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On a related note: why are we putting up with other languages anyway? I've been asking myself for a long time why we (as in humanity) don't try to standardize o

by jnky 10y ago

On a related note: why are we putting up with other languages anyway? I've been asking myself for a long time why we (as in humanity) don't try to standardize on a language. The language of the Internet is English for the most part, and since the Internet is the greatest facilitator of communication in human history, that standard language might as well be English. I firmly believe the world would be a much better place if people from everywhere could communicate with each other without being inhibited by the language barrier. I understand that this is not something that can be done overnight, but a lot of people learn English as a second langue today, so maybe a switch could be made in a generation or two, as people who don't speak English as a first or second language slowly die out.

mpeg 10y ago
I can't disagree more. The language of _your_ internet is English. Personally it always bothers me to think of how the largest parts of the internet are essentially walled off by language. China has essentially its own version of everything we use day to day, so does Japan, Russia, LATAM ...
- jnky 10y ago
  But that's exactly my point. Instead of having a bunch of barely connected Internets walled off by language, why not standardize language and have one global venue of communication, where everyone can work together? I am German and I often come across this with my friends, all of whom speak English as a second language. Yet they consume mostly the German parts of the Internet out of habit and convenience. But as far as I can tell, they are worse off for it, since they don't have access to a lot of the stuff the Internet has to offer. That is especially obvious when searching for IT/tech/science topics, but also relevant in other contexts.
  - Matt3o12_ 10y ago
    I couldn't agree more! As a German, all my friends always ask me why my phone is in English and they just won't understand how much more the "English Internet" has to offer. Just the other day, we had to look up something for our school and I simply sumerized the first few lines of the English Wikipedia article and my teacher was amazed how quickly I got those information. Furthermore, English allows you to see topics from many different views – people from all over the world express their opinions which is much more then most German Jornalist find relevant/agree with.
    - krebby 10y ago
      I'm the opposite. I'm a native English speaker but I put my phone / computer in German so I can keep up my language skills. It constantly teaches me new constructs in German just by using my phone, and by this point most of the concepts have become second nature to me.
  - fiatjaf 10y ago
    Same here. The "brazilian internet" is terrible, and I see brazilians who do speak English only browsing the internet in Portuguese, everywhere.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    >Instead of having a bunch of barely connected Internets walled off by language, why not standardize language and have one global venue of communication, where everyone can work together? Because I don't want a huge monoculture, and the end goal is not to have "everyone work together in one way" (which sounds like something from the Third Reich), but to let a thousand flowers bloom. Ease of doing business is not the be all end all criterion...
    - jnky 10y ago
      First off, I disagree that a common language means a common culture. There are a lot of distinct cultures that share a language. Personally I don't care that much about the ease of doing business. Rather, I think standardizing on a language would have a real benefit for humanity as a whole. Apart from practical considerations, think about how often people from other countries are somewhat dehumanized as an "other" or "the enemy" without you being able to get a view of the situation from the other side of the fence because of the language barrier. I'm wondering for instance if the Cold War could have happened in a world where both parties share a language while being connected over the Internet. Also, congrats on the unnecessary Nazi comparison.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        >Also, congrats on the unnecessary Nazi comparison. Not meant to offend (didn't even knew the parent was German at the time, thought I was an American), but it wasn't an gratuitous reference either. It's not like someone in an internet forum calling someone a "nazi" because they disagree with them or anything. I legitimately believe that there are plenty of legitimate lessons to be learned (to avoid, of course) from the Nazis, as WWII and the Holocaust is the single most deadly and morally disastrous event of the modern era. And these kind of schemes for "one global government" / "one common language" etc, do have parallels and historical precedents on ideas such that of the Third Reich. An occupied, German speaking Europe, if not world, was indeed one of their stated goals.
        jnky 10y ago
