News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New Hours of Speech. Parent comment

Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by least on Thursday August 05, 2021 @11:28AM (#28075085)
Auxiliary languages are kind of inherently doomed to fail to function as they're intended because in order for them to function as such, commitment needs to be made to adopt it multilaterally by governments with sufficient influence. If today the United States and China bilaterally decided to force Esperanto into their school curriculum it'd likely be adopted very quickly by everyone else, but that isn't the case and I doubt it ever would be under almost any circumstance, because learning English is just immediately more practical, even if it's a significantly more difficult language to be picked up.

And that's how it's played out. Nearly every developed nation teaches English as a second language or is a native population of English speakers. The universal language is English. The JVM bytecode for people is English.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by hkt on Thursday August 05, 2021 @01:14PM (#28076622)
Spoken like an anglophone. Tell that to Latin America and East Asia..
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by least on Thursday August 05, 2021 @01:56PM (#28077210)
I don't have to, you can look at pretty much any of their language curriculum and find a huge presence of English in nearly all their education systems.

Certainly you will find people learning other languages for trade depending on the region, but even in East Asia, as you say, English is taught in China, Japanese, Korea. In Singapore English is the language everyone learns (and is taught in). In Vietnam the primary foreign language taught is English. In the Philippines one of its official languages is English. Argentina teaches English in elementary school. In Brazil students from grade 6 have to learn a language, which is usually English. In Venezuela English is taught from age 5.

So what exactly do I have to tell them?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by yongjik on Thursday August 05, 2021 @02:01PM (#28077282)
Not sure about Latin America, but bring someone from each of China/Japan/Korea and they'll talk to each other in English.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by voidnullnil on Thursday August 05, 2021 @12:55PM (#28076345)
> The JVM bytecode for people is English.

What are you telling me? That I need to drop English?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Mozilla Common Voice Adds 16 New Languages and 4,600 New ... by jl6 on Thursday August 05, 2021 @02:02PM (#28077292)
My takeaway is that nobody should speak English, but instead people should compose their sentences in a different language and then translate them to English at the point of speaking (with small pauses in the conversation for you to collect your thoughts on this garbage).
[ Parent | on HN ]