Wouter,

On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 20:59:29 +0100, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > I predict that the 
> > language of the Internet will continue to be some form 
> > of English for the forseeable future.
> 
> I agree, but the question is whether we would recognise it as English.

Well we hardly recognise English from a few hundred years ago as it is - at school we studied Chaucer's 
"Prologue to the Canterbury Tales" in English Lit.  I could probably understand more nowadays, but at that age 
I had great difficulty understanding *any* of what it was saying!  Apart from the "flexible" spelling, the 
actual words and grammar are so different from current English that it may just as well have been a foreign 
language.  I predict that this will be a problem if time-travel ever becomes a reality!  :-)
 
> And your argument of the mighty status quo is valid, unless a new factor
> emerges quickly. So it will depend on whether the Chinese (or India?)
> will join the internet one-by-one or en-masse (maybe after having been
> on a government-created isolated internet for 10's of years).

Well I think you'll find that India is already on the way to having Internet access widely available in urban 
areas already, and the /lingua franca/ there is English.  Since there are a number of local languages in use 
(Bengali, Hindi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, and probably others) and they don't all use the same characters, and 
speakers of some of these don't get on with speakers of some of the others, I think it's really unlikely that 
a single Indian language would ever predominate.  Incidentally, the population of India outnumbers the native 
English speakers from *all* other countries by several times, but I don't know how many learn English as a 
second language.

I think one of the reasons English has become established is because it wasn't imposed (not recently anyway - 
I hope there aren't any Welshmen watching! :-) but has been adopted because it gives the highest chance of 
being understood by any random other person.

English is also a very forgiving language - you can make a complete pig's ear of it and people will still 
understand!  :-)  I think it's a shame that Esperanto wasn't simplified more than it was - dropping genders 
completely, for example.  It had it's chance but seems to have missed it - the only people who seem to speak 
it are those with an interest in languages.  It failed to be adopted as a language for international 
communication, which I think was its intention.

I find it interesting at mixed-nationality meetings that, for example, a group of Germans and Dutchmen will 
speak to each other in English, when I would have expected them to use German.

Incidentally, where does the word "Dutch" come from?  I can't see how you get there from "Nederlands" !

Cheers,


Howard Winter
St.Albans, England


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