I am against killing languages but this just seems like the likely outcome of a global economy. Eventually the planet will be cohesive if we don’t kill ourselves first. English isn’t my first choice in what language should be dominant though, it’s too fucking confusing and breaks its own rules too often.
I’m OK with the grammar, but the spelling is a total train wreck.
I wish we could just ignore that bit of history and start from scratch, because carrying a thousand years of historical baggage has gotten completely ridiculous at this point. There are also so many borrowed words from so many different languages that you can’t spell anything correctly without knowing the language of origin.
Just look at spelling bees, for example. English-speaking people seem to be okay with that, but people from other countries are like, “WTF are you doing? Just listen and write. What’s wrong with you?” Thanks to history, the sound has pretty much nothing to do with the letters. Forget about the rules. Just memorise each word individually.
That’s not OK. Someone needs to fix that mess, and many people have tried already. It looks unfixable to me. Maybe we should just abandon English and switch to any other language.
The simple claim of calling Arabic a single language is inherently a political one, in the same way calling Cantonese and Mandarin the same Chinese language is. Or would be like trying to reduce the Slavic languages into one or two.
By that argument, you should already be learning Mandarin, the world language spoken by the largest number of people, and in what in future will be very, very likely the biggest industrial economy.
Fun fact, I was last summer in Ljubljana / Slowenia, and some shops already have signs in Chinese writing.
I am against killing languages but this just seems like the likely outcome of a global economy. Eventually the planet will be cohesive if we don’t kill ourselves first. English isn’t my first choice in what language should be dominant though, it’s too fucking confusing and breaks its own rules too often.
I’m OK with the grammar, but the spelling is a total train wreck.
I wish we could just ignore that bit of history and start from scratch, because carrying a thousand years of historical baggage has gotten completely ridiculous at this point. There are also so many borrowed words from so many different languages that you can’t spell anything correctly without knowing the language of origin.
Just look at spelling bees, for example. English-speaking people seem to be okay with that, but people from other countries are like, “WTF are you doing? Just listen and write. What’s wrong with you?” Thanks to history, the sound has pretty much nothing to do with the letters. Forget about the rules. Just memorise each word individually.
That’s not OK. Someone needs to fix that mess, and many people have tried already. It looks unfixable to me. Maybe we should just abandon English and switch to any other language.
I wonder if Icelandic would be nicer.
With AI and videos, spelling will be irrelevant soon.
I really hope so.
The alternative global language is Mandarin which is even more of a mess
Arabic would also be an option, or an entirely new language.
Esperanto, sunken into it’s chair, slumbering, raises it’s head
The simple claim of calling Arabic a single language is inherently a political one, in the same way calling Cantonese and Mandarin the same Chinese language is. Or would be like trying to reduce the Slavic languages into one or two.
Esperanto gang, rise up!
we should standardize on Lojban.
that way, nobody’s happy.
By that argument, you should already be learning Mandarin, the world language spoken by the largest number of people, and in what in future will be very, very likely the biggest industrial economy.
Fun fact, I was last summer in Ljubljana / Slowenia, and some shops already have signs in Chinese writing.