Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

Another trend would be for "it's" to remain for "it is" and for the genetive to be "its'", although that final es is a sibalant and not a plural one.

And if there were an editor for our comments, I'd be able to spell genitive correctly. Sorry. Its not a joke, but that is.

Jeez man, you're on a roll today. If anything, the pressure among those who write and read is towards getting rid of ambiguity. Without the apostrophe or lack thereof there would be no way to tell the difference between the contraction and the possessive in many situations. Meanwhile, there is no ambiguity with the possessive = "its" conversion because the plural of "it" is "them".

If English is naturally selecting for inscrutability, count me out.

If you want a rational grammar, I recommend Esperanto; you won't find it in English.

The personal pronouns in general do not use a comma, and this is not hard to learn. Few, for example, write hi's for his. My, your, our, their, his, her, its, whose. Not an apostrophe in the lot. I don't think this one is all that hard to learn.

It is strange that Dr. Delong would describe the currently-unauthorized spelling of "its" as both pitiable AND likely to triumph. It begs the question, would Delong have similarly pitied Copernicus? Actually, I could care less.

Could care less? Or couldn't care less?

"The primary use of the apostrophe in English is as a possessive marker"

No. The primary use of the apostrophe (and the use in "it's") is as a contraction marker. It's the apostrophe-s combination which causes the problem. It's much more frequently used as a possessive marker than as a contraction.

But even though Brad's wrong, Brad's forecast may be right. I see more and more confusion between "there", "their" and "they're". One of these days we'll all just use "there" for all three. And one of these days we'll all just use "it's" both for "belonging to it" and for "it is".

A lot of grammatical errors are caused by generalization of a rule when the language is actually irregular (e.g. "mouses", "sheeps".) These mistakes sound silly and stupid but they're just failures to have memorized arbitrary and pointless exceptions.

Language teachers always insist that their language is logical and that there's a reason for everything, but they're WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

Getting plurals right is part of being normal and native and has no value for communication ("sheeps" is fine, and of course LESS ambiguous than the correct form. You could be a sheepmonger successfully for a hundred years and never use the correct grammatical plural once).

"It's" vs. "its" has no communicational value either. It's a way of showing educationsal level, and to a degree, class.

Chinese and German are worse than English. If I had been in charge of the denazification campaign, all German nouns would be neuter and all plurals would be regular. (I'd actually prefer to make them all masculine, but the feminazis wouldn't allow that).

Punctuation conventions are, I would argue, different from grammar per se. Both have changed over time, but today no one would ever consider this sentence to be grammatically correct: "He are a professor."

Whether we punctuate "its" the same way we punctuate other possessive pronouns, or whether we punctuate "it's" the way we do other types of nouns is largely a matter of style--the choices of editors, and publishers, and organizations. In this sense, punctuation rules are more arbitrary and haphazard than grammatical rules, which, by the age of 5, most children have already mastered.

I used to get all excited about the misuse of its/it's, or proud of the fact that my mother taught me the correct usage at the age of six, until I discovered that Abraham Lincoln apparently routinely used it's for the possessive.

When I duplicate his eloquence I'll quibble again about his grammar.

gmo

ITS AMERICA

Intelligent Transport Systems

http://www.itsa.org

:-)

The "it's" in place of "its" error might be older than the discussion is assuming. While working on my dissertation, I read the correspondence of Lord Clancarty, the British ambassador to the United Netherlands from 1817 to 1823 to Castlereagh and Wellington, and he occasionally made the it's-its error. Clancarty was a lawyer and graduate of Trinity College in Dublin. (Ah, maybe his Irishness explains it.)

Agreed, ABF. The conventions of punctuation have changed quite a bit in the past two centuries. Full colons separating what could be complete sentences have given way to full stops. The use of commas has diminished as well. (A good example of the older style is Gibbon's history of the Roman Empire.) Still, the underlying grammar is the same.

Ziska, perhaps you should take up Dutch. It combined its masculine and feminine nouns into a single case--retaining the masculine "de" as the definite article. The neuter remains, but in the plural is feminine, taking "de." The plural is nearly always formed by adding "-en" and only occasionally "-s." But since Dutch is an idiomatic language, it is much harder, in my opinion, than German.

