The fact that von Neumann, a polyglot fluent in English, kept writing in German while at Princeton and left translation to his assistants, makes me wonder how much productivity is lost to Europe not having a lingua franca native to all citizens. Personally English isn't my native language. I write English with greater fluency than my native language at this point, but reaching this level took thousands of hours that could have been spent solving problems and building things.
Thankfully one language (English, but whatever language it is might not be that relevant) is becoming 'de facto' the language for sciences, and kids are starting to learn it from an earlier age.
It's still a long way to go, especially for undeveloped countries. However, probably any children born within the next decade will be able to read and speak at least advanced English before reaching 18.
> Thankfully one language (English, but whatever language it is might not be that relevant) is becoming 'de facto' the language for sciences, and kids are starting to learn it from an earlier age.
Soapbox UX issue: That's why we language sticklers should tolerate and even welcome the "corruption" of English — that is to say, the crowd-sourced, grass-roots simplification of the tongue. Non-native speakers should feel that it's easy to achieve fluency in English without wondering whether they'll be looked down upon for getting it not quite right.
(That will also help English stay competitive with, say, Mandarin.)
Here's just one example: It should be perfectly fine to say "less errors," vice the supposedly-correct "fewer errors."
The point of the finer, pedantic questions of English fluency is to be a marker of social class.
It is, in fact, perfectly understandable to say “less errors” rather than “fewer errors”, except insofar as doing so marks one as “uneducated” and déclassé compared to someone who uses the “correct” usage. Of course, this particular class marker is less meaningful now that it’s too widely known—it’s more likely a marker of someone being a member of an anxious and pretentious tier of the middle class by now.
The pointless difficulty is, in fact, the point. For similar reasons, the word “ain’t” and the double negative are perfectly well-attested usages; they just exist primarily within specific dialects that are not socially prestigious. (Of course, blatant and well-known markers of class status are seen as stuffy and pretentious, which is why politicians tend to code-switch into more “folksy” dialects.
As for competing with Mandarin, I’m sure the Chinese upper classes are just as capable of telling each other apart from the rabble.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with some Scottish bloke. He said he doesn't understand why his Polish girlfriend keeps learning English when she speaks it perfectly well. 'That is simple,' I replied, 'suppose you're learning French. Is your learning goal to sound like a Scotsman who's learnt French, or is it to sound like someone from Paris?' From his point of view it was an apparent pursuit of social prestige while his girlfriend has likely been following the most obvious learning goal. It is like mastering any other medium.
As a non-native speaker of English, I really dislike this idea.
I indeed make this very error, but I prefer to rely on tools such as Grammarly to help me improve my abilities, than to other people to start accepting my mistakes as basically the natural mutation of the language.
Yes, a language mutates, and a simple language may be more welcome, but we don't need to force it. Let it happen naturally.
The way you said it, I imagine that you'd be willing to let a 'less errors' (instead of 'few errors') slip without trying to educate whoever made the error about this, if you were reviewing something (for example).
(B) the cold reality is that they need to learn the rules of "correct" English, even those rules are often arbitrary. That's because in professional situations, others — including but not limited to hiring partners, clients, and referral sources — are likely to think less of them if their usage doesn't conform to those rules; and
(C) When grading their work, I will deduct points when they don't use "correct" English, because part of my job is to help them learn to do so.
As much as I appreciate that people are chill about mistakes, I'm not sure if I agree. To me, as an English language learner, the grammar is trivial to learn and it is an anchor that gives me at least some reassurance. One of my most useful habits has been to pick a style guide and stick to it; I wish I'd done it earlier. People often say there should be no rules, but has anyone considered that rules ensure different regions don't develop dialects incomprehensible to each other?
What makes English actually difficult to learn is its broad vocabulary of idioms. One needs to develop a sense for 'natural expressions' because often there are dozens of grammatical expressions, only one of which feels natural. This is something difficult to understand for a native speaker so let me give you an example. Which if any of these expressions are a natural way to get a teacher's attention? 'Can I have a question,' 'may I have a question,' 'can I ask a question,' 'can I ask you a question,' 'may I ask you a question,' or 'I have a question.' This is by far more difficult to learn than any rule of grammar.
You would be surprised. At a previous job, we would receive guests from all around the world, and particularly from African, Asian, South American, and 2nd-tier European countries. The Africans and SEAs were by far the most consistently, fluently conversant. The (comparatively wealthier) Eastern Europeans and East Asians seemed to understand written English most proficiently, but seemed to loathe speaking it; the former broke the "English only" classroom rule most often.
Edit: I'm not surprised by the downvote, simply bemused.
I didn't downvote you but it is probably because you are making a straw man argument, countering something GP didn't imply.
There is probably some truth to some cultures being more shy when it comes to speaking. I'd wager it is an effect of people being judgmental of others' accents.
I see. That could be interpreted either way, but let's give henvic the benefit of the doubt and assume they were talking within the context of the above comment, i.e. Europe.
I don't think that suffices, because I have never heard European countries described as "undeveloped" (perhaps "underdeveloped"), if that. The benefit of the doubt usually orbits a common sentiment, and in this case there is a conspicuous incongruity.
As for the edit: "The test takers were self-selected." The tests also seem to be online-only, and by that measure, likely textual.
I'll say that there is an explanation for the phenomenon I've described: if one has the privilege to conduct business and socialize in one's native language, speaking proficiency in a lingua franca could likely be lower.
The incredible success of a small group of Hungarians from one region and time has sometimes been attributed to the unique social situation in Hungary then. Part of which was linguistic. In the case of the Hungarian Jews, they were usually Hungarian speaking at home, and often from families of German or Yiddish-speaking background further back. Usually educated in German. Some were educated in Hebrew at religious school. In the case of Hebrew, Hungarian and German, that's three radically different languages, about as unalike as three languages can be. Maybe that has an effect on the mind?
Though as I recall, von Neumann's family was non-observing. So he was fluent in Ancient Greek by the age of 5, instead. So I'm not that strongly wedded to the hypothesis. Maybe they really were from Mars, as Leo Szilard once quipped.
I'm not sure whether I constructed my argument properly, but it was about the average person being less productive due to working in a language that isn't second nature to them. German probably was second nature to von Neumann. In other words, by native I didn't necessarily mean the one and only mother tongue.
Sorry. No. Your argument was well-constructed. I have acquired two other working languages and it took about 15 years of regular work. I appreciate your point. Still, speaking more than one language seems to have benefits for general intelligence. So perhaps it is both a blessing and a curse.
> I write English with greater fluency than my native language at this point, but reaching this level took thousands of hours that could have been spent solving problems and building things.
There was the idea of Esperanto as everyone's second language, so that everyone could talk to everyone with 1/10 of the effort most people now spend learning English, but... it worked about as well as trying to convince people to leave Facebook while everyone else is there.
I had the impression that the assistant's proposed task was to translate von Neumann's older papers, the ones he wrote in German before moving to the US. In either case, he was fluent in German from childhood, but his English was not all that great at the time he moved (it got better with time). His native language was of course Hungarian.
