Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

I don't think its necessarily about the culture itself here, its merely a cheap populist tactic to rabble-rouse among a nation that has a rich history and struggles to handle the fact that its present isn't at that zenith. France do a lot of this sort of thing too.

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?

> 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.

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.

Greek here, nobody understands us, period. It isn't anywhere close to anything else.

As a Slovenian … I don’t have this superpower because I’m usually the only Slovenian there. There was a conference in NYC once where at least 10 people tried to introduce me to the one other Slovenian there, it was pretty funny.

Slovenia being small, we had already met years ago at a local meetup or something.

Polandball means we all know what "kurwa" means.

There’s a bit in the American TV series Fresh Off The Boat where the parents start shouting very normal sentences in Chinese so that it looks like a fake heated argument, and the salesman offers them a discount to get them to stop scaring the customers.

I'm Italian, living in Canada, the reason why I'm attached to my primary language is because I know the most vocabulary and language usage. Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy.

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 it's really hard for me to do in my home language. Some words have no translation or incorrect translation (I work as software developer), which incidentally is the same situation my Italian teacher faced 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.

Difficult to find a word for 'snow globe' too ..

> If you go to a conference, you can be quite sure no-one understands you apart from your friend who you are talking to

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.

The phrase lingua Franca is a great example of why English is the most international language in the world. It’s because of its ability to absorb from different languages.

That phrase is as English as the word tomato today.

The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu.

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.

from my perspective given my English background, I like English spelling. Sensibility says I should just give it all up and adhere to the dominant language form (en-US) for the sake of clarity.... and yet.... I shall not.

> 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.

Hindu - is someone who practices Hinduism and identifies as such, its not a language, that's Hindi.

>The phrase lingua Franca shows why languages become dominant, because they’re the one spoken by the most powerful group of people. It’s not because English is uniquely good at absorbing from different languages. Japanese uses a ton of foreign loanwords for things. So does Hindu.

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.

Yeah but this stuff get pushed as a higher priority over communication, that's my problem with every argument about "preserving culture".

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)

English is the most international language because of war, expansion and domination. It could be any other language whose "countries" won.

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.

> it's because English is an easily-learned language

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.

> I like English spelling.

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".

> 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.

The 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.

Sorry, my bad. I should have double checked. Thanks for pointing it out.

Spanish has much more complexity: complicated verb conjugation, gendered nouns, etc. English has no gender at all, and very little conjugation, and what conjugation it has is simple, except for a handful of words that it inherited from German.

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.

If you are interested, there's a good reason why English spelling is so weird. The pronunciation of vowels shifted between 1400-1700 and depending on when a specific word's spelling was "standardised" decides which version of the pronunciation was used. If it's the old vowel pronunciation the spelling will make no sense, whereas the new vowel are mostly ok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift is pretty good, and include sound files of the old vs new pronunciations.

> Spanish has much more complexity

All this tells me is that you haven’t learned either Spanish or English as a second language learner. Spanish is incredibly consistent. Unlike English, once you learn the alphabet, you can read everything in Spanish correctly.

> It's spoken all over the world.

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.”

https://www.dictionary.com/e/hardestlanguage/

> you'll struggle to find someone without a genuine fondness for it

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).

> English is the most international language because of war, expansion and domination.

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.

> Spanish has much more complexity

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.

Grammar is really not that much of an impediment to picking up a 2nd language for business and trade purposes. Unlike in school, no one really cares that much about grammar if you can understand what the other is saying.

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.

Ironically that's exactly what "computer" means.

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.

This is an artefact of how Germanic languages can often just glue words together without explicit connective words

"Sfera di neve" doesn't like a word whole "snow globe" does and indeed some write it as "snowglobe"

Minor nitpick: lingua franca was not the language of the most dominant group like English is today. It was rather the name of a pidgin loosely named after the name of one of the people's on Europe but having almost no connection to it other than "franks" being the exonym for "western Europeans" as perceived by east Mediterranean people. Sabir was not the language used by the Franks.

We had this debate in France in 1955. We use the word "ordinateur" for "computer", which comes from the latin "ordinator" which means something that order things, it shares the same root as the word "order".

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?"

https://journals.openedition.org/bibnum/534

I'm well aware and I find it somewhat amusing.

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?)

It's kinda funny picturing either of those words as we play Dark Souls (videogame) on these devices. Yes of course that's "all math", still!

The reason in the first place why there are English words in the day-to-day Italian is because a majority of the population _uses already these words_.

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.

> English is full of homophones that are pronounced identically but have different spellings and meanings, such as the words way and weigh.

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.

that's a calcolatrice, calcolatore is a computer :)

First paragraph, I agree. This however, not:

> 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.

> how it is spoken and written for the last 100 years

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'm aware, but still in the small circle of people I asked to, they all envisioned that over a computer, lol

you mean it's a great example of how something real can become a concept?

