Latin as the universal European language

[warpus]

Might as well make The Final Countdown sang in Hungarian as the European anthem.

 

[NovaKart]

Latin is just too difficult.

It's also funny how some Europeans think English should be spoken like the old fuddy duddies in Masterpiece Theatre.

 

[~Corsair#01~]

Eventually improvements in machine translation technology will make the entire question irrelevant.

People will have special real-time translating headphones and reading glasses or monocles.

Someone could be speaking Mongolian and another could speak Klingon and they'd have no problem understanding each other. Individual language use will be solely a matter of personal choice. Well, for the developed world anyway.

In the meantime, we can keep on using the existing official languages for official EU business and English for everything that actually matters.

 

[Winner]

As I'm sure you realise, most in the UK and Ireland learn local "dialects" and subsequently learn to use a higher register of English based ultimately on regionally and socially-specific dialects of the region to the north-west of London.

No. Today, British English is declining fast. You're losing regional dialects, but what used to be classified as "working class" speech is becoming the standard now. Those speaking in an R.P. accent are ridiculed as snobs. What passes for standard British English these days is pitiful (Estuary English and similar cockney-derived vomit). It's worse even than American English.

Just the other day I was using a photocopier, I noticed when I turned it on its lcd display read "the machine warms up". Inability to distinguish present simple and present continuous is a classic give-away for a foreigner using English, but is accepted usage among foreigners themselves and doubtless its usage will prevail over time as the actual semantic difference involved is negligible.

These are the easiest tenses to learn, I struggle with present perfect and past perfect which are not present in my native language.

In any case, it will happen the other way round. It's not the foreigners who are creating some new form of English, it's the native English speakers themselves who shape the language to their needs and whims.

The difference is, there is a lot more non-native speakers today, in Europe and elsewhere around the world, who've learned the language in its standardized, "high" form. The time will come when they will stop caring about which hell the native speakers are taking their language to. Even today, many non-native speakers find it much easier to speak English with other non-native speakers, because they pronounce properly and avoid obscure and highly specific phrases and idioms. It so happens that sometimes the native speakers are understood less than non-native speakers.

I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now there was something of a World Standard English used as the language of global communication, while British, American, Australian and the other Englishes have developed into "funny" dialects not easily understandable by the WSE speakers.

 

[NovaKart]

This exists in every language, why should English speakers work to speak a supposedly pure form of English. I can understand doing it in foreign countries or when working with non-native speakers to try and be understood. I do this all the time, there's a big difference in how I speak with native and non-native speakers. In books, TV shows and movies it would just make the English seem artificial.

 

[Pangur Bán]

No. Today, British English is declining fast. You're losing regional dialects, but what used to be classified as "working class" speech is becoming the standard now. Those speaking in an R.P. accent are ridiculed as snobs. What passes for standard British English these days is pitiful (Estuary English and similar cockney-derived vomit). It's worse even than American English.

No, that's actually complelely wrong. The trend is the growth of those regional accents over other regional accents ... i.e. Liverpool accents spreading into Cheshire and Lancashire, Black London-cockney accents spreading in the south-east, Newcastle accents spreading through Northumberland and into Cumberland.

These are the easiest tenses to learn, I struggle with present perfect and past perfect which are not present in my native language.

One of the mistakes learners of English often retain quite late, esp. if they come from Western Europe, is the failure to know when to say "I am warming" and "I warm".
Specific mistakes will be determined by where you come from. I can always tell when a student I'm marking is Iberian or Italian from minor defects in usage of subject pronouns, which tend to get omitted in their languages (actually they're on the verbs) but are used in, say, French.

In any case, it will happen the other way round. It's not the foreigners who are creating some new form of English, it's the native English speakers themselves who shape the language to their needs and whims.

I wouldn't be surprised if 100 years from now there was something of a World Standard English used as the language of global communication, while British, American, Australian and the other Englishes have developed into "funny" dialects not easily understandable by the WSE speakers.

Winner, that's what I was saying.

Even today, many non-native speakers find it much easier to speak English with other non-native speakers, because they pronounce properly and avoid obscure and highly specific phrases and idioms. It so happens that sometimes the native speakers are understood less than non-native speakers.

I have the same experience using other languages. This is because, as you say, natives speak faster and have much better manipulation of idiom and pragmatics, not just or even principally because the learned form is "proper". That's not how it works. Different non-native speakers have different levels of knowledge and insistence on what is "proper", and introduce different errors they are not aware of. This is how Koine, the simplified Greek of the New Testament, arose out of a variety of classical dialects of Anatolia and the Balkans.

 

[Aleenik]

I like the idea of a global language, not simply a universal language for each continent. Imo it would be good if there was a new, logical language made that has little in common with any current language. It would be a neutral language and hopefully way easier to learn than any current language. Esperanto doesn't fill this role because it is derived mostly from European languages. Latin definitely doesn't fill the role either. Of course though, English will be the dominate global language for the foreseeable future, but who knows what'll happen eventually. Maybe one day tentacle porn will take over the world and thus make Japanese the lingua franca.

 

[Algeroth]

Plenty of awesome content had already been made in the time of glorious past. It's too superior to modern pop-trash (mainly in English) to even bother to compare.