Shift _back_, you mean. "it's" is the original possessive of "it". It's only in these modern times that we've shifted to "its" to avoid confusing it with the contraction.

As a middle-schooler who was fascinated with archaic literature, I became quite frustrated with this, since everything I was reading used "it's", but my teachers insisted on "its".

Before about 1800 almost nobody followed rules of spelling, grammar, or punctuation. The rules were written during the eighteenth century. Most texts of pre-1800 authors come to us in normalized form; otherwise they would be full og what looks like mistakes to us.

cyclopatra is quite right that it was originally written with the apostrophe. Here's the OED's summary of the word's tangled history:

"Formed in end of 16th c. from it + 's of the possessive or genitive case, and at first commonly written it's, a spelling retained by some to the beginning of the 19th c. The original genitive or possessive neuter was his, as in the masc., which continued in literary use till the 17th c. But with the gradual substitution of sex for grammatical gender in the concord of the pronouns, the indiscriminate use of his for male beings and for inferior animals and things without life began to be felt inappropriate, and already in the ME. period its neuter use was often avoided, substitutes being found in thereof, of it, the, and in N.W. dialect, the genitive use of hit, it, which became very common about 1600, and is still retained in Westmorland, Lancashire, S.W. Yorkshire, Cheshire, Lincolnshire, and adjacent counties. Finally, it's arose, apparently in the south of England (London, Oxford), and appears in books just before 1600. It had no doubt been colloquial for some time previous, and only gradually attained to literary recognition. Its was not admitted in the Bible of 1611 (which has thereof, besides the his, her, of old grammatical gender); the possessive it occurs once (Lev. xxv. 5), but was altered (in an edition of 1660) to its, which appears in all current editions. Its does not appear in any of the works of Shakespeare published during his life-time (in which and the first folio the possessive it occurs 15 times), but there are 9 examples of it's, and 1 of its, in the plays first printed in the folio of 1623. In one of these at least (Hen. VIII, i. i. 18), the word is prob. Shakespeare's own (unless he wrote his). By this time it's had become common in literature, from which the possessive use of it soon disappeared; the neuter his is found as late as 1675 (see his poss. pron. 3 c); the use of the = its continued almost as late in literature, and is still dialectal, as is also the periphrastic the.. of it (o't), as in Sc. 'the heid o't' = its head. As its arose after the h of hit had been dropped, the form hits is not found in literary use, but it is the emphatic form of its in Scotch, 'his heid strak hits heid'."

However, the history is irrelevant; editors need consistency, and there is no prospect of possessive its getting an apostrophe in edited prose unless there is a general collapse of civilization.

[On preview: sorry about the confusing way all that reads; I laboriously put in italics where called for, but this stupid comment system ate the HTML.]

Our's is obviously not a language that trades in assiduous formal consistency.

Ziska says: Language teachers always insist that their language is logical and that there's a reason for everything, but they're WRONG, WRONG, WRONG!

Ziska, before you get too confident, grab a copy of The Sound Pattern Of English where Noam Chomsky explains that everything about the English language follows a logical rule. It has improved my writing and speaking and eliminated one hundred percent of my frustrations over irregularities of language.

Note that the lack of commas in the sentence immediately above this one is necessary and one of the reasons for universal comma separation in lists of three or more as described in the previous post (q.v.).

What is the rule for English plurals? Is it simpler than just learning oxen. rhinoceri, mice, sheep, geese, etc., one at a time? Having LOTS of rule is no help -- you really want the rule to be simpler than memorization, i.e. one or very few rules.

Likewise, the pronunciation of many written words can only be known if it is known when it was first written down in English (visavis the Great Vowel Shift, etc.), with special attention to individual words with irregular spellings and words borrowed from misc. languages -- Iraq, Qatar being two examples. (One poster here uses the sensible German-French spelling Irak, thus outing himself as Old Europe.

The Dutch had the right idea.

"Those who do so should be pitied, not scorned."

