OTOH, europe is exporting its talented people to the US, where they create those issues, so maybe it's a all a circle
For example there's clear differences on secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation.
> The silent death of europe occured somewhere in the 00s
Sorry, how are we measuring this exactly? It's a significant reach of a statement by almost every measure. For example; if the EU is so "dead" then why do US manufacturers respect its regulations?
I think most of these things are political rather than cultural. Specific laws take a variable amount of time to change/evolve, but are generally downstream of culture. Listing these kinds of political issues also tends to create a weird bias as you’re generally paying attention to the most extreme takes on all sides (e.g. you’ve listed access to abortion, but I would hardly consider this to be an indicator that the US was more culturally liberal than most of Europe pre-2022, just as I wouldn’t consider it an indicator that it is less culturally liberal post-2022,… it is more a political artifact than a genuine measure of culture).
I'm not sure how one even defines these. As an example, most of the examples you give have a near 50/50 (+/-10%) split here in the US.
That's what I mean. Many of those issues don't have anywhere near a 50/50 split in Europe, which is part of the definition of social norms, expectations and cultural values.
> secularism, gun-rights, access to abortion, universal healthcare, labour laws, privacy and regulation
At least 4 of those issues are american , not european. this just goes to show how much attention europeans pay to the US issues instead of our own issues (aging of population, demographic deficit, unaffordable housing, unemployment , lack of global competitiveness, old money, brain drain etc). And what about european tech? I only discuss about it on HN, a californian forum.
> privacy
While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european person. Nobody went out on the streets because they wanted cookie prompts. We are just letting bureaucrats run the show and tell us we should like it
Would be interesting to have a distance metric for cultures , however
This is wishful thinking. People pay a lot of attention to the US due to its cultural output and importance in geo-politics but when they open the door they still pay attention to their own locality which has its own context.
> At least 4 of those issues are american , not european.
I'm sorry, how are those issues not European? Do you think Europeans aren't human or something? They're social issues and its harmful to think the US has any sort of monopoly on them. I could easily pull concrete examples where those issues are relevant to European events that I might suggest you are unaware of.
> While these are interesting issues, they are nowhere near the top of the mind of average european.
I would argue that for an average European elector, privacy is a much greater expectation than it is for an American.
because they are not contested in europe, only in the US
> privacy is a much greater
It's nowhere near as important as housing or employment i think. Strict privacy was mainly championed by German Greens, not a pan-european issue
every single one of those issues gets discussed in Europe. The US does not have a monopoly on social issues, I fear you are just showing the limits of your perspective.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Poland#Legal_sta...
I would also suggest that considering the miserable failure of the mid-terms that the US has a similar strong average relatively set against limiting access to abortion too. Although I do appreciate that some areas of the US are more traditionally religious areas and more similar to the conservatives in Poland.
Abortion is one of the few cultural topics which doesn't tend towards borad consensus. E.g. acceptance of gay rights has a tipping point and then drifts towards the 90s+%, but abortion does not.
Her husband begged the doctors to terminate her pregnancy in order to save her life but he was told "this is a Catholic country".
I marched myself on this dark day in Galway but Ireland still has a long way to go to become truly independent from its Catholic stranglehold. That caused so much pain especially to the youth.
But they are on their way yes, I was especially happy when the gay marriage made it through.
Where do you live? Are you not aware that there is a very active and ongoing war in Europe which was triggered by the desire of a certain country to be more "European", and opposition to that desire.
Note that in 2014 it was "Euro-maiden" not NATO-maiden, or West-maiden.
Umm I do advocate for privacy. And I know many people that do. Feelings about GDPR are generally very positive.
But nobody wanted cookie prompts. They are the result of a shortsighted compromise.
What the EU should have done is simply forbid user tracking or make the user take action if they want to be tracked, no not tracking should be the default. Pop-up questions should have been explicitly forbidden.
However the industry knows that nobody wants to be tracked. And feared a loss of income. So they campaigned to weaken the law. The EU officials in their stupidity agreed. Stupid yes because now the industry blames them for the abundant cookie walls.
Unfortunately this is nothing new. Democracy has its problems.
French culture has very noticeably diluted in that relatively short time.
But when you see for instance the cooking section of some French media renamed 'Food' that means something... or at least that the editor is an idiot.
This is very apparent to me reading HN late at night my time, which is mid-morning Europe time. It's like there are two totally different groups here. (We don't all think alike, of course, but there are prevailing views that tend to get upvoted. What's interesting to me is how it shifts with time!)
What does culture have to do with companies wanting the European money?
I think this is a common Anglo-American outlook that thinks that generic European is the ultimate expression of Democrat (or Blairite Labour/LibDem). There are plenty of reactionary Europeans, and since they're not completely bound to US right-left ideologies there are plenty of examples of e.g. race-realist environmentalists, or anti-abortion socialists.
edit: I mean, you've offered a literal list of US wedge issues, and assumed that Europe takes the Democratic Party position on them.
I don't want to take a side on this one, but is your argument here really that US capitalists have high philosophical standards on what market they'll enter?
