future of written english

globish rip

sort of curious as to whether the cultural position of english right now is unprecedented (n.b. no one mention latin)

relatedly that nerriere person seems like he sucks a lot

from that description I think most americans speak globish and not very many of us speak english

In the sense that nobody has ever said 'This erstwhile buddy of yours is a weird duck who will probably put the kibosh on all our good deeds.', that is certainly true.

^^^ posts of missing louis jagger

I greatly doubt that 'globish' has much presence outside of well-educated elites. I expect that people still live, work and love in the dominant language of the place where they were born. The apparent 'ascendancy' of english probably doesn't connect much with non-native speakers at an emotional level.

I guess there's an interesting point in that beyond a certain level of competence, fluency in a language involves taking on board a lot of cultural knowledge. An American might not get the finer points of an Englishman's allusions to blood sausage and the poll tax, despite them having a lot in common relative to the rest of the world. For someone from a completely different culture, the amount to learn from scratch will be much greater.

that was an xp, I guess

ENGLISH PEOPLE HAVE NEVER SAID 'BLOOD SAUSAGE'. IT'S AN AMERICANISM. GRAAAARGH.

(sorry for taking ilx in-jokes too seriously)

eee ecky thump

Anecdotal evidence from the sub-editorial floor: I feel like I've been fixing a lot more run-on sentences in submitted copy over the last year or so. More people are just comma splicing, I don't know why that is, it could just be a fluke, maybe it has something to do with breathless internet style (etc etc you get the idea).

One thing that's particularly interesting to me is the role corporations will play in shaping how English is learned and used in other countries. The one i work for has just taken over two of the biggest private language chains in China and works extensively with the sistema schools in Brazil. The question of what kind of English the students will be learning has a lot to do with local conditions and exptectations but publishers and education companies will also have a huge say in the future.

typos have become commonplace even in respectable publications like the NYT and ILX

please switch over to twitterspeak the day after I retire/die

"chinese"

i read or heard this thing once when i was growing up about how <b>"chinese"</b>

Eh?

schoose

lol @ whiney

what are you getting mad about, doggie

i read or heard this thing once when i was growing up about how <b>"chinese"</b>

dude i put it in quotes b/c aside from the written form, there are a bunch of completely diff. languages that get subsumed under "chinese"

Anecdotal evidence from the sub-editorial floor: I feel like I've been fixing a lot more run-on sentences in submitted copy over the last year or so.

interesting. not sure if it's my imagination, or if i've just been paying more attention to this kinda stuff, but it seems like it's much more acceptable these days to use sentences that in the past would have been rejected as "incomplete"

The incomplete 'mini-sentence' wormed its way into broad use via advertising, where we have long been treated to such ad copy as:

Big. Bold. Refreshing.

"Chinese"

http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/12/chinese

The uncertainty surrounding the status of Beijing Mandarin at the time is highlighted by a meeting of linguists in 1913 to decide upon the new official language, at which the standard of choice was not the speech of the capital, but an artificial language incorporating the maximum number of distinctions found in the major dialects (including voiced stops, the entering tone, and the apical/laminal distinction before the palatal glide), envisaged as a compromise between north and south. But it soon became clear that no one, not even the linguists themselves, were capable of speaking this linguistic Frankenstein, and the movement failed miserably.