        > Not meant to offend (didn't even knew the parent was German at the time, thought I was an American), but it wasn't an gratuitous reference either. It's not like someone in an internet forum calling someone a "nazi" because they disagree with them or anything. The comment you took your quote from already mentioned that I'm German. That's alright though. I'm not "offended" by the Nazi comparison because of my German heritage. I just wanted to highlight what I perceived to be needless hyperbole that inevitably derails the discussion about the idea at hand by way of Godwin's Law. > I legitimately believe that there are plenty of legitimate lessons to be learned (to avoid, of course) from the Nazis, as WWII and the Holocaust is the single most deadly and morally disastrous event of the modern era. Agreed. > And these kind of schemes for "one global government" / "one common language" etc, do have parallels and historical precedents on ideas such that of the Third Reich. An occupied, German speaking Europe, if not world, was indeed one of their stated goals. Your argument is basically: "The Nazis did X, hence we should never do X - for all X". I think this is a fallacy. There has to be difference between subduing Europe/the world and proposing to standardize language as a tool of communication for greater peace and more collaboration. I don't think choosing a standard language is any more sinister than choosing standard units of measurement or base 10 numbers.
  - yongjik 10y ago
    When the great writers of 1950s envisioned the future of the computers, they depicted a giant centralized repository of all human knowledge, working tirelessly for the benefit of the society, because it was simply unthinkable to them that such a great power would be used for anything less grand. Instead, (borrowing a popular internet meme) we use the computing power to throw birds at pigs. I think you're misguided in looking at the Internet as "one global venue of communication." Users of the Internet don't need a network for global cooperation. They don't need a better world. They need a tool where you can talk to your friends and send them funny cat video (or the latest kernel patch, or whatever they feel like to share at that moment).
  - cortesoft 10y ago
    This will be solved as computer become better and better translators. We will be able to read, write, speak, and listen in whatever language we want, and computers will translate between them for us.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  That's exactly the point. People should stop wasting their efforts to maintain versions of the internet in other languages.
  - mpeg 10y ago
    Cool, let's standardise on Mandarin. What? You can't speak it? Well stop wasting your time maintaining the english version of the internet. You see how discriminatory that sounds? That's the reason there's not a single global language for the internet or otherwise.
    - ArtDev 10y ago
      The common language of the world should be Indonesian. Currently the world language is English though. Learning other languages is not difficult. There is no reason to not learn a new a language.
    - Karunamon 10y ago
      This isn't about discrimination or other trendy buzzwords, just practicality. English, for better or worse, is the standard language of the wider Internet, not to mention many professional fields.
      - izacus 10y ago
        In the western hemisphere perhaps.
        ArtDev 10y ago
        Incorrect. More people speak English in India than any other country in the world. English is the global language (for now), like it or not.
        izacus 10y ago
        While your nitpick is technically correct, we were talking about the language of the internet. Where chinese pretty much dwarfs english.
kyriakos 10y ago
Is this comment for real? I'm really confused If we were to standardise language it would only make sense to standardise to the one spoken by most people in the world and last I checked it was Chinese and Spanish.
- jnky 10y ago
  Yes, my comment is for real. I disagree that the language of choice should be Chinese or Spanish, because as far as I can tell more relevant content exists in English. If however a standard language would be chosen and it was Spanish or Chinese, I would still be in favor of it.
  - 0x0 10y ago
    I remember trying to look up documentation for nginx in its early days. Almost everything was in Russian, and with links and discussion boards also in Russian. That was an eye-opener for me, realizing how it feels when important software/internet information wasn't available in any of the languages I understand, and also that there really are huge parts of the internet that you normally don't see as a mostly-English reading person. Particularly Russian, Japanese and Chinese.
  - sdfin 10y ago
    I'm a Spanish native speaker and I think that one of the pros of English is that it's simpler. English grammar is much easier. Also English is the main language of scientific publications and the most used language on the Internet. I think that a language is just a tool and I would evaluate it only by it's effectiveneness for sharing ideas.
    - programLyrique 10y ago
      I am not a native speaker of English neither Spanish, but I have learnt both languages. I don't think English grammar is easier than Spanish (but that is debatable). But I think every body can agree that the pronunciation of Spanish is much easier, as Spanish is pronounced as it is spelled. Why not using an artificial language specifically built for simplicity, such as Esperanto?
paulojreis 10y ago
