October 26, 2004

• Mr Druon's campaign has won several non-French supporters, including the former Portuguese president, Mario Soar
• To me, the Académie Française is just a bunch of old, irrelevent geezers, and has been that way since early XVIIIth century. But, yes, I would like to see my mother tongue remain internationally relevent. I like my technical texts in French (when they exist) better than in English. But while I can see myself teaching English to my fellow Québécois, I can't fathom how I'd help an English speaker learn my language.
• Conversation, Richer. Not least since most Francophones seem give up in disgust at bad French and switch to English.
• Yeah. I'm like that too -- I switch to English when someone uses bad French. It's pretty visceral. It's often to show off my m4d 3ngl15h sk1lls, and also because the communication gap bothers me (my interlocutor's broken French vs. my pretty good English).
• I say they should go with Latin - accurate, elegant and dead. And no one (but the Vatican) can claim special treatment. It's either that or Esperanto. yes, rodgerd is right. The best way to help someone else learn your language (short of being a teacher) is to be patient. Let them mangle it, let them say barbarous things. Personally, I love when people speaking English as a second language create expressions or images no Anglophone would - it brings the language to life, and brings in a colour it wouldn't otherwise have. I have a Taiwanese friend who has given me two lovely neologisms (sp?) - once, she described a flower as being "without a wound" when she meant unbruised, and (less pretty, but funnier) she invented the transitive verb "to bitch". It's like bullying, but in that nasty, verbal way perfected by teenage girls. I think I've given these examples before - but I'm still trying to get them into wider usuage :)
• Bad tactics by the French, I should have thought. The best defence against the encroachment of English is the doctrine that all EU languages have equal status. It never worked like that in practice, of course, but a bid for unique status for French alienates many of the other members while freeing up English to assert its claims as the universal second language. (And why French, anyway, apart from EU tradition? German is the first language of more EU citizens than any other: Italian is close to Latin, the erstwhile legal language; Spanish has an international weight which nowadays surely exceeds that of French.)
• Richer, Je suis Anglais. Je parle Allemand, néerlandais at un petit peu de Français. Pour moi, Français est le plus facile. La structure linguistique me semble plus normale. U moet weten, dat ik spreek maar een klein beetje Franz. Truly, if you are not embarrased to speak bad French, I think it is the easiest language for a native English speaker. Natürlich, erwarte ich Widerspruch.
• At this point I am convinced that no other language is likely to unseat English as the international auxlang. Certainly no conlang will manage this task. English will fall like Latin fell—by dispersing into dozens of mutually unintelligible dialects—but that will not happen before America loses its super-power status, or China and India gain theirs.
• English will fall Intriguing scenario, but will it play in the age of (even more) mass communication?
• Can I just mention that there's a lot of italics in this thread when viewed with my Unicode eyball in? Merci.
• French? FRENCH? Useless, defunct language! Norwegian is where it's at. N'est ce pas? becomes ikkje sant?, je ne sais quois is veit ikkje ka, and ma cherie is the simple, elegant kjære. That, or estuary English, where the expressions above are translated "innit?", "dunno", and "luvva", respectively.
• Monkeyfilter: veit ikkje ka
• If they want precision, they should go for Loglan. No, seriously! It's very precise, and since it is artificial, it does not favor any one country or group of native speakers. If they want a certain ironic but petty humor, they should go for English, a very practical choice, but officially call it, in properly-accented French if you please, "la langue de la liberté".
• Pour moi, Français est le plus facile. La structure linguistique me semble plus normale. I wouldn't wish to contradict your experience, Chaz.. but at least in the UK French has the (relative) advantage of being the foreign language that everyone learns first, so will have the upper hand in terms of familiarity. In terms of learning it sufficiently well to be able to conduct high-level diplomacy with native speakers in it, it's as hard as any other language. But as for any other language, it's worth the effort. I'm new here... please be nice... I have enjoyed lurking very much, but a pithy, witty FPP coming soon (don't hold your breath)...
