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Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 6:31 pm
by mèþru
For the simple fact that not enough of the right people are interested in changing things, English will continue to remain a lingua franca anyway and will not be reformed by planning. I don't think that any action the United States can do, short of massively depopulating the Anglosphere by use of WMDs, would change English's global status.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 8:59 pm
by linguoboy
Travis B. wrote:The thing is Sal's objection to we is based on that it is referring to individuals who are not present in the immediate conversation, as if one had power over them. Does that change if I were to say "I think the US government should take steps to preserve English as a global lingua franca"? One is still speaking as if one has control over something that one does not (because if one were not, why would it matter whether one thinks the US government should or should not do something in the first place).
What I like about this phrasing is that at least there's something resembling a concrete proposal here. We can debate whether it's desirable or even possible fore the US government to attempt this. (And this isn't a sterile question given that a number of us here do exercise control over the US government, even if the actual degree of it invested in each of us is minuscule.) Whereas when you say, "Are we going to let X happen?", the "we" is so vague and diffuse it's not clear to me what group is even being talked about. We on the ZBB? We the American people? We the citizens of the Anglosphere? We the English-speakers? I don't even know where to start answering a question like that.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 9:58 pm
by Pole, the
Viktor77 wrote:
Travis B. wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:There's that "we" again.
It's a good thing you and Viktor aren't great friends. With your powers combined, the universe itself might tremble!
Umm what? Replace we with I in my post. Does it make any sense afterwards?
Sal appears to have a thing against what I learned as "royal we." Perhaps it's an American thing?
We will never know.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 10:11 pm
by Zaarin
Pole, the wrote:
Viktor77 wrote:
Travis B. wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:There's that "we" again.
It's a good thing you and Viktor aren't great friends. With your powers combined, the universe itself might tremble!
Umm what? Replace we with I in my post. Does it make any sense afterwards?
Sal appears to have a thing against what I learned as "royal we." Perhaps it's an American thing?
We will never know.
We are not amused.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 4:17 am
by jmcd
Travis B. wrote:
linguoboy wrote:
Travis B. wrote:Personally, I think the goal should be to have a written language that can survive the breakup of English itself as a spoken language. Latin was able to survive as a written and sacred language for almost two millenia. Should we not aim for the same with English?
Why? The material conditions on Earth today are entirely different than they were in the days when written Latin was a significant lingua franca.
The purpose is for Standard English's place as a global lingua franca to survive language change itself, because there will still be a need for a global lingua franca, and in particular to enable people speaking different English languages to still have a means to communicate with one another, even if what they speak at home may be non-crossintelligible, and to read things written in times past, rather than being limited to reading things written in recent times.
The need for a global lingua franca followed the existence of one, which itelf was preceded by the sociolinguistic and geopilitcal context encouraging such a situation.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 4:35 am
by jmcd
kodé wrote:Then down the continuum you get things like "Imma" for "I'm going to" or "Jeechet" for "Did you eat yet", which I only use in casual speech, and rarely see written outside of facebook or song lyrics.
On the other hand, I'd estimate that this is one of the most frequent contexts for using written language among literate adults nowadays.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 6:39 am
by hwhatting
jmcd wrote:
kodé wrote:Then down the continuum you get things like "Imma" for "I'm going to" or "Jeechet" for "Did you eat yet", which I only use in casual speech, and rarely see written outside of facebook or song lyrics.
On the other hand, I'd estimate that this is one of the most frequent contexts for using written language among literate adults nowadays.
I dunno, I still write much more at and for work (e-mails, reports, presentations) than I write on social networks, and I very rarely write songs ;-)

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 7:33 am
by jmcd
I suppose it depends on the kind of work you're doing. If you're academic work, then you'll certainly need literacy skills at work. But in manual labour for example, reading might relevant once or twice but writing very rarely.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 9:02 am
by Travis B.
jmcd wrote:The need for a global lingua franca followed the existence of one, which itelf was preceded by the sociolinguistic and geopilitcal context encouraging such a situation.
There has always been a need for lingua francas - it is a net positive to be able to communicate with more people rather than less - and it is more acute now since the general population has more ability to communicate with people far away than in times past. This is not a product of English being a lingua franca; this would be the case regardless of what languages could fit the role of lingua franca themselves.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 9:13 am
by mèþru
I think that the Ill Bethisad idea of no dominant language could actually work in real life.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 9:29 am
by hwhatting
jmcd wrote:I suppose it depends on the kind of work you're doing. If you're academic work, then you'll certainly need literacy skills at work. But in manual labour for example, reading might relevant once or twice but writing very rarely.
Besides academic work, there's also office jobs, where writing reports and doing presentations are a valuable skill. That's what I'm doing.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 10:56 am
by Vijay
Zaarin wrote:We are not amused.
There's some comic strip featured in the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad that always seems to start with some guy picking something up and asking, "Wat is DIT?" (what's THIS?). There's one where he's at a restaurant and picks some sort of vegetable up out of the plate, and the waiter tries to explain that it's something called an amuuse. The next frame shows him in the kitchen with the whole dish thrown over his head and saying to the chef in English, "...they were not amused..."
Travis B. wrote:There has always been a need for lingua francas - it is a net positive to be able to communicate with more people rather than less
There are other ways of dealing with multilingualism besides lingua francas.
mèþru wrote:I think that the Ill Bethisad idea of no dominant language could actually work in real life.
There are certainly situations in which there is no dominant language. I don't think there was any one dominant language in the Iroquois League, for example.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 12:04 pm
by mèþru
That is a bad example. The Iroquois League used Mohawk as its working language.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 12:05 pm
by Travis B.
Vijay wrote:
Travis B. wrote:There has always been a need for lingua francas - it is a net positive to be able to communicate with more people rather than less
There are other ways of dealing with multilingualism besides lingua francas.
You forget that lingua francas need not be big languages on the level of Latin or French or English or Modern Standard Arabic or Mandarin. Just because in a given case there may not be big lingua francas does not mean that there are not little, local lingua francas.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 12:16 pm
by Vijay
mèþru wrote:That is a bad example. The Iroquois League used Mohawk as its working language.
Did it really! Okay. Never was sure how that worked. Thanks!

