this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
342 points (96.7% liked)
Curated Tumblr
4065 readers
1127 users here now
For preserving the least toxic and most culturally relevant Tumblr heritage posts.
Image descriptions and plain text captions of written content are expected of all screenshots. Here are some image text extractors (I looked these up quick and will gladly take FOSS recommendations):
-web
-iOS
Please begin copied raw text posts (lacking a screenshot that makes it apparent it is from Tumblr) with:
# This has been reposted here to Lemmy as part of the "Curated Tumblr Project."
I made the icon using multiple creative commons svg resources, the banner is this.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
On the one hand, it's a shame to lose all those languages / dialects. On the other hand, the whole purpose of a language is communication, so the fewer distinct languages, the more people are able to speak with and understand each-other.
My guess is that it's a matter of time before everyone on the planet speaks a common language, and the odds are pretty good that language will be English. Which is a bit of a shame, since it's a pretty shitty language in many ways.
It'll be an English-Mandarin Chinese pidgin, like in Firefly.
Maybe, but Mandarin / Chinese isn't really used outside China. English has about 1.5 billion speakers, and over 1 billion of them speak it as a second language. Chinese has 1.1 billion speakers, but only 200 million speak it as a second language. It seems like the international langua franca is English.
Policies could change, and China could try to teach people Mandarin as part of the Belt and Roads initiative. But, right now, if you're trying to do business in other countries or with foreigners in your country, English is the most useful language to know.
That's not to say that future-English will necessarily be too similar to current English. I'm sure the more it spreads, the more it will change.
My personal favourite is the term lingua franca itself from when everyone (important) spoke French.
As in English is the lingua franca.
Latin for (roughly) English is the French.
A Latin term used in English to indicate French.
But really, isn't the "Franca" part from the Frankish language used in West Germany / Northern France / Benelux? Apparently the Byzantines called all Western Europeans "Franks" and the Lingua Franca was the simplified Italian / Spanish language with many Greek, Slavic, Arabic and Turkish loan words used for trade around the Carribean. So, it's more "English is the European Language" or maybe "English is the language to use with Europeans".
I was hoping someone would correct me!
I knew that translating Franca as French was anachronistic but didn't know where to start.
I'd forgotten about the Franks.
There's a Brexit joke in there somewhere.
Definitely, but I think the Brexiteers get a last laugh because AFAIK EU business is still done in English.
The lingua franca per se.
Neniu amo por Esperanto?
Hopefully with better pronunciation, it was quite grating on my latest rewatch haha
And one episode where the ship's alarm is in Cantonese, for some reason, when they used Mandarin for every other use of Chinese in the whole show ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Great show though
They could all learn Latin instead of going this awful way.