09:01 – Even the scummiest of politicians will sometimes tell the truth when it suits his own agendum. So, it was with no surprise that I read Eurozone collapse ‘will send continent into depression’
According to no less than Jose Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, a collapse of the eurozone would instantly wipe out half the value of the eurozone’s economy, plunging Europe into a deep depression, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the 1930’s and reducing living standards to Latin American levels. Barroso has his own agendum, of course, which, as always, is “More Europe”. As with all statists, his motto is Never Waste a Good Crisis. And, in fact, he exaggerates. Living standards in the southern tier, including his own country, may in fact fall by 50% or more, but the effects on the FANG nations will be considerably less severe.
Someone asked me the other day why I am more optimistic about the future of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand than I am about the rest of the world, including other first-world countries that use other languages. Two reasons: first, and the importance of this should not be underestimated, we speak English, which is demonstrably superior to all other languages. As a rough guide to relative usefulness, I suggest cubing the ratio of the number of words in the English vocabulary to that of the comparison language. Second, and even more important, our women have equal rights and responsibilities. We don’t waste half our population. Of course, that’s also true of Europe, particularly northwestern Europe, but they have saddled themselves with inferior languages, which limits their competitiveness.
Still, Europe is in wonderful shape compared to most of the rest of the world, where women are treated at best as less-than-a-man and more commonly pretty much like livestock, if that well. (A woman, of course, is often cheaper than a cow, and easier to replace.) This situation applies throughout the entire islamic world, India, nearly all of Africa, and much of Asia, Central America, and South America. It’s no wonder that these are all third-world countries, and doomed to remain so.
And yet, people are often surprised to learn that I consider myself a feminist. In truth, I’m an elitist. I value hard-working competent people above others. I have no use for people who are lazy or incompetent, or both. If people are hard-working and competent, I don’t care what color their skin is or whether they pee sitting down or standing up. And I think that attitude is common in the first world and rare otherwise.
Work on the biology book continues. I’ve finished three microcosm lab sessions, leaving only one on observing Winogradsky columns in the to-do pile. Today, I’ll jump to a different topic altogether, although I’m not sure which one.
Why is English so superior to other languages?
I strongly agree that it is the most useful language in the world because of its ubiquity. As the de-facto international standard language, especially for technical discussion, it pays to be fluent in it. The Internet also allows easier communication between people, and again English is the default standard. So it’s very very useful to speak that universal language well.
But is English really a better language in terms of its communication efficiency? That’s very arguable. In the distant past, Latin served as the international standard. In more recent past, French was probably most common (especially for diplomacy). And German was more common for technical matters a century ago.
Wow. If you go back into the anals of our host’s site, there was an extensive discussion of this some years back. I taught English to foreigners for almost 10 years. There are many reasons why English is THE superior language of the world.
Among the most important is that it does not respect gender except where it counts (as in people and some animals). That every noun–a tree or a rock–must have a gender–and worse, that articles and modifiers must be conjugated to agree with the gender,–is simply insane. English has only 2 cases: subject and object. Having a separate case for indirect object, possessive (7 cases I am told for Polish, and 11 for Russian), all requiring modifiers and/or pronouns to be declined, is yet another insanity.
English is changed by the users. Rules for European languages are decided by a panel of arbitrators. In fact, I am noticing that all around me, English speaking natives are now saying “went” as the past-participle. No longer is it go/went/gone, it is “He had went to college for only 2 years.” It is now encouraged that prepositions should be at the end of a phrase–e.g. “Where is he from?” “I don’t know where the bullets for your gun are at.” Also, the US is now using the Queen’s lingo of “he went missing” instead of saying “he disappeared”, “he vanished”, or “he is missing”.
English is FAR more descriptive with many more words that have discriminating shades of difference and allow more accurate communication with fewer words. In fact, if you ever look at direct translations of English into German, it is not surprising to see that it takes more words in German to convey the same idea than in English.
Lastly, English is a very forgiving language. You can mangle an English sentence badly, and the idea still gets communicated. As I found out in my German classes, if you merely reverse the order of direct and indirect objects of a sentence (a major difference between German and English), even teachers with decades of experience with foreigners will throw up their hands and remark that they have no idea what you are trying to say. Goof up just a little in German, and nothing at all gets communicated. Goof up horribly in English, and–as long as all the words are there–the idea still gets across.
Of course, during my teaching, I was exposed to lots of studies about English, and the fact is that it is much easier (and far cheaper) to learn English than any other language on the planet, including the now defunct Esperanto, that was supposed to become the universal common language. One can become an effective communicator in English in about one-third the time of any other language in modern use.
