tommydee: Yeah, remember when French (or German) was what people learned when they wanted to learn a foreign language? Now, I'm wondering just WTF would you do with it. Buy cheese? Go to Nigeria? Not get your ass kicked in Quebec?

???

And that's why I took Spanish.

vpb: Well, Belgians, Luxembourgers don't count.

They mostly speak Luxembourghish in Luxembourgh, which sounds kinda like a stroke victim trying to speak German.

natazha: I have a friend that is a polyglot and travels almost constantly for his job. He gets great delight speaking Parisian French in Quebec. In France, he'll start off in "K-becker", as he calls it. If asked to speak English, he switches to American pronunciations, but uses a very heavy Russian accent and German sentence structure.

That would be so awesome. If I had three wishes my first would be to be able to understand and speak several languages. Other two wishes used for clarifying loopholes.

cretinbob: The year was 1778

...and i wish I was in Sherbrook now

How about we just use the language air traffic controllers use and call it a day?

A few year's ago I attended a multinational, multilingual NATO conference, complete with full translation service. After the formal introductions, all of the speakers (and audience) removed their headphones and spoke in English for the remainder of the day. During question period, one participant got to the microphone and began her question in French, causing everyone to scramble for the headsets, including the German presenter. The official translator-- who had disappeared earlier-- had to be brought back from the cafe. After several minutes of fiddling with headphones and waiting for the translator to set up the transmission, the francophone questioner once again spoke into the microphone: "Oh never mind, I'll just ask my question in English"

Mister Peejay: spawn73: SweetSilverBlues: meanmutton: spiderpaz: French is the 4th most spoken European language behind English, Spanish and Portuguese. The fact that they're crying about their language not being the official International language just tells you everything you need to know about the French.

Where in Europe do they speak Portuguese outside of Portugal? There's only 10 million people in Portugal. There are 65 million people in France, 81 million in Germany. The vast majority of both populations speak the language for which their countries are named.

Do you perhaps mean German?

There's a few million Brazilians who'd like ro speak with you.

In Portugese.

No, they'd like to speak with you if you think Brazil is in Europe.

Just to clarify:

Portuguese is spoken in Brazil
Brazil is not in Europe
therefore, Portuguese is not a European language?

You know, I can almost see an argument for that, if one only considers where the majority of speakers are, not where the language's origin was.

The original question was "Where in Europe do they speak Portuguese outside of Portugal?"

Brazil is not in Europe.

spawn73: Mister Peejay: spawn73: SweetSilverBlues: meanmutton: spiderpaz: French is the 4th most spoken European language behind English, Spanish and Portuguese. The fact that they're crying about their language not being the official International language just tells you everything you need to know about the French.

Where in Europe do they speak Portuguese outside of Portugal? There's only 10 million people in Portugal. There are 65 million people in France, 81 million in Germany. The vast majority of both populations speak the language for which their countries are named.

Do you perhaps mean German?

There's a few million Brazilians who'd like ro speak with you.

In Portugese.

No, they'd like to speak with you if you think Brazil is in Europe.

Just to clarify:

Portuguese is spoken in Brazil
Brazil is not in Europe
therefore, Portuguese is not a European language?

You know, I can almost see an argument for that, if one only considers where the majority of speakers are, not where the language's origin was.

The original question was "Where in Europe do they speak Portuguese outside of Portugal?"

Brazil is not in Europe.

And that question was in response to the statement about European languages, not languages spoken in Europe. Vicini said go back to the beginning ...

first off, it's kind of ironic that the largest european nation not in the european union is the nation whose language is the "lingua franca" of the continent.

secondly, it does make it more fair. should they issue the reports in spanish or german? dutch? russian? ladino?

jiaxiaobo: I hear this argument all the time and, my apologies, it is nonsense

Really, if it's nonsense perhaps you could comment on L'Académie française and it's on-going (and stupidly quixotic) effort to weed out foreign influence in the French Language? Or maybe on the relative size of the English official vocabulary relative to any other language on the globe today? (Hint, English just plain has twice as many words as any other).

proteus_b: first off, it's kind of ironic that the largest european nation not in the european union is the nation whose language is the "lingua franca" of the continent.

Er. The UK is in the European Union.

secondly, it does make it more fair. should they issue the reports in spanish or german? dutch? russian? ladino?

They do, at least in Spanisch, German, and Dutch. Russia is not part of the EU and so Russian is not an official language of the Union. Neither is Ladino.

The EU has 23 official languages. All official regulations are publshed in all 23 languages. For working documents and most reports, however, due to time and budget considerations, are usually only translated into English, French, and German.

proteus_b: first off, it's kind of ironic that the largest european nation not in the european union is the nation whose language is the "lingua franca" of the continent.