Languages shape and are shaped by the environment, by the way the speakers experiences the world. There's the example by Franz Boas, regarding the many words Inuit might have for different kinds of snow [1]. Their language, in a very utilitarian manner, evolved to that state; and, of course, Inuit people's perception of the world is shaped by the fact that "snow" is not a single nor simple concept (they don't see "snow", they see a particular kind of snow with its associated characteristics). Wouldn't using English be a disservice to them, in their environment? Besides the kind-of evolutionary argument (which might be downplayed on a globalised world), you'd have to consider the history and culture which languages carry. There are e.g. many recipes in my mother tongue which are named from historical and social context; all this would be somewhat lost in translation. Obviously you have a point and there would be a lot of advantages on standardising on a language. The great issue is then on weighting pros & cons. Or greatest, even: being able to even begin to consider the cons. Can we really have an objective measure of how much we, mankind, would lose by turning all languages except English in dead languages? Anyway, it doesn't matter much as the biggest obstacle is obviously political, not cultural. [1] which was said to be a hoax, but after all not so much: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...
- jnky 10y ago
  You make a couple of great points and I concede that their would surely be some friction losses. However, my point is that I think the pros outweigh the cons in this instance and that humanity would be better off if everyone could communicate with everyone else.
  - programLyrique 10y ago
    I think that with the progress of automatic translation and interpretation (which is not perfect now, but is likely to progress -- I can't imagine all the current progress in machine learning not being also applied to automatic translation) as well, learning a foreign language for practical reasons could also become useless. No lingua franca anymore...
GuqL 10y ago
Good idea Mr. Trump, but how about a standard programming language that everyone agrees on first?
- ssahoo 10y ago
  That would be JavaScript written in Chinese with localized spanish, comments.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Programming languages are all in English. _if_ you didn't realize, _do_ think about it _for_ a _while_.
  - atomwaffel 10y ago
    Linotte would like to have a word with you. In French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte
fiatjaf 10y ago
I agree with you, and English is not my primary language (nor is it an official language of my country). The medievals had Latin. We have English, and people do have incentive to learn English (while still keeping their regional languages) because almost all knowledge is available in English on the internet. But we see everywhere efforts to "localize" everything from English to other languages, and this is ridiculous. Wikipedia in languages other than English is awful for almost all topics, websites I visit for the first time keep showing me badly-translated versions of their primary English content and I can't get MDN documentation to be shown to be in English, instead of the horrible translations made by voluntary people they automatically show to me.
- programLyrique 10y ago
  Wikipedia in French, and Wikipedia in German are very good. They have each of them the third of the articles of the English Wikipedia (in 2012, source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-languages-on-wikipedia/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-... ). Note also that the German Wikipedia had as many edits as the English ones, with fewer articles, which could be a good indicator of the (good) quality of the German Wikipedia. More generally, there are plenty of very high quality websites in other languages than English on the Internet.
  - megalodon 10y ago
    In addition to this, Wikipedia in Swedish is great and has 1m+ articles in a language spoken by <10m inhabitants.
coldtea 10y ago
>On a related note: why are we putting up with other languages anyway? I've been asking myself for a long time why we (as in humanity) don't try to standardize on a language. Because we value our languages and cultures, thank you very much? Especially if you happened to be born a native English speaking, and you propose this from that vantage point, it comes as borderline racist, and reminds me of this except from Bernard Shaw's Julius Caesar: "Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." English the language of the internet? It is perhaps the language of YOUR internet. The Chinese internet is as big -- and there's the Indian internet, the Spanish speaking internet, and tons more besides. Why not just get rid of other cultures too, and just keep anglo-saxon culture? Imagine how easier things could be then, not only we'll have one language, but we could all relate to the same stuff... Oh, and about those English -- it's dominance in the last centuries is just a historical accident, caused by British and then US power. Even the very term used to describe such a phenomenon, "lingua franca" is not English. The main language used to be Greek, then Latin, then French and English, etc. And that's mostly on the Western part of the world (Europe, US etc) -- that westerners tend to think it's the whole world, but it's hardly 10-20% of the global population. The "lingua franca" could be again very different in 1 or 2 centuries...
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  I prefer to use my regional language when talking to people in my region, and doing local transactions, conversations and contracts in my region, while using English to browse on the internet and use any kind of software. I think it is much more of an insult to keep things as they are, where developers everywhere try to translate software and websites to my regional language, and the result is catastrophic. The level of the translations from English to Portuguese I'm forced to read on the internet is a terrible insult to Portuguese, a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela, it is the horror, the horror.