We were told that it would be necessary to learn Chinese and Asian dialects in order to do business with them, but the fact is that it is far, FAR cheaper for Asians to learn English than for English-speakers to learn languages of the Orient.
Without a doubt, English is THE superior language of the world–and it is without even a close second.
Are there any computer programing languages where the reserved words are in a language other than English? In Pascal, Modula 2 and Oberon, all languages created by Niklaus Wirth of ETH in Switzerland, all the reserved words are in English. Why English and not French or German?
Because Bob is right, English is the superior language, particularly if you’re typing on an ASCII keyboard.
The reason English is so superior is that we English speakers shamelessly steal words from other languages to fill out our own. Accordingly, English is able to express subtleties that no other language can. When a foreign word expresses a concept better than an existing English word, we simply steal the foreign word and make it an English word.
Also, if there isn’t a suitable word, we simply create one. The evolution of new words in other languages is slow to non-existent. In English, new words are added constantly. Can you imagine a “language police” for English? The French do that because they’re perfectly aware that if they don’t Francophones will eventually all become Anglophones.
In short, English rules because it’s dynamic and more expressive than any other language. The dominance of Latin and later French had nothing to do with the inherent quality of those languages and everything to do with the transient cultures in which they evolved. In today’s world and probably for at least the next millennium or so, if you want to get ahead you need to speak fluent English.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_languages
Yes, but no mainstream languages.
Even if you, say, modified Perl to use Russian instead of English and it worked perfectly, there’s still the matter of bringing in external libraries and sample code from the internet and similar concerns.
I’ve worked with non-English-speaking programmers in other countries. They’d memorize the reserved words and use cheat sheets as needed. And some of the programmers and most of the managers would complain about English-based programming languages, but, you know, not a single one was sitting down to write a Mandarin or Spanish equivalent of PHP or Java or even BASIC which was going to take over the world.
If I were the King of Da World™ I’d make Lojban the official language and forbid anyone in my Fortress of Awesomeness™ from speaking in any other language. This is not because Lojban is inherently superior to all other languages (though it has its good points) but because it’s so friggin difficult that virtually no one would be saying anything. Finally I’d get some peace and quiet.
Hmm… a comment seems to have been eaten. Here it is again, without the link to lojban dot org.
If I were the King of Da World™ I’d make Lojban the official language and forbid anyone in my Fortress of Awesomeness™ from speaking in any other language. This is not because Lojban is inherently superior to all other languages (though it has its good points) but because it’s so friggin difficult that virtually no one would be saying anything. Finally I’d get some peace and quiet.
I have nothing whatsoever to add to what Robert and Chuck have said in regard to the Master Language of the Universe, which, contrary to false beliefs, is NOT mathematics.
Oh wait–there is one other thing: God speaks English.
But all the cool scifi books of the 70s and 80s said that we would be speaking Esperanto.
One of the reasons I love “Firefly” is the speaking in English and cursing in Mandarin.
More people still speak Latin than Esperanto.
Robert alluded to it, but in terms of word count English has roughly twice as many as Chinese, and climbing. We steal and we make it up as we go along and like the Borg, we just assimilate it from all over hell.
I was studying Latin, Old French, Old Norse, medieval Italian, etc. in grad school, and have to use a bit of Acadian and Quebecois French when we cross our border to the north, about forty minutes away. But I have since redoubled my studies in all of English; etymology, Old English, Middle English, anything at all to do with it. Can’t get enough.
And I have to acknowledge and thank my teachers from long ago, but especially Jack Donovan, of Framingham North High School, Maffachufetts, who drilled us mercilessly in English grammar until it became part of our fucking DNA and bone marrow, while slagging the shit out of me every chance he got, a master of sarcastic putdown. RIP, Jack, I love ya.
And Pearl Oliva, who took us on field trips to see Romeo and Juliet at the Shubert Theater in Boston, starring Jane Asher, sister of Peter Asher, from Peter and Gordon, and girlfriend of Paul McCartney at the time. To see Franco Zefferelli’s production of it. To the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in the Fenway, a marvelous treasure house of art and culture, founded and built by a truly remarkable woman of means and wit and strength. RIP, Isabella. I think Pearl may still be among the living and I am on the track accordingly to at least send her a note.
Those two teachers more than any others lit me up for our marvelous native tongue.
Chuck wrote:
“In fact, if you ever look at direct translations of English into German, it is not surprising to see that it takes more words in German to convey the same idea than in English.”
Oh? What about Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschafts-kapitäswitwe? How many words would it take to say that in English?
Personally, I think we should go back to Latin.
