tanadrin:

tanadrin:

Global English is a thing of beauty; academics writing on EU law use infinitives, prepositional verbs, and abstract nouns in ways no native speaker would countenance, but which everyone assumes is normal because other people do it.

anaisnein

I desperately want examples

The verb form of “evocation” is “evocate.”

Lots of Institutional Nouns are capitalized in ways that aren’t unintuitive, but still look funny (Member States is a big one, I think this conforms with the EU’s own usage).

“Consist in” is really popular. Nobody seems to have heard of “consist of,” despite it being more common (IME) among native speakers.

So is “in respect to” instead of “with respect to.”

You get a lot of terrific usages that make sense, but are super un-idiomatic, and that on closer digging reveal the idiom of the native language of the writer, or an imperfectly translated word. Sometimes you can reverse-engineer these by, say, looking up the Spanish equivalent in Google Translate and finding an alternate English translation of it. Sometimes you just get a sentence whose meaning is clear but whose syntax is a horrible pretzel you have to unpack to make it work properly.

And of course the punctuation is all over the place because every language has its own conventions for things like commas, and nobody thinks to teach standard academic prose style when teaching foreign languages.

(This can also result in weirdly informal usages, phrases like, “so that means that there’s a big difference” where native writers of formal English would go straight to “resulting in a significant difference.)

My favorite today was a hypercorrection (hypertranslation?). Some thoughtful Spaniard, who recognized many of the patterns distinguishing our language from his own, wrote “specifically stablished” instead of “specifically established.” Perfectly logical! Also wrong.

All of it just reminds me–it’s really not our language anymore. It hasn’t been England’s language for centuries now. But it doesn’t even belong particularly to English-speaking countries anymore. Places where it’s the working language in a polyglot population, like the EU and India, are making it their own, and new and internationalized varieties of English suit the needs of their speakers, not the needs of Americans or Brits or Australians. English may hold its dominance as a global language for a little while yet, but it will be less recognizably English the longer it does so.

(via bulbous-oar)