I'd say the french protests are a good testament to the french culture being alive and kicking when basically every other country accept slaving their lives away until 67+
The independent retirement board says otherwise but ok. If the trickle down economy and automation delivered we wouldn't even work until 60. But instead we have proles like you bootlicking the top 1%
It reminds me of "socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires"
The real problems are the unfortunate contradictions in end of politics style liberalism: growing wealth inequality, wage stagnation, increased worker efficiency and record profits, the media can only do so much to hide it. So protesters are under the impression that their demands are realistic, of course thats at the root of the argument and your outlook on it depends on your degree of faith in liberalism.
and it can. Bear in mind that these were hard fought social structures that Europe sacrificed generations for in the war, which toppled the greatest empires and ravaged our lands, they came at great expense. It might be easy for a modern American to scoff at the concept of "70's style social democracy", but it is our version of "liberty" which we would protect as much as any American might the bits of the constitution that they like.
Remember that the totality of European GDP rivals US GDP (its in the big top 3 with the US and China), we will make social democracy work because to us, its the lowest acceptable bar. While one half of American news reels will continue to peddle the concept that its impossible because its within their vested interest to do so, it remains a stalwart part of European social expectations.
Perhaps when the US suffers a crippling loss on its lands once more and is forced to face the worst outcomes of the human experience, it might consider building a kinder social state too.
Honest question in good faith, as even some individual EU countries don't have a consistent culture (think e.g. Germany) and at least for my very tiny slice of Europe, the culture and regional customs are still very much alive! :D
I sympathize with concerns of mythologizing culture into existence, as is usually done in the process of nation state formation, but it’s a poor grounds for being a pedant.
The same 8 lane stroads with the same super box stores and fast food chains. All connected with the same type of highway to a bunch of single family homes with little low level commercial or cultural activity.
While homogenization is at work, the cultural divide is blatant to the point of being highly visible here.
Having a foot in both worlds, I don't see it. If anything national cultures are giving way to European culture (which does have some inherited traits from the US) more than anything else.
I’ve been online for 17 years and so I’ve been very aware of the trend of “wokeism” and other things like that. I also live in the country known as Europe. Yet in “real life” I have never, ever encountered a woke, virtue-signalling stereotype. The closest I came was some other guy’s experience that he relayed to me.
And that goes for other American (or not) things that also are “online”: those things might be something that I can read about every day while online, but I might never hear it come up in “real life”.
> The media is generally importing american anxieties and US domestic issues are even adopted as local
Aside from some fringe people who are immediately made fun of by us normal baguette-eaters, no.
In fact this is absurd on its face: high speed internet (thanks America?) made it clear to all of us too-online citizens of the country of Europe that Americans have concerns and opinions that are completely alien to us:
- Trigger-happy police
- Dying because lack of health insurance
- Circumcision
- Individualism of the type “I’m against taxes because it’s involuntary; people should give out of their own free will”, and yet also when they are facing hardships themselves: “I’m not gonna accept no charity!” (…makes sense)
- Opinions on abortion
- Etc.
And people argue a lot about that. (In my experience English message boards are often split 50% between the US and 50% the rest of the world, so there are a fair few Europeans to argue with). That’s what happens 95% of the time; the other 5% is your version: “Oh wow, those things are so cool; I’m gonna adopt and argue for them here in the country of Europe.”
I can’t imagine most Americans have either (though the numbers may be different on this particular board).
I think most Americans are aware that the primary culture wars going on right now are fairly divorced from everyday life.
Compared to rich nations, however, it looks downright awful.
When me and my wife where choosing where to live, given we were planning to have kids, the idea of school shootings really scared us, so we had to pass on the U.S. entirely.
> > Etc.
A lot of the good films I saw the past years were from europe. I really enjoyed the contemporary scandinavian scene recently, you could try to enlarge your vision and watch different things (recommendation [0]) There's a crazy amount of artistic domains, and I can't believe that someone (as you just did) can think of having scanned successfully the whole Europe cultural practices to be allowed to say " european culture is gone". Music, dance and visual arts are being created everyday : does it constitutes a part of what you call "culture" ? Concerning the public intellectuals you talk about, well, they were only a diffusion channel for one part of the european culture , and I don't think their death implies the death of culture, but rather the lowering of the signal amplitude perception from USA.
Europe has tons of intellectuals. It doesn't need the US to defend it. There is tons of culture that is incredibly different in Europe compared to the US, just look at Urbanism and Public Transit for example. And the political issues are imported because they are issues here to and young people in the West generally point in the same direction, but even then many of the issues are quite individual as well.
Emigration to the US is not that common, and immigration to places like Germany is very common. Its mostly Eastern Europe that are emigrating both to Western Europe and the US.
The idea that their army is the coolest and will save us from aliens, that their bilionaires are secretly superheroes, that foreign leaders are crooks secretly plotting to conquer the world and so on.
These are Projections
Nothing more American than this example of how an oft-derided-in-the-rest-of-the-US bunch of coastal Hollywood elites constantly put out a bunch of movies glorifying guns, violence, capitalism, and the USA.
Also it's not just about this over-the-top movies that are completely out of touch with reality. Often the propaganda is subtle and even unintentional, made by victims of propaganda themselves.
There have been occasional British TV shows/movies with this premise as well. That's not American culture, that's "what would happen if aliens invaded and we make a movie about that" culture.
The reason you think it's American is that only the Americans seem to make sci-fi these days. I don't know if that's budget or culture or what. On HN we talk a lot about how impoverished the Euro tech scene is vs the USA but it's not just tech. Italians use a lot of English words because the Euro movie/TV scene is also out to lunch. What was the last mega-franchise that came out of Europe? Probably Harry Potter? So, Europe but not EU. And Harry Potter was created in the UK but actually brought to worldwide attention thanks to investment by ... Americans.
