We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Latine scribe, calumniator! “Anglis adhuc mundum regit, sed id necessario OK non est. Tempus est vim suam cohibere?”, writes Michele Gazzola in the Guardian.
Pro disertis, clara sunt beneficia — aliis, sunt ingentia gratuita. Hic viae sunt nonnullae ad boost iustitiam linguisticam
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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I never did Latin at school, so I didn’t know “boost” was a Latin word. Submit all complaints to Dominus Google. In Arapaho.
Just as machine translating gets better AND cheaper, this numb-nuts wants to tax me for the crime of… [checks notes]… speaking English in England!
There was a time when Latin did appear in British newspapers. Without translation. This is an extract from the Westminster Play published in The Times of 7 December 1923
MIC. Et penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. Hoc tu fecisti, Demea, quod sociis, Auxilium non das.
DEM. Non do? Non omnia conor Germani ut cunctis solvered iusta queant ?
And I don’t understand that either.
‘Actually, it is quite easy to be topp in lat. You just have to work.’
To paraphrase Thatcher: Michele Gazzola would rather his own country (and everybody else’s) be poorer, if only the gap wrt the English-speaking countries could be smaller.
He does not realize the advantage that he has, in being able to speak to his fellow Italians (?) without monoglot English speakers understanding what he says.
Factio Conservativa delenda est
The Google translation that i got is as follows:
which translates back to:
The Latin in the OP translated to:
The translation of the subtitle in the OP preserves the meaning, except for replacing:
fluent speakers –> the eloquent.
I am fond of iterative improvement; conjectures & refutations, as Popper would say.
This is one area that that the Chinese will have a hard time taking over, especially in the west. Mandarin and Cantonese are both exceptionally difficult languages for new learners whereas English (aside from it spelling and or crazy definite article) is widely considered one of the easiest languages to learn — though perhaps some of the non native speakers are better placed to comment on that than me.
Moreover, Chinese languages are not only overall more difficult, their onramp is especially difficult since both their orthography and phonology is extremely challenging. And if you can’t even say or read the words it is very hard to start. When I learned Spanish I could make a decent attempt to read and pronounce the words with a little training, and so from the beginning I could easily learn little phrases. Same with the latin above. I don’t speak latin but can at least read the words and certainly some of the cognates are pretty obvious. ““Anglis adhuc mundum regit, sed id necessario OK non est” many of the words have fairly obvious meanings especially if you are familiar with idiomatic Latin phrases. Not sure what adhuc or sed means, but I think I can make a good guess at all the other words.
That is way more difficult in Chinese languages. Maybe it is easier if you speak other oriental languages? On that I’m not qualified to answer.
So although I see a future of Chinese hegemony it is hard to imagine them achieving linguistic hegemony too.
“It must be curbed” is another way of saying “how *DARE* you do things that I want to stop you doing, and you refuse to comply with me forcing you to stop it, DAMMIT!!!”
The only way to “curb” the use of English is only through force. People use English because they chose to use English.
Custos delenda est.
I stopped reading the article when I got to the phrase “linguistic justice.” Done.
One tires of the constant and blatant cultural appropriation.
All I can say is… Yeesh, is the stupid strong in that piece.
The reason English is what it is would be that it’s the ultimate pidgin, an all-encompassing voracious hole which sucks in all other languages and then spits out something intelligible to nearly everyone. Its impurity is why it has been so successful.
Also, why it is so damn confusing. It’s layers and layers of things it has gathered into itself, like one of those horror-movie garbage monsters taking found material and making a new body for itself. If you speak French, you have to look on it all with a certain sense of horror because it is the antithesis of all that you value, and proof that the very idea of “freezing” and making a language some sort of cultural shrine and touchstone just doesn’t work.
That’s another odd point about France; not only did they take themselves down the rathole of the grande ecoles, they’ve also created an entire Academie Francaise meant to preserve and spread their language. The inanition provided by the institutions is a large part of why France is what it is today, a moribund failing culture that will likely be mostly dead in a couple of generations, preserved God alone knows where.