- jnky 10y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm not a native English speaker and I don't live in an English-speaking country. However, I think I am "allowed" to voice this opinion without being labeled a racist, regardless of my native language. I still think that there should be a standard language. I really don't like that language is often conflated with having a distinct culture. I acknowledge that there is some connection between language and culture, but I don't think having a distinct culture necessitates a distinct language. There are many distinct cultures that share a language already. Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture? Also, some languages like Latin died out, while we still benefit from its speakers cultural achievements.
mickeypi 10y ago
If the internet were used only to publish read-only content, like a magazine, then maybe this would make some sense. But language shapes thought. It actually limits it. If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. People who speak different languages actually see the world in different ways, with different nuances and details. And the internet is highly interactive, collaborative and social. You don't have to look beyond HN to see great examples of this. This means that limiting the internet through a single language means we would be also limiting our ability to form, spread and implement new ideas. Creativity often comes from finding a curious analogy that crosses domains. If one of those domains has only a poor English representation then it's unlikely that the brainsinvolved in an English-only conversation would discover the novel analogy. So no, that would not be good for the internet as canvas of collaboration and communication of ideas and thoughts.
- rspeer 10y ago
  > If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. This is a fairly strong statement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is not widely believed. You can state the hypothesis in various ways, ranging from the strong hypothesis ("you can't think things that aren't in your language", which is clearly false because you can learn new things about language) to weak ("language kinda influences your thoughts"). There is evidence in favor of what I'd call the "extremely weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis": that language can influence the way you judge things that are established by convention such as colors and directions, in experiments that are specifically designed to emphasize these distinctions, sometimes.
gpderetta 10y ago
For science? Legals? Business maybe? yes, there is a chance it could possibly work. For everything else? Politics, literature, journalism, and of course everyday usage? It couldn't possibly work. Let's say you held the whole world population at gun point, forced everybody to learn English and and use it for then year. I'm sure that as soon as you relaxed your iron fist, the various locally used dialects would diverge in a few generations and you would be back to what we are now. The world is not as connected as we like to think.
mcguire 10y ago
Cue reference to Basic English. http://ogden.basic-english.org/ http://ogden.basic-english.org/
statictype 10y ago
Do you also think we should standardise on one programming language and that it would make the world a better place? It would be an incredibly boring world where communication could only be expressed in some lowest common denominator.
jwdunne 10y ago
I'm a native English speaker. I don't really know any other language, though I've studied a bit of the romance languages. I don't think English is a good "standard" language. Despite widespread usage, there are a lot of problems I see with it when compared to other languages. For example, the word read. Which read did I mean? If I spoke it, and meant the other read, was I talking about the colour red? I know, context and all that, but the inconsistent, broad rules often based on context alone isn't that great. I imagine computers would have a bit easier a time with a language with a more consistent structure. I think a good parallel lies in programming languages. PHP is widespread on the web. Should we make it the standard? If I called for that, I'd be served a link to how PHP is a fractal of bad design or similar with a resounding no and perhaps a bit of shame to finish things off nicely. That and in England the whole "St George's day hurkadurr" crap is pretty tedious. I don't want to see memes like "English is the world standard language. Why do we need a polish shop in ENGLAND?!"
- jedberg 10y ago
  This is a constructed language designed to solve most of those problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto People have been pushing for years to make it the standard worldwide language. Incidentally, you can use reddit in Esperanto: https://eo.reddit.com https://eo.reddit.com
  - jwdunne 10y ago
    Esperanto came to mind when reading through the comments here. I first heard about it around 10 years ago but not thought about it since. Certainly renewed my interest!
    - geomark 10y ago
      I actually took an Esperanto class when I was a kid. I'm old now, so that was a long time ago, and it never went anywhere in all the intervening years. I have now learned a tonal Asian language and I don't see how Esperanto would ever be adopted by people who speak such languages.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
RodericDay 10y ago
Making english the lingua franca would be like making javascript the "universal" programming language.