I don't know, I think pity is a condescending term that places a greater emphasis on grammar than is warranted. Figuring that possessive its is spelled it's is common sense, and it's only the irregular nature of the word that causes the confusion and a common mistake.

Thus I don't believe it is appropriate to 'pity' someone's native intelligence per se (because logic would dictate the opposite of what is required) but rather that they are less familiar with written English in all of its capricious splendor.

Well, I feel strongly that since the rule is relatively simple, people once taught it can keep it straight. True, the rule is relatively recent, and some of my favorite authors went back and forth with no consistency at all because in their time there was no insistence on it (Jane Austen is one that comes to mind immediately -- she always writes "your's" at the end of letters in her books). But now there's a rule for consistency and clarity which is relatively simple to learn and keep straight.

When people don't, it seems to me that they are either not overly concerned with the reader's ability to understand (which is the reason why grammar rules were made, incidentally -- not as a class weapon but as a method for us to communicate better in writing) -- or perhaps, they are just trying to look like they are too cool for grammar, which is really annoying as well -- or perhaps they have never been taught this (very simple) rule.

I also think that a possibly unintended, but undoubtedly real, effect of the setting up of hard-and-fast grammar rules has been that people who don't follow them *out of ignorance* are seen by those who know them as uneducated or lower-class and they get discriminated against; plus their writing seems hard to follow and understand.

So yes, I would pity someone who didn't understand when to use the apostrophe and when not to.

I am not saying grammar rules won't evolve or that they are not arbitrary. I am just saying that the current ones exist so that we can communicate clearly with each other and that they are not that complicated. So why not use them? I would not "sneer" at people who are ignorant of them; but I would (and do) tell them what the rule is. After all, the rule for possessives, specifically, is NOT THAT HARD a rule.

I'll bet $100, corrected for inflation, that by 2150 the apostrophe will have disappeared both in English contractions and as the genitive marker. Very few languages are able to disambiguate regularly in print what is ambiguous in speech. English is already very hard to read and write correctly and it is even harder for the many millions of second language English users who have become the guarantors of the language's social status. In the next century and a half, there will either be a very substantial language reform in English, one which will move heavily towards phonetic regularisation; or English will cease to be an "international" language and local communities of users will start their own language reforms because the standard will have become nearly impossible to read.

Further to Zizka’s point, I heard a grammarian years ago say that humans once used smell to distinguish between groups. If one smelled different, one was quickly killed and eaten. Now, we use language. If one’s language use is different, one is quickly ostracized (then killed and eaten). Thinking that one choice in language use is “pitiable” or alternatively, to be scorned, seems to support this view. Language use that leaves one unable to adequately communicate (so unable to attract income, affection or assistance) is a serious problem. Language use that does not interfere with communication but draws comment seems more like sniffing to see who is or is not a member of one’s tribe. Truss is a member of the tribe of proper English, and smells non-members in non-standard use of “it’s.”

Stead of it's 'twas "'tis" the nonce, forsooth

Scott,

Other than Norwegian, and to a limited extent, formal school English, are you aware of any major "laguage reform?" Languages change, but my impression is that, with very rare exceptions, they do not change much due to official efforts. France is fighting a holding action, with limited success, rather than attempting reform. The example in France is that the holding action is mainly against the encroachment of English, which gives little support to the notion that English in its present form is too cumbersome to maintain its position in the world. I would think that linkages to progress in other areas, such as technology and entertainment, is what will make or break English as a world language.

K Harris - This happens to be my specialty.

All of the Scandinavian languages have been subject to regular reforms. Dutch has undergone a major reform in the lifetime of current speakers and a smaller reform in the last decade. Most of Europe's official languages were more-or-less invented by official standards organisations less than a two centuries ago, as was Hebrew, both kinds of Bahasa, Pilipino, Hindi, Urdu and modern Greek. All are subject to active management. Turkish and Russian underwent huge reforms in the aftermath of WWI. Romanian has been regularly reformed, including changing from the Cyrillic to Roman alphabet, then back to Cyrillic in Moldova and now back to Roman. Chinese underwent a series of big reforms in the 20th century that rendered the former written language - classical Chinese - nearly impossible to read. Japanese had a big reform in 1947 and several smaller ones before that. Korean has been very heavily managed for the last 50 years, progressively abandonning hanja and reforming the hangul to better match actual use.

