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Very interesting. British history is uniquely interesting since it’s also a history of the English language before it was the global language. Puts it in the uncanny valley of familiarity.
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Today is St Cuthbert’s Day, & - since I am unable to head for Durham or Lindisfarne – how better to celebrate it than by going on an insanely long walk in search of the scattered trace elements of #AngloSaxonLondon?
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British history is at least the third most salient history for everybody: 1: local history, which is British for ~67M people 2: colonizer history, which is British for ~2B people 3. everywhere else, which got ESLized by either Britain directly or via the US
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English is genuinely unlike other languages since it forms a secondary language layer at a meta level. It does not merely co-exist with other languages or inject loan words into them. It’s an inter-lingual protocol language.
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It’s also unlike any previous language that could claim partial-global status, like French/Latin in Europe, or Sanskrit/Persian in South Asia. They were scholarly/elite global languages because globalization itself was an elite thing. Mostly only elites could travel far.
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Spanish comes close, but it lost the colonial race too early (pre-industrialization) to be a language of global *modernity*. And the Dutch never established a big enough zone. English is it. Occupying Level 2 of our linguistic brains all by itself.
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I think what installed English as the global Level 2 is that it became the language of global institutions that co-evolved with modernity and became the native Level 2 language of the global middle class.
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English is the only language where the slightly anemic middle-class “TV newscaster” version, rather than the robust and colorful working class version, is the most powerful “distribution” so to speak. It’s a middle-heavy language, class-anatomically speaking.
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Most other languages are bottom heavy, including Spanish. There are no living top-heavy languages. The elites of any language are generally not numerous enough to drive the overall evolution of a language, only their uppity dialects.
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This leads to weird effects. Even though I’m much more fluent in English today than in Hindi or Kannada (and have been since ~ age 6 or so), the latter 2 occupy a lower abstraction level in my brain, and feel more “native.” That’s because they’re ordinary, bottom-heavy languages.
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The idea of “native speaker” needs modification for English. When I hear people for whom it’s a “working-class native” language (ie working class in Anglo countries) there’s a weird mismatch. I often have greater mastery but lower “nativity” which is only possible in English.
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This is because English is such a middle-heavy language, it’s possible to be a rootless global and have meaningfully higher *idiomatic* mastery than working-class natives in an English-native geography. Because the idiomatically powerful layer is the middle.
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I cannot speak any of the heavily local dialects of English at all, like Geordie or Cockney or African American. In most languages that would make you an outsider. In English it makes the “locally rooted” types the outsiders if they can’t master BBC or American standard dialects.
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Hindi is a good “normal” example. TV Hindi is an anemic, Sanskritized, de-Urdu-ized bureaucratic monster created in 1940s that nobody actually speaks but is taught in schools. Hindi movies use a less artificial heartland Urdu-heavy dialect, with lots of regional variants mixed in
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My point is, the homogenized middle-class large-regional version of English is uniquely powerful relative to local versions. You can essentially say fuck you to local linguistic conceits in a way you simply cannot in other languages.
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Replying to @vgr
In America, walking into certain contexts speaking uninflected American standard English immediately makes you an outsider. Locally-flavored English exists to the same extent as in other languages.
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In Hindi, which is a more typical Level 1 language, the flavors you speak determine your power. I grew up speaking Bihari Hindi (eastern), then later got fluent in Bambaiyya (western, Mumbai). In other regions, if I used one of those, I’d be instantly tagged and mocked/distanced.
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But if I spoke TV Hindi the effects would be *far* worse. That shit makes you super-low-status outsider *everywhere.* In English though, it makes you a powerful institutional middle-class native. The “elites” Trumpies hate. I don’t know of any other language where this is true.
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To connoisseurs of language, this makes “standard Englishes” (there’s like 2-3, like BBC, American-TV, etc) almost offensively unaesthetic. They are too legible, too geographically large-scale, too rooted in modern white-collar institutions rather than farms and factories etc.