by jnky 10y ago

mpeg 10y ago

I can't disagree more. The language of _your_ internet is English. Personally it always bothers me to think of how the largest parts of the internet are essentially walled off by language. China has essentially its own version of everything we use day to day, so does Japan, Russia, LATAM ...

jnky 10y ago
But that's exactly my point. Instead of having a bunch of barely connected Internets walled off by language, why not standardize language and have one global venue of communication, where everyone can work together? I am German and I often come across this with my friends, all of whom speak English as a second language. Yet they consume mostly the German parts of the Internet out of habit and convenience. But as far as I can tell, they are worse off for it, since they don't have access to a lot of the stuff the Internet has to offer. That is especially obvious when searching for IT/tech/science topics, but also relevant in other contexts.
- Matt3o12_ 10y ago
  I couldn't agree more! As a German, all my friends always ask me why my phone is in English and they just won't understand how much more the "English Internet" has to offer. Just the other day, we had to look up something for our school and I simply sumerized the first few lines of the English Wikipedia article and my teacher was amazed how quickly I got those information. Furthermore, English allows you to see topics from many different views – people from all over the world express their opinions which is much more then most German Jornalist find relevant/agree with.
  - krebby 10y ago
    I'm the opposite. I'm a native English speaker but I put my phone / computer in German so I can keep up my language skills. It constantly teaches me new constructs in German just by using my phone, and by this point most of the concepts have become second nature to me.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Same here. The "brazilian internet" is terrible, and I see brazilians who do speak English only browsing the internet in Portuguese, everywhere.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Instead of having a bunch of barely connected Internets walled off by language, why not standardize language and have one global venue of communication, where everyone can work together? Because I don't want a huge monoculture, and the end goal is not to have "everyone work together in one way" (which sounds like something from the Third Reich), but to let a thousand flowers bloom. Ease of doing business is not the be all end all criterion...
  - jnky 10y ago
    First off, I disagree that a common language means a common culture. There are a lot of distinct cultures that share a language. Personally I don't care that much about the ease of doing business. Rather, I think standardizing on a language would have a real benefit for humanity as a whole. Apart from practical considerations, think about how often people from other countries are somewhat dehumanized as an "other" or "the enemy" without you being able to get a view of the situation from the other side of the fence because of the language barrier. I'm wondering for instance if the Cold War could have happened in a world where both parties share a language while being connected over the Internet. Also, congrats on the unnecessary Nazi comparison.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      >Also, congrats on the unnecessary Nazi comparison. Not meant to offend (didn't even knew the parent was German at the time, thought I was an American), but it wasn't an gratuitous reference either. It's not like someone in an internet forum calling someone a "nazi" because they disagree with them or anything. I legitimately believe that there are plenty of legitimate lessons to be learned (to avoid, of course) from the Nazis, as WWII and the Holocaust is the single most deadly and morally disastrous event of the modern era. And these kind of schemes for "one global government" / "one common language" etc, do have parallels and historical precedents on ideas such that of the Third Reich. An occupied, German speaking Europe, if not world, was indeed one of their stated goals.
      - jnky 10y ago
        > Not meant to offend (didn't even knew the parent was German at the time, thought I was an American), but it wasn't an gratuitous reference either. It's not like someone in an internet forum calling someone a "nazi" because they disagree with them or anything. The comment you took your quote from already mentioned that I'm German. That's alright though. I'm not "offended" by the Nazi comparison because of my German heritage. I just wanted to highlight what I perceived to be needless hyperbole that inevitably derails the discussion about the idea at hand by way of Godwin's Law. > I legitimately believe that there are plenty of legitimate lessons to be learned (to avoid, of course) from the Nazis, as WWII and the Holocaust is the single most deadly and morally disastrous event of the modern era. Agreed. > And these kind of schemes for "one global government" / "one common language" etc, do have parallels and historical precedents on ideas such that of the Third Reich. An occupied, German speaking Europe, if not world, was indeed one of their stated goals. Your argument is basically: "The Nazis did X, hence we should never do X - for all X". I think this is a fallacy. There has to be difference between subduing Europe/the world and proposing to standardize language as a tool of communication for greater peace and more collaboration. I don't think choosing a standard language is any more sinister than choosing standard units of measurement or base 10 numbers.
- yongjik 10y ago
  When the great writers of 1950s envisioned the future of the computers, they depicted a giant centralized repository of all human knowledge, working tirelessly for the benefit of the society, because it was simply unthinkable to them that such a great power would be used for anything less grand. Instead, (borrowing a popular internet meme) we use the computing power to throw birds at pigs. I think you're misguided in looking at the Internet as "one global venue of communication." Users of the Internet don't need a network for global cooperation. They don't need a better world. They need a tool where you can talk to your friends and send them funny cat video (or the latest kernel patch, or whatever they feel like to share at that moment).
- cortesoft 10y ago
  This will be solved as computer become better and better translators. We will be able to read, write, speak, and listen in whatever language we want, and computers will translate between them for us.
fiatjaf 10y ago
That's exactly the point. People should stop wasting their efforts to maintain versions of the internet in other languages.
- mpeg 10y ago
  Cool, let's standardise on Mandarin. What? You can't speak it? Well stop wasting your time maintaining the english version of the internet. You see how discriminatory that sounds? That's the reason there's not a single global language for the internet or otherwise.
  - ArtDev 10y ago
    The common language of the world should be Indonesian. Currently the world language is English though. Learning other languages is not difficult. There is no reason to not learn a new a language.
  - Karunamon 10y ago
    This isn't about discrimination or other trendy buzzwords, just practicality. English, for better or worse, is the standard language of the wider Internet, not to mention many professional fields.
    - izacus 10y ago
      In the western hemisphere perhaps.
      - ArtDev 10y ago
        Incorrect. More people speak English in India than any other country in the world. English is the global language (for now), like it or not.
        izacus 10y ago
        While your nitpick is technically correct, we were talking about the language of the internet. Where chinese pretty much dwarfs english.

