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> As a bilingual person yourself I assume you do the same. You would really be willing to give that up? IMO: Language is emergent. The fact that you often swit

> As a bilingual person yourself I assume you do the same. You would really be willing to give that up? IMO: Language is emergent. The fact that you often switch language mid-sentence, or use different languages in different contexts, demonstrates this. I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that English became popular because it was easy to adopt words and phrases from other languages. I suspect that even if we (all people) had a point where we all spoke a single language, our general emergent behavior means that new words, phrases, and dialects would naturally emerge.

newsbinator 6y ago
> our general emergent behavior means that new words, phrases, and dialects would naturally emerge Of course- this, plus geographic separation, is the reason we have so many languages today. But technology and mass media bring to bear forces against language fragmentation that were never seen before historically. Find me a great programmer, anywhere in the world, who can't carry on a fairly competent (not deep obvs) conversation in English. One would necessarily have to read docs in English, or use programming language keywords in English, or even interact with a global community of other programmers in English. If you extend that into every other industry and school, it's feasible for the entire population of the world to be native-level in 1 global language, and for that competence to be maintained for hundreds or thousands of years. Like the Marain language in Iain M. Banks' Culture series.
- gumby 6y ago
  Mass communications can enforce linguistic convergence in a language community (this was an explicit goal in France, for example, though it was largely the culmination of centuries of explicit linguistic imperialism/engineering). But it tends not so much to meld languages together as to make partitions. Even a century ago, it was said, you could walk from Paris to Rome and along the way every village spoke fluidly with the surrounding ones in essentially the same language...yet by the time you got to Rome you were speaking Italian! These days, though the border regions tend to have a lot of bilinguals, the languages are distinct and people a few miles on either side of the border may not Have a common tongue at all. As for language keywords: do you need to speak Italian to play music or do you simply know what “da capo a la fine” means?
- gwbas1c 6y ago
  > Find me a great programmer, anywhere in the world, who can't carry on a fairly competent (not deep obvs) conversation in English I worked with one. They were a Windows driver developer. We were desperate, because there aren't a lot of Windows driver developers anymore.
gumby 6y ago
> I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that English became popular because it was easy to adopt words and phrases from other languages. This is a thing English speakers like to say but all languages do this, and in particular imperial languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian) have reason to do it a lot. Language is so important and so intensely used that all the corners are long since knocked of; no one language is hard for kids to learn and it is equally as easy/ hard to adapt a loan word in any language. Also I hear English speakers (I am one btw) talk about English having an unusually large vocabulary. They have clearly never seen an Italian dictionary!

newsbinator 6y ago

> our general emergent behavior means that new words, phrases, and dialects would naturally emerge Of course- this, plus geographic separation, is the reason we have so many languages today. But technology and mass media bring to bear forces against language fragmentation that were never seen before historically. Find me a great programmer, anywhere in the world, who can't carry on a fairly competent (not deep obvs) conversation in English. One would necessarily have to read docs in English, or use programming language keywords in English, or even interact with a global community of other programmers in English. If you extend that into every other industry and school, it's feasible for the entire population of the world to be native-level in 1 global language, and for that competence to be maintained for hundreds or thousands of years. Like the Marain language in Iain M. Banks' Culture series.

gumby 6y ago
Mass communications can enforce linguistic convergence in a language community (this was an explicit goal in France, for example, though it was largely the culmination of centuries of explicit linguistic imperialism/engineering). But it tends not so much to meld languages together as to make partitions. Even a century ago, it was said, you could walk from Paris to Rome and along the way every village spoke fluidly with the surrounding ones in essentially the same language...yet by the time you got to Rome you were speaking Italian! These days, though the border regions tend to have a lot of bilinguals, the languages are distinct and people a few miles on either side of the border may not Have a common tongue at all. As for language keywords: do you need to speak Italian to play music or do you simply know what “da capo a la fine” means?
gwbas1c 6y ago
> Find me a great programmer, anywhere in the world, who can't carry on a fairly competent (not deep obvs) conversation in English I worked with one. They were a Windows driver developer. We were desperate, because there aren't a lot of Windows driver developers anymore.

gumby 6y ago

> I vaguely remember hearing somewhere that English became popular because it was easy to adopt words and phrases from other languages. This is a thing English speakers like to say but all languages do this, and in particular imperial languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian) have reason to do it a lot. Language is so important and so intensely used that all the corners are long since knocked of; no one language is hard for kids to learn and it is equally as easy/ hard to adapt a loan word in any language. Also I hear English speakers (I am one btw) talk about English having an unusually large vocabulary. They have clearly never seen an Italian dictionary!