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I agree that there's some value in documenting and preserving minority languages. At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevent

I agree that there's some value in documenting and preserving minority languages. At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally.

caio1982 9y ago
That’s why lingua francas develop over time. It does not mean linguistics barriers/gaps should be eliminated, they should be bridged.
Drakim 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. I agree, the language barrier means a lot is lost. But at the same time each story and even way of thinking is flavored by the language it is expressed in. Certain things cannot be fully expressed in another language, the words don't hold the same charge and history. If the entire world were to speak one language tomorrow and nothing else, there would be a great diminishment in the world's art, culture and mythos. So it's not a black and white issue.
- waqf 9y ago
  What's the point in the world having more art, culture and mythos if it doesn't have more that's accessible to any single individual? The best way for each new cultural artifact to reach the most people is for it to be created in a language and culture that the most people share.
  - schoen 9y ago
    This view seems harsh to me because it seems to treat languages and cultures as 100% interchangeable. I can imagine what you described as an extremely important factor for many people, but you seem to view it as the only possible factor. (I'm currently at a crossword puzzle tournament in a foreign language in a foreign country, when I could of course find many such tournaments in my own country... so I guess I've been spending the whole weekend enjoying an experience of appreciating a foreign language in a way that's in some tension with what you describe.)
  - Drakim 9y ago
    Obviously it would be the best if it was accessible to everybody at all times, but that's not the case right now. And my argument is, just getting "rid" of all languages except one would also entail getting rid of a lot of the things you wish to preserve and share.
  - CalRobert 9y ago
    Different languages yield different way of thinking about things. I might not have ever grokked functional programming with Python, even if it's doable, but in Javascript it made sense, and now even makes sense in Python. I didn't understand how to use "whom" in English until I learned (some) German, and I feel that I understand more nuance and subtlety in my own tongue as a result. Same goes for the (sadly nearly dead) subjunctive form. Language appears to be the tool we use not just to communicate, but to encode our thoughts. It gives us a way to wrangle the abstract from something ethereal and unmanageable into a conceivable thing we can handle. Having many different languages yields many different ways of thinking, not just communicating, and we are impoverished for their death. This is a fascinating story about the experience of a deaf person who had no language until their 20's. It affected their thinking in an utterly profound fashion - not just their communication. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/
schoen 9y ago
The language preservation community's answer to this is usually that multilingualism is extremely possible and even common -- although some speakers of extremely powerful languages like English and Chinese might not have as much experience with it. :-) A huge number of people around the world speak at least a local or family language as well as a "language of wider communication"; depending on their situation, they may easily be fully fluent in both. So a preservation-oriented policy or culture would encourage this kind of bilingualism. This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism. [Edit: A commenter below says this approach is less traditional in Esperantism than I thought.] But a similar result could be achieved with, say, English as the main world language, or with people speaking just a handful of regional languages as well as their family languages. One challenge to bilingualism is that a lot of governments don't like it (for many different reasons), while another challenge is economic. Bilingualism is very possible, but people in various circumstances could easily stop viewing it as desirable or important, because language A will get them a job in the city and language B won't, and each language takes at least some time and effort to use and keep up with. (Or if people habitually move far away from their families, they'll have fewer opportunities to practice speaking with their families.) Anyway, there are significant tensions here, but these possibilities don't have to be mutually exclusive as long as people continue to care about their family and local languages and have access to social situations that give them opportunities to use them. And it can even be government policy to try to preserve minority languages while also promoting bilingualism in other more widely-spoken languages.
- Mediterraneo10 9y ago
  > This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome. Naturally, even with Zamenhof’s dreams, in the short term Esperanto or another international auxiliary language would only coexist with the native languages of its speakers. However, it wasn’t until the last fifty years or so that a certain segment of the Esperanto movement has begun to advertise Esperanto specifically as a way to safeguard language diversity by letting people keep their native language but have access to an international auxiliary language. Not all Esperantists agree with this, and through such campaigns one gets the impression that World Esperanto Association and similar organizations are only trying to jump on the wider anti-globalization bandwagon in order to get more attention for Esperanto. Furthermore, Esperanto organizations take a quite schizophrenic approach: if Esperanto is supposed to be only an auxiliary language, why do so many Esperanto organizations praise the creation of original literature (and other cultural output) in Esperanto? Why isn't it encouraging people to write solely in their native language and then only translate it to Esperanto?
apocalypstyx 9y ago
>The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. More like the easier it is to maintain the pretense of understanding others.
jernfrost 9y ago