kyriakos 10y ago

Is this comment for real? I'm really confused If we were to standardise language it would only make sense to standardise to the one spoken by most people in the world and last I checked it was Chinese and Spanish.

jnky 10y ago
Yes, my comment is for real. I disagree that the language of choice should be Chinese or Spanish, because as far as I can tell more relevant content exists in English. If however a standard language would be chosen and it was Spanish or Chinese, I would still be in favor of it.
- 0x0 10y ago
  I remember trying to look up documentation for nginx in its early days. Almost everything was in Russian, and with links and discussion boards also in Russian. That was an eye-opener for me, realizing how it feels when important software/internet information wasn't available in any of the languages I understand, and also that there really are huge parts of the internet that you normally don't see as a mostly-English reading person. Particularly Russian, Japanese and Chinese.
- sdfin 10y ago
  I'm a Spanish native speaker and I think that one of the pros of English is that it's simpler. English grammar is much easier. Also English is the main language of scientific publications and the most used language on the Internet. I think that a language is just a tool and I would evaluate it only by it's effectiveneness for sharing ideas.
  - programLyrique 10y ago
    I am not a native speaker of English neither Spanish, but I have learnt both languages. I don't think English grammar is easier than Spanish (but that is debatable). But I think every body can agree that the pronunciation of Spanish is much easier, as Spanish is pronounced as it is spelled. Why not using an artificial language specifically built for simplicity, such as Esperanto?

paulojreis 10y ago

Languages shape and are shaped by the environment, by the way the speakers experiences the world. There's the example by Franz Boas, regarding the many words Inuit might have for different kinds of snow [1]. Their language, in a very utilitarian manner, evolved to that state; and, of course, Inuit people's perception of the world is shaped by the fact that "snow" is not a single nor simple concept (they don't see "snow", they see a particular kind of snow with its associated characteristics). Wouldn't using English be a disservice to them, in their environment? Besides the kind-of evolutionary argument (which might be downplayed on a globalised world), you'd have to consider the history and culture which languages carry. There are e.g. many recipes in my mother tongue which are named from historical and social context; all this would be somewhat lost in translation. Obviously you have a point and there would be a lot of advantages on standardising on a language. The great issue is then on weighting pros & cons. Or greatest, even: being able to even begin to consider the cons. Can we really have an objective measure of how much we, mankind, would lose by turning all languages except English in dead languages? Anyway, it doesn't matter much as the biggest obstacle is obviously political, not cultural. [1] which was said to be a hoax, but after all not so much: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there-really-are-50-eskimo-words-for-snow/2013/01/14/e0e3f4e0-59a0-11e2-beee-6e38f5215402_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/there...