My guess is it's due to the dominance of government funded media firms. What's the best known European sci-fi franchise? Dr Who? A relic that dates to the 50s. The BBC lost interest in sci fi and fantasy a long time ago. Too expensive, only popular with unpopular demographics. Far better to make yet another 1800s period drama.
Let's be honest, your butthurt towards America aside, it is. It damn sure ain't yours.
Does the pendulum really ever settle in the middle with anything society?
I wouldn't class this as anywhere on the pendulum as its not an economic policy and social issues are a bit of a fudge into the classical left/right spectrum.
I would argue that signalling fascist virtues is still a form of virtue signalling. It just depends on what you consider to be a virtue. But yea, any attempts at cultural renaissance are vulnerable to nationalist and even fascist tendencies.
One of the key takeaways was that speaking and thinking are interrelated. When you are thinking, the same area of the vocal chords are activated but with a lower intensity compared to when you are speaking.
This means that what you cannot speak, you cannot think. By prioritising Italian, they are scientifically enabling the population to think more like Italians.
I don’t care about the ban though, it doesn’t affect me.
(aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
What the previous poster if describing is a strong, deterministic relationship between language and thought (the idea that, by banning certain uses of language, they can control how Italians think). This is essentially nonsense: Italians are Italian, regardless of whether they work in a company run by a CEO or an "amministratore delegato".
This is false.
As an American who has lived in the US my whole life, it can be tough to see outside the box, so to speak. What parts of the US worldview are being exported? How does it differ with traditional attitudes?
Your far-right political movements, especially religious movements, are actively trying to export themselves to Europe, with varying success depending on the specific trend.
A large part of corporate culture, as people in EU management still long for an idealized version of what exists in the US.
Outside of a few pockets, EU entertainment has more or less completely been wiped out now, so any culture borne by entertainment is mostly US now.
What are the evidence of this? Has there been an uptick in American right-wings activities in Europe?
https://www.politico.eu/article/roe-vs-wade-us-the-european-...
A nit - it seems the US far-right is adopting tactics from European far-right history and not the other way around. Trump literally used the words "blood and soil" at some point and Fox is mastering the art of propaganda.
Because I'm talking of a recent trend, and this timeframe offers a relevant context.
Please explain, in detail, what part of Golden Dawn was actively exported from the US.
> As an American who has lived in the US my whole life, it can be tough to see outside the box, so to speak. What parts of the US worldview are being exported? How does it differ with traditional attitudes?
Your evangelicals export homophobia and prosperity gospel to Africa. And other not so nice things that were kept in check by church-state separation on your soil, but developing nations don't have mechanism to defend themselves against. Tobacco industry floods poor nations with cigarettes using marketing and legal threats. Your puritanism shoved into everyones throat, can watch violence all day, but saw a nipple? End of the world. YouTube no swear rule was/is ridiculous. The land of the free, my ass. And the idea that culture can be owned by corporations. Disney much?
Sounds funny on the surface, but it's more consequential than that.
A legit/legal Asian paid porn site that I used to visit was shut down because American credit card companies decided they didn't want to get involved in that business. It's the kind of things that drives people to crypto (disclaimer: I never owned any crypto), and it's not just because of ideological or scammy reasons, sometimes it's just to get away from American hegemony in the finance sector.
There are other similar but more sinister things like these: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pa8xy9/is-the-doj-forcing-ba...
It's fine by me if America is just enforcing their morals within their own borders, but given that the USD is the de-facto world currency, these policies get exported everywhere.
The way most people experience this is partisan ideological fighting that spills out into the rest of the world, especially left wing social movements. This is how you get people yelling "hands up don't shoot" at unarmed British police, and BLM marches in central European cities where there's no history of slavery and famously civilized police. It makes no sense in the local cultural context but people are bored and copy what they see on TV and social media.
I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias. While its fine for lulz, I worry that you're being sincere. Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language and you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it.
On paper there is absolutely nothing wrong with cultures seeking to preserve the use of their own language, however it is fair for us to argue that restrictive and punitive measures such as this are not helpful.
Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;). Would English then be a "relic" to you?
Well. My first language is Polish, and there are some of us who call it "superpowers". If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to, and possibly that one passer by, who is also Polish or Ukrainian.
That is, unless we start to curse. Then we are probably well understood.
But I got a new greek buddy recently, and when she talks on the phone, my ears cannot lock on anything.
Edit: completely unrelated, but I saw your username on lobster on a dead man switch thread (I use Shamir’s Secret for treasure hunts to I thought the DMS idea was cool). Do you happen to have invites? I started to write again, and wanted to post something but I don't have any account.
I think I have some invites, can you email me about it?
Cheers.
Slovenia being small, we had already met years ago at a local meetup or something.
I'd be careful about that. I've overheard others making nasty remarks thinking I wouldn't know what they were saying. Seinfeld had a pretty funny episode about that.
I've watched Polish movies. It doesn't take long before one gets the hang of what others are saying.
We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication, when invoking cultural issues. If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.
And when I talk about work l, it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (software development), which incidentally is the same place where my Italian teacher was when trying to explain some concepts that had a translation in Italian, but the original latin word had a "wider meaning" that wasn't captured by the translation.
"Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"
But gluing words together without explicit connections is common pretty much everywhere. Compare Greek, which freely forms adjectives that way, or Latin sanguisuga "bloodsuck[er]" (leech) or lucifer "light-bear[er]" (light-bearer).