I hate the gender system of other languages, for the reasons Chuck pointed out. Sometimes gender is obvious, sometimes it makes no sense and has to be learned. The craziest thing about French is that the word for bra, le soutien gorge, is masculine.
RBT wrote:
“In today’s world and probably for at least the next millennium or so, if you want to get ahead you need to speak fluent English.”
Asian kids, and Koreans kids in particular, are doing a lot of their schooling in the West for just this reason. Dad stays back home and earns the dough to pay for it all, mum and the kids come to Australia or elsewhere and do several years of schooling. My sister often has Korean kids in her class and when they’re done here they speaka da lingo pretty good.
Gotta disagree with you on that last one, Miles_Teg. Of course it’s a masculine trait to hold onto breasts all day long.
OFD wrote:
“I have nothing whatsoever to add to what Robert and Chuck have said in regard to the Master Language of the Universe, which, contrary to false beliefs, is NOT mathematics.
Oh wait–there is one other thing: God speaks English.”
More likely Hebrew, Ancient Greek or Latin.
Deist turned atheist Stephen Hawking wrote the book “God Created the Integers”, which contradicts your view.
Miles_Teg says:
Chuck wrote:
“In fact, if you ever look at direct translations of English into German, it is not surprising to see that it takes more words in German to convey the same idea than in English.”
Oh? What about Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschafts-kapitäswitwe? How many words would it take to say that in English?
Okay, you got me there. Maybe I should have said it takes more letters in German.
Actually, I very much liked the ability to combine words in German into a more complex idea. At one point, I was going to keep a list of my favorite combined words,–and I should have, because I cannot remember a single one, now.
There are some ideas and phrases that are peculiar to a particular language and would take many more words to adequately describe. “déjà vu” is one from French, and “zeitgeist” is one from German. So, as Robert noted, we just appropriated those terms as our own.
Some ideas just cannot be adequately translated from one language to another, because we just do not think of them in English-speaking culture. I meant to keep a list of those, too, but never did. At the moment, I cannot think of one, but I know Jeri and I discussed several over the years we were in Berlin. Maybe Brad can provide one.
“doch” is a pretty nifty word in German, with no English equivalent. It has lots of meanings depending on the context, but perhaps the most common is equivalent to “au contraire”. It is meant to be a complete contradiction of what someone has just said. Having heard my own kids argue about something over and over with “Yes, you did!” “No, I didn’t!”–it was a shocking surprise to me when our German grandkids simply said, “Doch!” to refute the other one’s statement, however long it was.
English does “doch” in one less letter. “Not!”
“More likely Hebrew, Ancient Greek or Latin.”
“Dead” languages. He had to modernize a bit. Nothing better than English for that, mate.
“Deist turned atheist Stephen Hawking wrote the book “God Created the Integers”, which contradicts your view.”
I admire and respect Mr. Hawking tremendously, but anytime his views on God contradict my own is a good day for me. There have been other brilliant, genius scientists through history, and currently, who see things my way, more or less.
I do not really understand the “scorched earth” sentiment in relation to language. If you talk a language other than English, you are vermin, let’s wipe you, or at least your language, out.
I thought libertarianism was about allowing every person the freedom to live his life the way he wants to. Now it seems only those who are Americans, speaks only English, and do not believe in God has a place in the sun. What damage does it do to anyone if, besides English, I speak Afrikaans to my fellow citizens? Why should Germans speak English among themselves, when it is foreign to them? They can probably express themselves better in their own language, even if English has 20 gazillion words available, of which maybe 1% is known to the Germans?
Even with their language “handicap”, the Germans managed to do quite well for themselves, as the Chinese are beginning to do, who speak the language most common in the world. (More people speak Chinese than any other language, included English.) And contrary to what our host says, from an accounting viewpoint, I would rather have a surplus like the Chinese do, than a deficit the size of that of the USA.
Different cultures and languages need to survive for the same reason that we want a multitude of species in nature: it enriches the gene pool. It also enriches people in their psyche, their experience of life, in the different viewpoints that are available, and from which even Americans can learn.
I await the flames … :-[
I don’t think anyone wants the other languages to go away, it’s just that English is taking over the world so everyone should get on the bandwagon and at least become passably fluent in it.
Not a whole lot of them, and many fewer now that they don’t have to worry about being burned at the stake. It’s difficult to escape the fact that acceptance of religion is strongly inversely correlated with the acceptance of science. Before the Enlightenment, most people were devoutly religious, or at least were forced to pretend to be so. Religion is now a pale shadow of what it was, and that’s almost entirely thanks to science.