English, on the other hand? Likely to still be spoken in some form, if only because of the fact that it was first on the scene for so much of media technology with the largest market. At some point in the future, you’re going to see something like a “Cinema Standard English” becoming a linguistic Rosetta stone, something we can all go back to as a common ground for communicating. It will likely last even longer than Latin, because of all the actual recordings of it, and the fact that it is so damn flexible.
English ain’t going anywhere soon. For good or ill.
bobby b wrote:
I’m always amazed by the idea of cultural appropriation when when cultures come in contact with one another they trade cultural concepts, ideas, world-views, manners of dress, hairstyles, stories, mythologies, etc. It isn’t simply trading of goods and girls to become wives. Sometimes the trades are successful, like how the Romans took the Greek mythologies and put their own spin on them and they became the Roman mythology we know and love. Sometimes they are less successful, like Christian missionaries to North Sentinel Island. Sometimes the old cultural standards are destroyed, often as the result of a war, such as the Conquistadors brutally destroying the Aztec, Maya, and Inca cultures.
Steven R: “I stopped reading the article when I got to the phrase ‘linguistic justice.’ Done.”
I never trust anyone who routinely qualifies the noun justice with some adjective or another.
“English still rules the world, but that’s not necessarily OK.”
As soon as I read that, I just knew this column would be a waste of my time.
Yes. Any form of “justice” which does not involve the preservation of or restoration of property rights (and I include the physical body here as the first and pre-eminent type of property) is not justice at all; rather, it always seems to be the other thing instead.
One advantage that Chinese has is that in its (albeit clumsy) written form, it can be ‘read’ by anyone who has learned the characters, even if they don’t know the words behind the characters. So if we all learned the writing system, we could have universal written discussions with anyone literate on Earth (and talk about them behind their back or to their face).
There is no intrinsic quality in English that makes it any more suitable to be a global language than Mandarin, French or, for that matter, Swahili.
English is a global language for one reason alone: the last two political and economic world superpowers back-to-back since the Battle of Waterloo have both been English-speaking.
If by some fluke, Finland had been the superpower for 100 years or more, everyone determined to build a successful career for themselves would be busily swotting up the 15 Finnish noun cases.
JGH wrote:
“It must be curbed” is another way of saying “how *DARE* you do things that I want to stop you doing, and you refuse to comply with me forcing you to stop it, DAMMIT!!!”
And wouldn’t you know it, but Natalie already wrote that article.
@JJM
There is no intrinsic quality in English that makes it any more suitable to be a global language than Mandarin, French or, for that matter, Swahili.
I actually don’t think that is true. English is a mongrel whore of a language, and because it is such a mixture (Anglo Saxon, Norse and French) it has had a lot of the complexity taken out of it. It is kind of like a creole, a pair of languages mashed together to make them mutually intelligible, that spent a thousand years developing, and eventually acquired a navy. Why, for example, does English not have grammatical gender? Anglo Saxon, Norse and French all have it, but the genders of words are different in these languages, so it is all mixed up and so they eventually gave up making the distinction. And of course it is a whore of a language because it readily absorbs all comers. The vocabulary is already far from virgin given its previous partners, so adding a few more words isn’t much affecting its chastity. The English dictionary is consequently just huge.
It used to have complex declinations and conjugations and grammatical genders but the mixing of the languages, and the people speaking the languages, has forced a simplicity that makes it simpler to learn. And in the past few hundred years we got rid of most of that which remained (the thees and thous and speakeths). Of course the same history has made the spelling extremely challenging, so you get what you pay for I guess. There are other languages that are probably simpler than English, Indonesian and maybe Spanish for example, or of course a language designed to be easy like Esperanto. But English is definitely in the group of relatively simple languages to master.
But of course I would say that since I didn’t have to learn it as an adult.
