Torsten Mohrin wrote on 1999-07-21 10:54 UTC:
> On Tue, 20 Jul 1999 12:23:34 -0700 (PDT), Scott Horne wrote:
>
> >I don't see the need for a common language. But if I were to
> >choose one, English would not even be in the running.
>
> I can't ignore reality. All (international) newsgroups and mailing
> lists I know are in English.
The same goes for scientific publications and technical documentation.
Sure, there have been other lingua francae before (Greek, Latin, French,
etc.), but their deployment in the world's cultural heritage and
economic practice was vanishingly small (several orders of magnitude!)
compared to the use of English today. It may well be that English has
already passed the threshold that makes a language the last language of
choice for global communication for at least the next few hundred years.
Both Mandarin and Spanish (the only other competition worth mentioning
at this time) are either geographically very restricted or not used
widely by populations with very significant economic (and therefore
cultural) global influence. International communication in Europe is
mostly done in English today, even though German is the most widely used
language in Europe and France makes by far the most fuzz about
protecting their language.
The advantage of English is its grammatical simplicity, which is of
great help to the beginning learner. Its down side is its rather chaotic
spelling/pronounciation relationship, and (most certainly a consequence
of the simple grammar) a lack of clarity of expression and a danger of
ambiguity, which makes English quite difficult to use in formal texts
such as contracts, laws, and ISO standards. Languages with more clarity
of expression are often also languages with higher training requirements
(the same holds also for programming languages!).
Markus
-- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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