Comment by darby_nine
Comment by darby_nine 4 days ago
Eh it'll probably be the de-facto public/professional/transactional register and people will speak another language at home.
Comment by darby_nine 4 days ago
Eh it'll probably be the de-facto public/professional/transactional register and people will speak another language at home.
> Based on what?
I never expected to be taken as declaring an objective fact; I just notice that this is already how workplaces are shaping up. I could easily be very wrong.
Anyway, with the internet the understanding of proximity changes. With an increasingly global economy everyone will be closer to people they only share english with. Or maybe mandarin, if you want me to emphasize skeptacism.
No offense, but sometimes an annoying aspects of monolingual people(those without substantial second language training, not just ** monolingualism totaritarianists) is that sometimes the only aspect of the concept of a language some of them understand is words.
About 30% each of English vocabulary is to have been borrowed from French. That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said. That's obviously never the case.
That's because dictionary vocabulary is just an asset file for a language. It's a major, but still a part of a language. Integrating bunch of words into a language only inflates that dataset.
Dinitrogen tetroxide(N2O4) is apparently called "tetraoksid diazota" in Russian. Do memorizing bunch of those compounds in Russian makes you fluent in that language? I'd very much doubt it.
> That means the phrase "it's all French to me" in free standing could logically imply that you do have good idea of what is being said.
It is not logical to infer that because a word is derived from another language that you'd have any chance of understanding it. The phrase just is a cute recognition of the same derivation.
But you seem to imply monolanguage speakers think the opposite! I strongly suspect this is true of multi-language speakers that learned language through formal techniques. Language is so universal you cannot expect people to be ignorant of its complexity despite their never descending to its depths.
But I'd also like to point out French is occasionally quite understandable. It's when french falls into simple phrases that it becomes unintelligible. As an analytic language it's nearly as easy to decipher as latin is, although orthography is very difficult to learn.
Based on what? Again we’re just throwing eventualities out there with no basis in current reality.
People are pretty good at understanding English in Norway. But the only factor that introduces English into the conversation is when someone does not speak Norwegian. In my experience.
People are extrapolating from the fact that people use English-borrowed slang to these far-fetched scenarios. Yeah? Slang and words have always been borrowed. Not even medical doctors speak Latin to each other.