robbkvasnak:The weirdest thing about English is that there are people who think that if you don't speak English you are uneducated. You may speak five languages fluently but if English isn't one of them, then you are shamed by these people into thinking that you are some how handicapped. This is part of the hegemony of the English speakers and they have convinced many others to believe this - especially those in their past colonies but also many Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians. I find this out and out WEIRD!

I recall a story (unfortunately, lost the source) on this topic:

A well-known and brilliant professor from the Continent once came to visit colleagues and acquaintances in London in the 1950s, using French (or was it Esperanto? I forget) as the common language. Once the group went out to dinner. When the waiter came to take everyone's orders, the professor addressed him in broken, badly accented English, struggling to make himself understood.

One of his colleagues recalls the sudden shift in perspective towards the professor among the others at the table: here was one of the most renowned men of his age, and suddenly he was unable to communicate at the level of a seven-year-old. In a moment it appeared to them as if he had lost all his intellect, merely because he couldn't speak English!

It is a bad anglo-centric bias, I agree.

robbkvasnak:The weirdest thing about English is that there are people who think that if you don't speak English you are uneducated. You may speak five languages fluently but if English isn't one of them, then you are shamed by these people into thinking that you are some how handicapped. This is part of the hegemony of the English speakers and they have convinced many others to believe this - especially those in their past colonies but also many Germans, Dutch and Scandinavians. I find this out and out WEIRD!

Yep. I read an article that said that people who speak English in the developing world are likely to have 3 times the salary of non-English speakers.

I might be that rich people can afford to teach their kids English. Or, it could be that their is greater access to jobs for English speakers because they are assumed to be higher class. Or, both is true.

I am very grateful that I was born an English speaker.

In spite of the benefits of speaking English, there is no motivation in these cultures to actually put the time into learning it. These cultures have serious issues with work ethic. They also have superstitions that hold them back. For example, you can learn English easily by just having English friends. As if learning English is magic.

They hate learning from audio programs, computer programs, reading, writing, going to classes, opening a dictionary, or anything that requires work. The conclusion: They really want to speak English but they don't want to learn English.

ChuckWalter:The only problem with reforming English spelling is that all old texts would be fifty times harder to read. I can currently read a King James Bible, the U.S. Constitution, or The Red Badge of Courage and still understand it, but if I've only ever learned phonetic spelling then all of that raw literature would be lost to me. We could still translate them, but that is a lot of work and many books would never be reprinted. I would have to take an “Old English” class in school in order to enjoy historical literature.

If it is truly fifty times easier to use phonetic spelling then there would be no logical reason NOT to reform. I think you underestimate how much education/literacy is required to read (and understand) older texts. For nonreligious students Shakespeare might be their first exposure to old English style and conjugations. I know it was no cakewalk for me to understand when we read him in school.

Many schools are starting to give kids tablets, and cheap tablets are already becoming more than powerful enough to replace a PC for productive use. Any beginning programmer could write a simple program to respell text if given a file of translations. If anything an updated spelling system would help to usher in the golden age of digital books and textbooks. I for one would not miss physical copies, especially as we're on the verge of cheap and light-weight e-ink displays. There may be concerns about losing data to technology, but a sealed and shielded metal box with maybe 100 terabyte hard-drives and a few laptops could back up pretty much anything important that has ever been printed and more. The printed library of congress is estimated to have like 10-20 terabytes worth of data if I recall correctly.

kaŝperanto:The printed library of congress is estimated to have like 10-20 terabytes worth of data if I recall correctly.

"MAST is currently home to an estimated 200 terabytes of data, which according to STScI is nearly the same amount of information contained in the U.S. Library of Congress."
source

Alkanadi:

kaŝperanto:The printed library of congress is estimated to have like 10-20 terabytes worth of data if I recall correctly.

"MAST is currently home to an estimated 200 terabytes of data, which according to STScI is nearly the same amount of information contained in the U.S. Library of Congress."
source

The LOC also has a ton of digital content, but the actual print media is much smaller. The figure in general is very vague and you get widely varying numbers from different sources. A snippet from Wikipedia:

"A 2000 study by information scientists Peter Lyman and Hal Varian suggested that the amount of uncompressed textual data represented by the 26 million books then in the collection was 10 terabytes.[24]

The Library makes millions of digital objects, comprising tens of petabytes, available at its American Memory site."

High quality audio and images/video probably make up the majority of the digital data. I only included the "print" figure because we're talking about concerns over losing digital data to EMPs/etc. that books can survive.

If English was written phonetically, I'd be writing completely differently to the Americans on here or even the English!

That said, English probably is the most useful language out there, even if the form most commonly used isna really ma ain ken.

(Leaving Esperanto aside, Spanish is probably one of the more practical global languages - in terms of using the Roman alphabet, phonetic(ish) spelling etc etc.)

A few of my gripes against English as a global language:
* The "th" sound. Horrible - especially in the likes of "thr".
* Illogical spelling and grammar.
* It seems hard for learners to pick up the colour and idioms of English. (Second language English is often very bland. Global English is horrible.)

Nephihaha:That said, English probably is the most useful language out there, even if the form most commonly used isna really ma ain ken.

It is said that English is "the new international language". This is not quite accurate, however. The language more widely encountered in the world is Obviously Non-Native English. This language bears a marked resemblance to English, but is in almost all respects more inexpressive, more awkward, more clinical, and often intelligible only with effort.

In other words, much fewer people speak passable, let alone fluent English than most anglophones, especially Americans, think. They rarely will venture outside an English-speaking country, and if they do, they will be holed up in a hotel with trained multilingual staff. The illusion that "English is spoken everywhere!", however, is quote strong from that vantage point.

Tempodivalse:

Nephihaha:That said, English probably is the most useful language out there, even if the form most commonly used isna really ma ain ken.

It is said that English is "the new international language". This is not quite accurate, however. The language more widely encountered in the world is Obviously Non-Native English. This language bears a marked resemblance to English, but is in almost all respects more inexpressive, more awkward, more clinical, and often intelligible only with effort.

In other words, much fewer people speak passable, let alone fluent English than most anglophones, especially Americans, think. They rarely will venture outside an English-speaking country, and if they do, they will be holed up in a hotel with trained multilingual staff. The illusion that "English is spoken everywhere!", however, is quote strong from that vantage point.

Unless you've been to engineering school (or took a similar technical major in college). We see firsthand many highly intelligent PhDs who are capable of conversing in English, but only really about technical matters.

I've been toying with the idea (theoretically, I'm hardly going to start a movement) of a regularised international English. Something that wouldn't be too hard for native English speakers to pick up or understand, but not as hard as natural English for ESL students to learn. Something along the lines of Esperanto, but following English conventions.

English itself is starting to break apart. 'Indian English' used to frustrate me, I considered it a bad form of English until I realised it's actually an English dialect, like parts of America and the UK. You could come into an Australian conversation and if the native speaker was trying hard enough you wouldn't have a clue what they were saying. (Of course, that tends to be localisms and accents rather than grammar.)

BeardedBloke:I've been toying with the idea (theoretically, I'm hardly going to start a movement) of a regularised international English. Something that wouldn't be too hard for native English speakers to pick up or understand, but not as hard as natural English for ESL students to learn. Something along the lines of Esperanto, but following English conventions.

Try Globish. It uses 1,500 words from English. It is grammatically correct. He trains teachers and students.