Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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/

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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.