EU Progress: Official Language Change to "Euro-English

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Discussion Overview

The discussion centers around the proposed change of the official language of the European Union from German to "Euro-English." Participants explore the implications of this change, the necessity of a common language for European unity, and the potential for language evolution or simplification.

Discussion Character

  • Debate/contested
  • Conceptual clarification
  • Meta-discussion

Main Points Raised

  • Some participants argue that Europe needs a single language to foster unity, suggesting that "Euro-English" could serve this purpose.
  • Others express skepticism about the practicality and desirability of adopting "Euro-English," with one participant humorously suggesting Esperanto as an alternative.
  • There are comments on the historical context of language in Europe, noting resistance to abandoning native languages due to cultural identity and historical significance.
  • Some participants critique the idea of simplifying English spelling, questioning the dignity of using forms like "Lite" and "Thru."
  • A few posts introduce humor regarding regional accents and dialects, highlighting perceptions of different English-speaking communities.
  • One participant mentions the idea of using "txt spk" for EU communications, suggesting it could save time and resources.
  • There is a discussion about the effectiveness of English as a de facto standard in business and technical communication.

Areas of Agreement / Disagreement

Participants express a variety of opinions on the change to "Euro-English," with no clear consensus on its necessity or effectiveness. Some support the idea while others contest its practicality and implications.

Contextual Notes

The discussion includes various assumptions about language evolution, cultural identity, and the implications of adopting a simplified form of English, which remain unresolved.

  • #31
GCT said:
Please god ... not Chinese. From what I hear it is the worst to learn as a secondary language - complex - it would be hell just having to inscribe those characters much more the pronounciation is some sort of an art form also. English shall do , thank you very much.

I've taken a little Putonghua / Mandarin Chinese and although you're correct that the writing system requires lots of memorization, and remembering and pronouncing tones is difficult coming from an atonal language, as far as speaking and verbally understanding it I found it to be easier than any European language I've studied (French and a little Spanish and Russian.) You don't really have to conjugate verbs at all, for example.

Our new Secretary of the Treasury appointee speaks Chinese and Japanese, sez the newz...
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  • #32
Proton Soup said:
i'm not a yank, you canuck, I'm a Southerner. and our grammar is better than those "youse" guys up north.
Anyone between Canada and Mexico is a Yank. And 'youse' is a New York term; you'll never hear it up here unless someone is uttering a quote from 'The Godfather'.

Phrak, it used to be that the international language of commerce was German. That and English were the official aviation languages. Things change according to socio-economic fluctuations.
 
  • #33
How do you alphabetically sort something in Chinese/Japanese?
 
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  • #34
CaptainQuasar said:
? They wouldn't lose their investment, they'd still be able to speak English.

You know we're talking about what the official language of the European Union ought to be, right? The premise of what I'm saying is that it would prevent the E.U. from spending centuries bouncing back and forth between different official languages.

What I'm saying is that the E.U. member states would do their descendants a favor to adopt a nation-neutral and culture-neutral language now and bite the bullet. That's what the benefit of Esperanto would be in the long run, its neutrality.
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that's assuming a lot. it's even got it's own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto" . are certain types of people attracted to esperanto?
 
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  • #35
Yeah, "youse" is pretty much just New York and New Jersey and people who pretend they're from New York or New Jersey.
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  • #36
Danger said:
Anyone between Canada and Mexico is a Yank. And 'youse' is a New York term; you'll never hear it up here unless someone is uttering a quote from 'The Godfather'.

see, that's where you're wrong. if you weren't completely ignorant of the culture here, you'd realize calling a Southerner a Yank is an insult. and yes, i realize "youse" is Yank. youse guys say "aboot" and "eh".
 
  • #37
mgb_phys said:
How do alphabetically sort something in Chinese/Japanese?

Y'know, come to think of it, I never actually learned that about Japanese during the little I took. In Chinese there's a system that counts the number of brush / pen strokes used to construct the character, then subdivides each of those groups based upon some other rules. Japanese has an additional two phonetic alphabets as well as using some Chinese characters, so I don't know whether they sort things based on the phonetics or whether they use the Chinese system.
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  • #38
Proton Soup said:
that's assuming a lot. it's even got it's own http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto" . are certain types of people attracted to esperanto?

There's a long way to go between that and "you invaded us" or even "your soccer team beat our soccer team last year."
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  • #39
CaptainQuasar said:
There's a long way to go between that and "you invaded us" or even "your soccer team beat our soccer team last year."
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the french will hate it just because it's ugly.
 
  • #40
There are two kinds of people I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.
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  • #41
Proton Soup said:
if you weren't completely ignorant of the culture here, you'd realize calling a Southerner a Yank is an insult. and yes, i realize "youse" is Yank. youse guys say "aboot" and "eh".
And if you weren't so ignorant of international culture, you'd know that to everyone else on the planet, any citizen of the US is a Yank. And yes, when we go oot and aboot, we tend to say eh a lot. And as Turbo pointed out, Newfies have a language all of their own. The rest of us, fortunately, are born with the genetic ability to understand them.
 
  • #42
Danger said:
And if you weren't so ignorant of international culture, you'd know that to everyone else on the planet, any citizen of the US is a Yank. And yes, when we go oot and aboot, we tend to say eh a lot. And as Turbo pointed out, Newfies have a language all of their own. The rest of us, fortunately, are born with the genetic ability to understand them.

i know, that's why i must preach the gospel to you heathens. say it with me. Sou-thern-er. :wink:
 
  • #43
Danger said:
And if you weren't so ignorant of international culture, you'd know that to everyone else on the planet, any citizen of the US is a Yank. And yes, when we go oot and aboot, we tend to say eh a lot. And as Turbo pointed out, Newfies have a language all of their own. The rest of us, fortunately, are born with the genetic ability to understand them.

