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    Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain

    Game » consists of 19 releases. Released Sep 01, 2015

    The final main entry in the Metal Gear Solid series bridges the events between Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and the original Metal Gear, as Big Boss wakes up from a nine-year coma in 1984 to rebuild his mercenary paradise.

    Language Invasion, and Kojima [Spoilers]

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    MikeLemmer

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    This reminds me of two conversations I've had.

    About a decade ago, I attended a wargaming convention in Seattle. One of the speakers was a former CIA codebreaker who translated Chinese transmissions during the Cold War. When someone asked him if the Chinese language would dominate worldwide media one day like English currently does, he just laughed. He explained that Chinese writing was extremely complex because the nobles wanted to keep the commoners from understanding it; this also made it hard for it to gain any traction outside of native-speaking Chinese.

    A year ago, one of my guildmates moved to Japan to work as an English teacher. Among his numerous tales, he's been exasperated by his students complaining about learning 50 symbols (upper- & lower-case letters) of the English alphabet when they have to memorize over 5,000 Japanese symbols to read a newspaper competently. When we got to talking about the complexity of Asian languages, he brought up the nobles-did-it explanation and said, more or less:

    "Japanese and Chinese were invented as practical jokes on the peasants."

    In comparison, I think English is simpler to learn and also has a habit of swiping additional words from other languages as necessary, meaning foreign speakers already have a foot in the door. Combined with the sheer number of local English dialects and broken English still being pretty understandable, I suspect part of English's popularity is it doesn't give a f*** how mangled or cobbled together it is.

    "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 Nicoll

    Granted, I'm not a linguistic expert, although it would be interesting to hear one chime in on the reasons for English's spread other than "the British spoke it".

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    billymaysrip

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    It is an interesting angle, but it doesn't really account for Kojima's recent projects. If he really felt strongly about Japanese being usurped by English, he's doing a bad job of showing it as of late: Death Stranding is primarily being developed in English, and stars a number of actors that don't speak Japanese. I felt the themes of MGSV were in line with his interest in memetics, which has been one of the continual threads of the Metal Gear series.

    Personally, I don't fully understand why people would be "butt-hurt" by English-language signs; perhaps it's because I come from a South Asian country that was colonized by the British and has English as one of the official languages. Here in America, English is slowly losing its spot as the primary language, with Spanish becoming more and more common. I also live in NYC, where Spanish speakers are pretty common, but now you'll see shows on major TV networks (like Jane the Virgin) where actors just speak Spanish and they subtitle it, which was considered crazy only a few years ago. Who knows if things will continue to change!

    I have to imagine the one thing that might stop Chinese from becoming the lingua franca of the future is the number of dialects - many of which are really hard to understand. From the various tones and initials, it's hard to even say what "Chinese" is. It's rather funny, on the topic of Western influence, that one of the most celebrated Chinese writers domestically, Lu Xun, was dead-set on reforming Chinese characters and was one of the first people to translate Western literature in mainland China.

    But blogs like these are why I still browse the GB forums! Very interesting and insightful.

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    MikeLemmer

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    #6  Edited By MikeLemmer

    @jamjyo: Speaking of language wars, I want someone to explain how English overcame Latin as the predominant language in Europe. It's easy to write off its dominance now as a result of the West's cultural influence, but how did the language of some backwater island manage to overthrow the former Roman Empire's most prevalent language centuries ago?

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    Shindig

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    #7  Edited By Shindig

    Rome fell. There's your short answer. Germanic tribes moved in.

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    DocHaus

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    #9  Edited By DocHaus

    Could've ended this blog on a better note than "what some guy on Reddit said," but other than that I enjoyed this piece. It made me look deeper at the cultural revenge angle that Skull Face and Code Talker talked about, especially as the latter hints at this in some of the optional cassette recordings: he lived through the era of Indian Schools in America, where Native American kids were ripped from their families and forced to assimilate into a new culture, facing harsh punishments and beatings if they tried to speak their native Dine. While the English Invasion might be subtle and peaceful now, centuries ago it was aggressive and violent as fuck.

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    Zomgfruitbunnies

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    Having been on both sides of the Pacific, I think this goes both ways. More people in Asia are speaking English and more people in North America are learning Asian languages. I meet a lot American and Europeans in China, and I shouldn't even have to mention how many Asians are immigrating to the Americas. There is an exchange of cultures happening on all sides and people and businesses are adapting. Foreign things are new and exciting, it's natural for art and businesses to gravitate toward new opportunities. Is language invasion real? I dunno, maybe. Or it might just be an inevitable side effect of globalization. It would do us good to remember that culture and language change all of the time, as a result of internal and external influences. There's nothing inherently sacred about customs or tradition. We can only wish things change for the better and to the benefit of all involved.

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