• [W]ill it play in the age of (even more) mass communication? I expect that it will. I have no proof of this, but I think that the majority of adult English learners pick English primarily because of its immediate benefits, be they economic or social. Few learners, I would imagine, learn English to communicate with distant peoples or gain access to new bodies of literature and art. I don't think better communication will change this much. Most of our daily experience will still be local. We can already see the fragmentation of English. While the Americans, the Australians, and the English laugh at each other, the Indians become the largest group of English speakers in terms of absolute numbers. In places like Singapore or Japan, English adopts the features and vocabulary of local languages to become rather distinct pidgins. Once America becomes just another country, there will no longer be a need for the American dialect to override local variations.
• Once America becomes just another country, there will no longer be a need for the American dialect to override local variations. Ignoring for the moment whether the assumption will actually come to pass, would this also imply that some Americans' US-accented non-English languages also be considered acceptable? I would think it would work both ways, eh?
• Regarding fuyugare's idea, does anyone knows anything about Spanish or Arab? Not as big as English, yes, but both have grown hard-to-understand or uninterelligible variants.
• Chaz: I got the "French is Hard" impression when I read a French Second Language textbook. I bathe in the language, so most of it feels natural. But seeing all the exceptions, woah. Oral French isn't that complicated. But its written form is.
• Clearly the spread of English was originally down to a long run of economic and military success by English speakers: but that's not the whole story any more. These days it has a value as a lingua franca even where native speakers and their interests are absent. I'm sure, for example, that English would eventually have become the de facto working language of the EC even if Britain and Ireland had never joined. So there would still be pressure for some 'standard dialect' to prevail, even if America became 'just another country' *smirks behind hand* Welcome, alto linguistic!
• fuyu: You're describng the process by which Latin evolved from the universal language of an empire into Italian, Spanish, Romainian, et al. It's not hard to see English goe the same way. Besides, now that the English-speaking West has ceeded economic superiority to China (without them having to fire a shot; dashed clever that) I expect my kids will end up having to learn a flavour of Chinese, unless outsourcing what wasn't handed over to China to the Indians makes them powerful enough that Indian English ends up as a global language.
• You're describng the process by which Latin ... Yes, I said as much already.
• I'd vote for Esperanto. Seriously. Easy to learn (especially for Europeans), no real sociological bias, and everyone's at an equal disadvantage in using it.
• French may be easier for anglophones, because of the heavy borrowing from French
• Couldn't you use the same argument for German or the other Romance languages?
• I don't know what you mean by "sociological bias", but Esperanto does have an Eurocentric bias as far as word-stock or grammatical features like gendered pronouns are concerned. This is not a big deal for an European auxlang. To completely go off on an Esperanto tangent, I find some elements of it to be very unfortunate. Its "accusative case" drives me nuts. It isn't a true accusative as it has plenty of ablative uses. The vast majority of cases in Esperanto have case-particles; why single out the accusative case as declension? Esperantists often tell me that it allows a greater freedom in word-order, but that explanation is not very satisfactory to me. Esperanto, like English, is pretty consistently right-branching: the natural way to say "man bites dog" is viro mordas hundon, even though hundon mordas viro is unambiguous. A more unfortunate choice in Esperanto is grammatical number. As a native speaker of a non IE language without this feature, it has always struck me as odd to commit to the singular in "A bird! A plane!" (and why not "No, a superman!"?). But, even allowing this feature, I still see no reason to force agreement! English doesn't have number-agreement, and it manages without any trouble. German has it, and it's a menace!
• Richer: I don't mind when you switch to English because I'm having trouble in French, but before you do, two things: 1) Don't do it if I just have an English accent. There's the possibility I've been in French immersion since Kindergarten, speak the language every day and just have an English accent, rather than being actually "bad" at French. 2) If my French is actually bad, and you do switch, don't sigh then roll your eyes before you do it. This message brought to you by the Anglophone-Who-Try association of Canada. (Note: Don't take this as a snark - this is just an outlet for my bitterly remembering my first trip to Montreal, where it seemed every third person I spoke to would roll their eyes at me and switch to English. I speak the language, I just don't speak it avec votre cher accent Francophone! J'essaye, Québec!)
• I don't switch to English when it's simply an accent, just like I don't switch to Spanish when someone goes "yé crois qué lé prof voulé dire qué..". I don't think I've ever rolled my eyes at someone because of their poor French. But then, all the English speakers I've met have been friendly (I don't work in the service industry). Usually, a conversation will go on in Franglish.
• Yes, I said as much already. While we're at it, French, Spanish, and Italian are not mutually unintelligible.