Danger! You'nes are in rare form for 'e'nes over here.
 
  • #44
Phrak, you're perilously close to sounding Welsh. :-p
 
  • #45
CaptainQuasar said:
There are two kinds of people I can't stand in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures, and the Dutch.
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You know, I was thinking of that exact line a few minutes ago.
 
  • #46
europe isn't going to accept one language, no matter what any comission says. europeans are simply too self-centered and stubborn to let their pride down. that's not a generelization of europe, that's a generalization of every culture on this planet. especially when it is pressed with foreign influence. so its official status will only be on paper.

making english the official language of a continent basically sends out the message that "we english are superior, and its time to purge all of your pagan languages". you'll get countless arguments as to what the official language should be and all that. there is simply too much history entrenched in the old world countries, and they would not let it go.

such uniformity does not sit well with a country unless you enforce it with a blade. this may have worked back in the day when england was shooting people with only had sticks, but it would not hold in a developed continent like europe.
 
  • #47
Esperanto will never be a success. More and more Europeans speak English, also in Eastern Europe. But it's going to take many hundred years to unite Europe under a common language. This is of course not only about pride.

Even if it may seem boring at first glance, I hope the whole world will speak one language in the future. The language barrier is the most important barrier between people today. I want some cultural diversity to remain, but the world should be united under a common language, common human rights and common laws.
 
  • #48
leopard said:
Esperanto will never be a success.

IMHO it seems unquestionably a success; 120 years after being invented in Poland there are probably more people worldwide who have varying degrees of fluency in it than constituted the population of Poland in the year it was invented, there's a relatively large body of literature and as I mentioned a hundred-thousand-article-plus Wikipedia, the size of the Czech or Romanian Wikipedias and larger than 95% of the WikiMedia encyclopedia projects out there. That does not seem too shabby to me.

Do you think anything you personally invent will have have that kind of staying power and broad appeal? I certainly don't think I've come up with anything close.

Predicting the demise of Esperanto seems to be a perennial hobby for some people. I remember hearing the same thing said ten and twenty years ago, and of course it's since then that the entire Esperanto Wikipedia has been built.

Yeah, Esperanto may never become the international language but as the first widely adopted one it has proven that it's entirely possible for an artificial language to be viable. And it did so starting off when global literacy was pretty low and before anything like the internet or machine-assisted translation existed. How's about that, imagine if there was as successful a campaign based around an artificial language that had been specifically designed as an intermediate for machine-assisted translation between a set of other ones...

It just seems to me like one of these centuries some pluralistic society, Indonesia or some region of Africa or Asia or something, is going to pioneer officially using an artificial language and Esperanto will have been an important stepping stone to that.
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  • #49
I am Korean. I use broken English for international communication.
For Koreans to learn Japanese is easy,
but to learn English is very difficult because of grammatical structure.
I ignore who criticize my bad English.
I call that kind of English user as Yankeeglish user.
 
  • #50
but by what standard to you select an official language?

if its by numbers, mandarin should be the global language hands down. about a sixth of the world speak it, which more than twice as many as know english.

or do we go by what nation is the most prosperous? then english would win, but keep in mind a lot of our prosperity is through theft, murder, and exploitment.

or do we go by the most logical language? english wouldn't qualify, latin languages are more structured than english will ever be. perhaps if we devise a new language entirely?
 
  • #51
khemix said:
english wouldn't qualify, latin languages are more structured than english will ever be. perhaps if we devise a new language entirely?

That is only a viewpoint of european language.
for non-european language speaker,
to learn esperanto is same level of difficulty as english.
 
  • #52
broken english is global standard.
we must use grammar destroyed English.
when I submitted journal I boldly use broken english
without proofreading of native speaker.
That will affected rejection of my paper.
but I will not change my attitude.
Let us bravely use broken english.
 
  • #53
CaptainQuasar said:
Do you think anything you personally invent will have have that kind of staying power and broad appeal?

That's OT as hell. Esperanto will probably never become the language of Europe, not even a major language anywhere. Although it should. English has come to stay.
 
  • #54
Jang Jin Hong said:
I ignore who criticize my bad English.

Even constructive criticism?
 
  • #55
khemix said:
but by what standard to you select an official language?

if its by numbers, mandarin should be the global language hands down. about a sixth of the world speak it, which more than twice as many as know english.

or do we go by what nation is the most prosperous? then english would win, but keep in mind a lot of our prosperity is through theft, murder, and exploitment.

or do we go by the most logical language? english wouldn't qualify, latin languages are more structured than english will ever be. perhaps if we devise a new language entirely?

Either English (since almost all literature in the world is written in, or has been translated to, English), or a logic language that is easy to learn and at the same time rich. English is a very rich language, but very hard to learn.
 
  • #56
Jang Jin Hong said:
That is only a viewpoint of european language.
for non-european language speaker,
to learn esperanto is same level of difficulty as english.

No, it's more logical.
 
  • #57
Esperanto is as likely to become the national language of Europe as Nudism is likely to become the national uniform. They are probably even the same people.
 
  • #58
leopard said:
No, it's more logical.

There is not more or less logical language in general.
The grammatical structure which is close to their mother language looks more logical.
 
  • #59
Proton Soup said:
Esperanto is as likely to become the national language of Europe as Nudism is likely to become the national uniform. They are probably even the same people.

That is a narrow perspective of indo-european language speaker.
for Koreans, to learn Japanese is greatly more easy than to learn esperanto.
 
  • #60
Jang Jin Hong said:
That is a narrow perspective of indo-european language speaker.
for Koreans, to learn Japanese is greatly more easy than to learn esperanto.

i see english is not your first language.
 

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