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.

Homographs.

> Aside from that, it's an unfortunate language, since you can't use to communicate anywhere else beside Italy.

I was under the impression that you could communicate roughly but effectively between Italian and Spanish.

The ironic thing is that half of Italy doesn't speak italian

> 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".

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.

Only a short time ago, the word "computer" meant a person (who calculates things as a job).

That's not especially distinctive of Germanic languages. Chinese will do it exactly the same way, though the chains of nouns that are common in Germanic would be unusual to say the least in Chinese.

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).

> English has no gender at all

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.

English is very inconsistent, not that this necessarily makes it harder of course, compared to languages such as Finnish which has very regular grammar and no ambiguity with pronounciation.

("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.)

I am always amused by those kinds of etymologies where a word "gets back" to the language it came from or its more direct heir (Italian for Latin) after living in a different language.

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

Knowing a romance language already helps in picking up another one but I wouldn't say you can communicate easily between Italian and Spanish.

It would be like using your English to converse in Dutch.

> 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)

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.)

[1] https://glossary.sil.org/term/stative-verb

Nah, the sign language really is different.

Genuine fondness? I suppose if I wasn't interested in languages per se I might as well have zero positive things to say about German. Being on the internet for 25 years, working in international teams, playing online games on international servers - there were weeks and months where I barely used any German on a given day, compared to English, and that's fine.

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

It goes back to the same origins. Why do you trade? There has to be something to gain. Often that is a result of this act of war, expansion and domination.

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.

> 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.

I‘m German, and I don‘t care for that language. It‘s unnecessarily complex.

I don't think that's quite fair. I have had Italian-Spanish conversations which were slow but not painful. With Dutch I can often guess what something means when I see it written down but understanding the spoken language is very hard and I can only pick out a few words here and there.

you may also war because you trade though. Opium war is a good example of that where the war is inspired by difficulties trading.

Inconsistency of English is high compared to basically every other language.

Was that really the reason? What difficulty? They created this difficulty to find a chance to invade.

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.

Comparing to Finnish is... a choice. Finnish is known to be one of the most difficult languages to learn because of the incredibly variation in cases.

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.

> If you have to penalize usage of English words, you are doing something really wrong.

Just in official documents, though. You can still say "OK" in the street.

> It's one of the simpler and more consistent ones.

    floor
    cooperation
    coop

I moved to Finland, which is why it comes to mind. Finnish is definitely difficult, for native English speakers due to the grammar.

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.

This was done in Slovenia (računalnik)

This only serves to form unnecessary barriers. If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.

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

And the great vowel shift happened very shortly after the introduction of the printing press to Britain and the standardisation of English spelling.

There are many good reasons to learn from cultures, to understand them, etc.

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.

Sign languages are independent languages in their own right, with their own grammar, often very different to the grammar of the spoken language(s) used in the same region.

> everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.

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.

it can be done in romance languages such as italian, but it's way more frequent that one word has to be a verb and another a noun: sanguisuga (blood sucker), magiafuoco (fire eater), porta tagliafuoco (fire resistent door), apri-pista, or noun+adjective: cassaforte (strong box, safe) or preposition+noun: oltretomba (beyond the grave, after life)

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"

> If tomorrow, everyone spoke the same language (ignore which one it was), society would be better off.

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).

The war came about through a trading inefficiency. The Chinese markets at the time (still holds relatively true today) was a selling market, not a buying market. They weren't interested in European goods. So European trading vessels would have to stock up on silver as currency, and sail to China to trade the silver for desirable goods such as porcelain and silks.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

> "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.

"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.

Chinese has quite nearly the opposite problem: compounds are so pervasive that they'll think any disyllable is a compound, identifiable morphemes or no, even if it's a phonetic loan.

Right, because we're going to believe Wikipedia + a recount of events that don't even include any insights into the actual plans of e.g. the British empire at the time.

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.

I usually can grab a few things from tone alone for a lot of languages.

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.

Yeah, it's so far from other languages that you probably can't make out any of the words at all.

I think I have some invites, can you email me about it?

> not _always_ primarily motivated

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.

Just did.

Cheers.

> Try asking _anyone_ who doesn't have English as their first language in a serious context how they feel about their language

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...

This only serves to backup my point that culture preservation for no meaningful goal is highly dangerous.

Language-as-identity as a way of separating people has no meaningful use case that is positive for society.

I posited a world where flipping a switch was possible and the result was perfect. All your complaints are about a world where that isn't true, and so are literally inapplicable. You can argue this is unrealistic, but i'd simply point out the rest is a question of tradeoffs - how fast you do it, what language you pick, etc, there are no perfect answers.

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.

"OK" in the streets, "d'accord" in the sheets (of paper)