Language is also about culture and identity. When you give up a language you also give up some of your identity and things you value. For instance I write and use english more than my native Norwegian, however I am highly ambivalent towards making english the national language of Norway. With english comes many ways of looking at the world. For instance for nordic people gender equality is important. I don’t like how the english language is used with respect to women. You got words such as “slut”, “slut shaming” which there are no equivalent to in Norwegian. There isn’t really any good way of describing a women as a slut. Just as there are no good words in english to describe a man as a slut. There are many Norwegian words I am fond of related to our shared values like “dugnad” which is about working togheter doing maintenance, repair, upgrades in your local community. There is no word for it in english because the tradition does not exist in the US or UK. It is something that genuinly worries me as I see shared scandinavian values gradually year after year getting erased and replaced with anglo-saxon values.
- unabridged 9y ago
  Slightly ironic since slut is thought to be derived from the Norwegian words sludd or slutr
  - alephnil 9y ago
    Actually, the word it is derived from still exist in Norwegian (ludder), though it feel a bit archaic in modern Norwegian, and is much less used than "slut" is in English.
- k__ 9y ago
  True story, but I don't know if the goal of everyone being able to communicate is more important than culture. On the other hand, many europeans have no problem in speaking two to three languages, so making English the second language would preserve that culture?
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    If you were going to "make" a language a second language, you'd probably want to go with a language less insane than English.
pjmlp 9y ago
As fluent speaker in several languages, and given that European travellers speak on average three languages (native, resident country and English) I completely disagree. Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages. Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.
- unabridged 9y ago
  >there are many words that never translate well between languages Then it becomes a new word in that language. I think this is why english gains ground, because it eats new words constantly.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Becoming a new work won't be the same as in the original culture, just yet another case of lost in translation. You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities. However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word. Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.
    - Klockan 9y ago
      It works, see for example smörgåsbord -> smorgasbord. They have exactly the same meaning.
    - unabridged 9y ago
      But after reading the definition I completely understand the meaning of it. And if saudade becomes popular enough, eventually it will be usable in everyday english. For example look at schadenfreude.
- 9y ago
Hemospectrum 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure. Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone. You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives. You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation. Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go. If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  That is not a fair statement of what he said - you assume that the culture has not had a long time to preserve its cultural knowledge and that a dying culture produces much (after all it is dying for a reason) and you assume that the person can only speak the dying language. And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost. But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort? edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.
ACS_Solver 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. That is a strong case for having some language, like English, that everyone knows worldwide, in addition to their own languages. Languages aren't a barrier between people. Not having at least one language in common is. The difference is subtle but enormously significant given that people can and do speak more than one language, and that full fluency in 2 or 3 languages is the norm in parts of the world. There is a large amount of culture in every language. My own native language is quite small with no more than 2 million speakers, and for that language to disappear would also mean the loss of a lot of culture, and I do not just mean books and songs but also "everyday history" such as people's diaries, etc. And the loss of stuff we sometimes call untranslateable - not because it's impossible to translate per se perhaps but because there are often words or phrases that carry a particular cultural meaning.
- skummetmaelk 9y ago
  This would be lost anyway as language evolves over time. You really have to study in order to understand old english as an english speaker, or latin as an italian.
  - schoen 9y ago
    Still, (1) Having easy access to the last several generations' literature is very nice! (2) Knowing the modern form of the language is often a huge help to learning the ancient form, so losing native proficiency in modern languages would still be a hindrance to understanding older texts. (3) People can try to slow down language change in order to at least slightly reduce the magnitude of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
  - ACS_Solver 9y ago
    Old English is a fairly poor example because it was basically replaced by another language through conquest. While languages do evolve, it's a gradual process and they remain understandable for centuries. Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe are quite understandable to speakers of modern English, Italian and German. A speaker of Spanish or Italian can learn to read Latin texts even now with relatively little study. When the language of Julius Caesar is separated from modern Italian by 2000 years, the change process was so gradual that culture of the Roman Empire is still very visible in modern societies. That is not comparable to, for example, Mesoamerian cultures that were wiped out in a shorter period of time.
Aloha 9y ago
I think breaking down the language barrier between cultures is key to prosperity and peace. I wonder how many wars, diplomatic incidents and other issues could have been prevented with a common language.
xelxebar 9y ago
> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?
- runeks 9y ago
  > If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code). In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.
noonespecial 9y ago
There's bound to be times where the language is the story.

caio1982 9y ago

That’s why lingua francas develop over time. It does not mean linguistics barriers/gaps should be eliminated, they should be bridged.