I really feel sorry for real scientists nowadays who are also devoutly religious. It must be very difficult for them to watch the realm of religion continue to shrink as science continues to disprove truth claims made by religion. Now that we know for a fact, for example, that Adam and Eve did not exist and could not have existed, it’s entertaining to watch religious scientists attempt to reconcile the utter destruction of the whole basis of Christianity with their continuing belief. They’re now down to the quantum level, literally. Original sin in the spin of an electron. Talk about god of the gaps. Geez.
Where did I or anyone say that? People are free to speak whatever language they wish. People are also free to be stupid in other ways. That doesn’t make them less stupid.
funny, as you could see the terms rufa et altri spreading in the US
anyway, we welcome 80?% of the US to Latin America in 2020?
Maybe my catalonian ancestors who spitted people on the Mediterranean are laughing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_de_Flor
Well, there was a bit of scorched earth going on in the earlier part of the 1900s in Canada. My grandfather immigrated from Scotland (Ye’ve got your choice, Jock. Gaol for helping the bloody Irish, or immigration to Canada.), and was told that speaking Gaelic was forbidden. The Canadians also incarcerated Russians in the 1950s for daring to teach their children Russian. And that’s not even mentioning the unmentionable things we “did” to the French, like enshrine their particular slang as an official language of Canada.
However, I agree with the assessment that English is the new Lingua Franca. The ultimate Pidgin language. We steal from everybody!
There are a few really nice words in any language that don’t exist in others. As Chuck mentions, German offers “doch”: you said “no” but I disagree, the answer is really “yes”. French offers the confirmation “si”: you said “yes”, and I agree with you. I have always like “Gesundheit” as something non-religious to say when someone sneezes.
The ability to build your own words can also be really nice. If you have to qualify something in English, like “heads of department”, this is not to bad. When you need two levels of qualification, it gets awkward: “heads of department of the university”. In German, these are both just words, respectively “Abteilungsleiter” and “Universitätsabteilungsleiter”.
Genders do make for a bit of a mess. Even after 20 years of German, I still make plenty of mistakes – if you don’t absorb the genders as a kid, it is essentially impossible to learn them error-free as an adult. There are patterns, but with plenty of exceptions, and I often get genders wrong even when I ought to know them – just because I am talking to quickly.
One of the features of English is its simple sentence structure: subject-verb-object. However, the ability to mix it up in German has its advantages. Since you decline the subject and object, you can find them wherever they are in the sentence – and changing the word order can allow interesting shades of meaning. An example: “The dog is chasing the cat.” Staying with the Subject-Verb-Object structure, in German you have “Der Hund jagd die Katze”, which means pretty much the same thing. But you can turn it around (OVS): Die Katze jagd der Hund. The basic meaning is the same, but the sentence is emphasizing the object – perhaps gently correcting someone who thought the dog was chasing something else. However, this also makes the sentence structure fragile. if you are just learning German and get the declinations wrong, it can get confusing – maybe the cat is chasing the dog?
My wife, who is something of a language expert, puts it like this: It’s easy to English to an intermediate level; it’s difficult to become fluent, because of the huge vocabulary and the zillions of exceptions in spelling and pronunciation. Languages like German are the opposite: the genders and declinations are a huge hurdle when you are starting the language, but achieving fluency is easier, because the language is smaller and the rules (except for the genders) are a lot more consistent. Of course, kids growing up with either language have no problems.
RBT writes: “The reason English is so superior is that we English speakers shamelessly steal words from other languages”. That is a bit naive, and egoistic. Every language adapts, every language borrows words from other languages, every language creates new words. German is stealing lots words from English, especially in and around the Internet. Sending a tweet is called “twittern”, which is now a fine German verb with all the expected conjugations “Ich twittere, du twitterst, er twittert”. Is this a sign of German superiority, or just that the German language is very much alive?
I disagree that English is hugely better than any other language. It has a genuine advantage, because it is easier to learn to a practical level. However, if the political situation were different, another language might be dominant. There naturally needs to be a common language of commerce – it was once Latin, it was once French, it now happens to be English. Which makes all of us native speakers happy…
Brad, I’m not sure if the ability to just continually add syllables is all that much of a feature. “Universitätsabteilungsleiter” appears to be a run-on sentence to me. It also seems just as complex as “heads of department of the university”, and pushing what you can fit on a standard business card besides. At least you can put the English version on two lines. Seems to me that English is mostly made up of breaking up German words into proper sentences. 😀
And really, isn’t that just a middle management position, probably created because someone wanted “more” tenure than someone else? “All right Otto, you can be the damn Universitätsabteilungsleiter! Now are you happy?” Isn’t “Dean” actually the term used to describe the head of all departments? After all, Dean derives from the Latin decanus, meaning “leader of ten” as medieval monasteries were set up similar to military platoons. Since many universities grew out of monasteries and cathedral schools the use of Dean was retained. Dean fits just fine on stationary!