I give up... Serbian? Turkish? The UK has been in the EU since 1973.

proteus_b: first off, it's kind of ironic that the largest european nation not in the european union is the nation whose language is the "lingua franca" of the continent.

Are you daft?

XveryYpettyZ: Or maybe on the relative size of the English official vocabulary relative to any other language on the globe today? (Hint, English just plain has twice as many words as any other).

Actually, even setting aside the fact that it is impossible to accurately count the number of words in a language, Dutch probably has more. Conservative estimates say the Dutch vocabulary is around 1 to 2 million words (more liberal counts go up to 60 million). English is usually estimated somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000. It's hardly a measure of how "good" a language is though. Dutch admittedly has the drawback of sounding a lot like a coughing fit.

Radak: FlashHarry: is it ironic that english is the lingua franca for the EU?

I'm guessing that you're saying that because of the "franca" part, in which case the answer is no. While it is true that the name of the country France and the word franca in lingua franca derive from the same word, that's the only overlap there (and the word they derive from is actually an Italian word, as the original lingua franca was largely Italian Latin).

FTFY

/took 4 years of it
//thanks Mom & Dad! Real useful!

I sometimes hear that every 2 weeks another language dies out, as if that were a bad thing. Isn't the homogenization of all cultures humanity's manifest destiny? Doesn't this crucially require a standardization of language?? Isn't it equally important and convenient that this should happen to be the language that I natively speak?

I'm asking questions.

Porous Horace: English is a non-gendered language of few letters and has no diacritical marks.

Someone explain to me why gendered languages are not completely useless.

Eh, gendered words are useless, but not necessarily hard to learn. What really gives English its international oomph in my opinion is more that we don't really care that much about word order and grammar. Swapping a few words in French or Spanish can dramatically alter the meaning of a given sentence, in English it might make you sound stupid but anyone trained to speak the language in general will still pretty much know what you're saying. One of the things we inherited from Old English, iirc, which is otherwise closer to German than modern English.

Not really my field, though, maybe there's a linguist farker out there who can explain gendered nouns in a way that makes them seem sensible rather than arbitrary.

//To be fair, English has borrowed gendered words from Spanish for quite a while, at least in North America.

jiaxiaobo: A superior language has no need for spelling bees, for words will be written as they are pronounced, and there should be an effortless fluid logic to the creation of words and design of sentences allowing a child to learn his/her written and spoken language *before* they attend school. The most powerful language is the simplest to master.

Speaking of nonsense, what you just said is a myth. This idea of a perfectly phonetic language in which words are written as they are spelled is a chimera. There is no such natural language (don't get me started on synthetic languages such as Esperanto), and inasmuch as there ever has been, it's only a matter of a hundred years or so before pronunciation drift causes the written form to stop being phonetic. Think of English of Shakespeare's day compared with 21st-century English. ""Wound" meaning "injury" rhymed with "round" then; it was pronounced the same as "wound" the past tense of "wind".

And before you say Korean, no, it's not perfectly Korean, despite what Koreans will tell you. Nor is Spanish. That's not to say that they aren't CLOSER to being phonetic.

You could argue that Engish spelling should be reformed... that's how we got American spelling in the first place. But you can't make it universal for English because there are too many dialects. Look at "tomato" for instance. In order to make the official English spelling of "tomato" phonetic, you'd have to first decided which pronunciation was correct. You'd be officially declaring all other pronunciations incorrect. It's just not possible, nor is it really even desirable.

durbnpoisn: I'm a little confused by this...
There was a time when French was very popular. But Latin was MUCH more widely used as the universal language.

Now, since modern English borrows from pretty much all European languages (definitely including French), it has replaced Latin as the universal. I thought this was fairly well established. I'm a bit surprised that an organization like the EU would draft papers in any other language at all.

Because the French insist on it.

Seriously, there are all sorts of international things where there are two official languages: English because it makes sense, and French because the French absolutely refused to cooperate otherwise, and everybody else figured the hassle of two official languages was actually less troublesome than trying to make the French be reasonable.

Working languages of the UN? English and French. Of the ICC? English and French. Of NATO, despite the French withdrawing from the joint command structure for several decades? English and French. Of the International Olympic Committee? English and French. Of the Council of Europe? English and French.

You know why Coordinated Universal Time is abbreviated UTC? Because the French would not, just would not, agree to an English abbreviation, and everyone else at least had the balls to refuse to let the French impose TUC. So finally the committee picked an abbreviation that didn't match any language.