jnky 10y ago
You make a couple of great points and I concede that their would surely be some friction losses. However, my point is that I think the pros outweigh the cons in this instance and that humanity would be better off if everyone could communicate with everyone else.
- programLyrique 10y ago
  I think that with the progress of automatic translation and interpretation (which is not perfect now, but is likely to progress -- I can't imagine all the current progress in machine learning not being also applied to automatic translation) as well, learning a foreign language for practical reasons could also become useless. No lingua franca anymore...

GuqL 10y ago

Good idea Mr. Trump, but how about a standard programming language that everyone agrees on first?

ssahoo 10y ago
That would be JavaScript written in Chinese with localized spanish, comments.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Programming languages are all in English. _if_ you didn't realize, _do_ think about it _for_ a _while_.
- atomwaffel 10y ago
  Linotte would like to have a word with you. In French. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotte

fiatjaf 10y ago

I agree with you, and English is not my primary language (nor is it an official language of my country). The medievals had Latin. We have English, and people do have incentive to learn English (while still keeping their regional languages) because almost all knowledge is available in English on the internet. But we see everywhere efforts to "localize" everything from English to other languages, and this is ridiculous. Wikipedia in languages other than English is awful for almost all topics, websites I visit for the first time keep showing me badly-translated versions of their primary English content and I can't get MDN documentation to be shown to be in English, instead of the horrible translations made by voluntary people they automatically show to me.

programLyrique 10y ago
Wikipedia in French, and Wikipedia in German are very good. They have each of them the third of the articles of the English Wikipedia (in 2012, source: http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-languages-on-wikipedia/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2012/06/13/the-biggest-and-busiest-... ). Note also that the German Wikipedia had as many edits as the English ones, with fewer articles, which could be a good indicator of the (good) quality of the German Wikipedia. More generally, there are plenty of very high quality websites in other languages than English on the Internet.
- megalodon 10y ago
  In addition to this, Wikipedia in Swedish is great and has 1m+ articles in a language spoken by <10m inhabitants.

coldtea 10y ago

>On a related note: why are we putting up with other languages anyway? I've been asking myself for a long time why we (as in humanity) don't try to standardize on a language. Because we value our languages and cultures, thank you very much? Especially if you happened to be born a native English speaking, and you propose this from that vantage point, it comes as borderline racist, and reminds me of this except from Bernard Shaw's Julius Caesar: "Pardon him, Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature." English the language of the internet? It is perhaps the language of YOUR internet. The Chinese internet is as big -- and there's the Indian internet, the Spanish speaking internet, and tons more besides. Why not just get rid of other cultures too, and just keep anglo-saxon culture? Imagine how easier things could be then, not only we'll have one language, but we could all relate to the same stuff... Oh, and about those English -- it's dominance in the last centuries is just a historical accident, caused by British and then US power. Even the very term used to describe such a phenomenon, "lingua franca" is not English. The main language used to be Greek, then Latin, then French and English, etc. And that's mostly on the Western part of the world (Europe, US etc) -- that westerners tend to think it's the whole world, but it's hardly 10-20% of the global population. The "lingua franca" could be again very different in 1 or 2 centuries...