All this talk about English raises questions. Was it deliberate that so many of our words are ironic or humorous? Tall is shorter than short. Abbreviation is longer than the average word, and begs to be abbreviated. Lisp and stutter are just cruel. Funny, but cruel. Why are buildings not called builts? Onomatopoeia (a fair construct without the benefit of German!) rules much of our language, but what’s up with “-ash”? So many of our fighting or action words end with it: bash; clash; crash; dash; flash; gash; hash; lash; mash; rash; slash; smash, well you get the idea! I’m not sure where cash or sash fit in, but they’re up to no good, I’ll wager. And yet ‘ash’ isn’t an action word, but from whence we come and we’re will all end up.
Oh, brevity is definitely not a feature of German. And anyway, long titles make the Austrians happy, where everyone has to have one, right down to your everyday office clerk.
The humor in the German language is only visible to outsiders. A vacuum cleaner is a “dust sucker”. A glove is a “hand shoe”. A nipple is a “breast wart”, which somehow sounds a whole lot less attractive…
My favorite Germanism is their nickname for the F-104 Starfighter, whose safety record with the Luftwaffe was horrible, with something like 300 crashes and many pilots killed. Erdnagel, literally “earth nail”, but the actual German word for “tent peg”.
Ah, but the studies show that English is both cheaper and quicker to learn. In this era of globalized commerce, that automatically makes it the one that will succeed. I taught English to German businessmen who dealt regularly with Brazil, and English was the language they used to communicate with each other. Same with business contacts between Germans and people in the former Eastern-bloc countries. They spoke English with each other.
Until I actually taught English as a foreign language, and also had to learn German in my 50’s, knowing nothing but a few words that I mispronounced anyway, I really had no opinion about languages. But after nearly a decade of teaching it, I sure have an opinion now. One easily sees how superior English is, from multiple standpoints. What I noted above is really only the beginning.
On returning to the US, I left all of my collected teaching tools in Berlin, and those were ultimately disposed of by the family there, so I am without the studies from the industry magazines we got. One interesting one was a comparison of how long it takes an adult foreigner to learn a language well enough to teach it correctly to other foreigners. That was the study which–to me–spelled out just how difficult a language actually is. In the case of Asian languages with non-Arabic characters, the answer is never. You can study as long as you want, but you will never be prepared to teach the language correctly to other foreigners. The others that I remember are German = 9 years, French and Spanish = 6 years, and English = 3 years.
There were other studies that compared how quickly school children learn a foreign language via immigrant immersion, and again, English was waaay out on top. Kids in the range of 10 years old to 14 can learn to communicate fluently in as little as 6 weeks. And the amazing thing is that the kids from Eastern Europe, where languages commonly do not use articles, did not mess up on using articles required by English. I do not remember exactly how the other languages stacked up, but none of them was anywhere close to that 6 weeks figure. (I should also note that 6 weeks was the lower figure in a range; IIRC 3 months was the average.)
Personally, I have no problem with countries deciding what language(s) they will speak, but if they intend to provide a good living to their people, English will be one of those languages. As our host frequently points out, if you do not know English as well as a native, then you are unprepared for a progressive life in a global economy. I fault Germany terrifically for keeping English out of their country for so long. They KNOW English is crucial to their nation’s success, but yet the movies are all dubbed to German and there are no English-language radio or TV stations (apart from BBC World Service in Berlin–which the Brits did not give up after the occupation, as America did with AFRTS). The Scandinavian countries gave up on that decades ago, and they now speak English as well as those of us who grew up with only English. A great many of their TV entertainment shows are broadcast ‘as is’ from the English-speaking countries where they were produced.
Moreover, medical studies are now showing that people who regularly use more than one language, live longer, are more mentally nimble at solving problems, and defer Alzheimer’s by many, many years. So I am all in favor of dual languages.
As far as “not” in English, being the equivalent of “doch”, yes I concede it is sometimes used that way, but it really comes across as quite rude in English. IIRC that originated with a recurring Saturday Night Live skit, which pretty much defined the impoliteness of its use. “Doch” has no similar hint of discourtesy associated with its use. I remember when I was taking French in university, we frequently used, “au contraire mon frere”; that was well before the “not” word appeared, but still, that contained far more words than “doch”. However, for little kids arguing, “not” would be perfectly acceptable.