You have to understand that English and French are the exceptions, not the rule. French is a managed language, but the managers are very conservative. English is unmanaged and its speakers believe deeply foolish things about the nature of "correct" English. It is therefore stuck with spellings that have made no sense in 700 years.

There are languages where they don't hold spelling bees - that only happens when there is timely reform. Most languages have some form of active management and most have seen very large managed changes in the last couple of centuries. Language reform is actually quite pervasive and generally successful. It's just English where there is never any progress.

And French isn't the only language resisting anglicisms. Icelandic is far more active in its resistance, and even Dutch and German authorities are beginning to put up a fight. I actually heard a Swede recently complain about how hard it is to teach Swedish spelling because of the pervasive use of English words.

The rules for plurals such as mouse/mice goose/geese etc are regular, they just come from different dialects that fused to form Modern English.

In the Sylvesterian variant of Middle English the plural of mice would be 'meeces', goose would be 'Geeses'. The prononciation 'meece' is still current in parts of Lancashire, particularly in the area arround Preston.

Scott, Scott, Scott,

Im surprised at you, wagering a piddly $100, inflation corrected or not. (It will still be a tiny amount of your amassed fortune by 2150.) Worse, your wager is over the apostrophe? Look at where the world is headed kiddo, and at a blazing speed of light: ENGLISH. All English, all the time. Japanese international companies (and many more in Germany) use only English at some meetings despite no foreigners present. Within a short time, one will not be considered educated unless they can communicate in English, giving a huge push for, you guessed it, more English. By 2150, people may want to play around with new and old languages, but all 10billion of us will be using the second cousin of English fluently. The language will naturally change which is fine, as long as we retain the essential silent "gh". That must hold. China with 1.2 billion will first have to learn to speak with each other before THAT becomes an international langauge. (mochiron, nihonjin-tachi ha nakanaka ganko dakara 2150 nimo, tabun sono kokumin ha eigo wo tsukwanai kana....)

Todd, remind me, didn't you do your SST in Costa Rica? How good was the English spoken down there? Any real prospect of mass anglicisation there? I assume you're still in Japan. As far as I can tell, everyone in Japan studies English and most of them can't speak it worth a damn. C'mon, English isn't going to replace the rest of the world's languages ever! It is no more in the cards for English than it was from French.

I work in a European firm where I am the only native English speaker, where English is the only language used in any meeting with the boss. And, in a country that where English is widely used as a second language, in a computer company, the quality of English I encounter runs from awkward to crap. People are not going to stop expressing themselves in their own languages, and English is not going to drive the other languages of the world out.

I would have thought Goshen would have made that clear enough.

And of course, the difficulties in collecting $100 from me in 2150 makes the bet pretty safe for me. Wanna take me up on it anyway? I'll make a little bet to collect on: In 2030 - a full generation in the future - less than one person in 20 in China will be able to score 500 on a TOEFL, less than one in ten in Japan, less than one in four in Germany and less than half in Belgium. We'll make the pot a bit richer too - €100.

I can't believe I'm the first to post Bob the Angry Flower's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots.

http://angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif

Ok, I'll take this on (with due respect to original poster):

"Very few languages are able to disambiguate regularly in print what is ambiguous in speech. English is already very hard to read and write correctly and it is even harder for the many millions of second language English users who have become the guarantors of the language's social status"

I disagree completely -- English is a VERY EASY second language by most linguistic standards. There are phonetic connections between the written and spoken forms that reinforce the learning process. It is VERY uncommon for students to spell basic words incorrectly after having learned how to pronounce them and vice versa.

To put this in perspective, consider how non-alphabetic language such as Chinese are much more difficult -- the written language becomes far more specific than the spoken language (ie. the sound "ta" represnts "his", "her", "its", etc. in Chinese) and the meaning is often disconnected from the sound (knowing how to pronounce a word gives few clues as to how to write it and vice versa). There are ambiguous rules about how to spell/pronounce words in Chinese and a very ambiguous set of rules regarding word definition/construction.