fiatjaf 10y ago
I prefer to use my regional language when talking to people in my region, and doing local transactions, conversations and contracts in my region, while using English to browse on the internet and use any kind of software. I think it is much more of an insult to keep things as they are, where developers everywhere try to translate software and websites to my regional language, and the result is catastrophic. The level of the translations from English to Portuguese I'm forced to read on the internet is a terrible insult to Portuguese, a última flor do Lácio, inculta e bela, it is the horror, the horror.
jnky 10y ago
For what it's worth, I'm not a native English speaker and I don't live in an English-speaking country. However, I think I am "allowed" to voice this opinion without being labeled a racist, regardless of my native language. I still think that there should be a standard language. I really don't like that language is often conflated with having a distinct culture. I acknowledge that there is some connection between language and culture, but I don't think having a distinct culture necessitates a distinct language. There are many distinct cultures that share a language already. Even if that was the case, what would be wrong with cultivating a world wide culture? Also, some languages like Latin died out, while we still benefit from its speakers cultural achievements.

mickeypi 10y ago

If the internet were used only to publish read-only content, like a magazine, then maybe this would make some sense. But language shapes thought. It actually limits it. If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. People who speak different languages actually see the world in different ways, with different nuances and details. And the internet is highly interactive, collaborative and social. You don't have to look beyond HN to see great examples of this. This means that limiting the internet through a single language means we would be also limiting our ability to form, spread and implement new ideas. Creativity often comes from finding a curious analogy that crosses domains. If one of those domains has only a poor English representation then it's unlikely that the brainsinvolved in an English-only conversation would discover the novel analogy. So no, that would not be good for the internet as canvas of collaboration and communication of ideas and thoughts.

rspeer 10y ago
> If you can't express something in your language then you are unlikely to even think it. This is a fairly strong statement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is not widely believed. You can state the hypothesis in various ways, ranging from the strong hypothesis ("you can't think things that aren't in your language", which is clearly false because you can learn new things about language) to weak ("language kinda influences your thoughts"). There is evidence in favor of what I'd call the "extremely weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis": that language can influence the way you judge things that are established by convention such as colors and directions, in experiments that are specifically designed to emphasize these distinctions, sometimes.

gpderetta 10y ago

For science? Legals? Business maybe? yes, there is a chance it could possibly work. For everything else? Politics, literature, journalism, and of course everyday usage? It couldn't possibly work. Let's say you held the whole world population at gun point, forced everybody to learn English and and use it for then year. I'm sure that as soon as you relaxed your iron fist, the various locally used dialects would diverge in a few generations and you would be back to what we are now. The world is not as connected as we like to think.

mcguire 10y ago

Cue reference to Basic English. http://ogden.basic-english.org/ http://ogden.basic-english.org/

statictype 10y ago

Do you also think we should standardise on one programming language and that it would make the world a better place? It would be an incredibly boring world where communication could only be expressed in some lowest common denominator.

jwdunne 10y ago

I'm a native English speaker. I don't really know any other language, though I've studied a bit of the romance languages. I don't think English is a good "standard" language. Despite widespread usage, there are a lot of problems I see with it when compared to other languages. For example, the word read. Which read did I mean? If I spoke it, and meant the other read, was I talking about the colour red? I know, context and all that, but the inconsistent, broad rules often based on context alone isn't that great. I imagine computers would have a bit easier a time with a language with a more consistent structure. I think a good parallel lies in programming languages. PHP is widespread on the web. Should we make it the standard? If I called for that, I'd be served a link to how PHP is a fractal of bad design or similar with a resounding no and perhaps a bit of shame to finish things off nicely. That and in England the whole "St George's day hurkadurr" crap is pretty tedious. I don't want to see memes like "English is the world standard language. Why do we need a polish shop in ENGLAND?!"

jedberg 10y ago
This is a constructed language designed to solve most of those problems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto People have been pushing for years to make it the standard worldwide language. Incidentally, you can use reddit in Esperanto: https://eo.reddit.com https://eo.reddit.com
- jwdunne 10y ago
  Esperanto came to mind when reading through the comments here. I first heard about it around 10 years ago but not thought about it since. Certainly renewed my interest!
  - geomark 10y ago
    I actually took an Esperanto class when I was a kid. I'm old now, so that was a long time ago, and it never went anywhere in all the intervening years. I have now learned a tonal Asian language and I don't see how Esperanto would ever be adopted by people who speak such languages.

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RodericDay 10y ago

Making english the lingua franca would be like making javascript the "universal" programming language.