h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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It's true that English vocabulary is very extensive.
For example Spanish has a word for meat, but not for flesh; a word for bad but not for evil.

I understand that some Japanese companies use English in the boardroom rather than Japanese as they consider it a better tool for communication.

There are so many concepts that you can express in a word in English that take up a whole sentence in, say, Russian. For example:

To kneel (Eng) = To stand on your knees (Rus)
To stare (Eng) = To look really hard (Rus)
Jetlag (Eng) = Feeling tired because of changing time zones (Rus)

"I understand that some Japanese companies use English in the boardroom rather than Japanese as they consider it a better tool for communication"

I can only speak for one Japanese company when I say definitely not true. Knowledge of Japanese culture and attitudes suggests it's unlikely in others. The Japanese are proud of their language and culture.

What they do have in Japanese is a LOT of English loan words. Sometimes in conversation they can be quite hard to spot, especially because they're often abbreviated in ways which to our eyes are linguistically unconventional. For instance: "television", perfectly normal English word, quite a good example in fact because it's half Greek and half Latin. Nobody in England calls it a television, of course, saying either "TV" or "telly". Surprisingly, perhaps, Japanese lacks a "native" word for television. Their word is "terebi". Which seems to share its first two letters, apparently by coincidence.

Then you realise that Japanese people
(a) don't have the letter l or r in their language, only a single sound that's somewhere in between, so they (apparently) consider them freely interchangeable (this is not a crude stereotype or a myth - I can report it from personal experience. I regularly receive emails from colleagues referring to "regurations" or similar.)
(b) can't really do the letter v, and routinely use b instead and
(c) have different linguistic assumptions about where you're supposed to shorten words.

So "television" becomes "terebision" becomes "terebi".

Where was I?

If you're in the UK, can I suggest BBC 4 for brushing up on your history. They've put on very good series about the Saxons and are now repeating their series on the Normans. And the series that followed the history of a midlands village from Domesday to the present day was fascinating.
Perhaps the Black Death had a long lasting influence, in that labourers were scarce afterwards and could move round the country to sell their labour at the highest rates, while feudal societies peristed longer in other countries.

The Black death affected everyone in the european continent and beyond.

One of the first cases of 'biological' warfare was the throwing of plague infected corpses over castle walls in the middle east.

Apparently Nissan hold management meetings in English:

"Rakuten, the Internet shopping company, have followed Fast Retailing, the operator of the Uniqlo clothing chain, in announcing that English will be their official in-house language from 2012. Some other large companies, such as Nissan, hold management meetings in English, but the announcements by Fast Retailing and Rakuten could well be the start of a new trend."

http://www.eltnews.com/news/archives/2010/07/japanese_compan.html

Yes, and Toyota recently introduced some of British Leyland's working practices.

Will they start using Lucas wiring practices and bulbs, then?

At the risk of seeming picky, there's a significant difference between board meetings and management meetings. "Management Meetings" can be anything from 10 minute "daily huddles" to 3 day off-site extravaganzas. Board meetings are regular 1 or 2 day strategic affairs held with the external directors of the company and some of the very senior exec.

In management meetings speed is the more important than accuracy, in board meetings it should be the other way round.

Ben

A comment on languages

It used to be said that French was the language for diplomacy, German for technology and English for ideas.

But that was from the days when Europe actually was the centre of the world - our world anyway.

"Toyota recently introduced some of British Leyland's working practices"

I'm assuming that's a joke based on their recent Epic Fails?

We'll go no more a-Rovering?

A mini-joke there. Nothing too austintatious. Lean, you could say.

Alright, maybe the Mini Austin gag, ain't so bad.

Presumably to be sung allegro?

And sung at the correct speed...or Tempo as it's called.

@swl

"It's no coincidence in my mind that getting entangled in the utterly pointless Great War and WWII led to the end of the British Empire."

Britain got embroiled in both because she had no choice other than to get involved in continental politics. The days of isolation and a trading empire thanks to the English channel were long gone. Unfortunately, the "island in the Atlantic" myth persisted right up until World War II when Churchill had to shake the British out of the idea that things happening across only a few miles of water could somehow be ignored.

"As to why we're still important - the 5th/6th biggest economy, nuclear weapons (and the means to deliver them) and the ability to veto any UN Resolution we care to."

Also one of the worlds best armies and one of the worlds few blue-water navies.

Tiggy: My guess here is that you don't even realise that Ireland has only been a legally separate nation for less than 90 years.

It's been a culturally separate nation for far longer. And at the period you're discussing, it was also linguistically separate. I know a woman from the west of Ireland who didn't learn English till she was twelve.

TRiG.

@sTwigs

"1. Which other nations had a realistic chance of being Top Nation? (As in, in some counterfactual universe where Britain wasn't the imperial power it became, which countries could realistically have taken its place?) My own guesses (and they are just that, complete guesses) are France and Spain and, er, that's it. I say that because I don't think any of the other possible suspects (e.g. Germany, China) were either unified enough or outward-looking enough to have that kind of global reach."

France had a very good chance of becoming the dominant power in Europe in the early 19th century under Napoleon I but the French emperor, like many successful people, over-estimated his abilities.

Spain was a declining power around the same time and had been since the days of Elizabeth I. Declining powers rarely bounce back all that much.

By the late 19th century there were two serious threats to British supremacy: Germany and the United States. After the civil war, the Americans re-grouped politically and continued their industrial growth. Germany was formed in 1871 following the defeat of the second French Empire and quickly became a major regional power; if you did history at school you'll probably know about the infamous naval arms race between the UK and Germany in the early 20th century before World War I started. Germany's mistake, like Napoleon's a century earlier, was over-confidence. Germany was growing into a country ready to take on the new Anglo-French alliance but wasn't quite there yet. When the war started it was clear that although the German army was a match for Britain and France the navy wasn't and even though Jutland helped break the myth of the Royal Navy as some kind of indestructibility colossus it was still a British victory. Having said that, Germany was still in with a chance of winning the war until 1918 when the Americans joined-in and provided fresh allied troops on Germany's Western front which was too much for the exhausted empire. Germany had actually made *huge* territorial gains in the East which she was forced to give-up following her defeat.