David Moser from the University of Michigan goes into a number of these issues in a casual but very well-written essay available online at:

http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

It is an excellent read and I agree wholeheartedly. The ambiguities and difficulties of English arise from the irregularities of the grammer (which - as Brad points out, are simplified in daily usage and so not a fundamental obstacle to second language learners), not from any fundamental contradictions in the learning process itself. This contrasts enormously with other language, and is probably a large reason why the English language is a language of international commerce while others have faded by the wayside.

Trevelyan, there are alternative languages in the world besides English and Chinese. Can you give another example of a language with a writing system as messed up as English? I can think of a few - Japanese, Tibetan, French, Thai - but English is much worse than Spanish, or Russian, or Swahili, or Bahasa, or Basque, or Vietnamese. By what linguistic standard is English considered easy?

English has several very marked sounds that most foreign speakers consistently get wrong. Spanish and Italian have few difficult sounds by comparison. Hawaiian and Tahitian have even fewer. English has an odd stress pattern that is very hard for romance language speakers to learn right. It has a lot of complex consonants, which are very, very hard for Chinese and Japanese speakers to learn, among others. If I had to pick an international language on the basis of ease of pronunciation and spelliing, I'd have picked Italian or maybe Dutch.

Literacy is, as I assume you know if you read pinyin.info, quite low in China and writing is even harder. People regularly select incorrect characters with the same sound value. They often confuse the second and third tones because they sound the same most of the time. They have whole words that they don't have a character for! Chinese in print is far worse than spoken Chinese because they don't even designate word barriers clearly. If you confuse one character for another and then don't use word barriers, quite a few common reading strategies fail and texts quickly become hard to decipher. Most of the time, Chinese characters add nothing in terms of disambiguation, at least for texts written in the modern vernacular.

ENGLISH IS NOT A SPECIAL LANGUAGE! It's has an improbable spelling system, a problematic variety of dialects, several very unusual phonological properties and a complicated grammar based on very fixed word orders. And that is just when considering speakers of other European languages. For people who speak Chinese, English has a disturbing amount of phonetic variety, a difficult to master system of phonological stresses, a tense system which does not map neatly to Chinese aspect, a distinction between indefinite and definite articles that seems positively mystical, and a system of verbal and noun morphologies that is actually more complicated than in most coastal Asian languages. And don't even get me started on what a nightmare it is to teach Chinese people how to use English clauses correctly.

English is important for purely political and economic reasons. English has no special properties that make it easy for other folk to learn. None. None whatsoever. I can not emphasise this enough.

Oh, now you're just trying to be provocative.

If we do switch, I ask that we start using hi's and her's for consistency's sake.

I think the drift in the discussion toward a difficult/easy debate misses a pretty important point. Language learning is easier when we are young, and grows harder as we age. There is some evidence that the process is not continuous, that language learning becomes very much harder for most people after the first decade of life, roughly speaking. There are also huge differences in language learning ability. I would think that the differences between languages would be dwarfed in the language learning process by other factors.

The argument for regularizing language also seems to rely on an assumption that conscious logic is important to language use. First language learners don't rely at all on logic to understand the underlying grammar of their language, and successful second language acquisition probably doesn't, either. If someone is relying on logic and consistency to navigate through a spoken (or written) phrase, either the listener is far from native competence, or the speaker (writer) is.

Brad, it's fine to say you imagine the "correct" usage will switch from it's to its in the next few centuries, but thinking about HOW that might happen, IMHO, makes it unlikely. Specifically, differentiating between it's and its is a class marker; and as such it seems to me that the literary classes, along with teachers, will fight tooth and nail to maintain the distinction which, among other things, maintains their sense of superiority.

