Le Baron wrote:Cainntear wrote:Would you surprised if I was to say "no, I think it's not rubbish."...? Because, bizarre as it may seem to you that other people have different views on the world from you, we in fact do, and we actually believe the things we say -- we are not some faceless conspiracy of liars who know that LeBaron is correct and say otherwise for nefarious reasons.
I wouldn't say any of that. Just that your analysis is naive and incorrect. Views and opinions are lovely, but the harder facts of how English came to prominence and is maintained are more solid and more interesting.
Am I to read that as what I say is views and opinions, but what you say is fact...? Cos it still sounds like you're saying that your belief that you're right justifies telling me that I'm categorically wrong
Cainntear wrote:Except that French was the established international language. How did English displace French?
What?
Ah, the "I can't believe you would believe something so stupid what" -- that's really pretty rude.
It was one colonial language among a handful. It and Spanish lost out to English.
I'm not talking about colonial languages -- I'm talking about international lingua francas. As colonial languages, French, Spanish and English were not in competition. The colonial powers were in competition, but within each individual colonial empire, one language reigned unchallenged.
The old 'French was the language of diplomacy' is a nice cultural touch for people to utter at dinner parties, but we know the truth about how colonial imperialism actually played out.
See, now you're the one that's ignoring history. You've picked one strand and are treating that as the full story. French's status as the "language of diplomacy" isn't (as you seem to be implying) a euphemism to wipe away the atrocities of the empire, but a reference to the fact that it was used by diplomats from independent, non-Empire, non-Francophone countries for international communication.
To this day, international agreements are still very often referred to as "accords" because for centuries they were written in French.
Cainntear wrote:"No impetus" is different from "no intent". The internet is dominated by English in no small part because of the ignorance of the monoglot American techies that created the protocols it runs on. They wrote it for their own usecase -- 26 Latin letters, no diacritics etc -- and that made using it for other languages tricky. They didn't spec in protocols for automatically handling translated versions, and even now, multilingual websites use hacks and inconsistent techniques, and many people end up unaware that a version of any given site exists in their language.
Yes indeed. Which is yet another case of English being given a priority leg-up.
As I keep saying, I'm talking about the lack of intent and the lack of marketing. I am not saying for a second that it is fair, just and equitable, I am saying simply that it is an emergent phenomenon, where a bunch of interacting forces create structure from random input.
After all the early Internet kicked off just as enthusiastically in France, so what happened? (That's a rhetorical question, not a request). If your original 'view' was correct all the end users would be driving the language uptake, but on the whole they're not.
Why is your view better than my "scare-quotes-view"? You believe that the lack of correction proves your point, I believe it doesn't. And I'm not the only one.
The internet reached critical mass in English. The first adopters in France were interacting with an English-language internet. They integrated themselves into an English-language internet. They produced material online in English. Then as their colleagues and contemporaries joined them, they were interacting with... an English-language internet. Because the critical mass was in English, they continued to make stuff in English.
Cos, you know, it was either write in English only or write everything twice.
This, of course, wasn't just a problem for French speakers, but speakers of every language other than English.
The only thing unique about the situation for French was the existence of Minitel. France could have been a global early adopter of the internet, as it had the quality of communications infrastructure and high level of home computer ownership necessary, but in Minitel they already had a remote data system that was run by the national phone company. As I understand it, France Télécom deliberately held back supporting modems and the internet, and France on the whole was late to adopt the internet. Many companies didn't bother building websites at first and continued to focus on Minitel, and that led to people seeing little point in using the internet, and the whole thing became a self-sustaining system -- lack of users discouraged developing websites; lack of websites discouraged new user; ad infinitum.
And meanwhile, as I said, there was still some growth of internet use in France, but it was in English.
There is a view in the tech field that had France Télécom pushed the internet to their users as a replacement for Minitel, France would have been a major player in the internet, and French would have become the undisputed "second language of the internet".
In fact, there is also the hypothesis that if French had gained any such foothold, the knock-on effect would have been that the internet would have been more readily recognised as multilingual and other languages would have benefited.
It was not the "marketing" of English (to use the word Cavesa started this part of the debate with) that did that -- it was a commercial decision by a telecomms monopoly that had no English agenda to push.
And that is just one of the many factors of this complex, emergent system.