dianhua” (meaning “electric speech”) was borrowed from Japanese. Calque (when a term is invented out of a word-for-word translation from another language) is of course very easy between Chinese and Japanese, because anything written in kanji can simply be read with the corresponding Chinese words; the meanings expressed by a character in Chinese tend to match well with those of the same character in Japanese.

38

It’s courriel, short for courrier électronique (*courrier *= mail, and *électronique *= electronic).

39

Not even close! Most college-educated Indians learn English (and most of them got into college because they went to English-medium schools), but that constitutes a small percentage of the population. (I don’t have the numbers.)

This statement is extremely misleading. I would recommend you never repeat such a statement to an Indian. There are about 20 officially recognised languages in India. Hindi is the official national language (but a huge percentage of Indians resent Hindi’s status). English has semi-official status and is the de facto standard for official activities. Regardless of this de facto status, no Indian leader ever intended that the statement “English is the official language of India” should be a true statement.

Again, not as a common language. As an elite language.

That’s not how it works. It’s highly dependent on circumstances. It’s pretty much only true when both parties can see that the other person is college educated and not from his own ethnic group.

Also “600 native languages” is very misleading. Most people speak multiple languages and there is very little chance that you will be in a situation in which another person can’t understand to some extent one of the major languages – Hindi, Bengali, Telegu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, or Sindhi. If you are in a place where the people don’t know any of these languages and speak only Bhili or Bodo or Santhali, etc., then you can be pretty sure that they won’t be able to understand English either.

Casual conversation in India is rarely carried out in a single language among the current generation of educated Indians. Sentences commonly include English and Hindi words, along with whatever other languages the speakers know. The density of words from any particular language is dependent on the locale and the ethnic background of the speakers.

40

acsenray:
After reading your interlined post I can only say, I think there are a billion English speakers in Asia, outside of China. I doubt that even a small fraction of them have English as a first language. Yet, still, they speak English, and I think there are a billion of them. There are a lot of countries outside of China that are still in Asia.

A native of India told me that English and Hindi are the official languages of India. She seemed unoffended by telling me that. Why she might be offended by what could be an error in the political history of her country is rather mysterious, nor would I understand why someone would be offended if I repeated the same error. (By the way, what is the official Language of India?)

And you seem to assume that my coworkers are from India. Currently none are. My coworkers are from South America, and Africa, where the ability to speak English is far more common than casual conversation in English.

I hope I have answered you point, although I am not sure what it was.

Tris

“In my opinion, there’s nothing in this world, Beats a '52 Vincent, and a red headed girl.” ~ Richard Thompson ~