Why English language is so popular ?

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#42
ashok said:
For a non English speaker, the language is very hard to learn. Especially when so many words are pronounced rather differently compared to the way they are written. In many (older) local languages the words are pronounced exactly as written.
Simple example of confusion for others is how 'knife' and 'Nike' are pronounced. Alphabets are silent often and there are plenty of exceptions that we have got used to over the years. Newcomers find this tough. An additional problem is how words are pronounced by Britishers ( who speak the 'Queens' language!) and Americans . Asia generally uses the 'Queen's' language because they were taught that way for over a 100 years by the British colonizers. However nowadays that is getting diluted by bad English due to poor teachers. Additionally some people speak it anyway they want ( using grammar from their mother tongue ) and no one seems to want to correct them.

And of course English keeps borrowing from other languages ( eg: moolahs !) and in a 100 years will probably be quite different from now and spoken by the vast majority of the people on the planet. A common language is the best thing for mankind. It doesn't matter what it is . Just don't make me learn Mandarin now ! It's too late for me. 🙂
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Well Nike is not an english word to start with so it is not pronounced the way one would expect. Indeed most native english speakers get that one wrong.
Nike is the ancient greek goddess of victory pronounced Ni-kee.

Most people in Britain do not speak the Queen's English but a local dialect or accent of which there are many, a lot more than I was used to from Germany and it's dialects. Americans have serious problems understanding those.
 
#44
Charles Darwin said:
if a businessman from Spain deals with one from Finland they'll be conversing in english.
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Three decades ago, hardly anyone in Spain spoke a word of English.
Same story for the Italians, French, and even the Germans.

I felt obligated to learn some Japanese to be able to explain (repeatedly) to hotel guests at 4am that it wasn't possible to get their (always very lengthy) fax to Tokyo transmitted.
Chinese and Russian businessmen in the early '90s ? Sucky grade !
 
#48
Pano said:
Y'all is plural. All y'all is a wider, more inclusive plural. Y'all is never singular, despite what you might hear in the movies.
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That could only come from a Hawaiian. You probably never ate at a Waffle House. See the discussion in Mencken's "The American Language."

I was once as benighted as you, but my Texas compadres set me straight, though not without some bruising.
 
#52
snup said:
sankyoo
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Not Scandinavians.

After a visit to Christiania with two Copenhagen girls, I was stoned out of my skull.
A bus driver on his way back to the terminal picked me up at 5am, dropped me off at the adress I was staying, free of charge.
Bloke might just as well have been a professional interpreter, the fluent way he handled English.

4 hours later I was at the Maersk head office, trying to remain alive.
The Hugo Boss guys there, at a few hundred grand a year per head, coped with English just as well, not better.

(I also recall sharing a joint with Nike's marketing CEO around 4am, that was one impressive guy)
 
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#60
I was forced to take french-lessons in high school.
If it wasn't for Asterix I wouldnt have been in attendence at all.
That and the ancient mythology/religious babble didn't matter to me at the time.
I could understand scandinavian (not finnish, which is a slave-language), german, english,and some latin at the start of kindergarten, due to family relations. And Faeroe, some inuit-accents and the worst of all : danish regional volapyk.
I never understood, why esparanto didn't catch on.
Latin I had learned by looking at latin names for species of fish (big interrest), birds and reptiles.
Needless to say,
when I was offered russian, spick and span- lessons, I would rather improve my skills with a football.
So because of my grades, I had to improve my english, to qualify for The Technical University of Denmark, At the time known as the Danish Polytechnic originally started by H.C. Oersted of electromagnetic field fame.
Knowing enough about maths, physics and chemistry/ history/ biology wasn't adequate to qulify for entrance to the holy catacoombs.
But I made it in after pulling myself together.
The rest has been a interresting voyage of discovery and understanding things better.
Thank F for that
 
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