Is English the ideal 'Lingua Franca'?

Of course, it already is how it is; English is the world language and that will probably not change any time soon. This thread's purpose takes on a more speculative form and therefore pressumes to ignore potential political attitudes towards- and the current, widespread use of the English language. Instead focusing on the topic from a more linguistic point of view.

Looking at it solely from a linguistic point of view, considering such factors as grammar, spelling etc, is English the most flexible alternative or are there maybe other and better ones?

 

I liked Robert MacNeil's "Story of English". A 9 part series.
English grows and changes with time. One lesson I liked was
The Saxon woman and the Danish man are living on the farm.
Their nouns like horse or wagon are similar enough but, gender, and cases screws their communication. So they invent the all mighty importance of word order, not that important in Danish or Saxon because they have cases. And like wise the preposition. And nouns became neutral with the plural by adding a "s".
These were developments by "the people". Not the academy or some such intellectuals.
And it is the people evolving English that make it the special language it is.

Now it is important American English become the standard with no unnecessary "u"-s
And y'know American broadcasters decided on "Midwest English" as the standard in the days when Boston sounded diff from NYC, diff from Philly, diff as one traveled south.

Moi
If they want foreign aid, let them ask for it in
pounds, feet and gallons too!

r > g

Stop Creeping ism
No "u" in flavor, or color, etc.
Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic,
regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.
​

 

Spelling-wise and phonetically, English is atrocious. But, it sort of is very "expressive" and English is also rather simple as it is rather consistent in terms of conjugating verbs and other grammatical advantages such as no gender and no cases.

I do not think English is a particularily beautiful language, but I suppose it is the ideal Linga Franca, not only because it is quite simple, but especially considering USA is the economic centre of the world and holds the throne as pop cultural hegemon.

Esperanto was once meant to be the new and ideal Lingua Franca, easy for anyone to learn. It never caught up and will probably just die out completely really soon.

 

Esperanto is still the "Official" language of the UN. And that alone will probably keep it alive for a great many years to come.

In order to ease translation, the translator of a speaker converts everything said into Esperanto. Then the various translators for other diplomats translate it from Esperanto into their native languages.

This is done so as to help avoid confusions. If the diplomat's own translator handles the initial translation into Esperanto, hopefully it will ease confusion due to local dialect differences. For example, if the diplomat said something was "hot", his translator would put it in the correct context (temperature or good).

This is also why the famous "Hot Line" between the USSR and USA in the Cold War had the US sending messages in Russian, and the Soviets sending messages in English. To try and avoid translation mistakes.

 

Some spelling oddities are because we don't speak it the same.

Knight. Night.
The "k" is heard when you hear someone read "Old English".

Modern English is less guttural than Old English. Dilution of the Germanic influences.


And the Lord gave us "th" to tease all the foreigners too.


Moi


r > g

Listen for their "eh". As if it were a word.
Across an immense, unguarded, ethereal border, Canadians, cool and unsympathetic,
regard our America with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us.​

 

I suppose what 'Lingua Franca' we have is very much dependent on what language they speak at the cultural and economic centre of the world; it used to be Latin, but then changed to French to finally become English. If China manages to "step up their game", we might as well see Mandarin as 'Lingua Franca' in the future.

 

Esperanto lacks "soul" and "life". It is, in the true sense of the word, an artificial language with no real cultural roots to any place at all. I think such language can never gain popularity anywhere.

 

And it has not. But as such, it is ideal for translations. Simply because it strips out the cultural nuances and forces the translator to render things into their most basic forms.

When I am reminded of translation errors, I always remember back to the famous President Bush (41) trip to Japan, where he talked to the Prime Minister about some trade adjustments. The response he got back was "We will think about it", which in American English means that the response is neutral, or even possibly positive neutral.

