What language is the Common of our world?

[Banshee16]

Just a quick question. Which of their languages? Granted, China has an official form of chinese (mandarin) commonly in use, but in practice each region and sometimes even sub-region of the land has its own version of chinese - some of which are completely unintelligible with each other, to the point of being considered separate languages instead of dialects of a single language, such as Cantonese and Mandarin.

True, they have a common writing system, but I do not see the rest of the world adopting the chinese writing system so as to better understand chinese. It is just too complicated. Recent studies even showed that of the several areas in the brain used for language comprehension, one of them is actually different for chinese speakers when reading their language. This is not even taking into account the vast number of characters and the difficulty for swift typing on a keyboard made for using such. I have difficulty imagining such a keyboard in realistic sizes, actually.

As for India, there is no common indian language. Instead there are about a half dozen or so official languages - one of which is English (perhaps due to the fact that the British were in charge until a bit over a half century ago or so). Thus English has an edge even there. Note, incidentally, that Chinese teach English in their schools. I can't recall if it is mandatory or not, although I know that in Japan it is often mandatory at the High School level if the student is persuring a Liberal Arts degree (in which case Chinese and I think ancient Chinese are also mandatory - or perhaps that's only at some schools?).

In all honesty, I'm not sure which version of Chinese. Perhaps one will eventually be selected. I think a common misconception I see is that English, and western culture will be dominant forever, whereas history has shown that all empires go through rises and declines over time. In North America we've got lower birth rates, rising costs, gradually slowing economies, declining competitive edges in sectors other than the service industry, and China's star is on the rise. They may be learning English over there right now, because it's a smart thing to do when you're playing catch up. But when they've surpassed the U.S., Canada, Britain, etc. the incentive will no longer be there. I think that it might be another 30-40 years before we really start to see that impact, but I think it's going to happen.

As to Indian, you raise a valid point. They do have a well-established history as part of the British Empire, and English is established there. I think Chinese is the most likely eventual lingua franca of the 21st century. Maybe they'll end up using the same alphabet used by the romance languages and English, but applied to the Chinese language. Who knows?

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

So, why do I think it will flow this way and not simply get replaced? Because this is easier than forcing everyone to adopt a new language. Also, the Chinese, Indians, Spanish, Africans, Swedes, Russians, etc. are already adopting English as the default language to use when communicating with other cultures, whether professionally or casually. Hands up who speaks a different native tongue than what they type here at Enworld... I'm not making grandiose oracular predictions, I'm only identifying both historical precedence and existing trends. 90% of current-day "English" words ,syntax and strucures, are formed of bits and pieces of Greek, French, Latin, Spanish, Gaelic, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, German, Norse, Arabic, Yiddish, etc and has little resemblence to the old Anglo-Saxon-Norman blending that formed the original "English". At this point, adding Mandarin, Hindu, and some more Spanish to the mix is par for the course and to be expected, Heck, let's toss in some Urdu while we're at it for good measure! Just remember, should you go time travelling into the future, make sure you stop every 50 years or so and spend about a year there to acclimatize to the changing linguistic and cultural thoughtscape. Yes, it'll greatly lengthen your travel time to the year 2206, but you'll thank me when you reach your destination and you only appear to be "quaintly old-fashioned" rather than the equivalent of a cro-mag with a lobotomy!

Why do you think easiness will matter? I'm sure there will be cross-polination, but without fail, the leading language of the time has changed several times throughout history, and I have no belief that this will change anytime soon. Businesspeople that I've known that deal with industry in Asia have usually needed to learn those languages. The Chinese speak English when they come here, but go to their country, and you have a *huge* advantage in negotiations if you can speak their language. When they are more culturally and economically powerful than the west, they will no longer need to cater to us the way they have had to when trying to catch up.

Banshee

 

[Banshee16]

When I am able to talk any person on the planet using only English; when English becomes everyone's first language; when the last translator is put out of business - then I will see English as the "common" language.
I think that a lot of people in this thread think that because English is very prominent that it somehow constitutes the "common tongue" found in most D&D games. As I mentioned previously, in D&D common is considered the language every creature speaks by default. The 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting goes as far as to state "[a]lmost all intelligent creatures one might encounter can understand and speak common..." Sure English is very prominent in international politics, trade, and technology, but try talking to an uneducated person living in a small village in a non-English speaking country. If English really were the "common tongue" translators and ESL teachers would be out of a job.