Finnish is a very challenging language, and you might consider that if the Finns had indeed been a world super power then perhaps commerce would have been conducted in Finnish, but the fact that it was would have significantly impacted trade and commerce, so we’d all be poorer today. In fact the difficulty of the language would have significantly impeded the ability of the Finns to become a superpower in the first place.
In a world where Finland took the place of Britain as an imperial power, then the fact is that the Finnish language would have been forced to either evolve into something like English in terms of universal appeal and utility, or a Finnish creole would have been forced into existence, one that would likely have taken the place of Finnish even in Finland…
Everyone makes the mistake of assuming that things would be different, if only… In every case, the “if onlies” vanish once you fill the role, and once you’re in that role? You discover that there are reasons things are the way they are, and you can’t change them no matter how hard you rail against them.
So, just as I couldn’t be Mr. Shiny Happy Friendly leader guy when I pinned on stripes, Finnish could not remain the esoteric complexity it is were it to have become a major language of commerce.
It’s precisely the same as all these idjits railing against the “patriarchy”. OK, great… You want the job? You get it… And, observe yourself gradually morphing over into exactly what you railed against, because it wasn’t the men who were doing those things, but the damned role they had to fulfill. Which, if you’re to perform it to the same standards, you’re going to have to fulfill in similar ways. You can’t be Ms. Nice Person and run things; this is why female leaders throughout history have been just as “bad” as the male ones, when it comes to wars and oppressions. You do what the job requires, and if that job requires that you do unfortunate things to others, well… Guess what?
Thinking that it’d somehow be different “if only” is a marker for some truly egregiously delusional thinking. It’s as true here, discussing Finnish as a language of world commerce as it is of saying that Mom wouldn’t do the things Dad did, if only she was the main household breadwinner…
It is the necessities of the role, more than anything else, that lead to the ways people and institutions go about doing them.
Old joke…
Most languages borrow from other languages…
English follows them down a dark alley, mugs them, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.
Finnish is so difficult that for decades they put out a radio news broadcast in Latin, on the basis more people would understnad it…
English isn’t big on fancy grammar. It’s big on vocabulary. The original version of the joke is from a usenet post by James Nicoll:
Languages develop to serve their environments.
Just as there are 53 words in Inuit for “snow”, Finnish contains 72 words for “depressed.”
I remember a great line from The Monty Python Show. “I could have been a miner, but I didn’t have the Latin.”
Necessity speaks, consequence follows. You live in the Arctic, you need a lot of descriptives for “snow”.
Or, at least, people think you do. I don’t speak any of the Inuit languages (there are apparently several, at least dialects…) and I’ve only got the reports of others who claim they do to say, but I’ve seen varying statements on this issue down the years, some saying it’s another one of those “just so” stories with no basis in reality, others saying that there are a lot more specialized terms for snow and ice than other languages. Don’t know, first-hand, soooo… Your mileage may vary.
I can safely say, however, that that is one of the key strengths of English: English speakers adopt and coin words at the drop of a hat. I just did it, up in that initial paragraph. I wanted a word for the class of words used to describe things that includes adjectives, adverbs, and participles. There isn’t such a thing, so I coined one. May be a new usage, may not be… But, there it is, and the average reader likely understood exactly what I meant by it. That’s something that I’m told is very unusual and hard to do in a lot of languages, so when a speaker of one of those languages encounters it in English, it’s a problem for them.
The other strength of English is the flexibility of it all when it comes to jargon, the specialized language for specific fields. Other languages don’t allow for the creation of these specialized vocabularies (or, so I’m told…) as easily, and when you go to start learning an esoteric field in English, well… It can get interesting for all concerned. Being a polyglot pidgin tongue can allow for a much higher degree of flexibility and adaptability, which is also a burden when it comes to trying to understand the version of the language spoken a few centuries back. Polish, for example? Very stable language, little change… You can still read Polish language material from the days when the then-current English was nearly unintelligible to us today, and not have a lot of trouble with it. Again, so I’ve read.