But in Japanese, that phrase is a polite way of blowing somebody off. Kind of like the phrase a former Prime Minister used in response to the Potsdam Declaration, "Mokusatsu". It means to "Kill it with silence", in other words ignore it and pretend it was never made. A better translator would have caught the Japanese meaning of the phrase and rendered it more appropriately, possibly avoiding a minor incident where the President said the PM acted in bad faith and went back on his word.

 

If you are interested in the opinion of the carrier of another language, then English is one of the best choices for simple everyday communication and one of the worst for use as an intermediate language when translating from one language to another.

English is very simple. I never taught it specially, I use a computer interpreter for communication and this is enough to make me understand the interlocutors and the interlocutors understood me. World experience shows that English is very easy to learn. And this is one of the reasons for his huge popularity.

But in the same simplicity lies the main problem. The words of English have too many meanings. The analytical structure of the language loses many possible shades because of the lack of semantic modification of words. Therefore, when translating from any more complex language into English, a lot of meaning is lost, and the text becomes ambiguous. Because of this, there is a big problem with modern machine translators. If I translate, for example, the text from Russian into French, then the translation is done in intermediate English. But when translating into English with more complicated, a lot of information is lost and the sentences often become generally ambiguous. And a translation from English into another language, which is also more complicated, acquires not just a loss of information, but often a complete distortion of it.It would be useful to use something more complicated. For example, Latin or Esperanto.

Another problem of the English language is phonetic saturation and ambiguity. Even English speakers often confuse sheep and ship or beach and b*tch In the days of the radio talks it was generally a huge problem, in the presence of interference, the English language becomes very poorly understood. Ideal here is probably German. Its noise immunity is even higher than that of the Russian language.

That's where I find English language quite appropriate - it's in poetry. Its polysemy allows you to build very beautiful allusions (which often can not then be translated into other languages )

 

To be fair, it is almost impossible to translate from language x to language y without completely ruining the cultural nuances of language x. For example in Balinese the word for 'think' and 'feel' is the exact same, meaning they do not at all distinguish between the two (most likely connected to the island's Buddhist culture) and in Turkish, thete are - at least - five words for 'soul' each of them referring to different feelings.

This is one of the bigger problems socio-cultural anthropology faces and to be honest, I do not think it would have made any difference in the example you gave if Bush's translator had been using Esperanto instead.

There is this fun translator on the web called "Bad Translator" that translates the sentence you type in back and forth between English and other languages. The end result is always hilarious.

 

This entirely depends on what your native language is and how early in life you get exposed to English. As my native tongue is another Germanic language (Swedish) and I got exposed to English through telly and radio, pretty much from birth and started learning in 3rd grade it came very easy for me.

My father who is Turkish would definitely have huge problems learning English due to vast grammatical differences between Turkic languages and Germanic ones and the same applies to my Finnish maternal grandparents.

Interesting. I still think the reason English being the 'Lingua Franca' has nothing to do with simplicity, but rather that it is entirely a result of US (and before that the UK) is the cultural and economic centre of the world.

I've heard Russians learn French very easily for some reason.

 

I can not say that the Russians had any big difference in the complexity of learning English, German and French. All these three languages are basic for studying in schools and schoolchildren master them approximately equally. I studied German at school myself. Difficulties arise in the study of the Latin language. Even more - when studying Oriental languages (Japanese, Chinese ...)

 

I think it's spelling is probably one of the worst aspects of English. I do think that needs to be cleaned up, but it's hard to do since there isn't an official body that determines what's correct English and what isn't. That's not true for many languages.

 

No idea why it would be that Russians would learn French easier than others. I recall it having to do with pronounciation, Russians are - apparently - good at French phonetics.

Being neighbours, there are alot of similarities between Finnish and Russian - There are plenty of Russian words in Finnish such as ikkuna (window), kanava (channel), lattia (floor) and pomo (boss). Probably alot more, but these are the ones that I know of.

 

Spelling also differs between American and British. But, yeah I agree that English spelling is quite atrocious.