I really liked Brad’s example of turning around “The dog chases the cat” for emphasis of the object, but in German, the sentence meaning does not change. We cannot do that in English and keep the same meaning, without turning the sentence passive “The cat is chased by the dog.” German is very precise. I once had a student ask, “When someone says ‘I’m having lunch with a friend,’ how do you know whether the friend is man or woman?” My response is that you do not know. He was incredulous, because saying that in German requires defining whether the friend is male “Freund” or female “Freundin”. In English, we just have no expectation of knowing anything about the sex of a “friend”.
What about, “I’m having lunch with my friend Susan.”? Of course, I’ve heard tell that there are boys named Sue.
One issue we haven’t mentioned is the parsimony of English, and particularly US English. (It always strikes me as verbose when a character in a Brit TV episode says something like, “Yes. Yes, it is.” That’s a construct one seldom hears used by a native US English speaker, for whom just “Yes.” is sufficient.)
What does it matter what gender my lunch companion is anyway? If it’s important, than you can ask. “I had lunch with my friend” doesn’t tell you the restaurant, what we had, or even what day or week the lunch was eaten, so why the necessity for other languages to care if the companion was female or male?
Strictly a matter of expectation. They get to know the sex of the person by the pronoun in their language; we do not, therefore we have no expectation of knowing. But they do and feel cheated when that information is not there.
BGrigg says:
Brad, I’m not sure if the ability to just continually add syllables is all that much of a feature. “Universitätsabteilungsleiter” appears to be a run-on sentence to me. It also seems just as complex as “heads of department of the university”, and pushing what you can fit on a standard business card besides. At least you can put the English version on two lines. Seems to me that English is mostly made up of breaking up German words into proper sentences.
I think you have to be around German for a while to appreciate that–in German–Universitätsabteilungsleiter IS brevity. You took nearly a whole sentence and reduced it to a single noun. Nevermind how long the word is.
But in German, brevity is really not the point. Hardly anyone cares about brevity. Accuracy, preciseness, and directness count. In fact, a precisely and correctly written long sentence was a work of art to my German teachers, and they loved creating them.
IMO, the German language is, like the people, more direct. What does “vacuum cleaner” tell you? Practically nothing. But “dust sucker” says it all. I always liked their word for “helicopter” which is basically “lift screwer”. Now which tells you more? helicopter? or lift screwer?
All people who are unable to or unwilling to learn and speak English should be exterminated forthwith, removed from the face of the earth, posthaste. They are a burden to the rest of us.
God told me this in a dream last night. He also had some rather bad language about Bob, but I let it slide.
For now.
Chuck wrote:
“In the case of Asian languages with non-Arabic characters, the answer is never. You can study as long as you want, but you will never be prepared to teach the language correctly to other foreigners. The others that I remember are German = 9 years, French and Spanish = 6 years, and English = 3 years.”
One of my lecturers at uni has been learning Sanskrit for about 0 years. I think he’s still learning, but is teaching it to us. Of the three Hindi teachers I’ve had (one Indian, one Aussie, one Yank) the latter two teach it quite well to foreigners. The Aussie knows her Hindi isn’t *really* good but the American is completely fluent (as he should be after 40 or so years of it. The Sanskrit teacher studied Chinese initially (in his UG degree), was pretty good at it too but doesn’t teach it as far as I know.
Damn it. learning Sanskrit for about *20 years.
Bill wrote:
“What does it matter what gender my lunch companion is anyway? If it’s important, than you can ask. “I had lunch with my friend” doesn’t tell you the restaurant, what we had, or even what day or week the lunch was eaten, so why the necessity for other languages to care if the companion was female or male?”
‘Cuz we like to gossip! 🙂
If you ever read Iain M. Banks’ SF novel *The Player of Games* you’ll learn that The Culture’s artificial language, Marain, does not use gender in normal circumstances. It is possible to specify gender but that’s not normally done. Pretty useful when sentient machines count as citizens and you don’t want to demean them by calling them “it”.
Regarding gender in German – this is now coming into conflict with political correctness in a big way.
If I refer to a male student in German, this is a “Student”. If I refer to a female student, she is a “Studentin”. If I want to refer to an unknown student, I should then use the male form – which is no longer PC. So my school insists that I use the invented term “Studierende” – literally, a “studier”. Of course, “Studierende” must have a gender, and the gender is…you guessed it…male. The same non-solution is used for teachers, employees, and a whole host of other terms.
This is the same mess that happened in English, when it became non-PC to refer to an unknown person as “he” (e.g., “When we hire someone, he’ll take over the project”). I’m a bit out of touch, but as far as I can tell, that is still a problem – the most accepted solution (when I left the USA) was using “they” (“…they’ll take over the project”), even though that is grammatically incorrect. What is the usual solution today?