I suspect that going forward, there will likely be a frozen version of current English that will serve as a touchstone lingua franca for most of the human race, if only because so much of the modern intellectual infrastructure is based on it. The “installed base” of language is going to be what keeps things in some variety of English, and keep it mostly intelligible to us. Although, there is some room for improvement, especially with rationalizing the spelling and counting systems.
This is one I’ll happily chime in on.
Back 48 years ago, I ran overnight snowmaking operations for a small MN ski area. Hedco machines. It was important to know about the existing snow, and the layers we were adding to the base. You have to know density, wetness, granularity, age, crustiness, uniformity . . . a bunch of variables that were important in order to get the right foundation below and durable and fun carving layers on top. You varied output based on temp and water content and fan speed and atomizer ratio.
So the Hedco manuals and training covered about 25 different snow types, all with different labels. We had one short-term worker who was Inuit, and he would laughingly critique our labels, giving us the more exact (and more numerous) labels from his home, which included much more info concerning how runners would slide on it.
I don’t know if the number was truly 53, but I know it was over 50.
The Finnish thing – well, a joke based on all of the Finns I’ve ever known. A bleak people.
@bobby b,
Like I said, I’ve no idea myself. There are a lot of people out there saying it’s BS, at least as many saying it is a “thing”, and a bunch saying things like “Yeah, but…” and qualifying it all. I don’t speak any of the languages in question, so I don’t know first-hand.
It’s one of those things that at least seems likely… Which is something I’ve learned to distrust. I keep running into those little nuggets of “conventional wisdom” I’ve heard, some of which were taught to me as a child by all sorts of “trustworthy” people, and I keep finding them to be either outright falsifications or deliberate exaggerations and distortions… So, trust, but verify. And, since I can’t verify it personally?
As to Finns? I’ll say this much in their defense: If you lived in the arctic next door to Russia and had been a constant source of slaves to be sold south for both the Swedes and the Russians, well… Yeah. You’d be a little dour, too. Also, paranoid and highly suspicious of Russian-speaking strangers.
It’s weird how little the Northern slave-trade is known, or how prevalent it was. Nor is it commonly known how long it went on, either. In terms of numbers, I’d be entirely unsurprised if those numbers surpassed the African trade, especially if calculated on a percentage-of-population basis going back to the days when the Viking traders first started marketing Finno-Balts to the Byzantine Empire.
It occurs to me that every 400 years or so the English language undergoes a massive structural change. The Romans leave in 410ad after 400 years of influencing the local Celtic languages and starting around the year 600 we see the Angles-Saxons-Dane migration that leads to Old English. 1066 and we see the Norman Invasion and starting around the year 1150 until 1450 we have Middle English. Early Modern English is from 1450 until the Restoration and the the Modern English we know and love to now. So we’re just about due for another massive shift in English.
Mr. Gazzola may very well get the linguistic reckoning he so richly desires, but not for the reasons he wants.
Or, not.
I suspect that the existence of widespread sound and video recordings will have a severe leveling effect on the language. You can already see that in the decline of regional accents in the US and the UK both. As time goes on, I suspect that more and more of the dialects are going to get smoothed into non-existence.
Going forward a few hundred years, should we manage to avoid killing ourselves, the impact of what we might term “Archival English” as a lingua franca for isolated interstellar communities can’t be discounted. There will be local linguistic shifts and adaptations, but the baseline of what they have in their archives will always be there as a common tongue. The best candidate for that purpose is English, I’m afraid. Nothing else has the breadth or depth of material available. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that the only way a lot of current languages are going to be known is from their residual loan-words in English, and the various whatever-to-English dictionaries there are preserved.
I don’t see English being replaced, absent some massive cataclysm. Even then? There are a lot of reasons it will still be used as a common tongue among the survivors of such a thing.
Steven R
It occurs to me that every 400 years or so the English language undergoes a massive structural change.
