Thread: English Mania

It's nice for the sake of convenience, but it's only convenient for those who already know the language.

It's "bad" in that cultures die out day by day. There's a TED talk that discusses the issue of ethnocide (Wade Davis on Endangered Cultures) that evoked my sympathies. This issue of universal language and whether or not people view it as a good or bad thing ultimately depends on whether or not they value culture. I don't value culture in and of itself as being beautiful, as there are plenty of cultures I have no favor for, but I don't believe that's a reason to see them disappear. So much language, and so many different ideas that can come from them. So many different walks of life for so many human beings.. Why see that destroyed? There are still so many good things that can come from our differences.

"Not because America is pushing it, but because the world is pulling it."

Just for the note, French was the universal language before WWII and before America started pushing it.

All the stuff the guy says is exaggerated, but there is a need for a universal language and English is really simple to learn IMO. If only people realised the importance of their native languages as well and didn't butcher them by putting in an English word in every second sentance.

I think the adoption of a language as a universal one is a good thing. English is particularly convenient for me because I'm a native speaker. But the language barrier is yet another thing that prevents us from having a unified world.

When it comes to the destruction of culture, I'll readily admit I don't have much concern for it; plenty of cultures have been lost over the course of history. They naturally are created, evolve, and die. But things of value to people tend to remain.

I also don't consider culture to be based around languages particularly. Languages are a tool for expression, cultures are primarily based on beliefs and actions. And there are many diverse cultures, all of which speak English. Not to mention that different languages are a barrier to understanding the different cultures. It's true that different ideas and viewpoints can come from different cultures, but without understanding, this is meaningless. A universal language would aid with this.

And to be honest, if people truely cared about preserving culture and the variations, they'd want to impose more barriers; exposure to new ideas changes the cultures they seek to preserve.

We are far, far overdue for a global language. I don't think English should be the language of choice though. Too many rules and exceptions to memorize. I have played with other languages and have found Japanese to be extremely simple in all respects(except memorizing the alphabets.)

Also, with children capable of learning multiple languages with ease, there's no reason to wipe out old languages, just teach them as well. Many countries already require English as a secondary language, and most U.S. high schools require at least two years of any foreign language.

English is in reality one of the worst languages to be used as a "universal language." It is a mash up of several very different languages (mainly latin/romantic and german) and therefore the rules were tacked on after the language had already evolved and often don't work and even contradict each other.

There have been several languages invented for the purpose of an easy to learn universal language (see; esperanto) and none of them have gone anywhere. English is only held in the regard that it is because the anglo-american lobbyists are the loudest.

Originally Posted by Photolysis

I also don't consider culture to be based around languages particularly. Languages are a tool for expression, cultures are primarily based on beliefs and actions. And there are many diverse cultures, all of which speak English. Not to mention that different languages are a barrier to understanding the different cultures. It's true that different ideas and viewpoints can come from different cultures, but without understanding, this is meaningless. A universal language would aid with this.

Do you think that languages might have evolved within a specific culture in order to express those specific beliefs and actions? Do you think that cultures can be different enough from each other in such ways that their beliefs and actions cannot be accurately expressed in each other's language? How equipped do you think english might be to accommodate all of the cultural differences across the globe? Do you think any language is capable of accurately expressing the beliefs and actions of every culture? Is it possible that a universal language would first require a universal culture?

I'm remembering something I read in a wikipedia article about Russian humor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian...boo_vocabulary

The very use of obscene Russian vocabulary, called mat, can enhance the humorous effect of a joke by its emotional impact. Due to the somewhat different cultural attitude to obscene slang, such effect is difficult to render into English. The taboo status often makes mat itself the subject of a joke.
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Another series of jokes exploits the richness of the mat vocabulary, which can give a substitute to a great many words of everyday conversation. Other languages often use profanity in a similar way (like the English fuck, for example), but the highly synthetic grammar of Russian provides for the unambiguity and the outstandingly great number of various derivations from a single mat root.

There's one example of language having a tie to its culture.

Malcom Gladwell's newest book Outliers has an excellent chapter on how the Chinese language facilitates numeracy. Most of the following excerpt from that chapter is available on his website, gladwell dot com.

Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4,8,5,3,9,7,6. Read them out loud to yourself. Now look away, and spend twenty seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again.