On the other hand, I would have thought usage of the contrafactual subjunctive ("if I were a rich man" rather than "if I was a rich man") to be a similar sort of class marker, and that distinction is apparently lost on the average American. What may be different in this case is that that distinction never existed, or was lost a long time ago in the US, when the nation and class were more fluid; I honestly don't know the history of how that piece of grammar disappeared from American English. Additionally, it's vs its is specifically a written distinction, thus one that has more persistence than loose speech, and thus easier to sneer down at.

Scott, while I wholeheartedly agree with most of your post, I'm puzzled by your suggestion that Dutch might be a good international lingua franca. You're kidding, right? It's idiomatic. What we'd call slang in English is part of the language in Dutch. For example, if someone succeeds "with their heels over the ditch" -- the image being leaping across a ditch and landing on the other side with only your toes on the bank -- then they have just barely made it. That's an integral part of the language, and it's pretty rough on us foreigners. Then there is the problem of gender in pronouns, which aren't consistent from region to region. As much affection as I have for the Netherlands and its language (I even get by in Maastrichts), I don't think it would make a good common tongue.

Gratuitous off-topic point: the notion that Flemish constitutes a separate language is silly. Why can't we bring back Netherlandic and Netherlandish into English?

You're quite right about there being nothing magical about English. I'd wager that the success of English in the past two-hundred years has more to do with British economic predominance in the 19th century and American in the 20th. Did I not read somewhere that English replaced French as a diplomatic language partly because neither Wilson nor Lloyd George could speak it? Somehow, in the diplomatic correspondence I've read, I like French. It allows one to be curt and polite at the same time. Still, I'm sure that's possible in other languages in the hands of a skilled writer.

I agree with jam who said that apostrophes are primarily used in contractions not possesives in the English language. In normal conversational and informally written English, it's difficult to get through a sentence without using a contraction while one can say or write a great deal before using a possessive. Apostrophes are only used to make nouns possessive, not pronouns. In that light: his, hers, my, mine, your, yours, its makes perfect sense. Not an apostrophe in the bunch. What's so difficult to understand, Brad?

Grammar and punctuation are not the same things.

Everyone in this thread seems to have mastered English grammar: they have written sentences where subjects agree with verbs, verbs are in the right tenses, the word order is correct, etc.

And yet even if people are completely fluent in spoken English, they may still punctuate words, phrases, and sentences according to different styles and standards. Many of the posts here would be punctuated differently if they came out in books by different publishers (Chicago vs. OUP vs. MLA vs. The New Yorker etc.).

Punctuation errors do exist, but these belong to a different class than grammatical errors.

Scott,
Sure Ill take you up on the bet, but we all know by 2030 there will only be once currency, the all mighty dollar. So let us wager your original 100 greenbacks. And they will still be green, dammit!

I'm not sure what the current numbers are, but I know that in Japan, policy is shifting from starting at 13 years old to 7 years old. In 2030, I can easily see 10% of the entire population hitting 500 on TOEFL. 25% in Germany might be a tall order by 2030, but Ill say yes here as well. What we really should bet on is the percentage of "under 50" in these countries. 10% in China? no. Let's just bet on Japan and Germany.

I agree that English is not special, but it happens to be a linguistic wave just as satelite, the internet and Hollywood really took off. (with 350 million of the worlds wealthiest people on average.) As Churchill famously stated "English is the worst of all languages, except for all the others." Then again, he was sort of pro-English. What are the contenders? Japanese and Chinese? about 3000 too many characters for most to take on. French or German? Not enough critical mass (you do remember the Helrich lecture on rockets, right?) Arabic? too isolated. Spanish? not enough incentive for the world to learn as a primary second language.

English wins, nukes flying, or not. I agree that you won't hit 100% any time soon, if ever. But you will hit near 100% of those with 4 years of university education, and that is becoming a greater share of the world's population. We will also see another tier of those with 2 years of education. Now you are talking about a large slice of the world getting 500 by 2030.

English is actually considered a "middle level language" in terms of difficulty based on what _average_ non native speakers go through to learn. You get Spanish speakers who have an easy time and Japanese haveing a FAR harder time (6-8 times as long to learn. Applies to Koreans as well. Chines have an easier time than Japanese due to grammatical differences). If the world had to learn Japanese, all except the Fins and a few others would haev a nightmare with grammar and then 2000 characters on top of that. In this sense, English, like Spanish, and many more are not "hard" languages for the majority of learners.

