grey
Senior Member
Remember "T Dot"?
Remember "Megacity"?
Remember "Megacity"?
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Post: How do you pronounce 'Toronto'
- Thread starter wyliepoon
- Start date
Lenser
Senior Member
In rap and hiphop circles, it's still T Dot, I think. As for megacity, I forget how that came about - was that the fruit of amalgamation? It certainly seems to have fallen out of favour nowadays.
kkgg7
Banned
Something? It is 100% due to the economic power of the US.
The influence of a certain language has everything to do with the country where it is mainly spoken and hardly anything to do with features of the language itself. If the US hadn't dominated the world, English wouldn't have its status now. Whether the language itself is flexible or not, is completely irrelevant.
Canadians and Australians should be thankful that because there is a strong economic/military power who shares the same language, they don't need to learn any foreign languages
Lenser
Senior Member
Agreed that there is nothing intrinsic about the English language which makes it superior to other languages. I was being a bit flippant.
But your contention that we have America to thank for the dominance of English is suspect. Before the US rose to prominence there was this little thing called the British Empire. They colonized extensively and fostered powerful trade mechanisms everywhere they went. England was a great sea power and that's how they extended their influence - all this long before commercial flight. Their language of business was English. America simply took up the torch after England was done.
Next up, perhaps future generations will be speaking Mandarin or Hindu. Who knows? Meanwhile English will be dominant for some time yet.
But your contention that we have America to thank for the dominance of English is suspect. Before the US rose to prominence there was this little thing called the British Empire. They colonized extensively and fostered powerful trade mechanisms everywhere they went. England was a great sea power and that's how they extended their influence - all this long before commercial flight. Their language of business was English. America simply took up the torch after England was done.
Next up, perhaps future generations will be speaking Mandarin or Hindu. Who knows? Meanwhile English will be dominant for some time yet.
Celestica
New Member
Does anyone know of a monosyllabic interpretation of Toronto? "Tron" would be pretty cool...
adma
Superstar
Yup. So, blame Mike Harris for generating that one. (Before "megacity", though, there was "Metro".)
Minus Smile
Banned
Toronaldto.
grey
Senior Member
Hell yeah, three cheers for anti-intellectualism.Canadians and Australians should be thankful that because there is a strong economic/military power who shares the same language, they don't need to learn any foreign languages
toraerach
Active Member
The dominance of the English language goes beyond it being the language of commerce solely. For those parts of the world that were colonized by Britain, it became the prestige language, the language of government and education. Those who led the struggle for Indian independence were by and large fluent in it, as were those who assumed positions of authority in Kenya, South Africa, Singapore, etc. Eventually, through later American exploits, this also became true of places like the Philippines, South Korea, etc. One of the legacies of two of the world's largest empires has been that people all over the world have one common language - something that no level of economic dominance can easily sideline. Mandarin and Hindi have comparatively little reach or enough prestige outside of their respective countries to make abandoning English as the global language possible. Consider the very history of English itself: it was centuries after the Norman invasion before the language of prestige (then French) was abandoned by the upper classes, and even then Latin and French were essential to a proper education.
As for the idea of "laziness" brought up in this thread, well that's a little ridiculous. Of course people speak lazily. We all do (for example, who doesn't use contractions in everyday speech?). It's all about efficiently getting your point across, not about obeying some unnecessary and arbitrary rules. If we were to stick strictly in conversation to what is considered proper, we'd end up sounding either robotic or somehow foreign to the language.
Jonny5
Senior Member
I think the shifting of languages will begin to slow down as technology provides faster, cheaper and far more accurate translation services. Google will translate any webpage for free. I know it's not perfect now, but the speed of it's improvement is remarkable. I remember 10 years ago, using some translation site on the internet to change French to English and it was barely readable, just literally changing words only. Today you can get instant translations that make necessary changes in sentence structure. I can see these being nearly flawless 20 years from now. Phones could have built in translators shortly after that.
Lenser
Senior Member
Sure, there are other excellent reasons why English rose to dominance; trade/business being only one of them. My main point earlier was that the United States is not the reason English is so global in the current era.
But as for the future, much depends on future attempts at dominance/empire building and colonization. As you pointed out, it takes generations to edge out one language and establish the primacy of another. Sometimes it has to do with spreading perceived prestige; sometimes it begins more forcefully, under power of occupation. Lots of ways a language can spread - not all of them pretty to observe.
old boy
Senior Member
Is there another important language as flexible as English ? The English language is so accommodating and plastic, counter to the somewhat classic forms of other notables... well beyond it's Germanic/French roots.
kkgg7
Banned
Flexibility is not necessarily a good thing. For a second language learner, flexibility doesn't mean it is easier to learn. It means it has more irregularity and therefore the rules don't apply to more actual cases, which makes it hard to learn.
German and Russian, for example, have very complicated grammatical rules and are therefore a lot harder to learn in the beginning compared with English, however, when you mastered those rules, they become easier. English, on the other hand, has endless idiosyncrasies which seems almost impossible to even master most of them.
One other issue about English is its huge vocabulary. English has 4 times commonly used words of what French does, which also poses a challenge to second language learners, as no matter how good you think you have got, there always seems to be a new and unfamiliar way to say the same thing.
My experiences tell me that it is a lot easier to learn English on a half-assed basis, which is why everyone in the world seems to speak some form of English. However, in order to be really proficient/near natively level, it actually requires more effort than other European languages such as French and German.
In conclusion, I think the more "flexible" a language is, the harder it is to learn. When grammar is rather strict, it is actually easier since that's all you need to know.
Dan416
Senior Member
I think the point about English's flexibility is an important one, and does help to explain English's dominance. I think it's the reason English is language of Science.
kkgg7
Banned
English's dominance in science was because of the US dominance in pratically everything. Little to do with the language itself. It is like the USD is the world's reserve currency because the US is powerful, not because the greenbacks are exquisitely made. Take a look at Nobel Prize winner: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_nob_pri_lau-people-nobel-prize-laureates
US: 270
UK: 100
Germany 77
France 49
...
Since when being flexible is a good thing for scientific language? Chinese, which doesn't even have a grammar in the real sense, is probably 10 times more flexible than English and it didn't become the language of science.