I try to be gender neutral when I can. Partly because there’s no need to upset the ladies, and partly to take the piss out of the PC types.
Back in the Seventies when using the term “chairman” could earn you the death sentence the non-PC types like myself took the piss out of the trendoids by using terms like “chairobject”.
It’s been a bazillion years since HS English, can someone remind me why “They’ll be taking over the department” is grammatically correct?
I’ve always considered that sentient machines wouldn’t care a whit about gender, if anything, they would be repulsed by the biological messiness of it all. Calling one a “he” or “she” would be an insult. “It” would be respectful, and the appropriate term.
If English is going to dump gender for most words, we should at least stock up on some non-gender terms while we’re at it.
And OFD, thanks for the Catholic point of view (Kill everyone that doesn’t look or sound like me)! Very medieval of you. Here I thought you were a bit of a Renaissance Man, and instead you go back a few more centuries than that!
I consciously use sex-neutral phrasing when writing for kids, mainly because I don’t want to do anything to discourage girls from pursuing science. Otherwise, I use correct English.
O’Reilly prefers sex-neutral phrasing, but they don’t push too hard. I remember one time that a copy editor (a woman) called me on the fact that I’d used the inclusive male pronouns throughout except in one specific case where I was talking about someone who’d made a bad mistake. In that paragraph, I referred to that person as “she” and the editor called me on it. I explained that in the other instances I was using the inclusive male pronouns, which I insist upon, while in this instance I was referring to a specific incident in which the guilty party had in fact been a woman. To her credit, she let it pass.
Why didn’t you say “they screwed up”? I assume the point you were making was that a mistake was made, not that it was a woman who made it.
No, I was writing about a specific incident, and the person who screwed up was a woman.
…can someone remind me why “They’ll be taking over the department” is grammatically correct?
If you are talking about a single person, then referring to that person in the plural is technically incorrect.
For example, it would be fine to say: “We are going to hire a bunch of taste testers, to check Bob’s chemistry kits”. However, one shouldn’t say “We are going to hire a new employee; they’ll get to taste test the chemistry kits”. For all we know, after the test the person might undergo spontaneous mitosis – then we could refer to them as “they”.
I thought it might be the plural. How about “We are going to hire a new employee; who’ll get to taste test the chemistry kits”?
Which, by the way, is a position that I’m not interested in, having tasted more than my fair share of chemicals in my youth.
There is no doubt that using “they” for antecedents of unknown gender is — and has been, for decades — in common usage around me. When Oxford U. says I have to teach my English students to put prepositions at the end of phrases and sentences for clarity, how can anybody say it is wrong to use “they” to cover unknown genders with one word?
I do see that my favorite English teacher, Canadian Mary Ansell, does not include that usage in her book on N. American English usage.
http://www.ansell-uebersetzungen.com/gramch18.html#1
PC definitely varies from place-to-place in the US. There was much more of it in Boston, but here around Tiny Town and Indianoplace, people openly denigrate PC usage, and pay it absolutely no heed. One does not hear a lot of “he or she”; but you do hear a lot of “they” or “their” when the gender is unknown.
I think it is a valid usage, and I taught it to my students, who were advanced enough to understand the concept. The fact that it is in common usage that way, is good enough for me. Give it a few years and it will be okay with Oxford, too.
Hmm. I posted a comment; it has not appeared; but when I try to post it again, I get
Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!
Did I? Where?
Let me try the post again with some modification.
Using “they” for antecedents of unknown gender is — and has been, for decades — in common usage around me. When Oxford U. says I have to teach my English students to put prepositions at the end of phrases and sentences for clarity, how can anybody say it is wrong to use “they” to cover unknown genders with one word?
I do see that my favorite English teacher, Canadian Mary Ansell, does not include that usage in her book on N. American English usage.
http://www.ansell-uebersetzungen.com/gramch18.html#1
PC definitely varies from place-to-place in the US. There was much more of it in Boston, but here around Tiny Town and Indianoplace, people openly denigrate PC usage, and pay it absolutely no heed. One does not hear a lot of “he or she”; but you do hear a lot of “they” or “their” when the gender is unknown.
I think it is a valid usage, and I taught it to my students, who were advanced enough to understand the concept. The fact that it is in common usage that way, is good enough for me. Give it a few years and it will be okay with Oxford, too.
Using “they” for antecedents of unknown gender is — and has been, for decades — in common usage around me. When Oxford U. says I have to teach my English students to put prepositions at the end of phrases and sentences for clarity, how can anybody say it is wrong to use “they” to cover unknown genders with one word?
