Another EU tantrum: No more English! Petulant EU leaders seek to drop English as the official language.

[SirLinksALot]

SOURCE: AMERICAN THINKER

URL: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/06/another_eu_tantrum_no_more_english.html

by: Rick Moran


The petulant children who run the European Union have been throwing epic tantrums since the Brexit vote, looking to punish and humiliate Great Britain for disobeying them. They refuse to meet representatives of the British government informally to discuss how the mechanism of an EU exit can be implemented. EU President Juncker haughtily questioned why members of the UKIP party were attending a meeting of the EU parliament to discuss Britain's exit ("Why are you here"?).

Now, it's been proposed that since Britain is leaving the EU, that English, the official language, be dropped.

Forbes columnist Tim Worstall explains why that's a really, really dumb idea:

Now that Britain is leaving the European Union they’re moving to insist that English no longer be used in that institution. And the thing is that these sorts of things just don’t work that way. Which language people use is a market. Just as which currency they do, which pub they go to or how fashion changes over the years. These are not things decided by bureaucrats miffed that the world isn’t giving them enough respect. They’re things that we decide ourselves and with language it’s something that we decide every time we open our mouths.

I say this not because I am the traditional monolingual Englishman (my Russian was once good enough to do business in that language, my Portuguese and French are good enough to navigate through life in those two countries, my Italian would come back with a month or two in country. Not claiming fluency in any language, not even English, but I can cope) but because markets just don’t work in that manner. Language is simply a means of communication – people will use whatever language aids in that. Demanding that people use one or the other simply does not work. As the French actually ought to understand.

The French were horrified when terms like "hamburger" and even "french fries" attained widespread usage when US fast food companies expanded on the continent. The official arbiter of the French language, Academie Francaise, ordered that all English language terms be dropped from ads in favor of their French alternatives. Needless to say, it didn't work.

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[EC]

Doesn't bother me. They're not going to be writing any laws that affect us any more, so let them talk in whatever language they please.

Which will turn out to be English anyway - neither the French or the Germans will accept the other's language as the primary one for EU business, no one speaks Flemish, Italian is so long winded that printing costs would double. 

[SirLinksALot]

Which will turn out to be English anyway - neither the French or the Germans will accept the other's language as the primary one for EU business, no one speaks Flemish, Italian is so long winded that printing costs would double. 

Yep, and what about Ireland? Do they expect them to speak Gaelic instead?

How many Irish are fluent in this?

[EC]

About one in a thousand can handle some Gaelic. Same sort of numbers for the Scots, Welsh are much higher at about one in 500 for their barbaric tongue.

[Fishrrman]

"Another EU tantrum: No more English! Petulant EU leaders seek to drop English as the official language."

They might as well adopt arabic.

At the rate things are going, they're all going to be speaking it before too much longer.

[For-Q-Clinton]

Great, let them waste more money translating documents to the new official language :-).

And they better not choose French because they may be spending more money again in a couple years when France leaves.