Death Thread 2017 - GW is Cool, and Good - The Something Awful Forums

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El Estrago Bonito: Dec 17, 2010; Scout Finch Bitch

Doesn't something like one out of every 8 people alive speak Mandarin? That seems pretty wide spread IMHO

# ? Jan 5, 2017 02:54

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# ? May 10, 2024 09:19

Safety Factor: Oct 31, 2009; Grimey Drawer

El Estrago Bonito posted:

Doesn't something like one out of every 8 people alive speak Mandarin? That seems pretty wide spread IMHO

It is and it isn't. Yeah, you find Mandarin speakers here and there all over the world, but think about just how many people live in China.

Meanwhile, English is a horrible pidgin language that makes no sense and yet will consume all before it.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 02:58

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

I was told (admittedly by a linguist, so I put some more trust in it than random hearsay) that English has worked really well as a pidgin language because English is a really redundant, low-information language. Apparently most other languages are more internally consistent, and so as a consequence getting them wrong makes you really hard to understand, whereas in English everyone understands what "Working hard to put food on your family" meant.

EDIT: And it kind of makes sense to me because I spent several minutes trying to think of the most gibberish things I could say and I had trouble.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 03:43

Gato The Elder: Apr 14, 2006; Pillbug

spectralent posted:

I was told (admittedly by a linguist, so I put some more trust in it than random hearsay) that English has worked really well as a pidgin language because English is a really redundant, low-information language. Apparently most other languages are more internally consistent, and so as a consequence getting them wrong makes you really hard to understand, whereas in English everyone understands what "Working hard to put food on your family" meant.

EDIT: And it kind of makes sense to me because I spent several minutes trying to think of the most gibberish things I could say and I had trouble.

Work to put hard families in your food.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 04:11

Chill la Chill: Jul 2, 2007; Don't lose your gay

Dat time, GW wen made age of Sigmar yeah? We neva like dat. GW dun shishi on our game. No listen to Kirby, haole say any kine wen buy, brah. But the good kine, the opossum, cute yeah, an wow! Da opossum, he my bruddah, he kine to stay good. He say howzit and Kay den.

E: lol I forgot how annoying it was to type pidgin

# ? Jan 5, 2017 04:42

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
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El Estrago Bonito posted:

Doesn't something like one out of every 8 people alive speak Mandarin? That seems pretty wide spread IMHO

How likely are you to need to speak to a Chinese farmer or factory worker? Sure, lots of people speak Mandarin, but they're not people that are going to have any influence on global culture or that you will ever personally interact with. Meanwhile, the vast majority of scientific research is published in English. Students across the globe use English textbooks to study medicine and high level science and mathematics. It's going to be loving hard to displace English as the international language regardless of the status of the United States or England.

The other big lie is that everyone in China speaks Mandarin. They don't. They all speak regional dialects and receive some degree of Mandarin through school. But hilariously a lot of people who speak incomprehensible dialects have been told that "it's basically the same as Mandarin" and so have gone on living their lives assuming they speak Mandarin when they don't, which you can imagine is a total clusterfuck when they leave their villages.

The Chinese government has also made sure that China will produce no movies, television, or books worth consuming. And if a Chinese pop song ends up being good, you don't need to speak the language in any capacity to enjoy it (see: Gangnam Style for proof of concept).

# ? Jan 5, 2017 04:57

Chill la Chill: Jul 2, 2007; Don't lose your gay

Yeah I bet people once thought french or Latin will be the dominant language for scientific inquiry for eternity too. gently caress English, it's terrible.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 08:33

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
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Chill la Chill posted:

Yeah I bet people once thought french or Latin will be the dominant language for scientific inquiry for eternity too. gently caress English, it's terrible.

Far be it from me to predict what will happen in the next two hundred years, but you're basically ignoring all historical context with this post and it's a truly awful comparison to try to make.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 08:39

Hamshot: Feb 1, 2006; Fun Shoe

Chill la Chill posted:

Yeah I bet people once thought french or Latin will be the dominant language for scientific inquiry for eternity too. gently caress English, it's terrible.

Latin I can believe because for a time a majority of scientists were employed by the catholic church, but French?

As for the best reason English makes for a bad scientific language, I present the Dr Fox lecture wherein an actor recited a lecture of nonsense to a group of researchers and received an ovation for it, due to his lexicon using lots of really really big scary words that make you sound smrat.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 08:40

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
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Hamshot posted:

Latin I can believe because for a time a majority of scientists were employed by the catholic church, but French?

As for the best reason English makes for a bad scientific language, I present the Dr Fox lecture wherein an actor recited a lecture of nonsense to a group of researchers and received an ovation for it, due to his lexicon using lots of really really big scary words that make you sound smrat.

