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English as the universal language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| maaku Senior Member United States Joined 5576 days ago 359 posts - 562 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 41 of 206 26 October 2009 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Try learning Chinese! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6661 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 42 of 206 26 October 2009 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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1. English is probably as close to being a universal language as we can expect a language to be.
2. It's certainly convenient to have some language be so widely known around the world by such a large number of people. The fact that we're all having this discussion in English is significant. Those of us who read this forum and contribute to the discussions are not a typical group of people. We are more interested in languages and learning languages than most of the rest of the world. We're the statistically unusual bunch that learns languages just for fun. Many other people would be perfectly content to learn only one other language and use it to communicate with large numbers of people scattered around the globe regardless of how they might feel about that language, its native speakers or the countries where it is a native language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5523 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 43 of 206 26 October 2009 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
First of all, only some words in Chinese have one syllable. Furthermore, inflection is not only about what part of a word to accent, but also about which words, and how. Thus inflection is just as relevant in Chinese as in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5523 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 45 of 206 26 October 2009 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Did you mean me or maaku? I don't quite see where you are going with this. Maaku's point was, I think, that accent is part of pronunciation, just like the sequence of sounds is, it's only less obvious because it's not usually recorded in writing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 46 of 206 27 October 2009 at 12:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's easier than you think. Where's the stress on the word "the", for example?
English may not have tones, but you can still pronounce things wrong and say something you didn't mean to. Edited by Cainntear on 27 October 2009 at 12:06am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Rikyu-san Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5530 days ago 213 posts - 413 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, French | Message 47 of 206 27 October 2009 at 10:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1222988/Web-s cript-shake-allow-internet-addresses-Arabic-Japanese.html?IT O=1490
Biggest revolution - Internet addresses in Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Hindi or any other non-Latin based language. I think this is relevant to our discussion, as it challenges English as the universal language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5523 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 48 of 206 28 October 2009 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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"Most dramatic internet shake-up in 40 years to allow web addresses in languages from Arabic to Japanese"
Most dramatic? That journalist is obviously on crack. It's fun, if not very practical, to allow addresses in any script, but it is hardly "important" at all. Certainly not the "most important" thing on the internet in 40 years. How about www? Or the fact that half the world is online? An address is just a label, not even that. Once you have typed it in, you don't need it. The future of addresses might be in 2d-barcodes anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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