6 ms·

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather th

It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, in addition to their native tongue. It might as well as be English rather than any other language. The other options are Spanish, French, Hindi, Chinese, or Arabic. It makes little difference as each of these are not going extinct any time soon.

gaius 8y ago
As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.
- KozmoNau7 8y ago
  Think of the wars over which language should win out.
- iforgotpassword 8y ago
  You kinda did this, unintentionally mostly, which just resulted in every country coming up with their own incompatible encoding. Unicode tried to unify this mess again.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.
  - gaius 8y ago
    Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX
    - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
      > Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX So it isn’t enough that we have to be limited to ASCII, we have to be limited to only one of several typesetting engines as well? Your claim above that ASCII ought to be enough was already odd, but to defend it now you are going into even more absurd territory. Furthermore, TeX’s feature set does indeed include a few basics, but it still lacks some typesetting features later made available in Unicode. This is one reason why modern TeXnicians appreciate being able to typeset TeX-formatted documents with Unicode characters included thanks to xetex.
  - frockington 8y ago
    What is the proper use of curly versuss straight quotation marks? Do they serve a purpose other than style?
    - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
      They provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many other features (take a look at e.g. Oxford University Press’s in-house style guide) – have been a feature of professional English-language typesetting. The public has grown used to them, and typesetting that fails to employ such things tends to look cheap and amateur (and therefore untrustworthy and not worth buying or citing) to a readership that publishers are trying to target.
- weberc2 8y ago
  I’m guessing computers will get really good at translating between a at least a handful of prominent world languages. Think a fantastic Google translate with a flawless UI.
colanderman 8y ago
This is the idea behind Esperanto, the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second, to avoid privileging native speakers and promulgating hegemony. (Granted, Esperanto vocabulary and orthography is quite Euro-centric.) Learning a second language is difficult, especially one very unlike your native tongue. Native speakers of the de facto lingua franca always have a first-order advantage.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  The problem about Esperanto (aside from Eurocentrism) is that it has no real bulkhead to start from, unlike (to pick Esperanto-origin-era competitors) say French, English or Spanish.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    Two other problems: 1) it's eclectic (i.e. its vocabulary is assembled using words belonging to other European languages), and 2) unlike English, it uses diacritics.
    - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
      1) English is the poster child of eclecticity; 2) diacritics aren't exactly a huge stumbling block.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  > the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second The Esperanto movement does not strictly stipulate that. The phenomenon of denaskuloj, i.e. native Esperanto speakers (children born to parents who use Esperanto as their home language) is something that the Esperanto movement has been proud of for many decades now. Now, these native speakers might not get that much “privilege”, just some higher level of respect, but still, during my time in the Esperanto movement, I saw on various occasions grammatical disputes presented to a denaskulo in order to provide a "decisive" answer. If Esperanto scaled instead of remaining its niche pastime, it is easy to imagine first-language speakers of the language gradually being taken more seriously than second-language learners.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
> It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, It's obviously not necessary as it is still far from the case that everyone speaks English, nor has it been the case historically. It is true that lingua francas, link languages which acquire large numbers of non-native speakers are a common feature over time, spreading from obvious utility (trade etc.)

gaius 8y ago

As something of an idealist I can’t help but think Unicode was a terrible mistake. We could have used ASCII as a carrot to get the whole World speaking a common tongue. Think of the wars that could have been avoided, the scientific progress.

KozmoNau7 8y ago
Think of the wars over which language should win out.
iforgotpassword 8y ago
You kinda did this, unintentionally mostly, which just resulted in every country coming up with their own incompatible encoding. Unicode tried to unify this mess again.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
One of your several mistakes here is to assume that Unicode is necessarily connected with multilingualism. In fact, ASCII is not enough for even typesetting English at a professional level: various kinds of non-breaking spaces and hyphens, curly quotation marks “” instead of straight "", ligatures, etc. are all things that any professional English-language publisher requires but are beyond the ASCII set.
- gaius 8y ago
  Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    > Those can all be expressed in ASCII TeX So it isn’t enough that we have to be limited to ASCII, we have to be limited to only one of several typesetting engines as well? Your claim above that ASCII ought to be enough was already odd, but to defend it now you are going into even more absurd territory. Furthermore, TeX’s feature set does indeed include a few basics, but it still lacks some typesetting features later made available in Unicode. This is one reason why modern TeXnicians appreciate being able to typeset TeX-formatted documents with Unicode characters included thanks to xetex.
- frockington 8y ago
  What is the proper use of curly versuss straight quotation marks? Do they serve a purpose other than style?
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    They provide some further visual disambiguation. But still, even if they are mere “style”, style matters. For long ages now those quotation marks – and many other features (take a look at e.g. Oxford University Press’s in-house style guide) – have been a feature of professional English-language typesetting. The public has grown used to them, and typesetting that fails to employ such things tends to look cheap and amateur (and therefore untrustworthy and not worth buying or citing) to a readership that publishers are trying to target.
weberc2 8y ago
I’m guessing computers will get really good at translating between a at least a handful of prominent world languages. Think a fantastic Google translate with a flawless UI.

colanderman 8y ago

This is the idea behind Esperanto, the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second, to avoid privileging native speakers and promulgating hegemony. (Granted, Esperanto vocabulary and orthography is quite Euro-centric.) Learning a second language is difficult, especially one very unlike your native tongue. Native speakers of the de facto lingua franca always have a first-order advantage.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
The problem about Esperanto (aside from Eurocentrism) is that it has no real bulkhead to start from, unlike (to pick Esperanto-origin-era competitors) say French, English or Spanish.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  Two other problems: 1) it's eclectic (i.e. its vocabulary is assembled using words belonging to other European languages), and 2) unlike English, it uses diacritics.
  - _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
    1) English is the poster child of eclecticity; 2) diacritics aren't exactly a huge stumbling block.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
> the movement behind which further stipulates that the common second tongue should be universally second The Esperanto movement does not strictly stipulate that. The phenomenon of denaskuloj, i.e. native Esperanto speakers (children born to parents who use Esperanto as their home language) is something that the Esperanto movement has been proud of for many decades now. Now, these native speakers might not get that much “privilege”, just some higher level of respect, but still, during my time in the Esperanto movement, I saw on various occasions grammatical disputes presented to a denaskulo in order to provide a "decisive" answer. If Esperanto scaled instead of remaining its niche pastime, it is easy to imagine first-language speakers of the language gradually being taken more seriously than second-language learners.

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

> It is necessary that there should be a common global language that everyone speaks, It's obviously not necessary as it is still far from the case that everyone speaks English, nor has it been the case historically. It is true that lingua francas, link languages which acquire large numbers of non-native speakers are a common feature over time, spreading from obvious utility (trade etc.)