Link to video.

Kinda ironic that what you linked is mediaeval pop-trash.

 

[Pangur Bán]

Kinda ironic that what you linked is mediaeval pop-trash.

Best medieval literature was probably in the vernacular, and almost all of it is lost. Something in English, the "Brunanburh Poem":

Link to video.

 

[Akkon888]

It's pointless to subjugate every European culture to some standard; if we want a universal language, it's better to invent brain transmitters that can relay information between people without requiring a vocal component, i.e. telepathy.

The only issue is that it isn't advanced enough right now; there are sensors which can enable mind-reading, but they are bulky and are very basic. More like communicating "I'm hungry" instead of "I heard all of the Europeans are speaking French all of a sudden, what's that all about?"

Who am I kidding. At least you don't have to learn Chinese.

 

[Traitorfish]

An Englishman on here, where everything is written down, can understand a Scotsman or an American, but not a Frenchman.

An noo the winter winds complain
Cauld lies the glaur in ilka lane
On draigled hizzie, tautit wean
An drucken lads,
In the mirk nicht, the winter rain
Dribbles an blads.

 

[Miles Teg]

An noo the winter winds complain
Cauld lies the glaur in ilka lane
On draigled hizzie, tautit wean
An drucken lads,
In the mirk nicht, the winter rain
Dribbles an blads.

That's literally not even English.

 

[warpus]

It's pointless to subjugate every European culture to some standard; if we want a universal language, it's better to invent brain transmitters that can relay information between people without requiring a vocal component, i.e. telepathy.

The thoughts would still have to be transmitted in a language.

 

[Veles]

Čeština funguje docela dobře s naprostým minimem diakritických znamének

Didn't even have to use google translator to understand it, by the way Czech alphabet does appear much "lighter" than Polish, but still, imo, diactrical signs should be avoided. The differences between the sounds of "s" and "š" or "с" and "Č" is to much to be represented by a mere ~ at the top, there should be a separate character.
In Cyrillic your sentence would be:

Čeština funguje docela dobře s naprostým minimem diakritických znamének.
Чештина фунгуе доцела добже с напростым минимем диактритичкых знаменек.

Christianity is poison. We should have created our own religion based on the traditional beliefs, then raid the West for knowledge

*the war song starts playin'*



Link to video.

 

[Jouzou]

Now, I think it would be very cool, but too impractical. I prefer English, but that is of course a heavily biased opinion because it happens to be the only foreign language I'm fluent in. There have been many attempts to create a lingua franca for Europe (Esperanto and Volapük just mention a couple) but none of them have had notable success. I can't imagine why Latin would be any different.

 

[Quackers]

That's literally not even English.

Hmm the article even concedes that there isn't a clear scholarly distinction between a dialect and a language but it looks like they have gone with language.
I was given a poem in the same "language" as Traitorfish's poem was for my ENGLISH GCSE a few years back. It's literally just English with a very, very strong regional accent then written phonetically. You could probably do the same for Liverpool, the West country, Newcastle and Northen Ireland.

 

[Traitorfish]

Hmm the article even concedes that there isn't a clear scholarly distinction between a dialect and a language but it looks like they have gone with language.
I was given a poem in the same "language" as Traitorfish's poem was for my ENGLISH GCSE a few years back. It's literally just English with a very, very strong regional accent then written phonetically. You could probably do the same for Liverpool, the West country, Newcastle and Northen Ireland.

It has a distinct orthography, phonology, vocabulary, grammar and syntax. If that's a mere accent, then you could in essence make the same claim about Dutch or Swedish.

Besides, you could just as easily invert the relationship, casting Standard British English as a regional dialect of Scots. There's no genealogical basis on which to lend SBE any primacy- it's not the ancestral form of regional dialects, not the starting point from which they have diverged, it's just come out on top because it was the dialect of the economic-political hub of the country. It is not intrinsically special, it's just convenient to treat it as such.

 

[Pangur Bán]

@Traitorfish, not sure you could include orthography there. That is something it definitely lacks. This is the real problem for Lowland Scots varieties: there are lots of them and their de facto written standard is standard English.

 

[Traitorfish]

@Traitorfish, not sure you could include orthography there. That is something it definitely lacks. This is the real problem for Lowland Scots varieties: there are lots of them and their de facto written standard is standard English.

I suppose that might be pushing it, yeah. I was thinking of the proposals I've seen floating around to construct a standardised Scots with an orthography derived from Middle Scots, but you're right that it's over-stating it to make the claim until somebody actually does it.

Of course, Quackers' logic would also tell us that Middle Scots was a dialect of English, so at least it works on some level...

 

[Terxpahseyton]

@Winner
The elements of a national identity are a little like the financial industry. They reflect reality by creating it.
If an artificial Slovakian language with artificial differences helps the Slovaks to have the relationship to their nation they want, let them have it. I get its current ridiculous appearance, but the artificial of today is the natural of tomorrow.

Neither is a dialect of the other. Both are descended from a language originally spoken in Moravia/Western Slovakia. How you call it is irrelevant.

So you would be fine with Czech being officially renamed in Slovakian?