Australian here, like the author. Apple Pay (and equivalents) work _everywhere_ here, including at the tiniest market stalls, and for the smallest purchases. I stopped carrying my wallet the moment my driver licence was available on my phone, the last piece of plastic I was mandated to carry around.
While the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.
I've never understood the argument "humans only use vision and hearing so self driving cars should too". We don't constrain what we do with machines to what humans do.
Humans don't have wheels either. Is Tesla planning to replace wheels in their cars with legs, Flintstones style?
The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary.
Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday.
A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "he".
That's not grammatical gender. Most people can distinguish between persons and nonpersons and map that onto the correct pronoun or relativizer to use.
But in German the girl you met yesterday is neuter, and the burger you ate yesterday is masculine, and you need to know that to form a grammatically correct sentence about them.
If you're arguing from simplicity, Mandarin actually has very simple grammar - much simpler than any of the other languages you mention (no gender, no inflections, no declensions at all), and learning to speak it is not as difficult as people seem to think. Learning their ridiculous writing system (which is morphosyllabic, not ideogram-based) is another question.
The reason Mandarin is not an international language and English is, is because learning English as your L2 gives you the ability to speak to people in the United States and England and Australia and New Zealand and India and lot more besides, where learning Mandarin gives you the ability to speak to people in ... China (and even then, historically, only one small part of China).
Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France and England were sniffing around Australia, France again was distracted by its wars.
Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français
It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English). However, it's much more difficult to guess the spelling from the pronunciation due to the number of homophones and silent letters.
Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.)
Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn.
I don't believe that English borrows more profligately than any other language. Historically it was hugely influenced by Norman French but nowadays I'd suggest more languages borrow from English than English does from other languages. The eternal fight between the Académie française and the people who actually speak French over borrowed words vs "native" ones is a good example of this.
English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too.
English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners.
It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it.
Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.
So many things wrong in this article it makes me doubt the rest of the (undeniably interesting) content.
- English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak and counting diphthongs it has about 20
- "phenology"?
- tonal languages, while challenging to learn for someone who doesn't speak one natively, are not that uncommon, and 4 tones (assuming they're counting correctly) isn't that many. Mandarin has 4. Cantonese has (depending on whom you ask) up to 9. There are American languages with 10-20
- English has 24 consonants by most counts (confusing the Latin alphabet with English phonology again), but there are African languages with famously many, many more than that
- "like Spanish, Navajo is a verb-centric language in which syntax centres on actions" - I'm not sure what that even means. Spanish, like Italian, is a pro-drop language which means you can drop the redundant pronoun if you want because the verb inflection tells you everything you need to know. Navajo is (depending again on who you ask) an agglutinative/fusional/polysynthetic language which, while weird to English speakers, is not that unusual (e.g. Turkish, Finnish)
If we’re going for ecclesiastical humour then we absolutely cannot go without mentioning Umberto Eco’s piece on Mac vs DOS: https://www.simongrant.org/web/eco.html
This does not explain a cat's ability to choose the thing to knock over that is most likely to annoy you and therefore most likely to get your attention.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention which I think is the most obvious reason for commission on outside purchases: if Apple did not charge a commission on purchases made outside the app, it would leave a huge loophole - developers could just list their apps free on the App Store with limited functionality, with a link to an outside purchase to fully activate them.
> Those trends, in addition to decreasing diagnoses in foreign-born persons, contribute to rising evidence that leprosy has become endemic in the southeastern United States.
and the paper itself says the same thing in the summary:
> In summary, our case adds to the growing body of literature suggesting that central Florida represents an endemic location for leprosy.
But one thing that's missed is the advantage ESL speakers have: they by definition speak at least one other language. English speakers either don't have to or find it too hard to find someone to practise on even if they want to learn.
The fact that English is the lingua franca of science has another advantage even to ESL speakers: they only have to learn English to communicate with just about any other scientist in the world. Imagine having to pick between learning English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, depending on who you wanted your audience to be?
While the paranoid nerd in me might occasionally wonder about all my spending being tracked, watching someone fumble with magic pieces of ~paper~ plastic and metal in a supermarket now looks as quaint to me as someone taking their pig to market to exchange for some eggs and bread.