I do see that my favorite English teacher, Canadian Mary Ansell, does not include that usage in her book on N. American English usage.
http://www.ansell-uebersetzungen.com/gramch18.html#1
PC definitely varies from place-to-place in the US. There was much more of it in Boston, but here around Tiny Town and Indianoplace, people openly denigrate PC usage, and pay it absolutely no heed. One does not hear a lot of “he or she”; but you do hear a lot of “they” or “their” when the gender is unknown.
I think it is a valid usage, and I taught it to my students, who were advanced enough to understand the concept. The fact that it is in common usage that way, is good enough for me. Give it a few years and it will be okay with Oxford, too.
Well, apparently, none of my posts are being accepted, so I will give up for the day.
Except for that one.
The spam filter caught and held them until I released them.
Sorry about the repeats. I will know better next time.
Wow, Chuck is a triple-poster! Really bad netiquette, Chuck; I have reported you to the authorities at ICAAN or wherever the big pooh-bahs are. You’re in big trouble now.
bgrigg sez:
“And OFD, thanks for the Catholic point of view (Kill everyone that doesn’t look or sound like me)! Very medieval of you. Here I thought you were a bit of a Renaissance Man, and instead you go back a few more centuries than that!”
Kill them all! God will know his own! That was some cardinal exhorting the troops when it was Get The Albigensians season.
And we do not use the term “Renaissance” anymore, I must inform you, sir. That has been a big faux pas, a gaffe, if you will, in college and university humanities departments, especially English departments, for a long time now. It implies some kind of triumphalist stuff or something, I forget the exact criminal offense in their endless fucking statutes of PC shit.
You must use “Early Modern” when you are referring to that historical period, sir.
As for me being medieval, well, yeah, that is what I went to a MAJOR East Coast university for twenty years ago, a doctorate in Medieval Studies. The only three courses I took that I liked and that were worth a shit were history, philosophy and Old English. Plus intensive medieval Latin one summer. The other stuff in the English department was a mess of totally wack requirements like “French Feminism,” and other theory-oriented bullshit from a neo-Marxist-Leninist perspective, per usual, taught by wealthy tenured lefty bastards who lived the life of Reilly and yet repeatedly and relentlessly trashed the system that supported them and their families and gave them that life. Re-education camps for all of them, I say, take a page out of the KGB and Mao textbooks.
LOL! I never knew that Renaissance was upsetting to the English Majors of the world. I shall endeavor to use it often.
By all means, sir! I make a point of it myself.
Chuck wrote:
“Hmm. I posted a comment; it has not appeared; but when I try to post it again, I get
Duplicate comment detected; it looks as though you’ve already said that!
Did I? Where?”
Same thing happened to me last week. I mentioned it several times. Can’t the regulars be exempted from the SPAM filter?
RBT wrote:
“No, I was writing about a specific incident, and the person who screwed up was a woman.”
Your whole point is that English adapts, and so it should. Mine was that where gender is not relevant we shouldn’t mention it, just as there’s no need to mention skin colour, religion, views on gun rights and so forth.
Did this event happen *because* the person involved was a woman, or asian, or dumb? Then by all means mention that. But if it isn’t relevant there’s no need, and may distract or misinform some readers.
I stopped freelance writing for programming magazines almost a decade ago, even though it had been a lucrative gig, because I got tired of the fresh-out-of-college chippies waving their English degrees as they mangled my prose. It was annoying but tolerable when all of the generic “he”s were changed to “he or she”, but not tolerable when a particular “he”, specifically Donald Knuth, became a “he or she”. But the final straw was when a copy editor, who knew nothing about the technical material she was editing, took some correctly used jargon and changed it to “correct” English, in the process making me sound like an idiot who knew nothing about the material he was writing. This, naturally, was done after the author’s final review, so I didn’t see it until the article appeared in print.
The use of “chippies” was chosen with malice aforethought. Every one of the copy editors I worked with was female, every one was fresh out of college, every one had a degree related to English, and ever one was completely ignorant of software, computers beyond word processors, or any other technical topic. The aggravation of teaching computer jargon to an English major who didn’t want to learn it made the gig not worth it.
Well, I’ve not had any problems. Perhaps the regulars have been? 😀
“Chippies” is exactly the right word. Speaking as a former English major and grad student.
Intolerant and intolerable harpies. Those who went on to doctorates, by virtue of their gender and the plethora of feminist and womyns’ studies programs, became professional tenured harpies and administrators, and now enforce their neo-Leninist doctrines all over the West.
The damage done to several generations of students is incalculable.