Drakim 9y ago

> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. I agree, the language barrier means a lot is lost. But at the same time each story and even way of thinking is flavored by the language it is expressed in. Certain things cannot be fully expressed in another language, the words don't hold the same charge and history. If the entire world were to speak one language tomorrow and nothing else, there would be a great diminishment in the world's art, culture and mythos. So it's not a black and white issue.

waqf 9y ago
What's the point in the world having more art, culture and mythos if it doesn't have more that's accessible to any single individual? The best way for each new cultural artifact to reach the most people is for it to be created in a language and culture that the most people share.
- schoen 9y ago
  This view seems harsh to me because it seems to treat languages and cultures as 100% interchangeable. I can imagine what you described as an extremely important factor for many people, but you seem to view it as the only possible factor. (I'm currently at a crossword puzzle tournament in a foreign language in a foreign country, when I could of course find many such tournaments in my own country... so I guess I've been spending the whole weekend enjoying an experience of appreciating a foreign language in a way that's in some tension with what you describe.)
- Drakim 9y ago
  Obviously it would be the best if it was accessible to everybody at all times, but that's not the case right now. And my argument is, just getting "rid" of all languages except one would also entail getting rid of a lot of the things you wish to preserve and share.
- CalRobert 9y ago
  Different languages yield different way of thinking about things. I might not have ever grokked functional programming with Python, even if it's doable, but in Javascript it made sense, and now even makes sense in Python. I didn't understand how to use "whom" in English until I learned (some) German, and I feel that I understand more nuance and subtlety in my own tongue as a result. Same goes for the (sadly nearly dead) subjunctive form. Language appears to be the tool we use not just to communicate, but to encode our thoughts. It gives us a way to wrangle the abstract from something ethereal and unmanageable into a conceivable thing we can handle. Having many different languages yields many different ways of thinking, not just communicating, and we are impoverished for their death. This is a fascinating story about the experience of a deaf person who had no language until their 20's. It affected their thinking in an utterly profound fashion - not just their communication. http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/91725-words/

schoen 9y ago

The language preservation community's answer to this is usually that multilingualism is extremely possible and even common -- although some speakers of extremely powerful languages like English and Chinese might not have as much experience with it. :-) A huge number of people around the world speak at least a local or family language as well as a "language of wider communication"; depending on their situation, they may easily be fully fluent in both. So a preservation-oriented policy or culture would encourage this kind of bilingualism. This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism. [Edit: A commenter below says this approach is less traditional in Esperantism than I thought.] But a similar result could be achieved with, say, English as the main world language, or with people speaking just a handful of regional languages as well as their family languages. One challenge to bilingualism is that a lot of governments don't like it (for many different reasons), while another challenge is economic. Bilingualism is very possible, but people in various circumstances could easily stop viewing it as desirable or important, because language A will get them a job in the city and language B won't, and each language takes at least some time and effort to use and keep up with. (Or if people habitually move far away from their families, they'll have fewer opportunities to practice speaking with their families.) Anyway, there are significant tensions here, but these possibilities don't have to be mutually exclusive as long as people continue to care about their family and local languages and have access to social situations that give them opportunities to use them. And it can even be government policy to try to preserve minority languages while also promoting bilingualism in other more widely-spoken languages.

