On Jul 9, 8:19 am, Mxsmanic wrote:
David Horne, _the_ chancellor (*) writes:

Mxsmanic wrote:

David Horne, _the_ chancellor (*) writes:

Fair enough- but India still has over 3 times as many people speaking
Hindi as a native language than the number speaking English as a
secondary one.

Not so. There are far more than one billion speakers of English in the world.

I didn't claim otherwise. Re-read the above.

I did. "Speaking English as a secondary one" means all speakers of English,
not just native speakers, and there are far more than one billion such people
in the world. This greatly outnumbers the number of native speakers of Hindi.
Thus, claiming the opposite--to say nothing of claiming that there are three
times as many native Hindi speakers as English speakers--is clearly incorrect.

Oh the irony of it all (obviously Engrish isn't your first language.
Must be French...). Don't read context into the sentence where there
is none:

India still has over 3 times as many people speaking Hindi as a native
language than the number [of Indians] speaking English as a
secondary [language].

I don't know why you think 1 billion people speaking english as a
second language has anything to do with the sentence.

Sheesh. Glad you weren't *my* language teacher.

(As an aside: What about Russian as a second language? It's an (iirc)
ICAO language; in terms of area Russia is the largest country on the
planet, and it has a nice big population. Plus it's pretty damned
easy to read. Although, on the other hand, 10 syllable words are
tough on the radio