It is also worth pointing out that English right now is undergoing a MASSIVE change. English was for a long time pretty much only a spoken language with limited writing, because people educated enough to be literate spoke French in the aristocracy and Latin in the religious realm. But with its adoption by the Royal Court in 1300s it became much more commonly written, and not long after printing came along to make writing much more common. So really English goes through two phases — a language defined by speakers to a language defined by writers.
However, over the past twenty years a new form of English has developed — sort of halfway between spoken and written. Originating on the early internet and becoming dominant through texting and other types of online communication. It is a sort of half spoken half written language. “r u k” for “are you ok?”
It has changed almost every part of the language. For example, grammar: for example, this odd construct that was used before but is WAY more common now “Biden can’t carry a deck chair. Sad.” to the wide use of the hashtag as not a searchable marker as it was originally designed for but as a semantic summary. “Biden can’t carry a deck chair. Sad. #toogeriatricforpresident” or as a consequential summary “Biden can’t carry a deck chair. #trump2024”.
It even has a massive new orthography with the widespread use of trigraphs like (-: which originated in early email, to actual new characters such as 😀🎅😡😵.
It eschews punctuation, or more to the point uses different punctuation such as … ??? / and so forth.
And it has a lot of new vocabulary. LOL used to be an abbreviation pronounced L-O-L, now it is a word — lol (pronounced as written) — and even a verb “I lolled when I saw him trip over the deck chair.”
And on and on. Linguists are really only just beginning to investigate this, but from what I can see it is THE most dramatic change in the English language since we dropped the second person singular pronouns. It is a kind of verbal writing that is bleeding into strongly into casual speech and even to some degree into formal writing.
The Finns are aparently the happiest people on the planet. They do have a horrendous suicide rate.
Do these two things make sense together…
Yes, maybe. Perhaps Finns are happy because the unhappy ones are dead.
Or… My understanding is Scandi countries are very conforming. You either fit in or it’s social suicide which may lead to actual suicide. So they’re either conformist or leave or top themselves.
I once dated a Finnish girl in London (1995). She loved the UK because she felt she could be herself here. She was a post-grad history student and a confirmed anglophile. Her top heroes were Elizabeth I (her field was Tudro naval history) and Maggie Thatcher. She was quite right wing in the real sense of the term.
Wow, a post-grad history student who loved Thatcher!!!
The last time i was in Helsinki, people smiled at my friendly banter much more than the first time i was there. Maybe it’s because i have got better at bantering, but i think that is at most a minor factor.
Fraser Orr brings up an interesting point about hashtags. They mean something to us because of the current zeitgeist. Some future historian will have to do a lot of research to understand them and their significance. I used to do a lot of genealogical research as a part of my job at the library and that meant going through a lot of newspapers from the late 1800s and early 1900s and their editorial cartoons and their daily funny pages made multiple references to people and events of the day. I am well read on the major currents of the era, but even so, far too many of their references were unknown to me.
Imagine some future historian trying to decipher the meaning of #dicksoutforharambe.
All right then. Spanish, anyone? Or Esperanto. Oh, wait, that’s of Western origin, too. Dastardly westerners!
I’m really late to this party, but here’s a possible reason why English may be better suited as an international language of wider communication than Chinese: English is not a tonal language. Speaking from years of experience in developing orthographies for tonal languages (in Africa, admittedly, but the principle is the same*), I can say that figuring out a good way to write tonal languages is fiendishly difficult. Chinese dodges the issue by using non-phonetically-based characters, which has its advantages, as mentioned above, but which comes with the huge disadvantage of a massive learning curve. So I don’t think Chinese as currently constituted could ever take over as a *written* global language.
There are possibilities for adaptation. As someone stated upthread, languages simplify when they are used by many non-native speakers. So tone could decrease (or even disappear?) as an element of Chinese. Or one of the various Romanization schemes could take over as the dominant written form of Chinese.
(*Well, African tonal systems tend to be even more complicated, I think…)
I’m even later to the party than Beaneater, but highly recommend David Moser’s essay “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard” – https://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html