 

Just French phonetics is very different from Russian. Especially their rolling "R" In my opinion, English phonetics to learn Russian is easier. Although the easiest, of course, German. There, in general, the reading of words differs little from the Russian language

In French there was a very large fashion at the beginning of the XIX century, before the Russian-French war. Then there were even Russian aristocrats who spoke only French, did not know Russian, since they only spoke in French since birth

I do not know close to the Finnish language, but it seemed very difficult to me Precisely because there are many Germanic / Latin / Greek roots in common with Western languages and have very little in common with Finnish So there are common roots in Russian With Japanese, but there are very few of them ...

Therefore, when I look briefly at French, Danish or Italian text, at least I can very superficially understand what he is talking about. But the Finnish - this is something completely incomprehensible

 

Except Russians (and Greeks) do not know how to differ between "X" and "H".

Well, of course. Finnish belongs to it's very own language group, but nontheless there are plenty of Finnish words that are loaned from Russian and I am sure you would recognise these.

I would love to learn Russian, but it would be a huge phonetical language for someone like be who doesn't master any Slavic language. Not to mention learning to write it, Kyrilic seems too big of a challange for someone who is used to Latin. Would be cool to be able to speak it though.

 

Because many Russians have been French in previous lives.

 

Cyrillic should not be a problem for those who taught the Greek alphabet in mathematics or physics? I do not know if the Greek alphabet is taught in American schools, but in Russia the Latin and Greek alphabet in schools is taught necessarily. It is for chemistry, physics, mathematics.

So, almost all the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet, which differ from the Latin alphabet, are of Greek origin

Russian "П" like Greek "Π" ("big Pi") it read as latin "P".
Russian "Ф" like Greek "Φ" ("big Phi") and read as latin "F" ("Ph").

And so more

There are very few exceptions. Such as "Ж" = "Zh", "Я" = "Ya", etc.

 

In Swedish schools, they do not teach Cyrillic and as I never took chemistry or any advanced maths, it is all very ailien to me.

I have heard Russian grammar is absolutely horrendous for foreigners and pretty sure that would kill me right away.

Bet all the Brazilians playing football in Ukraine and Russia struggle quite alot with the language. They probably do not even bother to use it and just go around with translators, I guess.

 

Oops. In Russia it is taught in an ordinary secondary school necessarily and all

That's for sure. The Russian language is a synthetic language with a fairly complex grammar. Here I understand the problems of foreigners. Although, probably, the Russian language is not so difficult to teach the Germans - they have a similar complexity grammar. Four cases versus six cases in Russian. This difference is compensated for by the complexity of the German gypsy participles. Here they are - hell for a Russian schoolboy

But the Russian language is not the most difficult on the territory of Russia. For example, in Tabasaran language 46 (!!) cases: D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabasaran_language

In general, Dagestan is a unique region in this sense. There for 3 million people there are about 40 different languages from 4 language groups. 14 (!) Languages in Dagestan have the status of state languages

 

Hello, I met some russian, most of them didn't had any accent. I even met a russian I could said he speak better french than a lot of french.

I don't think so. Chinese is way too complicated. I think that the fact that english can be rather simple was an huge advantage for british people.

English share a common point, latin was rather easy to learn too.

French at the opposite was never a true lingua franca. I mean, it was the lingua franca of the nobles and aristocrats but it was never the one of the people.

 

Russian education probably beats Swedish by miiiles.

Yeah, Swedish has 0 cases. Finnish has 15 and Turkish has 5 and I speak both. Guess the more languages you know, the easier it gets to learn a new one. Not to brag or anything, but I was always quite ahead of my classmates in French.

 

I think that at a certain level of diligence and with the presence of practice, anyone can learn to speak any language without an accent

I'm just assessing the "foreignness" of a foreign speech in Russian rumor. For example, French or English by ear are very different. German is much smaller. And the Italian language or Hebrew can often be mistaken for an unclearly pronounced Russian

 

It's definitely