YEAH I JUST MOVED TO SPAIN AND I HAVE NO CLUE WHAT THE HECK EVERBODY IS SAYING TO ME EVERYWHERE ALL THE TIME SO CLEARLY IT IS INFERIOR AND THEN LIKE HALF THE TIME IT'S NOT EVEN CASTELLANO AND HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO SEE THE DIFFERENCE THIS IS INSANE BUT THE FOOD IS GREAT AND THE GIRLS ARE PRETTY SO YAY

Well that's on the way out, and quickly, and soon everyone will be signing up for Mandarin and you'll only hear English at your local Beijing McDonalds.

I've heard that argument before and I can't believe anyone subscribes to the idea that Mandarin would ever be a global language. Only about 1/6 of the world speaks Mandarin, why would the other 5/6 learn a language that is radically different from their own? Chinese is not an easy language to learn. I know a few handfuls of people that moved to China for work. After almost 2 years, only ONE person from that group knows anything more than basic chinese. His chinese is extremely limited, and that is with lots of study and daily interaction with native speakers.

Chinese requires not just the relearning of vocabulary and grammar rules, but correct pronunciation as words take on completely different meanings with different emphasis on syllables. In addition, the writing system is archaic and not conducive to technological advances at all. Considering most skilled chinese workers know english or german or french already, it makes much more sense that those languages would be a world standard.

Chinese requires not just the relearning of vocabulary and grammar rules, but correct pronunciation as words take on completely different meanings with different emphasis on syllables[/quote]
You do realize that asian people all over the world have been learning English, simply because it was the lingua franca of business, largely because of the US's dominance (as well as that of the British in the past). Are you so naive (or blind) to assume that that will always be the case? How do you know that in 50 years China won't be vastly ahead of the US economically?

You don't, you simply assume because you've been conditioned to assume that US dominance was immutable. It's that kind of hubris (or ignorance, if you happen to not be from the US) that is as we speak causing our decline.

It was the case not that long ago that all european intellectual discourse was conducted in Latin. Do you not realize that things change?

I'll give you some empirical evidence. I have lots of family in Costa Rica and used to live there. In the past it was the case that any student who could afford to would learn English, whether it was to get a job in tourism or in business. Then the People's Republic of China built a very large bridge in Costa Rica, in an effort to foster stronger foreign relations, and (perhaps as a result or perhaps because of other efforts) there is now a lot more Chinese business in Costa Rica. Guess what happened? Costa Rican students (my cousins included) are now learning Mandarin.

Will it be any time soon that average people in the US are learning Mandarin just to get along in the global economy? No. Will it happen sooner in other countries? Yes, it already is. Will it eventually happen in the US? Depends on how whether our foreign and domestic policies continue to drive us back into the middle ages while others flourish.

But your hubris won't help the situation.

As for two different ways of saying 'the', I assume you mean 'thee' and 'the', and if so I think it's down to dialect. I have never said 'thee' except when reading 'Olde Worlde' English...

A person yelling "Fuck you" in a crowd in English. As you say, no one knows exactly who is being spoken to. This is because of ambiguity, something that English is full of. It's completely ambiguous who the object is, or even whether the object is plural or singular. How can you state that this "communicates an idea simpler and quicker than in Spanish"? In Spanish you instantly know, at least, that the person is talking to (for example) one person instead of a group of people. That is more information because of less ambiguity. In my book Spanish wins.

The rule is, as I said, clear and consistent. It also conveys more information that the English equivalent. If I say "I dropped the plates" a listener needs to inquire further to find out whether I dropped them on purpose or whether it was a mistake. This is immediately clear in Spanish.[/quote]

Which seems perfectly natural to you, because your first language obligated you to make that clear. To an English speaker, who's language does not force him to make that distinction, it doesn't seem important - and if we feel it is, we always have the option of saying "I accidentally dropped the plates" or "I deliberately dropped the plates" (or even "I threw the plates to the ground"), while still being able to say merely "I dropped the plates" if we feel that the plates' having been dropped is more important than whether or not it was an accident. That's the benefit of ambiguity like this - it gives you the option of omitting unimportant or irrelevant information.

Just like the distinction between definite and indefinite as exemplified by the/el versus a/un seems perfectly natural to us, but seems totally unnecessary to a Russian (since Russian has no articles, definite or indefinite), who would also be amused at our insistence on using the copula (be/ser) in sentences like "I am a student" "Soy un estudiante" when he can simply say "? ???????" (literally, "me student").

