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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Cf the idea of “view from nowhere” discourses of journalism, bureaucracies and corporate PR, English is much more a “language from nowhere” than peers. Modern BEUs are descended from sprawling institutions like the East India Company, not the British isles
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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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