There are cases like noun+noun but they are rare and they are not productive, i.e. I cannot make one up. Pescecane (fish dog, i.e. a shark) is ok, but you cannot "sferaneve" for a snowball
Probably the reason is that the two nouns have to have a special relation for it to work, i.e. one word has to act as an adjective, it has to qualify the first word somehow. The shark is a fish, but is a fish that bites like a dog, hence it's a fishdog a pescecane. Similarly "casa madre", for headquarters, it's not a house of the mother ("case della madre") but it's a special kind of house that has the quality of "gatherhing the whole family together like if in the case of a real family"
> We tend to forget that the main purpose of a language is communication
But also one might consider, or seek the word, that certain way of spitting, tells some peeps we fam.
Language isn't just about communicating meaning but also cultural content, identity and social markers. This is part of what drives its frequent development and also part of why some people want to preserve their way of speaking even if its merely a creole or a "dying" language.
If everybody in Italy understands "computer", calling it "calcolatore" is outright against communication (that word in italian is closer to "device to do math operations", which is technically correct, but not what people imagine)
The root "comput-" comes from latin "computo" while "calcolatore" comes from the latin "calculo" which is a rough latin synonym of "computo". The form "comput-" transformed in Italian into "cont-" like in "conto" (English count), "contante" (cash) etc.
So perhaps "contatore" (counter) instead of "computer" would make more etymological sense.
It was picked over the word "calculateur" which is the French equivalent of "calculatore" after IBM France shared a letter wondering if "calculateur" was too restrictive and didn't properly express the machine capabilities. To which Jacques Perret answered "why not ordinateur?"
The problem is the interpretation people give to the word. If I say computer, people think of something with keyboard + mouse and a screen, or maybe a laptop (funny enough, they will not think of their phone).
If I say "calcolatore", we envision one of those devices to do math operations, used in school (are those still a thing?)
In Hebrew we have "tachless" that comes from yiddish "tachless", that comes from Hebrew "tachlit" but now tachless and tachlit have different meanings and different grammar roles
I grew up in the UK and prefer British-English to American-English, both in terms of spelling and pronunciation.
That said English has terrible spelling compared to other languages, it's impossible to know how to pronounce a word just looking at the spelling.
I don't need to give examples, as it is well-known already. I benefit from the fact that many people I've met around the world speak English, but it's almost unfortunate that one of the harder/more inconsistent languages "won".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is pretty good, and include sound files of the old vs new pronunciations.
English is not one of the harder or more inconsistent languages in the world. It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.
This is a general pattern with languages that go through a phase where they are learned by large numbers of adults.
("I could have read the red book, because I like to read." is just one example of inconsistent pronounciation. Spelling is non-obvious to people learning the language, again as a result of unusual and inconsistent pronounciation.)
Different languages have different features which make them harder to different populations. A better description of English would be: English is one of the languages to learn. English has no complex case system. We do not have grammatical gender. Our use of grammatical number is limited and consistent (except in certain loan words). There are exceptions to these, but they are largely words which are so common as to be part of the foundational learning -- pronouns, primarily, where we preserve gender and where case goes beyond "add an apostrophe-s." Because case is not especially important, word order is important, which can be challenging for people from cultures with a different standard word order. Spelling is challenging due to both the vowel shift and the number of languages which have acted as input to English (at a minimum: native Celtic languages in Britain; Anglo-Frisian and its antecedents; French, both Norman and more southern dialects; and Latin and Greek pulled in by the early natural philosophers of the early modern period).
English does have an unusually high number of irregular verbs, which, combined with the spelling and pronunciation, can make it seem inconsistent; but there are many other ways in which English is startlingly simple compared to highly-inflected languages.
But Finnish is easier than English in the sense that pronounciation is 100% regular and predictable - that's the metric I've been using in this thread to say "English is hard". (I understand the reasons behind that, the mixture of influences, loan-words, and voewl shifting.)
In a lot of ways English is easy, and even bad English is understandable.
floor
cooperation
coopThe people pushing for this do, in fact remember that the primary purpose of language is communication.
Imagine being an aging Italian, or Quebecer, who has spoken Italian, or French all your life, do not have a good grasp of English, only to become unable to understand much of the discourse in your own mother country.
I, myself, am not super keen on seeing Spanish, Mandarin, or Esperanto become the lingua franca of my area.
Given that, this goes against the "preserve communication" argument. After all, this is how Italian was born (at least that's what we studied in school), there was Greek, there was Latin, somewhere the language got distorted by common people all the way until it became Italian and got shared by many, many people.
The language was not defined, it evolved with how people used it.
This process has been going on forever, I don't see why it should change now with artificial constraints.
For what is worth, official documents should be allowed in English language for the entire country, given we are part of the EU, there is a whole money-sucking machine (and time-sucking!) to translate things in English when interacting with other EU countries.
I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.
It would be like using your English to converse in Dutch.
Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.
History and historical culture, on their own, are a bad reason to do something (ie learning from history makes sense. Doing something for no other reason than the length of time its been does not)
The rest is just about which language and who chooses.
The only thing this sort of bill does is make it harder to get to a better state. At least here they are not pretending it's helpful to do it
Would it? It would matter which language. It'd benefit those most familiar with it today.
People have been laughed at for their accents when learning a language. How does this help?