By the way, doesn't the prevasive use of English in Sweden signal a trend?? I bet that uses way more English than Esperanto.

Todd, in Flanders, in my university, among native Dutch speakers, not all the students who were registered in English language degrees could score 500 on the TOEFL, even though 550 was supposed to be the minimum for admission. The world is full of people who say they can speak English but who never face an external test like the TOEFL. Language skills are very widely exaggerated and even the Swedes are a lot worse at it than they like to think. Fluent English - fluent at a level comparable to a native speaker - is extremely rare even in very anglophilic countries like Sweden. It is very hard - nearly impossible - to acquire real fluency in a foreign language at school alone.

"...by 2030 there will only be once currency, the all mighty dollar..."

I note that my euros are worth $1.23 and wonder if the mighty greenback is any more likely to be the global currency than the yen.

Batavicus, in terms of being easy to spell, Dutch is a piece of cake. In terms of easy to pronounce, it's just wonderful? Can't make a retroflex "r" like they do in Amsterdam? Geen problem, ze doen dat anders in Antwerp! You can always use an uvular "r" and it's fine. Should "g" be voiced or unvoiced? Not a problem, north of the Rhine it's unvoiced, south of the Rhine it's voiced. Voicing on initial consonants? Half the time the Dutch can't be bothered, so do it either way. Really, sound systemwise, it's a piece of cake.

Syntax is something else. I heard people tell me that Dutch is an "idiomatic language" but that's just folk linguistics. All languages are idiomatic. Dutch speakers, like many other ethno-linguistic communities, thinks that their language has some unique property that is hard for other people. The only thing I can think of in Dutch that's really, really hard is figuring out when and how to use those "kleine woordjes" like "toch", "eens", "maar" and the like.

Scott,
I thought 500 TOEFL was our wager. I know that isnt close to fluency, although considering how many 8 year olds are starting English all over the world, I still say by 2050 any educated person will have a higher degree of English competence than 500 TOEFL.

You mentioned them Swedes. I once met one in Japan where I asked what part of the US he was from since he sounded from the midwest, although not quite. Obviously, this guy had lived abroad and in the US. But more and more are doing this. I lived with a group of Europeans for a few months who mentioned that their English improved far more than their Japanese -- while living a year in Japan. The speculative fact that college educated people will have a high command of English in 2030 is a great shift in the world even if raw numbers are not so high. 10% of Chinese at 500?? Chinese still havent figured out a how to get everyone to speak a common language in their own country! Manderin, Shmanderin.

The yen has as much chance of being the single international currency is the one I print in my back roo.... nevermind. I agree, we will have several currencies for years if not decades and beyond.

Scott,

There may be lots of Dutch who have a devil of a time scoring 500 on the TOEFL, but I found it most unusual to discover a taxi driver, waiter, clerk, student, or just about anybody who was unable to make themselves understood in English in the major cities. Not sure what that has to do with prospects for English in the future, though.

Arguing whether English will conquer the world is kind of iffy till one offers a definition for world domination. A test score of 500 is one definition, but may not be a very good substitute for things that matter culturally. Bilingualism (or tri-, just keep on counting) seems to be right in at the heart of this debate, but so far goes unmentioned. We don't really expect English to replace other major languages?

The ability to carry on romance and shopping in the language of mom and pop lowers the incentive for learning any other language, so the standard of acquisition will often be fairly low. If, however, the second language comes in handy, the standard will usually be above incomprehesibility. When debating which language will "dominate," official standards of proficiency may not be the standard we want to use.

Sine ira et studio - Without anger or bias. (Tacitus)

Dominus vobiscum - May the Lord be with you (Plural)

Impossibilium nulla obligatio est - Nobody has any obligation to the impossible. (Corpus Iuris Civilis)

Pecunia in arbotis non crescit - Money does not grow on trees

Qui dedit benificium taceat; narret qui accepit - Let him who has done a good deed be silent; let him who has received it tell it. (Seneca)