How about California before colonization, then? There doesn't seem to have been a dominant language there before English came along.
Travis B. wrote:You forget that lingua francas need not be big languages on the level of Latin or French or English or Modern Standard Arabic or Mandarin. Just because in a given case there may not be big lingua francas does not mean that there are not little, local lingua francas.
No, there don't have to be lingua francas of any kind. There are situations where people just learn each others' languages rather than having one of them (however small or large) dominate over the others.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 1:01 pm
by Travis B.
Vijay wrote:
Travis B. wrote:You forget that lingua francas need not be big languages on the level of Latin or French or English or Modern Standard Arabic or Mandarin. Just because in a given case there may not be big lingua francas does not mean that there are not little, local lingua francas.
No, there don't have to be lingua francas of any kind. There are situations where people just learn each others' languages rather than having one of them (however small or large) dominate over the others.
In essence, you are saying that for us to communicate here in the ZBB, we should all learn not just English, but, IIRC, German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Spanish, Indonesian, Israeli Hebrew, French? (I don't know if there's any other native French-speakers who have been on here other than the now-banned Legion), and like for the sake of equality,

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 1:06 pm
by mèþru
I can't speak for other posters, but I am not saying we should get rid of lingua francas. All I meant is that there is a possibility of there being no global lingua franca, and that that could be the future linguistic situation of the world.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 1:13 pm
by Vijay
Travis B. wrote:In essence, you are saying that for us to communicate here in the ZBB, we should all learn not just English, but, IIRC, German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Spanish, Indonesian, Israeli Hebrew, French? (I don't know if there's any other native French-speakers who have been on here other than the now-banned Legion), and like for the sake of equality,
The ZBB is not somehow representative of humans in general. Humans have other approaches to multilingualism besides lingua francas - not everywhere, but in some parts of the world. That implies nothing about the ZBB.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 1:59 pm
by Ser
Travis B. wrote:(I don't know if there's any other native French-speakers who have been on here other than the now-banned Legion)
(Don't forget long-banned Slereah.)

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 2:30 pm
by zompist
There's Ars Lande and Yiuel. (Also, isn't slereah English?)

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 2:57 pm
by Zaarin
Vijay wrote:How about California before colonization, then? There doesn't seem to have been a dominant language there before English came along.
I can't speak for California, but the PNW is right up there with California in terms of small area/high linguistic diversity, and it had a number of lingua francas: Chinook Jargon (even before English- and French-speaking traders entered the area, if I recall correctly), Haida Jargon, Nootka Jargon...I'm pretty certain there was an Inuit or Aleut based jargon used in the northern part of the region, too.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Wed Jul 20, 2016 4:40 pm
by jmcd
Travis B. wrote:
jmcd wrote:The need for a global lingua franca followed the existence of one, which itelf was preceded by the sociolinguistic and geopilitcal context encouraging such a situation.
There has always been a need for lingua francas - it is a net positive to be able to communicate with more people rather than less - and it is more acute now since the general population has more ability to communicate with people far away than in times past. This is not a product of English being a lingua franca; this would be the case regardless of what languages could fit the role of lingua franca themselves.
This is slightly different from the initial discussion: you mentioned 'global lingua franca'; now you mention just 'lingua franca'. Although, as Vijay has pointed out, there are objections to that as well.
Travis B. wrote:In essence, you are saying that for us to communicate here in the ZBB, we should all learn not just English, but, IIRC, German, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Spanish, Indonesian, Israeli Hebrew, French? (I don't know if there's any other native French-speakers who have been on here other than the now-banned Legion), and like for the sake of equality,
A number of other solutions exist:
We speak whichever language(s) we like
We speak a language which is dominant in linguistics or conlanging
We speak any of a specific list of languages
We all learn Vedurian
And one I have previously championed, Help your fluency thread being available in every thread.

As for French natives, there was also Legros. Also, Izambri (Catalan) and Vec (Icelandic) have been active recently enough.

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Thu Jul 21, 2016 12:04 am
by Ser
zompist wrote:(Also, isn't slereah English?)
(He's (((French))). Still hangs out on isharia too, to this day.)

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2016 9:57 pm
by ObsequiousNewt
I propose we all learn bbzx mqx wqp

Re: At what point do we accept variation into standard Engli

Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2016 8:06 am
by jal
linguoboy wrote:Seen on the scale of human civilisation, European dominance is a fluke, and already well on the wane. US dominance is even more recent and more flukey; we have a better chance of still being significant in 500 years, but dominant to the point of setting the standard for a global lingua franca? I'm not sure that's the way to bet.
Latin was a lingua franca in Europe, at least a thousand years after the demise of the Roman Empire (at least the Western one, and the Eastern one used Greek). I can see that happening to English as well.


JAL