You can't just flip a switch. It'd create a huge inequality divide moreso than today.
Some countries are surviving because they use a different language that's not English i.e. less impact from globalization.
That is no reason not to make progress.
As for practicallness: In a world of 8 billion people, literally anything you do (something, nothing, whatever) will cause hardship for someone. It's not even an interesting goal to try. Doing nothing causing hardship. Moving forward causes hardship.
Combine this with the fact that the unfortunate reality of humans is that one of the main ways that change happens writ large is through seeing the suffering (and success!) of others. I don't think you will change that part of our psychology anytime soon.
The sad truth is we don't all get a perfect, or even good, life. You can't make progress on this, either, without causing hardship to some. Does that mean you should not try?
Because you will never make progress in steps that are only positive for everyone, or even often get the chance to choose who it gets to be negative for.
It wouldn't last. Within years it would devolve into various creoles and with centuries; almost entirely different languages. Language is not merely functional but cultural and has purpose outside of meaning (e.g. identity).
Language-as-identity as a way of separating people has no meaningful use case that is positive for society.
That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.
Lingua Franca is a phrase in the most dominant language 2000 years ago, about the most dominante language 1000 years ago, used in the dominant language now. All of those languages used tons of loanwords as well. Someday Mandarin or Hindu may become the most dominant and they will use loanwords, and phrases from those languages will slip into English speech.
But those changes won’t be because English in unique in some way, it will be because that’s how languages work.
This isn't true. English is easily the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, and it's not just because of Anglophone nation power, it's because English is an easily-learned language. I live in Japan, and while Japanese borrows a lot of foreign words (mostly from English), it's not ever going to become dominant because it's just too hard to learn. It's the same with Chinese. Any language that requires you to learn thousands of glyphs just to be fluent in the written version isn't going to go far worldwide compared to a language that uses 26 (and shares those with a large array of other languages).
English is a uniquely simple language to learn compared to the languages of other powerful nations (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German); some of those have extremely baroque writing systems (or simply unique and different, for Cyrillic), and all of them have very complicated grammar rules. By contrast, any idiot can learn a little basic English quickly and speak it well enough to be understood, even if it's technically incorrect.
The only way you could possibly believe that is because you are a native speaker and didn’t have to learn it as a second language. English is notorious for being difficult to learn. Especially the abomination of our written language. Try learning Spanish to see what a truly easily-learned language looks like.
English isn't "notorious" for being difficult to learn at all. Citation needed. It's spoken all over the world. It's known for being difficult to become extremely proficient in, but it's very easy to learn to a basic level. It's much like learning to play guitar: any moron can learn to play some power chords on a guitar, and learning some more chords isn't that hard; playing decent-sounding songs with a handful of chords doesn't take long to learn. Playing at the level of a master like Malmsteen or Vai is something entirely different, and very few guitarists can reach that level of proficiency. It's much easier to learn enough on a guitar to play some simple song than on a piano, or worse something like a trombone for instance, but the guitar has a much greater range of ability (the difference between what a beginner can do and what a master can express with it) than most instruments.
That has zero to do with how hard or easy it is to learn. There is absolutely no correlation. It is spoken all over the world because of British colonialism, American cultural exports, and it being the lingua franca. Not because anyone actually would choose to learn it if they had any other choice.
Linguists categorize languages according to how hard they are for people to learn. Spanish is a category 1 language (the easiest to learn). English is a category 4-5 language (out of 5).
“Is English the hardest language to learn?
Given what we’ve already noted, you might be wondering if English is deserving of an equivalent ranking as one of the hardest languages to learn. Well, that too is a very subjective opinion. After all, people who are already fluent in languages that are related to English—particularly the Germanic and Romance language families—probably won’t find English to be that bad. However, English has a lot going on that could make it very frustrating to learn, even for a person fluent in one of these languages. Here are some of the commonly cited reasons that English is often considered to be a very hard language to learn:
English is an unusual mix of Germanic and Romance languages. Many English words are taken directly from Latin and Greek without changing their form or meaning at all.
The rules of grammar, pronunciation, and spelling in English are largely inconsistent and sometimes make no sense at all. For example, the past tense of ask is asked, but the past tense of take is took. Additionally, there are tons of exceptions to these rules that need to be memorized. For example, the beloved “I before E except after C” goes right out the window when we run into a word like weird.
English is full of homophones that are pronounced identically but have different spellings and meanings, such as the words way and weigh.
Often, English synonyms can’t be used interchangeably. For example, you often mean two different things when you say that someone is clever or when you say that someone is sly. The order of adjectives is often based on what “sounds right” rather than a formal set of rules. Often, native English speakers know the “correct” order of adjectives without even actually learning it.
All of the above issues cause problems even for native English speakers when trying to use proper grammar and spelling. Needless to say, a new learner is likely to struggle quite a bit when trying to wrap their head around the ridiculous rules—or lack thereof—of English. We may not be able to say for certain that English is the hardest language to learn, but we think it definitely makes a serious claim for the title.”
English the same word can be pronounced differently based on tense:
"Did you read the same book I read?"
Besides confusing I don't know what to even call a thing like that.
No it doesn't. It's not even close. Spanish has rules and generally follows those rules. English has rules and almost as many exceptions to those rules.
The Indo-European gender difference still survives in the distinction between he, she, and it.
