Re: Linguistic Predictions II

Dr. Jamshid Ibrahim wrote: 
Suppose extraterrestrials   landed on our Earth I am sure they will be
greatly surprised to find that people on a small planet like Earth
cannot communicate freely and direct

Earth a small planet? There are planets in our solar system that are bigger, much bigger than Earth, but they are probably unable to support life of any kind. There are reasons to believe that most planets where life can exist, must be about the same size as ours.

And those hypothetical extraterrestrials (in a real easy international language they would simply be called "outside-earthers") would really be astonished if they found people speaking the same language in places that had until recently little or no contact with each other.

English has already become global and no more the property of a certain
community.

Too bad my English teachers did not realize that when I was in school. School life would have been easier if they would not have insisted on me trying to speak English like the people of England did.

Nobody feels at a disadvantage when speaking English.
It's
no more Germanic in quality

Nonsense, I am sure that generally speaking English is more difficult to learn for the French or Spanish than for the Dutch or the Germans. And I suppose that for the Chinese or Japanese it is more difficult than for the French or Spanish.

because it has incorporated vocabulary from
nearly all languages in the world.

Vocabulary is just one factor. Grammar and pronunciation are also rather important. English grammar is not that easy if you take syntax into account (try to list all the rules that govern the position of adverbs in sentences!), and as for pronunciation, English has a rather large set of phonemes and many can appear in combinations that are difficult to pronounce for many non-native speakers.

This makes English indeed global. 
Every nation can find a bit of its linguistic heritage integrated into
English. Moreover, its writing system has no diacritical points as in
some languages which make them difficult to use, pronounce and
communicate in writing.

But it is also true that the English vocabulary has about twice as many phonemes as there are letters in the basic Latin alphabet, and that the ways to represent this rich phonemic inventory in writing are quite irregular.

A language with fewer phonemes and a more regular spelling would in my opinion make a much better global language.

English has become a powerful tool and rich; it 
has become simple and complex at the same time. Gender is nearly
non-existent because the article remains "the" whatever the gender and
the position in a sentence is. There are no difficult case endings
and
sounds as in lots of other langauges which sometimes constitute
insurmountable barriers .

That remains to be seen. Most people on this planet have considerable difficulty in pronouncing words like "width" or "eighth". And what about words like "indistinguishable" with a three consonant cluster "sh-b-l" at the end?

We can express any idea most powerfully and
precisely.

English does not even has a single word for "a consecutive day and night" (Dutch: etmaal) or for "the day before yesterday" (German: vorgestern), or for the "eldest brother of somebody's parent" (Thai: lung), or for "a female who is about to make a big mistake" (Esperanto: eraregontino). Yes, I can easily describe such concepts in English, but so can I in other languages that are lacking single words for them.


Gerard van Wilgen

www.majstro.com - Multilingual translation dictionary
www.erotikejo.com - International sex portal
.

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