Wouldn't Spanish be a BETTER choice?

Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 14:51 GMT
One thing is that not all overseas Chinese primarily speak Mandarin, you must remember, as many of them speak primarily Cantonese or Hokkien; hence, one cannot equate overseas Chinese populations with Mandarin-speakers, as China is in no fashion solidly Mandarin-speaking in an everyday fashion today, even though the use of Mandarin is increasing in China as a whole, and earlier in the twentieth century, much of the population of China really did not speak much to any Mandarin at all, as at that time, Mandarin was primarily just the language of northern and western China; it has only effectively spread to southern China with things like having education be all in it and like.

Okay, I forgot about Quebec, Louisiana, and Algeria. However, though, today Louisiana is insignificant in this regard, and Algeria has been a non-factor in this regard since the end of the Algerian War, due to its French colonist population fleeing back to France. The rest of that area is basically non-population colonial areas, with little French settlement, so hence French really is just a language of the educated and the social elites in such areas, and not a language of the general population in any form or fashion, so hence they don't really effectively count in this regard. So hence that makes just Quebec alone, which, yes, I should have included alongside France, Belgium, and Switzerland, but forgot to in a bit of an oversight.
Vytenis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 15:59 GMT
Carlos, Esperanto would be the best. It has no native speakers, so there would be no "privileged nations". Its grammar is 100 per cent logical in that there are no silly exceptions and pronunciation equals spelling 100 per cent too. Word formation is also very logical and consistent. It should take much less time to master Esperanto than English. As for pronunciation, true it may be more difficult for the Asian people than for European sto master it, but still it beats both English and Spanish in many respects.

However, as someone said, it's the ones that are on top who impose their language on others. But don't despair, Carlos. Spanish is becoming more and more important in the US, so we can hope that it will become world's second lingua franca soon. Sort of like English was second to French as a lingua franca 150 years ago. And who knows, maybe our great-grandchildren will be cramming in the Chinese characters :)))
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 16:13 GMT
The main thing about Spanish becoming more important in the US is that it is primarily a language of immigrants themselves here, with their children and grandchildren usually becoming primarily English speaking, except for maybe in areas of the US that are in relatively close proximity to natively Spanish-speaking areas. Therefore, while there may be many Spanish speakers here in the US at the present, that in no fashion necessarily means that it will at all displace English, no matter what the volume of Spanish-speaking immigrants is. Consequently, there is little likelihood of English being displaced by Spanish; there have been similar "scares" about this kind of thing in the past, with things like German in the Midwest and like, and typically such European immigrants actually kept their own languages longer, all things considered, than Spanish-speaking immigrant groups today do, and settled areas in such a fashion where they often became the majority group in those areas, and yet today their descendants are practically completely English speaking (and monolingual, for that matter), elderly individuals aside (even though I myself am rather bitter about the loss of any native bilingualness as a whole in the area in which I live, but that's another story).
Lazar   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 16:18 GMT
I think an ideal international language should have NO native speakers. If you picked English (or Spanish) then there would be 400 (or 350) million people placed at huge a advantage to everyone else in the world.

My personal preference is Latin. It's phoneme inventory is very basic, consisting of:
Vowels: /a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/
Consonants: /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /g/ /f/ /s/ /r/ /l/ /m/ /n/ /h/ /w/ /j/

And it wouldn't be a big problem if you couldn't make vowel length distinctions, or if you couldn't pronounce /h/, or if you pronounced /w/ as /v/. These wouldn't interfere with your ability to make yourself understood, and there would be no native speakers to correct you. I admit that Latin has a LOT of inflection, though.

You could choose Esperanto instead, but Esperanto is just so aesthetically displeasing, so horribly constructed...ugh. Plus, Esperanto has a lot of crazy consonants that would make it harder to pronounce than Latin. Plus, for feminists, Esperanto is FAR more sexist than Latin.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 16:26 GMT
I myself would agree that Esperanto could have been made better as a whole, most definitely. In addition, it does have accusative case markings which are unnecessary as a whole, at least in my opinion. And yes, I agree with you about the part that it is rather sexist, one way or another.

As for Latin, well, my problems with it are that it really are way too reliant on inflections, and in particular case inflections, and also its inflections are not rather regular like those in, say, Finnish, but rather are in separate declensions and like, which have to be remembered and whatnot. The fact that it also has genders for words doesn't help, either, as that has to be remembed as well. Were Latin analytic and genderless, it would be far nicer as a whole.

I haven't looked enough at Interlingua to really say much about it, but it may be suitable for our purposes. And then there's Lojban, the only think of which I can say about it is that it is really, really wacky...
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 16:28 GMT
That's supposed to be "the only thing of which I can say about it"...
Vytenis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 17:17 GMT
>>>The main thing about Spanish becoming more important in the US is that it is primarily a language of immigrants themselves here, with their children and grandchildren usually becoming primarily English speaking, except for maybe in areas of the US that are in relatively close proximity to natively Spanish-speaking areas.