More interestingly, English is in the process of developing a gender distinction between people and non-people, reflected in the use of the relativizer who for people and which for non-people. (The words do not otherwise differ; this is a purely grammatical distinction!) This incipient gender distinction is absorbing the old one, leading to the feeling that it expresses that the referent is not a person.
And English grammar is really not that simple - for example, few other languages have the distinction between continuous and perfect forms of a tense, but foreign speakers can simply avoid it in English ("I read the docs" instead of "I am reading the docs" for a really basic speaker).
One advantage you may mean by "grammar" is that English has relatively little variance for a verb or noun form - once you learn the root, there's not that many variations to account for tense, plurals etc. But Mandarin Chinese for example is much simpler from this point of view: there are basically 0 variations.
Phonetics are more of a problem. Chinese would be very hard to pick up in much of the world simply because tone is a very foreign phonetical feature, and people who haven't experienced it growing up are unlikely to even realize it is meaningful just by listening to speech.
However, even that doesn't matter too much. French is also a phonetically difficult language, with many very similar syllables being important for distinguishing words (for example the distinction between -n as a consonant vs a nasalized vowel). But, that didn't stop virtually all of Europe from adopting it as an international language at some point, not to mention much of north Africa.
I can't really tell what you mean. "I am reading the docs" is an example of a form that is generally called "continuous", yes. "Continuous" is an aspect, not a tense.
The same is true of "perfect", but the larger problem is that you haven't provided a perfect form. (Finite) perfect constructions in English are marked by auxiliary have, "I have read the docs". "I read the docs" uses what is generally called the "plain form" (the name describes the form, not the meaning that calls for the form), and it expresses that the verb is stative[1], describing a fact about the subject ("I am the kind of person who reads the docs") rather than describing an event that takes place at a particular time.
> Chinese would be very hard to pick up in much of the world simply because tone is a very foreign phonetical feature
This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjpnslsuA2g
So the exotic phonetic phenomenon that makes it so difficult for English speakers to learn Chinese is... something that English speakers are natively aware enough of to make and appreciate jokes about. (Not to mention objecting to people who are doing it wrong - check out "uptalk", which people spontaneously punctuated with question marks because the phenomenon was so obvious to them that they felt obligated to indicate it in writing even though the writing system has no provision for it.)
"Perfect" was the wrong word for what I meant, you're right. I was referring to the difference between the continuous form and the plain form, which doesn't exist in many other languages. For example, in French, "je lis les docs" can mean either "I am reading the docs" or "I read the docs (in general)". My point is, even though a native English speaker (or anyone past B1 or so) understands the difference between these two phrases, many foreign speakers actually don't, and would use them more or less interchangeably, relying on context.
Lots of grammar is like this: it helps reduce the amount of context necessary, but it's not critical to text comprehension. If you speak French while using the wrong genders for nouns, people will still understand exactly what you mean - it will just sound strange and maybe make certain complex phrases more confusing than they're used to. This happens very commonly when a language is picked up as a lingua franca by many foreign speakers.
> This is very commonly asserted, but I don't believe it's true. Here you can see a popular American sitcom making a series of jokes about tone, even though the same people who will tell you that Chinese is difficult because of its tones will also tell you that English doesn't have them
Tone exists in all human communication, but it is used very differently in tonal languages. In almost all non-tonal languages, a rising tone indicates a question, a flat tone indicates a statement, and certain other tones indicate the mood of the speaker.
But in a tonal language, particularly one with absolute tones like Mandarin Chinese, tones are more similar to vowels, consonants, or stress accent: they are an intrinsic part of words or syllables. The difference between "mā" (high tone) and "má" (rising tone) is not one of intention, they are simply two completely unrelated syllables/words (the first means "mother", the second means "numb"). There are three more words that use what would be the same syllable in a non-tonal language (transliterated as mà, falling tone, mǎ, falling then rising tone, and ma, neutral tone).
Even worse, moving from a neutral tone syllable to a high tone syllable may sound like, which to a Mandarin Chinese speaker would be equivalent to moving between a syalble using "a" to one using "e" would be interpreted as a rising tone (and thus a question) by a non-tonal language speaker.
The major currency is USD... Most English speaking countries are of British origin... Non-English speaking countries trade with the largest partner(s), which are of English origins...
I don't think it's the features of the language that are at play here.
That's one perspective. Another is trade. Trade is what caused my parents to learn English in the 40's and the 50's because it made them more employable.
Sure we can assume we just want to trade peacefully. History has said otherwise. We want to trade with the biggest trading partners and a lot of them grew by raiding others.
There was a clear plan to create an addiction and even as it was banned to smuggle more and more into the country.
A lot of things don't happen by chance. So does a certain country not actually have "weapons of mass destruction" etc.
European merchants didn't like this because its far more efficient to profit on every leg and the first leg of hauling silver was a loss with a mostly empty hold, so were seeking a product to sell to the Chinese market that would have pull that they could fill cargo holds with. Due to their lack of scruples, they discovered that opium was such a product and set in motion the very events that still plague us to today of growing opium across Asia to sell to China.
As a flood of cheap opium entered the market through the criminal gangs at the time (who were buying the opium through profitable liaisons with the British) the Chinese authorities set about cracking down on the trade in the interests of its people. Eventually this brought them into conflict with the British and in interests of keeping the ports open to the opium trade the first of two opium wars was declared.
The wikipedia article probably puts it better than I have [1].
> They created this difficulty to find a chance to invade.
