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in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

@Rain 🚱 The argument that it's not somebody's language because nobody's country is named after it is silly. The Irish and the Maltese overwhelmingly speak English as their first language, the other hundreds of millions generally don't.
in reply to clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡­πŸ‡°πŸ’™πŸ’›

OTOH, both Ireland and Malta have other languages as their official language inside the EU (probably also because English was already one of the official working languages)

(btw, afaik in Ireland most people do speak English as their first language, but in Malta that's Maltese, English is just extremely widespread at high proficiency and has official status after Maltese)
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla''

@Elena ``of Valhalla'' @Rain 🚱 Ireland really likes its Irish language as a distinguishing feature, and of course it takes the chance to use EU resources to promote it when it can get English without burning its get-one-language-for-free quota.

TIL about Malta's situation, thank you, I was misinformed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Malta

I was always under the impression that Maltese was in a situation similar to Romansh or Irish, but actually only 10% of the Maltese speak English as a first language.

They do use English as the exclusive language of instruction already in secondary school, which gives them an edge in English over everyone who don't.
Questa voce Γ¨ stata modificata (3 anni fa)
in reply to clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡­πŸ‡°πŸ’™πŸ’›

The idea that English is the "natural" common language is colonialistica, imperialistic

The common language should be foreign to everyone

English is natural only to some people
in reply to Abbie Normal

Well, good luck popularizing a conlang or a dead language and convincing the many people who already struggled through learning one lingua franca to throw that away for a new one. :blobshrug:
IMHO if you wanna make a decolonialized language course, it makes more sense to just remove all the god save the queen tea and biscuits stuff and use example texts from other cultures. And adjust the grammar accordingly. So, no Queen's English.
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

First thing I tell people when helping them with English stuff is to ignore what native speakers think and that all languages are kinda terrible. At the end of the day, it's just a very useful tool.
If it wasn't for learning English I would never have even read the word "decolonization".
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

I didn't write it's not useful

I wrote something else

it's not a "lingua franca"

becaus eit imposes the learning process on some people an dnot on others

do we want to do it anyway ?

Good

But let's callit what it is
in reply to Abbie Normal

I mean, I'm a quite good English practitioner

and yet, I struggle

after a whole life using it

how is this "franca" ?

It's not
in reply to Abbie Normal

Now I'll use an Italian word I can't translate in English

all natural languages are "glottofaghe"

Meaning, they tend to supplant your own native language

it's proven by some studies caried out in Paderborn

Not so Esperanto

Also Esperanto actually _helps_ you in learning other languages (if you're eruropean)

This has been studied in Paderborn too
in reply to Abbie Normal

So, no, English is not a lingua franca

it's a colonial operation
in reply to Abbie Normal

> Also Esperanto actually _helps_ you in learning other languages (if you're eruropean)

Heard the same argument from my Latin teacher, about Latin.
The problem with Esperanto is that there isn't as much "infrastructure" built for it.

IMHO what we should do:
- agree that English is the common point
- be more aggressive about language preservation

So eg. instead of having a choice of English, Latin, Italian, and German in my high school, students would learn English and one endangered language. (two languages was mandatory for us. plus two years of Latin.)
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

Also idk about others but English was a good starting point for me in Italian class. Most of the time my classmates were surprised because I figured out the meaning of a word before the teacher told us, it was because I knew it from English.
And an important advantage for English is that most STEM communication happens in English, and there are decades of research out there written in it. I am yet to see a paper in Esperanto.
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

So, I think we can have our cake and eat it too. Have one common language and not be colonialists about it. The important thing is what the language is used for, not what the language is.
Eg. it would be really cool if I could go to a random village and the signs would be in English and the local language and I could Rosetta stone my way into picking up words in the local language.
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

Oooh, is this the study you meant?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paderborn_method

This is cool. If this holds water then Esperanto might not be a bad addition. Although this still has the end goal of teaching both Esperanto and English, not just the former. I'm not against learning Esperanto, just against not learning English, because of its aforementioned usefulness in understanding the huge volume of existing literature.
But if we started with this and slowly transitioned to Esperanto (or even just a simplified and regularised version of English) that would be cool.
in reply to clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy πŸ‡ΈπŸ‡ͺπŸ‡­πŸ‡°πŸ’™πŸ’›

basically, that's how it has always happened, modulo a bit of inertia in some cases (e.g. Latin has remained a lingua franca in Europe for quite a few centuries after the roman empire had become a Greek speaking thing, while afaik French has been quickly superseded by English).
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

this would've been a slightly more compelling argument if it wasn't written in English. πŸ€”

I find some of the arguments very uncomfortable, while some are compelling, probably because I already know English fairly well. πŸ€”
in reply to maloki 🍍:ghostbat:

If it was written in Hungarian you couldn't read it. I don't see how that would help.
in reply to read-only account (Rain 🚱)

I know. But in English it sounds more like "look at me I am using this language to tell you that you should only use this language"

It's a no win situation :P

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