If you speak English, you have about a 50 percent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly If you're Chinese, though, you're almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers—4,8,5,3,9,7,6—right every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.

That example comes from Stanislas Dehaene's book The Number Sense, and as Dehaene explains:

"Chinese number words are remarkably brief. Most of them can be uttered in less than one-quarter of a second (for instance, 4 is 'si' and 7 'qi') Their English equivalents—'four,' 'seven'—are longer: pronouncing them takes about one-third of a second. The memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length. In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. In this domain, the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese, whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong a rocketing memory span of about 10 digits."

It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one would think that we would also say one-teen, two-teen, and three-teen. But we don't. We make up a different form: eleven, twelve, thirteen, and fifteen. Similarly, we have forty, and sixty, which sound like the words they are related to (four and six). But we also say fifty and thirty and twenty, which sort of sound like five and three and two, but not really. And, for that matter, for numbers above twenty, we put the "decade" first and the unit number second: twenty-one, twenty-two. For the teens, though, we do it the other way around. We put the decade second and the unit number first: fourteen, seventeen, eighteen. The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten one. Twelve is ten two. Twenty-four is two ten four, and so on.

That difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster. Four year old Chinese children can count, on average, up to forty. American children, at that age, can only count to fifteen, and don't reach forty until they're five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.

The regularity of their number systems also means that Asian children can perform basic functions—like addition—far more easily. Ask an English seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty two, in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is nine and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens nine.

"The Asian system is transparent," says Karen Fuson, a Northwestern University psychologist, who has done much of the research on Asian-Western differences. "I think that it makes the whole attitude toward math different. Instead of being a rote learning thing, there's a pattern I can figure out. There is an expectation that I can do this. There is an expectation that it's sensible. For fractions, we say three fifths. The Chinese is literally, 'out of five parts, take three.' That's telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It's differentiating the denominator and the numerator."

The much-storied disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grade, and Fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn't seem to make sense; its linguistic structure is clumsy; its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated.

Asian children, by contrast, don't face nearly that same sense of bafflement. They can hold more numbers in their head, and do calculations faster, and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction actually is—and maybe that makes them a little more likely to enjoy math, and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework, and on and on, in a kind of virtuous circle.

When it comes to math, in other words, Asians have built-in advantage. For years, students from China, South Korea, and Japan – and the children of recent immigrants who are from those countries – have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics, and the typical assumption is that it has something to do with a kind of innate Asian proclivity for math.* The psychologist Richard Lynn has even gone so far as to propose an elaborate evolutionary theory involving the Himalayas, really cold weather, premodern hunting practices, and specialized vowel sounds to explain why Asians have higher IQs.** That’s how we think about math. We assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart someone is. But the differences between the number systems in the East and the West suggest something very different – that being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture.
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Here we have a legacy that turns out to be perfectly suited for 21st-century tasks, and it’s hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our 21st-century intellectual tasks.

* On international comparison tests, students from Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan all score roughly the same in math, around the ninety-eighth percentile. The United States, France, England, Germany, and the other Western industrialized nations cluster at somewhere between the twenty-six and thirty-sixth percentile. That's a big difference.

** Lynn's claim that Asians have higher IQs has been refuted, convincingly, by a number of other experts, who showed that he based his argument on IQ samples drawn disproportionately from urban, upper-income homes. James Flynn, perhaps the world's leading expert on IQ, has subsequently made a fascinating counterclaim. Asians' IQ, he says, have historically been slightly lower than whites' IQs, meaning that their dominance in math has been in spite of their IQ, and not because of it. Flynn's argument was outlined in his book Asian Americans: Achievement Beyond IQ (1991).

Originally Posted by DuB

Malcom Gladwell's newest book Outliers has an excellent chapter on how the Chinese language facilitates numeracy. Most of the following excerpt from that chapter is available on his website, gladwell dot com.

Long article about asians, linguistics, and math...

Thank you for posting that. :bravo: I now know why Westerners think that Asians are human calculators: their number system is more logical. When put that way, the western system is downright illogical and arbitrary. I'm going to slap whoever makes fun of an Asian person learning the English number system now.