Mediterraneo10 9y ago
> This was also the traditional view of the Esperanto movement, which wanted Esperanto to be the unique world-wide language of communication while preserving all of the existing languages through bilingualism This is inaccurate. L.L. Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto – or at least something like it – would eventually replace all other languages. He didn’t care much for language diversity as we would understand it today, and he saw such differences between peoples as divisive and an obstacle to overcome. Naturally, even with Zamenhof’s dreams, in the short term Esperanto or another international auxiliary language would only coexist with the native languages of its speakers. However, it wasn’t until the last fifty years or so that a certain segment of the Esperanto movement has begun to advertise Esperanto specifically as a way to safeguard language diversity by letting people keep their native language but have access to an international auxiliary language. Not all Esperantists agree with this, and through such campaigns one gets the impression that World Esperanto Association and similar organizations are only trying to jump on the wider anti-globalization bandwagon in order to get more attention for Esperanto. Furthermore, Esperanto organizations take a quite schizophrenic approach: if Esperanto is supposed to be only an auxiliary language, why do so many Esperanto organizations praise the creation of original literature (and other cultural output) in Esperanto? Why isn't it encouraging people to write solely in their native language and then only translate it to Esperanto?

apocalypstyx 9y ago

>The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. More like the easier it is to maintain the pretense of understanding others.

jernfrost 9y ago

Language is also about culture and identity. When you give up a language you also give up some of your identity and things you value. For instance I write and use english more than my native Norwegian, however I am highly ambivalent towards making english the national language of Norway. With english comes many ways of looking at the world. For instance for nordic people gender equality is important. I don’t like how the english language is used with respect to women. You got words such as “slut”, “slut shaming” which there are no equivalent to in Norwegian. There isn’t really any good way of describing a women as a slut. Just as there are no good words in english to describe a man as a slut. There are many Norwegian words I am fond of related to our shared values like “dugnad” which is about working togheter doing maintenance, repair, upgrades in your local community. There is no word for it in english because the tradition does not exist in the US or UK. It is something that genuinly worries me as I see shared scandinavian values gradually year after year getting erased and replaced with anglo-saxon values.

unabridged 9y ago
Slightly ironic since slut is thought to be derived from the Norwegian words sludd or slutr
- alephnil 9y ago
  Actually, the word it is derived from still exist in Norwegian (ludder), though it feel a bit archaic in modern Norwegian, and is much less used than "slut" is in English.
k__ 9y ago
True story, but I don't know if the goal of everyone being able to communicate is more important than culture. On the other hand, many europeans have no problem in speaking two to three languages, so making English the second language would preserve that culture?
- StavrosK 9y ago
  If you were going to "make" a language a second language, you'd probably want to go with a language less insane than English.

pjmlp 9y ago

As fluent speaker in several languages, and given that European travellers speak on average three languages (native, resident country and English) I completely disagree. Languages are a way to express culture of a country and there are many words that never translate well between languages, because they express ideas or points of view not present in the target languages. Usually this idea of one language to rule them all, seems to keep coming up from cultures not able to bother to learn anything else other than English.

unabridged 9y ago
>there are many words that never translate well between languages Then it becomes a new word in that language. I think this is why english gains ground, because it eats new words constantly.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Becoming a new work won't be the same as in the original culture, just yet another case of lost in translation. You might translate saudade to mean home sick, missing someone, missing a place, missing an event, not being able to do something, feeling blue, among a few other possibilities. However none of them actually express 100% the same meaning as a native Portuguese speaker might be feeling when he/she says that word, because there is a mix of feelings and situations related in that single word. Or for example, the ways an Eskimo might describe a frozen landscape.
  - Klockan 9y ago
    It works, see for example smörgåsbord -> smorgasbord. They have exactly the same meaning.
  - unabridged 9y ago
    But after reading the definition I completely understand the meaning of it. And if saudade becomes popular enough, eventually it will be usable in everyday english. For example look at schadenfreude.
9y ago

Hemospectrum 9y ago

> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. This is an easy opinion to harbor when you speak a language whose future is pretty much secure. Imagine if you woke up one day and you were the last person who knew a word of English. All the English-language music you've ever heard, all the books and movies, etc., are now totally incomprehensible to everyone you'll ever meet. All copies of them, and indeed, all English text except for whatever's in your pockets, is gone. All the place names you know are removed from the map. All English words borrowed by other languages are gone. Every native English speaker (aside from you) has disappeared, and their very names are unpronounceable to the world's remaining population. Maybe even the Latin alphabet is gone. You get to keep all your memories, but naturally nobody shares them or has reason to believe they actually happened. Most people don't care to hear about them. If they do, they see them as a curiosity, a museum piece to be put in a display case, not something with the slightest relevance to their own lives. You can't even tell English-language jokes anymore. They aren't funny in translation. Of course this leaves you isolated. And of course there's a solution anyone can offer you: Forget about English. Adopt a whole new life where you're a normal person who speaks a normal language that other normal people understand. Your identity as an English speaker is entertaining for about five minutes, but ultimately an inconvenience to society. Hurry up and let it go. If this sounds harsher than what you were trying to say, perhaps you've underestimated what a language is to the people who speak it. It's more than just a list of words.