This to me is a condemnation of academia and not of English as a scientific language. It doesn't really matter if English is good at being the international language because it already holds that status and the work is being done and published in English.

The issue with Latin and why it fell out of favor was because it was an unnecessary barrier between research and progress. The language was well dead by that point outside of the Church itself and eventually people doing work got sick of having to write poo poo in a language they didn't speak. At one point they even experimented with a truly "scientific" language called the universal character and a few things were even written and published in it before it was abandoned for whatever language the philosopher or scientist spoke. Then you have British Imperialism spreading English to every corner of the planet and the American hegemony cementing English's legacy.

But at this point just the sheer volume of work done in English guarantees that it is an absolute necessity to speak and work in it to be able to participate in the majority of fields since all of the modern foundational work and original research is in English. There's the odd field where you need to speak German or whatever but those are an exception.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 08:52

lenoon: Jan 7, 2010

It's pretty cool to me that English is so widespread - I can be very lazy. It's even cooler that it means a huge number of people on the planet could just about read and understand early modern and Middle English simply because English is so imprecise, widespread and mutable that some pidgins and accents have converged on Middle English in the 20th century. Even old English (much more of a stretch) can be very vaguely understandable when heard, even if reading it is a giant bitch.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 09:15

Safety Biscuits: Oct 21, 2010

Atlas Hugged posted:

But at this point just the sheer volume of work done in English guarantees that it is an absolute necessity to speak and work in it to be able to participate in the majority of fields since all of the modern foundational work and original research is in English. There's the odd field where you need to speak German or whatever but those are an exception.

You're right of course, but to be fair this was true of Latin too.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 10:44

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
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Safety Biscuits posted:

You're right of course, but to be fair this was true of Latin too.

Not really. Latin was only used in the west. The Islamic world read it but translated it into Arabic and responded in Arabic. Past that it wasn't used at all. English is on every corner of the planet.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 11:06

Geisladisk: Sep 15, 2007

Scientific English, needs to finally shake off the rotting corpse of Latin for good. Injecting a second, dead language into your scientific texts is an absolutely fantastic way to make the subject less accessible, even for experts.

As a layman I can read through a German or Icelandic anatomy textbook with no problems and pretty much know what every thing mentioned is and roughly what it does, even with minimal context. In English, no loving way - Everything has a lovely, opaque, nonsensical latin name, and if I want to struggle through even a basic text, I need to constantly reference a dictionary.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 11:20

Drone: Aug 22, 2003; Incredible machine

Geisladisk posted:

As a layman I can read through a German or Icelandic anatomy textbook with no problems and pretty much know what every thing mentioned is and roughly what it does, even with minimal context. In English, no loving way - Everything has a lovely, opaque, nonsensical latin name, and if I want to struggle through even a basic text, I need to constantly reference a dictionary.

But German has a pretty high amount of latinization in the sciences and medicine as well though? :confused:

# ? Jan 5, 2017 11:23

Safety Biscuits: Oct 21, 2010

Atlas Hugged posted:

Not really. Latin was only used in the west. The Islamic world read it but translated it into Arabic and responded in Arabic. Past that it wasn't used at all. English is on every corner of the planet.

At the point that Latin-speaking European high culture changed to the vernacular, everything was in Latin or Latin translations (and some Greek) and they still made the jump. So the vast amount of work being done in English isn't really an issue to it eventually being superseded as the nearest thing to the world's common language.

Characteristica universalis is p neat, thanks for mentioning it. Sounds like some Glass Bead Game poo poo.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 15:42

MikeCrotch: Nov 5, 2011; I AM UNJUSTIFIABLY PROUD OF MY SPAGHETTI BOLOGNESE RECIPE

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more like BOLLOCKnese

Geisladisk posted:

As a layman I can read through a German or Icelandic anatomy textbook with no problems and pretty much know what every thing mentioned is and roughly what it does, even with minimal context. In English, no loving way - Everything has a lovely, opaque, nonsensical latin name, and if I want to struggle through even a basic text, I need to constantly reference a dictionary.

This is happening in the medical/pharmaceutical communities with dosing regimens, replacing lovely ambiguous latin terms (BID, QID, Q4W) with actual english (twice a day, four times a day, every 4 weeks)

# ? Jan 5, 2017 15:48

Atlas Hugged: Mar 12, 2007; Put your arms around me,
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Safety Biscuits posted:

At the point that Latin-speaking European high culture changed to the vernacular, everything was in Latin or Latin translations (and some Greek) and they still made the jump. So the vast amount of work being done in English isn't really an issue to it eventually being superseded as the nearest thing to the world's common language.

Characteristica universalis is p neat, thanks for mentioning it. Sounds like some Glass Bead Game poo poo.

I don't doubt that English could eventually be overtaken as the common language of Earth, but it won't be by Mandarin.

# ? Jan 5, 2017 16:03