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Standard Englishes are the MCUs of language. Derived from the comic-book realities of institutions, and sprawling diffusely over continents. They are offensive to aesthetes who prize their “ear” for language in the same way MCU movies are apparently offensive to Martin Scorsese.
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These Bureaucratic Extended Universe Englishes are a unique feature of English I think. A show like Yes, Prime Minister, where the elite bureaucrat is the source of linguistic wit and mastery would be very difficult in most languages.
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In Hindi movies for example, the equivalent of Humphrey Appleby type characters are *invariably* pathetic figures played for laughs. Their bookish bureaucrat Hindi marks them as trapped in weak institutional realities.
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Frankly, this is a condition I totally love, and that’s what makes me an unrepentant globalist neoliberal shill. People routinely underestimate the power of this world, just as they routinely underestimate the power (and GDP) of middle-class English, which actually isn’t anemic.
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“Anemic” is a revealing metaphor. It suggests a full-blooded vigor that, it is implied, can only exist at the “sons of toil buried in tons of soil” level of a language. If you feel Bureaucratic Extended Universe (BEU) Englishes are “anemic” it clearly reveals your politics.
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Note the unusual role language played in Trumpie/anti-Trump relations. The whole thing about correcting your/you’re type grammar errors. It’s difficult to imagine bureaucratic dialects even punching in the same weight class as popular dialects in other languages.
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I suspect if the same pattern occurred in other languages, the attempted corrections would go the other way. The working class language stylists would be schooling the BEU-native speakers on the right way to speak “street,” idiomatically acceptable grammar errors and all.
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To bring it back around, the reason the OT quoted thread is fascinating is that it is a) a reminder that English too was once an ordinary bottom-heavy language, and b) how little it matters today. You could grow up a fluent English speaker completely unaware of this stuff.
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This too is not possible in other languages. There is no way to become a fluent Hindi speaker without learning a great deal about India along the way. But you can become fluent in English learning barely anything about England.
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And not because it’s gotten globally localized but because it’s gotten globally *delocalized* beyond loose association with the largish, continent-sized BEU zones. Spanish by contrast has gotten globally localized I think.
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BEU English is simultaneously the last human language and the first computer programming language. As with English, nobody cares that Ruby was developed in Japan, or that PHP and Python were developed by Danish and Dutch guys. The geography of origin has low influence.
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It is significant, I think, that the natural language underlying most modern programming languages is English. I am not aware of any significant programming language derived from other natural languages. Not even in chauvinistic linguistic regions like France, Russia, China.
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BEU Englishes are programming languages for institutions-as-computers first, and high-culture literary media or street vernaculars second. The human side of BEU English is what programmers call “syntactic sugar.”
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This is possibly why I’ve been able to make a career out of writing I think. I’m more naturally an engineer than a writer. I’d suck at writing in bottom-heavy languages where vernacular and literary stylings matter a lot more.
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The role of the US is significant I think. English is the only language for which a non-native transplant geography has come to dominate the original flavor. Mexican or Argentinian Spanish don’t dominate Spain Spanish afaik. But the specifics of the American impact are unclear.
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Replying to @vgr
Could this be a uniquely American influence? Since the US, idealized into some conceptual abstraction, is a nation from nowhere - not intrinsically tied to land nor ethnic history. "The English an idealized American would speak"
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Just think how weird it is that British actors typically have to learn American accents to have big careers. There’s niche demand for reality show judges and chick-flick leads with original British accents, but the big careers go to the accent switchers. Albion’s seed ate Albion.
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There’s an angle related to translating texts to/from English as opposed to other language pairs. My limited experience translating (from Hindi) and being translated by others (German, French) suggests English is more like a lower-level compile target than a transpile target.
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I’d guess BEU English is a mid-level language like C, while most languages are high-level. AI latent-space nascent languages are the equivalent of domain-specific (architecture specific) instruction sets. Wonder what maps to LLVM/MLIR type intermediate representations 🤔
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