tomjen3 9y ago
That is not a fair statement of what he said - you assume that the culture has not had a long time to preserve its cultural knowledge and that a dying culture produces much (after all it is dying for a reason) and you assume that the person can only speak the dying language. And even then everybody would try convince that person to translate his culture into the new language or at least to codify the original language so that it isn't lost. But the real solution would have to start doing those things decades ago.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
Is life not harsh? Should the world just stop adjusting to the new global interaction just so that some people can avoid some discomfort? edit: To those downvoting me, can you please explain why? I was asking a serious question. The post above made it sound like that person's comfort was more important than adapting to changing times.

ACS_Solver 9y ago

> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. The fewer such barriers we have, the easier it becomes to understand others. Literally. That is a strong case for having some language, like English, that everyone knows worldwide, in addition to their own languages. Languages aren't a barrier between people. Not having at least one language in common is. The difference is subtle but enormously significant given that people can and do speak more than one language, and that full fluency in 2 or 3 languages is the norm in parts of the world. There is a large amount of culture in every language. My own native language is quite small with no more than 2 million speakers, and for that language to disappear would also mean the loss of a lot of culture, and I do not just mean books and songs but also "everyday history" such as people's diaries, etc. And the loss of stuff we sometimes call untranslateable - not because it's impossible to translate per se perhaps but because there are often words or phrases that carry a particular cultural meaning.

skummetmaelk 9y ago
This would be lost anyway as language evolves over time. You really have to study in order to understand old english as an english speaker, or latin as an italian.
- schoen 9y ago
  Still, (1) Having easy access to the last several generations' literature is very nice! (2) Knowing the modern form of the language is often a huge help to learning the ancient form, so losing native proficiency in modern languages would still be a hindrance to understanding older texts. (3) People can try to slow down language change in order to at least slightly reduce the magnitude of this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_planning
- ACS_Solver 9y ago
  Old English is a fairly poor example because it was basically replaced by another language through conquest. While languages do evolve, it's a gradual process and they remain understandable for centuries. Shakespeare, Dante and Goethe are quite understandable to speakers of modern English, Italian and German. A speaker of Spanish or Italian can learn to read Latin texts even now with relatively little study. When the language of Julius Caesar is separated from modern Italian by 2000 years, the change process was so gradual that culture of the Roman Empire is still very visible in modern societies. That is not comparable to, for example, Mesoamerian cultures that were wiped out in a shorter period of time.

Aloha 9y ago

I think breaking down the language barrier between cultures is key to prosperity and peace. I wonder how many wars, diplomatic incidents and other issues could have been prevented with a common language.

xelxebar 9y ago

> At the same time, each language is a barrier between people, one that prevents ideas to be shared and stories to be told. If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? Calling multilingualism a barrier between people seems a bit myopic to me. What about all anthropologic richness that language diversity teaches us? What about the stuff it's taught us about human psychology? What about the cooperative understanding that is built between people through the act itself of learning a language?

runeks 9y ago
> If all we had was Cobol as the One True Programming Language, we sure would have saved a lot of time reimplementing things. Would we also have missed out on anything important though? The question is: do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? The only reason COBOL is a useful language is because there exists a translator (compiler), that can transform COBOL into a language spoken by all CPUs (machine code). In that sense, COBOL is more a dialect of assembly than a separate language. And it’s only useful because it’s a dialect of this common language — assembly.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > do we use programming languages to share ideas and tell stories, or do we use them to get computers to do stuff for us? Well, it's both of them, just like spoken language Another question is: is the diversity among our spoken languages large enough for this to even matter? My impression is that any single language has enough internal diversity to host any number of paradigms, but they don't change enough to allow for much different things.

noonespecial 9y ago

There's bound to be times where the language is the story.