Bill Woods wrote:Theemile wrote: Eric Flint had a few interesting (and true) things to say about the English language. (Paraphrasing)
1) It was a language created in English tavern as Norman nobels attempted to woo Saxon barmaids
2) English is a language which chases other languages into dark alleys, mugs them and rifles through their pockets for loose Grammer.
Flint may have quoted those lines, but they were originally said by others.
1) "English is the result of Norman men-at-arms attempting to pick up Saxon barmaids and is no more legitimate than any of the other results." -- H. Beam Piper
2) "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." -- James D. Nicoll
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/English_language
I recently returned from a week in Italy visiting Italian friends and two weeks in Vienna visiting museums, restaurants, and a church or two. Usually we bring an English-to-whatever, whatever-to-English book along which we use mostly to get through menus. But everything was in English, along with the native language. What was even odder, in Vienna, was that our English language tour guide in the opera house was from Moscow. My wife spotted her slightly Slavic accented English so she asked the woman where she was from. The street food vendor we spoke (English) with who was from Bolivia and another vendor from Azerbaijan were a surprise. Everyone from everywhere, all speaking our mish-mosh of a language. And the tourist from China who spoke perfect English and asked us to take his photo in front of one of the palaces.
Even the French seem to have stopped complaining.
So any movie taking place in the future that uses English as a common galactic language is doing what seems to be natural.