If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century (although it would have still been a significant challenge given the might of China's manpower at the time). The British were a brutal force but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation, wealth was more of a primary motivator. So its much like US foreign policy today which is typically flexed to promote interests relevant to American GDP. It remains ugly when its flexed but its arguably a kinder aim than that of a fully imperialistic force such as say: the Mongols of the 14th and 15th centuries.
Think about why the British even introduced Opium to China and who controlled most of the production. Do you really believe they weren't plotting anything here?
> If they were seeking to invade then European possessions in China would have been significantly greater than Hong Kong given the weakness of the Qing dynasty over the course of the 19th century
There are lots of ways to invade. It doesn't have to be via military might. It can be via the church, opium as we're discussing here or other factors before the actual fight.
> but in a similar fashion to today's US hegemony they were not always primarily motivated by conquest and annexation
Are we rewriting history here? What happened to Vietnam, Iraq, etc etc? More like the media tries to paint it another way. You're free to not believe in it. I doubt it's all for the GDP.
Please respect my language choices. What I wanted to impart is that the map of the world is not smeared with the word "USA" like Imperialism would otherwise desire. I feel like you're treating all war as conquest and I feel like there's more nuance.
> Right, because we're going to believe Wikipedia + a recount of events...
Well you're welcome to add your own sources to the discussion as opposed to idle speculation or axe grinding.
You believe what you want but its clear that trade _was_ an element that contributed to the opium war. Most conflicts have numerous competing interests and a wide variety of competing actors. The European age of colonialism made this all the more complex given the lack of effective telecommunications and travel distances. This resulted in more competing interests having more agency which makes conflict all the more complicated and introduces more opportunity for half-truths and subterfuge.
I would discourage this apparent idea you have that the entire British Empire was perfectly controlled by some entirely malicious, autocratic and bloodthirsty hand in some sort of 80's action film with an entirely clear distinction between good and evil. The British Empire _was_ brutish, callous and avaricious and its a better world now without it, but to paint it with the same hand as one might any historic conqueror is to render history into a black and white pastiche.
Like we say "it was a bloody Sunday" to generically mean a massacre.
"Lingua franca" was a language, did you know that?
> That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.
It has been at least since the XI century. Long before tomatoes were a thing in England.
> English is the most international language in the world
Which English?
Because British and American English aren't.
And probably right now Mandarin Chinese is even more business oriented than English.
I'm such a person. I realize that any kind of preference I have for the language that I grew up with is an accident of birth. It helps to be part of a country that is so small as to be irrelevant in the greater scheme of things. Life doesn't stop at the border and if you want to be active at all then you're going to have to interact with people speaking different languages. English, German and French to begin with, and maybe Spanish, Chinese and one of the Slavic languages after that.
I think English is here to stay in a way that Latin never was, the digital repository of English text is absolutely massive, unless you want to limit yourself you simply have to speak English. When there was no internet that meant books and once the printing press was invented and books were no longer in very limited circulation (and reading and writing became more common skills) written culture really took off. The Roman empire is what drove the spread of Latin and once the empire collapsed it took Latin with it, with the exception of some niche uses (science, mostly, and religious texts).
> I would argue that belittling cultural preservation demonstrates deep Anglo-centric bias.
Counter point: I’m German. We currently have a lot of discussions about gender-fication of the German language. This has nothing to do with an Anglo-centric bias and still, we have exactly the same talking points.
On the one hand, it’s preserving language how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years, on the other hand, it’s about the biases in the language and how to overcome them.
make it more like 1 thousand years.
The point is culture and language evolve naturally and organically, so the language is not biased, people are. Discussing on how to remove biased from a language is the same think as to say "someone wants to put their biases in". It's true that it is happening, in the richest western countries only though, it is also true that it is because the Anglo-centric bias is predominant in the west when it's about social networks and influence on younger generations.
In China kids are restricted from using social networks and consequentially are not exposed to "content creators" that are just trying to ride the indignation wave to profit. it is also a well know fact that Chinese kids test scores on average are much better than the average western kids ones. this is another bias we are importing from Anglo-centric World, that we aren't discussing enough.
https://www.statista.com/chart/28802/childhood-aspirations-i...
I also don't see a reason why you would support the region you were born at all, if you like something else better. Tons of people move away and have zero regrets. Does reverse nationalism exist? :P
I‘m German, and I don‘t care for that language. It‘s unnecessarily complex.
But cultural preservation is a means and not an end, unlike you seem to be arguing. When made into its own end, Cultural preservation for the sake of cultural preservation simply exists to build barriers and differences between people.
That is literally the purpose when it is its own goal. To build a shared thing among a group that others do not have, so you can divide your group from them.
Cultural preservation only unites people by pitting them against an out group.
I'm honestly unsure how you can argue otherwise.
It has been the cause of many great atrocities precisely because it always creates an out group.
So yes, preserving culture for the sake of preserving culture is a net negative for society.
The rest simply becomes an argument that nobody should ever have change. Good luck with that. Change comes for us all. None of us live long enough that we should get to try to force future generations to abide our way of thinking.
I asked myself, and I said; 'meh'. Admittedly I speak English better than my first language now, and I'm also being deliberately facetious, but it's also true that I don't much care about my first language.
> Bear in mind one day English will no longer be the lingua franca as demonstrated by the word for lingua franca. ;)
I used to think it was hilariously ironic too, but then I stumbled on the actual etymology one day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca?oldformat=true#E...