People talk about American arrogance. Well, you know, the US has something to back it up. The French? Pfeh. The French ceased to be a Great Power after the Second Battle of the Aisne, and they know it; they just refuse to admit it.

Jerkwater: I sometimes hear that every 2 weeks another language dies out, as if that were a bad thing. Isn't the homogenization of all cultures humanity's manifest destiny? Doesn't this crucially require a standardization of language?? Isn't it equally important and convenient that this should happen to be the language that I natively speak?

I'm asking questions.


Yes, this is true of very small regional languages that were never spoken by more than a hand-full of living people at a time. Meanwhile, though, the larger marginal languages are being spoken by more people than they were in recent decades (and read by more people than they ever were in the comparatively illiterate past). Welsh, Irish, some nearly extinct American Indian languages, for example. Every Taffy, Mick, and Geronimo speaks & reads English, of course, but now a great many of them are actively keeping their traditional tongues alive and in actual use. Hebrew was a dead language for centuries, and was brought back to life about a century ago. Yes, there is a great deal of difference between modern Hebrew and ancient Hebrew, not the least of which is the addition of written vowels, but still, it's back.

ciberido: Speaking of nonsense, what you just said is a myth. This idea of a perfectly phonetic language in which words are written as they are spelled is a chimera. There is no such natural language (don't get me started on synthetic languages such as Esperanto), and inasmuch as there ever has been, it's only a matter of a hundred years or so before pronunciation drift causes the written form to stop being phonetic.

...whut? Japanese is a syllabic/morae language that is written exactly like it is pronounced(regarding hiragana/katakana/furigana, at least), with absolutely no changes in pronunciation(no such things as an accent in Japanese). Regional dialect changes words, not pronunciation.

That being said, most people readily admit that any language in use is "living," in that it adapts to users' preferences. Which almost everyone agrees is a good thing. So no matter what language you look at, it will inevitably change.

Cyberluddite: vpb: Well, Belgians, Luxembourgers don't count.

Neither do the people in Haiti or half of the countries in Africa. Too dark, and no money.

Nor are they a part of the EU.

Porous Horace: English is a non-gendered language of few letters and has no diacritical marks.

Someone explain to me why gendered languages are not completely useless.

If by "useless" you mean "arbitrary," then yes, gendered languages are "useless," but then, so is English. The best example I can give you for English is the definite article "the." The rules about when you use it and when you don't are extremely arbitrary and confusing to non-native speakers. The rules aren't even consistent from American English to Commonwealth English. Look at "hospital," for example. If you are inside one, are you "in the hospital" or "in hospital"? One is correct for Commonwealth or British English; the other is correct for American English. Neither rule makes any real sense.

And before you claim that this is an unfair example because every language has similar problems with articles, no, they don't. Russian, for example, has no articles at all, and nobody misses them. From the point of view of a native Russian speaker, articles in English are every bit as "useless" as you think gender in other languages is.

There are other examples, but this one should do.

jiaxiaobo: I hear this argument all the time and, my apologies, it is nonsense. English is an ugly mutt language that has borrowed a lot, yes, but all languages borrow from one another, and all languages today borrow increasingly from English.

Go look up the Toubon law and the Academie francais and get back to me. You can't completely stop borrowing between languages, but some are very accepting of it and other are very resistant to it. From the wiki articles...

As French culture has come under increasing pressure with the widespread use of English in media and technology, the Académie has tried to prevent the Anglicization of the French language. For example, the Académie has recommended, with mixed success, that some loanwords from English (such as walkman, software and email) be avoided, in favour of words derived from French (baladeur, logiciel, and courriel respectively).

The Toubon Law relating to usage of the French language), is a law of the French government mandating the use of the French language in official government publications, in all advertisements, in all workplaces, in commercial contracts, in some other commercial communication contexts, in all government-financed schools, and some other contexts... as the law can largely be considered to have been enacted in reaction to the increasing usage of English in advertisements and other areas in France.

The French are upset? Oh noes! Tanks be rollin'.. Look out Saarland.

gerbilpox: Radak:

I'm guessing that you're saying that because of the "franca" part, in which case the answer is no. While it is true that the name of the country France and the word franca in lingua franca derive from the same word, that's the only overlap there (and the word they derive from is actually an Italian word, as the original lingua franca was largely Italian Latin).

FTFY

/took 4 years of it
//thanks Mom & Dad! Real useful!

Radak: gerbilpox: the original lingua franca was largely Italian Latin).

FTFY

Let me be pedantic for a moment. When I said "original lingua franca", I meant the earliest language that was referred to using the name "lingua franca", and that language was mostly Italian (I was trying to distinguish the use of the word franca from referring to French).