Spanish is also a somewhat strict language as far as its rules go. For example, every vowel in Spanish has one sound. It is always pronounced that way, and once you learn how to pronounce it you always know how to pronounce it. If you look at a word written in Spanish, and if you know a few rules, you immediately know exactly how to pronounce that word. There are very few exceptions to any rule. English, on the other hand, is flooded (to use your terminology) with exceptions to absolutely every single rule. [/quote]

Spanish spelling is relatively young, focused on a single dialect (Spanish spelling is based fundamentally on Castillian pronunciation), and uses an writing system derived from a language - Latin - that Spanish is itself descended from. English spelling, on the other hand, is about a century and a half older, incorporates spellings from a wide variety of disparate dialects, developed in a time during which the English language was changing significantly, and uses a writing system derived from a language - again, Latin - with a very different phonology.

Spanish has 20 consonant and 5 vowel phonemes, which works quite well with an alphabet of 26 characters, with most of those characters retaining the same pronunciation they had in Latin. That same alphabet is not as good a fit with English's 24 consonant and 14 vowel phonemes.

Think about the way you pronounce the following words: thought, enough, though, cough, bough. Each one is a different pronunciation of the "ough" pattern. How the hell do you teach that to someone?[/quote]

There are relatively few words with the "-ough-" sequence - it's not that much to simply memorize the more important ones.

500 years ago, all those "-ough-"s were pronounced the same. Subsequent language evolution has caused them to diverge - and the spellings are gradually being replaced as a result. "Hiccough" and "hough" have been replaced by the now-standard "hiccup" and "hock"; "plow" and "draft" are already standard in North America, and "naught" is now standard in the US; and "thru" and "tho" are now acceptable in informal American English.

Language changes readily, but orthography does not

How about.. if someone says "bite", do you spell it "bite", "byte", or "bight"? How do you know? Seen, scene, feet, feat, etc.[/quote]

Those examples, at least, are easy to determine from context.

What about silent letters? How do you know how to pronouce "gnaw" if you see it? If you hear it, how do you know how to spell it?

Fact is that English is one of the hardest languages to learn in the world. That's because it's an unstructured mishmash of languages from vastly different etymological lines. What makes it the "best language in the world?" Nothing, the reason everyone learns it is that the English colonization effort was very widespread and successful, and after that there was the rise of the USA as the dominant superpower. Well that's on the way out, and quickly, and soon everyone will be signing up for Mandarin and you'll only hear English at your local Beijing McDonalds.
[/quote]

Correction: English is one of the harder languages to learn to read and write. Learning to speak and understand it is no harder, and possibly even easier, than most other languages - it has a relatively large number of phonemes (but by no means the largest), has a lot of consonant clusters (which are forbidden in most languages; though again, nothing approaching the monstrous consonant clusters of a language like Georgian), and makes finer tense/aspect distinctions than many other languages, but on the other hand, nouns and verbs have very few forms (roughly four each, with the notable exception of "be"), the overwhelming majority of verbs and nouns are perfectly regular with only a single inflection pardigm for each, most irregulars are only irregular in one or two forms, adjectives are not inflected at all, there's no grammatical gender except for third-person singular pronouns, there are no tones, there are relatively few exotic phonemes (it does have an abnormally large inventory of fricatives, but no retroflexes, no clicks, no ejectives or implosives, no laryngeals, no vowels that are only distinguished by lip-rounding), there are no complex consonant mutations (like in the Celtic languages), there are no grammaticalized evidential markers (like in many Amerind languages) or respect/status markers (like in Japanese), and there are relatively few person/number distinctions.

As far as Mandarin becoming the global lingua franca, suffice it to say that, like all Chinese languages, it's tonal. Tones are almost impossible to acquire for people who did not grow up speaking a tonal language - which is most people. And Mandarin is even harder to learn to read and write than English is. An inventory of several thousand characters, with well over a thousand needed for basic literacy, with the phonemic content of each character based on pronunciations that are 2000 years out of date, with many compounds being unpredictable or downright opaque, and with simplification having obscured the phonetic and semantic components of many characters. ('telephone' = ? 'electricity' + ? 'talk', not ? 'far' + ? 'talk' like a European would expect; ? 'electricity' + ?'wheel' = 'streetcar', not 'train', as the cognate compound in Japanese can also mean, and certainly not 'electric car', which is ??? 'electricity' + 'move' + 'wheel'. ? is the simplified version of ?, which is composed of semantic ? 'rain' and phonetic ? /shen/ i.e. rhymes with /shen/ and has to do with rain i.e. /dian/ 'lightning' - 2000 years of language evolution having blunted the rhyme - while the simplified version is just ? /tian/ 'field' with one stroke lengthened. And absolutely none of this helps you when writing.)