I think it's a quite simple psychological assessment many of us make simply by virtue of the fact that *we* speak English. I would suspect that probably 90% of EN Worlders are in the U.S. Many of the rest are in other western nations. It's quite natural for us to feel that our language is the dominant language when in many other places in the world it is, in fact, not.

I'm sure the French thought, a few hundred years ago, that their language would be used forever, since it was so prominent in many places of the world. Just as the Romans probably thought the same before that. Everything changes, given enough time.

Banshee

 

[SpiralBound]

Why do you think easiness will matter? I'm sure there will be cross-polination, but without fail, the leading language of the time has changed several times throughout history, and I have no belief that this will change anytime soon. Businesspeople that I've known that deal with industry in Asia have usually needed to learn those languages. The Chinese speak English when they come here, but go to their country, and you have a *huge* advantage in negotiations if you can speak their language. When they are more culturally and economically powerful than the west, they will no longer need to cater to us the way they have had to when trying to catch up.

Banshee

Well, mostly because the average person is lazy to a certain degree... Also, I mean "easy" in terms of "easy to effect a linguistic changeover". In times of abrupt changes in what the dominent language was across cultures, there usually was either a large scale event that caused a language to decline, a large organization in place to preserve a language or to impose a new one, etc... In the absense of such heavily influencing factors, the "status quo" will reign and slowly shift to meet the slower, more organic influences of cultural evolution. This is why I wouldn't predict an abrupt dropping of English in favour of another totally different language. That would require large scale events comparable to the Roman Empire's influence in getting Latin to be so popular "a little while ago"...

<my opinions>
As for The Chinese creating an influence that would push non-Mandarin speakers to speak Mandarin outside of China, perhaps you should talk to some native Chinese people. They're quite happy with the rest of the world not speaking their language! Given some things I've observed of their culture, I rather suspect that they would prefer that people speak English and leave the Chinese-speaking to the Chinese. Of course, when you visit them, they appreciate your efforts to speak their language, but don't mistake this to mean that they want foreigners to adopt Mandarin as their native tongue. I strongly suspect that were several nations to do this, the average Chinese person would not be happy about it.
</my opinions>

 

[SpiralBound]

I think it's a quite simple psychological assessment many of us make simply by virtue of the fact that *we* speak English. I would suspect that probably 90% of EN Worlders are in the U.S. Many of the rest are in other western nations. It's quite natural for us to feel that our language is the dominant language when in many other places in the world it is, in fact, not.

I'm sure the French thought, a few hundred years ago, that their language would be used forever, since it was so prominent in many places of the world. Just as the Romans probably thought the same before that. Everything changes, given enough time.

Banshee

To a certain extent I agree with you. This is why my claims regarding English remaining as it is were only extending as far as 300 to 500 years from now. That would place English at about 800 to 1000 years old, which could conceivably be the expected limits of it's lifespan as a living language, I don't know. The previous "Earth Common" Latin lasted longer than 1000 years, but it also gradually faded from common usage and became a secular language only. Perhaps this will in time occur with English too, although there's nothing which says that English must follow the pattern that Latin did.

 

[SpiralBound]

While there might be a great deal of new slang by then, our technology is probably doing a good deal to slow down change in English vocabulary, much as it is doing to gradually eliminate accents in favor of "generic Midwestern". I would think most of the new formal words you would have to learn would be new words coined for new technologies, in which case I'm not sure you wouldn't just be adding work to stop every 50 years to learn words that are antiquated on the next stop.