Travis, I agree with your point about assimilation in general, but then as you mentioned there are those who live in close proximity to Mexican boder. So they will not be assimilated so so or easily, will they? The Germans in Midwest did not have Prussia 50 miles away... Is there a danger that these areas with Hispanics majority can become so hispan-ized in the future that they will become totally alien to the rest of the US? Will it become like in Switzerland or Belgium: Spanish-speaking and English-speaking parts?
Vytenis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 17:20 GMT
>>they will not be assimilated so so or easily, will they?

sorry, it had to be:

"they will not be assimilated so quickly or so easily, will they?"
James   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 17:28 GMT
Esperanto would appear to be a logical fit because it doesn't belong to any particular nation, but that is the exact reason why it will not work. Esperanto is a fairly easy language to learn, Interlingua is as well, but its popularity is second to that of Esperanto. I have to agree about Spanish in the U.S. Most of the time when you see a Hispanic who only speaks Spanish it is an older person who is too lazy to make an effort to learn English. Most of the younger generations have Spanish being spoken in their households, but they hardly ever use it outside of their home because their friends, TV shows, movies, etc are all in English. Most of the younger generations understand Spanish but choose not to speak it. Spaish will be largely spoken in the West and the South of the United States, but it will mainly be immigrants who speak it. I doubt it will make any kind of social climb that forces the rest of America to learn it.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 17:32 GMT
Well, Vytenis, remember that much of that area has been *always* Spanish-speaking, to some degree or another; its Spanish-speaking-ness is not anything new, one way or another, and goes all the way back to when that area was part of Mexico and not part of the US. Also, one must remember that that's a rather limited portion of the US as a whole, both by area and even moreso by population.
ke   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 17:52 GMT
It's true not all overseas Chinese speak Mandarin but since the new generations tend to learn/speak Mandarin over their own mother tongues including Cantonese which result these non Mandarin dialects are dying out these days. Therefore by all means, you can count the population of worldwide Chinese as Mandarin speakers one day. And I don't see why Mandarin has to do with this topic. Really few whites care to learn Mandarin anyways.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 17:59 GMT
Yes, I myself agree that many of the Chinese languages will be likely displaced to some degree or another by Mandarin in the near future, at least within mainland China. However, I'm still not sure how prevalent this is in Chinese individuals living outside of China, for example, in Southeast Asia (for example, Singapore) or Taiwan, which may vary well differ from the pattern in mainland China itself. (No, I'm not going to get into a debate over Taiwan right here.) I myself though am not informed enough on the subject of language change patterns in overseas Chinese populations outside of the US to really definitively say anything about this though.
Easterner   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:22 GMT
Brennus: >>Russian, however, is a close competitor with English in the sciences and social sciences.<<

It certainly used to be pervasive, definitely so in Eastern Europe before 1990, but I don't think it is any longer. But perhaps it's my fault, I may be underinformed. At the moment, English seems to be all-pervasive in all fields, despite the fact that the Soviet Union was a close rival in the field of (natural) sciences with the US, and the bulk of scientific literature in Russian is huge.

As for Spanish being a better choice... don't think so. It is somehow inseparable from Hispanic cultures, while English is widely used in everyday communication even in multilingual countries without a significant number of native English speakers (some former British colonies, witness India or Nigeria, for example). This ease of absorption may have at least something to do with the more "rudimentary" grammar of English (an almost complete lack of verbal and noun inflections, for example). And at least for me, English has that "universal" air which Spanish hasn't, due to the fact that it is spoken on all five continents. From this point of view, English has a strong advantage over Spanish, even if the latter has more appeal from a strictly linguistic point of view.
greg   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:32 GMT
Travis,

When you speak about French, I've got the impression you're coming from Mars... Maybe you should plan a trip to Algiers (or to France since many Algerians are actually 'bicoastal' - like Morrocans, Tunisians etc).

Anyway, and to go back to why Mandarin or Cantonese could be favourably considered by non-Chinese all over the world, there's more here http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbcpoll3.html (what the world thinks about China) and here http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,12685784-2,00.html (what Australians think about China).

Those show that what you said about China's political 'isolation' is not accurate : I think your perception might be too US-centered since China is actually viewed positively by most countries (while the US is not).

In addition to that, Chinese as 1st o 2nd foreign language is growing rapidly. In France for instance, people learning Chinese - a tiny minority until now - has increased by 150 % in 20 years (the rate being 30 % in the last 2 years).

A last remark : "French colonist population fleeing back to France". The 'back' is superfluous : the greater part of the Pieds-Noirs never put their feet on European soil before 1962. They just fleed to France.
Travis   Saturday, April 02, 2005, 19:36 GMT
Well, part of the "universalness" of English may be linked to how British colonialism basically spread its use through a wide area which included a large number of different cultures, for example, the English-speaking European cultures of that which became the US, English-speaking Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, outside of the native cultures which already existed in those areas (and also culture of the Afrikaners, in the case of South Africa), but it also spread its use by the upper class in general, whether European in descent or not, in areas like India and various parts of Africa. It was also further spread by American imperialism to the Phillippines, where it displaced the role of Spanish there. In addition, it gained the role in many places of a local lingua franca separate from a number of different local languages, like in India and Nigeria as Easterner said. Hence English consequently became detached from being associated with any single country or culture, unlike Spanish, which is primarily associated with Spain itself, and the rather closely grouped cultures of Spanish-speaking Latin America; while Spain had ruled the Phillippines, Spanish there ended up being primarily replaced by English, and it had never been really firmly established on a popular level anyways there.