After all, Tu vuò fà l'americano is merely satire. https://youtu.be/BqlJwMFtMCs
I find that beautiful, but this law seems to be against it
For example just this evening I was listening to this Neapolitan (I think it's Neapolitan, definitely Southern) song Brigante se more [1] and I needed to see the written down lyrics to get a hold of it [2], as I couldn't understand almost anything at a first hearing. I know Italian pretty well, but I just couldn't parse the song when hearing it directly.
This is a funny example to use, because while the first tomato reached Europe in the early 16th century, it was not widely eaten in Italy until the mid-to-end of the nineteenth century. For a number of reasons, people (incorrectly) believed them to be poisonous.
Nitpick, but there was no such thing as "Italy" in the 1500s. There were several kingdoms and city states at war against one another. Modern Italy is a 19th century invention.
https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/italian-americans-and-th...
The only way to achieve this is with illiberal, authoritarian measures -- I.E. a centralized government forcing people to think and behave in a certain way. And not because such thoughts or behavior is harmful in any way, it's only because it's aesthetically displeasing. Not good.
Also, not all cultural homogenisation is created equal. It's good that all cultures have evolved to say that murder is a bad thing. That was cultural homogenisation, and it was good.
It is all smoke and mirrors to distract the public opinion from the government's failures.
OTOH the use of English words that have an equivalent in Italian has reached such high levels of stupidity that it has become a popular meme here, under the name "Milanese imbruttito" which roughly translates to "this is too much even for someone from Milan"
The actual way this gets exported is via the HR firms and executive picks of American corporations. That then affects the funding of movies, TV shows, video games and everything downstream of that.
And regarding attitudes toward women's bodies, one only needs to visit any beach in southern Spain and count up the topless women to notice those values are already Americanizing.
Some might say only non western or ex colonised countries should get protection and the ex colonisers culture should be left to rot (i.e. to be swallowed up by Disney). I think that's the neo liberal / left view. It's a bit biased in my opinion but it's certainly a common thing I've heard.
For example?
Just because some aspect of the commons would be lost to the pressures of market economics doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. If left to the tyranny of markets, we'd cut down every tree, dam every stream, catch every fish in the ocean, and the only culture you'd have would be drip-fed to you for $120/month by a television syndicate.
Also, even Americans aren't interested in leaving their culture up to the markets. Remember all the hoopalah about Disney and the NBA kowtowing to China, and how incensed people were that their culture was being changed by foreign sensibilities? The rest of the world gets to wear this shoe, a lot.
I also saw it happen over the course of maybe 4-5 years when I lived in Mexico City in 2013-2017.
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/the-history-of...
A counter to this is the Académie Française [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
Which happens to be the laughing stock of the rest of the world, good call.
https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/13/le-la-covid-co...
I’m not sure I know what you mean. Can you elaborate on this world view that you say American culture is exporting?
I think music and film are actually the primary way that this American culture is exported. Think about the whole culture surrounding movies - much of it is controlled and inspired by Hollywood.
I agree that it would be nice if the rest of the world wouldn't become so Americanized, but I think that's only viable if the population doesn't learn English en masse.
In a small European country's facebook I can't have a day without a payed onlyfans advertisement hidden in a story about a poor teacher who became rich instantly after she started a side job.
Also, language is different compared to cuisine. Not saying that cuisine isn't important in defining a nation's "character", because it is, but language is quintessential when it comes to nation-building.
They're a mild form of isolationism and nationalism and they can but do not have to be the first stage of a country moving further away from the center rather than a pendulum swing. With a pendulum the assumption is that it will move back but this sort of thing can easily move a country to the right and then ultra right, of which history carries a fair number of examples.
Italian is a descendant of the Latin language, which itself borrowed extensively from Greek. What is so special about today's Italian language that it should by all means be preserved in it's current form without continuing to borrow from foreign languages?
European languages borrow from English because the US offers so much that we voluntarily adopt in Europe. If most good movies, music, streaming services, computer hardware, computer software, Internet, electric cars, smartphones, AI, business ideas etc. were Italian, the English language would adopt more Italian words.
The example in the article (bru-shetta/bru-sketta) highlights the absurd pedantic nature of this proposal.
I truly weep for the world which we seem to have created.
Current italian government is 100% USA's puppet with no shame.
The provision in the proposal to force every public meeting to be held in italian is crazy… it'd kill holding scientific conferences in italy.
To be honest I'd want them to push it as an internal memo for the national tv. There is this trend to insert english words (mostly wrongly, just like americans use italian words mostly incorrectly as well) to sound cool. If this was eliminated from TV, I'd imagine it would go a long way already.
Pointing fingers is a bit hypocritical when most cultures will do it given the circumstances.
Are these two mutually exclusive?
If more people realized this, they'd be less rigid to the idea of new - or indeed, old - culture being re-told - or not. The fact is, if you don't use a language - it dies.
Italians are merely trying to protect the lies that they prefer to be re-told..
What the world needs is more people willing to protect cultures which are not their own. There is no one culture more superior to any other - ALL cultures are subject to total loss when the natural fallacies that make up that culture stop being re-told as human truths ..
On the other hand: I think countries should resist global cultural homogenisation. No offence meant to the Americans here, but I detest the exportation of American culture to Europe. I don't mean music and films, but rather the way of thinking about the world. I suspect this is where things like these proposals are coming from; it's the pendulum swing reaching too far before it settles in the middle.