Conversation

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.
Replying to
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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