I wasn't only refering to new words. Don't forget the shift of idioms and the redefining of existing words. In the early decades of the 1900's the word "gay" meant "happy & carefree", while a "calculator" or a "computer" was a person whose job it was to calculate or compute, usually numbers, "logging in" might conceivable refer to making an entry in a logbook, but would likely just be gibberish! Take a person from even as recent as 1950 and drop them into an average conversation today and the idioms, slang and new cultural concepts will make the otherwise perfectly understandable english unintelligable to him. He would understand most of the words, but he'd often be lost as to just what we were using them to mean, and most of the connotations of many statements would be lost on him. Heck, the concept of a "credit card" didn't exist prior to the 1970's. Just picture this theoretical time traveller listening in on a conversation between two 20-somethings in 2006, talking about being surprised that they had "maxed out their credit card when they bought a pdf online using their Visa." and being suspicious that a hacker had committed identity theft upon them... A "visa"? Are they foreigners working here? What's a Pee-Dee-eff? "maxed out"? Who is Max and where did he go? "credit card"? Is this a bank note? Some kind of index card with a citation on it? "hacker?" Is this some weird slang for a butcher? How do you steal someone's identity from a card? He'd know the 1950's era meanings of some of the words but the sentences themselves would be gibberish. Don't underestimate how quickly a language can get it's meanings "re-purposed" without requiring massive changes to either the vocabulary or the syntax.

Besides, any future worth going to is going to include a civilization that would have you well taken care of due to your importance to historians and for endorsements and advertising. Anything that would make you LESS authentically from 200 years in the past would just be a negative.

Hmmm.... I guess that depends on your purpose for travelling in time. You're also making a lot of assumptions about what the future would be like and what a future culture would place importance on. Our current views regarding the importance of history and concepts of preserving them are far from having continuously existed throughout history. Even in previous periods when history was culturally important, it wasn't always important in the same ways as we think of it today...

As for being personally used for commercial endorsements, what about that would encourage the future people to want to educuate or protect you? That's a situation where you're being exploited for their own monetary gains, (again, assuming that in the distant future such concepts have an equivalent), your personal wellbeing and enrichment isn't guaranteed to be on the top of their priority lists!

 

[trancejeremy]

I was just watching a couple of foreign movies tonight.

The first one was Chinese (Hong Kong, actually). While most of it was in Chinese, occasionally there was a phrase of English. "Yes, Sir" when addressing his police superiors.

The second one was Godzilla: Final Wars. In it, it has a American character, Captain Gordon, who speaks entirely in English (and this is the Japanese audio track), and occasionally the other Japanese characters will speak in English. And the use the English word "Mutant", albeit pronounced a little differently.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Yeah, 'cause aboleths and achaierai are really RAW races, with kingdoms and what not.

Aboleth and achaierai aren't in the RAW? You realize that stands for "Rules As Written," right? You seem to be using RAW in a way I'm not familiar with.

Do you mean PC races? Is that what you meant to say? That's a bit different from "all races."

Clarity of expression mirrors clarity of thought.

The fact is, all humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, half-orcs, etc.. speak common according to RAW.

So... You're saying the dominant culture speaks Common. But you concede that you can find examples of "races" that do not speak Common if you search outside the dominant culture.

I'd say my argument is standing pretty well.

 

[green slime]

English - it will take words from any language that permit it to communicate about something it did not have an easy lexicon for. Especially American English speakers will no longer consider the language the word came from, it's just another word.

??? Seriously; So does every other language, certain tiresome bureaucrats regardless.

 

[green slime]

With the internet and the dominance of English in IT circles, you would be very hard pressed to see either Chinese (of which could be either Cantonese or Mandarin (never minding the bazillion mutually exclusive dialects)) or any of the many languages spoken in India becoming dominant. One of the primary reasons against Chinese is writing. It's unbelievably difficult to design computer keyboards to spell using Chinese characters.

In addition, English is one of the most precise languages in terms of time. Japanese, for example, has only 5 verb tenses as does Korean. English has about 19 which is also more than pretty much any other language. English is the business language, partially because of American and British wealth, but also because it's incredibly exact when drafting ideas.

OTOH, the language skill in DnD bugs the heck out of me, but, without forcing players to spend all their limited skill points on learning new languages, I'm not sure what could be done to fix it.

I see more and more websites with asian characters appearing when I google search. In a score years, it'll be difficult to find those in English.

As to that conceited idea that English is "incredibly exact when drafting ideas"; that is just so much poppycock, I can't believe anyone actually took the time to type it out.