That's it? The only reason they're good at math is because the words are shorter and more concise? Not because of the atmosphere of rigid learning or something like that?

Originally Posted by DuB

Chinese numberses

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We've totally got to steal that.

Originally Posted by TimeStopper

That's it? The only reason they're good at math is because the words are shorter and more concise? Not because of the atmosphere of rigid learning or something like that?

The implication wasn't that this is the sole reason, only that it's an often overlooked factor. Gladwell's book discusses several other contributing cultural factors as well, but the part about number systems is the most relevant to this thread.

Gladwell used that passage to illustrate the fact that we are quick to attribute success to one's dispositions and abilities while tending to overlook incidental, situational factors. I'm using his passage instead as an example of how language can have a powerful influence on culture. See also linguistic determinism.

Watched the video, and it's odd to me that the speaker is treating the existence of a 'common tongue' as something new. People of different cultures always find a language in common if they come in regular contact, and it's usually the language of whoever does the most business or has the biggest army. The only reason no other language has spread across the globe is because people weren't talking to each other across the globe before, and England had the biggest military/trade empire when communication started to take off.

To be honest it could also be down to how logical it is. This makes English both more practical to use and easier to learn in the first place.

For a start we don't have all the ridiculous multiple cases and word genders that most other languages seem to have.

Originally Posted by Xei

To be honest it could also be down to how logical it is. This makes English both more practical to use and easier to learn in the first place.

For a start we don't have all the ridiculous multiple cases and word genders that most other languages seem to have.

The relative simplicity (I wouldn't go so far as "logical") likely comes from being widespread, not vice versa. It's contact with other languages that blows the chaff off a language and leads to the introduction of simpler forms from outside. The flipside of China becoming the largest English speaking nation on earth is that we're going to see more Mandarin words and constructions make their way into English. Given the scale of ESL in China and Chinese travel and immigration to the USA, it may be a fusion on the scale of earlier run-ins with Latin and Norman French.

While English may become the One World Tongue, there's no guarantee that the resulting language will bear a close resemblance to what we think of as English.

The relative simplicity (I wouldn't go so far as "logical") likely comes from being widespread, not vice versa. It's contact with other languages that blows the chaff off a language and leads to the introduction of simpler forms from outside.

This really doesn't make much sense though... English is relatively unchanged from before the British empire had even started.

English was always 'logical'. We never had pointless decorations like genders or such... and we certainly didn't have thousands of separate characters for every little nuance; compared to Chinese, English is way more practical.

Ohhh noooo... more people are adapting to the same language.. oh craapp.. now we can talk to each other better.

Is it really a damn surprise that a language could evolve as a more prominent one than others?

Is it really a problem?? I don't know but the only country I ever thought English to be represented by was Anglo-Saxons and.. oh yeah, they're dead.

On the other hand, I do not like how they say "I want to change/improve my life" by learning English. That is really my only complaint. It is denigrating to their mother language.

However, if the whole world eventually learned one primary language.. I don't know about you guys.. but I think that is a very good thing. I fail to see how I am wrong besides arrogant patriotism.

What do you think...?

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Then again, the Babel fish did have the misfortune of causing more and bloodier wars than any other creature in the history of creation.

Originally Posted by Xei

This really doesn't make much sense though... English is relatively unchanged from before the British empire had even started.

English was always 'logical'. We never had pointless decorations like genders or such... and we certainly didn't have thousands of separate characters for every little nuance; compared to Chinese, English is way more practical.

As a matter of fact, we have dropped some ornamentation (don't hear a lot about the proper use of 'thee' vs. 'thou' anymore, do you?) and retain quite a few Germanicisms that don't make much sense in our Romance pronunciation and syntax.

In any case, the relative simplicity of English derives from the fusion first with Latin and then with Norman French, and the continuous contact thereafter that maritime culture provides. As O'nus points out, Modern English was never a 'local' or tribal language. It's a fusion of Old English with the lingua franca of two successive empires, further honed through global trade and conquest.

Originally Posted by Xei

Then again, the Babel fish did have the misfortune of causing more and bloodier wars than any other creature in the history of creation.

Fiction.

(Note: I love Douglas Adams, but others may not realize. Also, if you are referring to Babel Tower, this was still a relatively small local event and I am not even sure if was real either...)

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