You're correct that Latin was probably the first language widely used to communicate between cultures of different native tongues, but term "lingua franca" (amusingly enough a Latin term itself) wasn't used until much later.

I'll make myself unpopular here by quoting a French text about lingua franca:

"Une définition plus ponctuelle nous vient de Charles Etienne de la Condamine, après avoir visité Alger en 1731 [Bibl. Nat. de Paris, ms In Folio 2582]: Le Mauresque est la Langue du Pays. Les Turcs parlent Turc entre eux; mais la langue dont se servent les uns et les autres pour se faire entendre aux Européens est ce qu'on appelle la Langue Franque. On dit qu'on la parle dans tout le Levant et dans touts les ports de la Méditerranée, avec cette différence que celle qui est en usage du côté de Tripoli et plus en avant vers le Levant est un mélange de provençal, de grec vulgaire, de latin et surtout d'italien corrompu, au lieu que celle qu'on parle à Alger, et qu'on appelle aussi Petit Mauresque, tient beaucoup plus de l'espagnol que les Maures ont retenu de leur séjour en Espagne..."

Link

In short, the lexicon of lingua franca had different origins depending where it was spoken. In the eastern Mediterranean, it was mostly Italian; further west, mostly Spanish.

See? French *can be* useful now and again.

ciberido: Porous Horace: English is a non-gendered language of few letters and has no diacritical marks.

Someone explain to me why gendered languages are not completely useless.

If by "useless" you mean "arbitrary," then yes, gendered languages are "useless," but then, so is English. The best example I can give you for English is the definite article "the." The rules about when you use it and when you don't are extremely arbitrary and confusing to non-native speakers. The rules aren't even consistent from American English to Commonwealth English. Look at "hospital," for example. If you are inside one, are you "in the hospital" or "in hospital"? One is correct for Commonwealth or British English; the other is correct for American English. Neither rule makes any real sense.

And before you claim that this is an unfair example because every language has similar problems with articles, no, they don't. Russian, for example, has no articles at all, and nobody misses them. From the point of view of a native Russian speaker, articles in English are every bit as "useless" as you think gender in other languages is.

There are other examples, but this one should do.

It simply depends on whether the article or lack of one will cause or clear up confusion. Russians leaving out articles when they speak aren't exactly grammatically incorrect, they're just potentially unclear.

Sometimes it's useful to know whether you're talking about just a random one of those nouns, a specific implied one of those nouns, this one of those nouns, or--in the case of the French--all there is of that noun.

Du chocolate versus le chocolate.

It's not about the rule and whether you sound right. It's about the meaning and whether you convey what you intend to convey. If you focus on keeping the meaning clear, the rule issues become harmless eccentricities.

That's why you hire someone like me to proofread your shiat, and ask you if you want to sound British or American (Irish, Aussie, or Canadian -- to get their specific eccentricities would take much more work. I'm not that good.)

A lot of things people mark down as grammar issues are style issues, and they're not as hard and fast as people want to make them. They only become really important where meaning's at stake. So rather than memorize rules, learn how these things (like articles) affect meaning, and take a meaning-based approach to applying them. You'll still be wrong sometimes, but less often, and people will usually understand what you were trying to say.

"I can't see why the Anglo-Saxon media should benefit from such an unbelievable competitive edge on the remainder of the other media and I can't see any practical reason for the Commission's incapacity to do this work."

Seems the French are just upset over the way that the Anglo-Saxon media are portraying them...

Julie Cochrane: It simply depends on whether the article or lack of one will cause or clear up confusion. Russians leaving out articles when they speak aren't exactly grammatically incorrect, they're just potentially unclear.

Um, no. Perhaps I did not make myself clear. It's not that Russians "leave out" articles. It's that the Russian language doesn't have articles to begin with. They don't exist.

So, just as English doesn't have gender (which Spanish and French do), Russian does have articles (which English does). And just as gender seems "useless" to a native English speaker (who has grown up with a language that doesn't use them and doesn't need them, and therefore wonders what use other languages have for them), so, too, do articles seems "useless" to a native Russian speaker (who has grown up with a language that doesn't use them and doesn't need them, and therefore wonders what use other languages have for them).

More generally, for any two languages X and Y, where X has some grammatical feature which Y lacks, native speakers of Y will imagine those aspects of X that Y lacks to be useless. It's not really true. It's just that language Y uses a DIFFERENT feature to accomplish the same task.

Saying Russian "leaves out" articles is like saying English "leaves out" gender.

Jamrock: Are you daft?

bloody batty, apparently. all the talk of the decline of the euro has apparently led me to confound the union and the eurozone.