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What GPL/EU compatibility is needed?What GPL/EU compatibility is needed?Posted Dec 19, 2012 17:41 UTC (Wed) by Wol (guest, #4433)In reply to: What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? by Tov Parent article: European Union's open source license to become compatible with GPLv3
Why should Europe adopt English as its prime language, seeing as it's a MINORITY first language!
If we're going to adopt "a european language" I would much rather adopt that OTHER international language, which also happens to be the most widely spoken first language in Europe! Any ideas which one?
Actually, it's a language group, rather than a language, but it's Romance, or as we could call it "modern latin". When you add together all those people whose native language is a derivative of latin, it is the most common language, outnumbering the germanic languages combined, or the slav languages combined.
As for English, Finnish, Hungarian, (French?) they hardly register!
My personal preference, actually, would be to select those major language groups (English, French, Germanic, Romance, Slav) and say that all official texts must be in one language from each group. It is up to the proposer to provide those official translations, and then every country can translate into their own specific language. And if there is a dispute as to meaning, the country that provided the original document has to use the translation, not the original! (For other disputes, the original would trump.)
Oh - by the way - I am a native Brit who's only Romance language is school latin (though I do speak German, French and Russian).
Cheers,
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Ok, the subject has changed to language policy now Posted Dec 19, 2012 18:22 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
> those major language groups (English, French, Germanic, Romance, Slav)
The problem with picking a language group (English is a Germanic language and French is a Romance language) is that even native-speakers within those groups can't understand each other, let alone speak and write the other languages.
I speak two Germanic languages, but I can't understand German, and I speak one and a half Romance languages but I can't understand Italian.
> then every country can translate into their own specific language
Who pays? If the country pays, then it's unfair because very little will be published in, say, Dutch, so the Dutch speakers (who form 1.5 medium-sized countries) will have to pay higher translation costs than the English- or German-speakers (who form much larger economies and could better afford such costs).
Or should the EU pay? In that case you've just recreated the current situation whereby everything is translated into every language and the EU pays.
There is no simple answer: language policy will always provide oodles of fun :-)
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 19, 2012 22:31 UTC (Wed) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]
Oh, and for anyone who likes grouping languages together and wishing that people weren't attached to existing languages, Interlingua is very interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
But for me, much less interesting than Spanish.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 9:08 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] As a Spanish speaker, thanks. There are many countries that are not that attached to their native languages: they tend to be small countries where commerce has been an important economic force, like Portugal or the Netherlands. There are others which do not take the trouble to learn anything else even if pressed: they tend to be big countries which have been the heads of former empires, like Spain, France or England (not UK, I should say).I like very much the Arab model: a private language (e.g. Moroccan) to speak at home and with friends, and an official lingua franca used in formal communications, classic Arab. It used to be this way in Europe with Latin, but it fell out of fashion many centuries ago. A pity, but to tell the truth Latin grammar was hellish.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 11:00 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] I like very much the Arab model: a private language (e.g. Moroccan) to speak at home and with friends, and an official lingua franca used in formal communications, classic Arab. It used to be this way in Europe with Latin, but it fell out of fashion many centuries ago. This was the basic reasoning behind Esperanto, which is supposed to be easy to learn as a second language. The idea was that, for reasons of politics and national pride, we would never get everybody to standardise on one single global language, so it would make sense to have an »auxiliary language« to be used if you had no other language in common. This sounds great in theory, but in practice there is both huge inertia and a chicken-egg problem (nobody wants to go first but unless there is lots of buy-in the advantages don't really come to play). Think of Esperanto (and other similar languages) as the Dvorak keyboard of languages.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 11:50 UTC (Thu) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]
> Think of Esperanto (and other similar languages) as the Dvorak keyboard of languages.
Its even harder, more like converting your entire company to Dvorak before you're allowed to use it on your own hardware.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 15:48 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> A pity, but to tell the truth Latin grammar was hellish.
Not for Russian speakers. It's fairly easy to pick up Latin if you already speak a language with a case system that is close enough to Latin already.
So bring it on, Latin as the choice for the global language wouldn't be so bad.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 18:21 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] The three most common languages spoken as first languages have no case system at all (Standard Chinese a.k.a. Mandarin) or a vestigial case system (English, Spanish).
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 23:02 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] It is quite revealing that all romance languages spawned by Latin lost the case system at some point. But it is not just that: in Latin the order of words in a sentence is completely arbitrary. Having a full degree of freedom in such a basic mechanism of grammar does not make it easy for speakers of highly positional languages.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 23:08 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]
> It is quite revealing that all romance languages spawned by Latin lost the case system at some point.
And gained articles and fixed order of words instead.
Also, not all languages have lost it - German retains quite a bit of Latin gender system and somewhat reduced case system.
>Having a full degree of freedom in such a basic mechanism of grammar does not make it easy for speakers of highly positional languages.
What GPL/EU compatibility is needed? Posted Dec 20, 2012 23:13 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] German is not a romance language, and proud of it. You could make the case with English due to much influence from Latin and French, but English people would not appreciate it.
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