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No need to be arrogant, I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal. Indeed, I only talked about myself in that comment, precisely to avoid pepp
by devcpp 13y ago
No need to be arrogant, I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal. Indeed, I only talked about myself in that comment, precisely to avoid peppering it with IMHOs.
I never said I was going to dictate anything onto anyone, it's an opinion, and yours is acknowldged. 7 billion+ to go.
>That's presuming that the very notion of a one world language would even work, considering all we know about linguistic mutations.
The US have had immigrants from all other the world a few centuries ago and I have never seen any problems directly related to education with 2-3 generations descendants, so I think it was a safe assumption. It can be discussed.
>What you want is akin to, "Why are we wasting all this time fighting cancer when we could be achieving spaceflight?"
Not really. IMO, it is actually much more akin to an engineer proposing that we set a standard so we could stop focusing on component integration so much, and actually get to work. I think many engineers prefer standards to having a large variety of systems that achieve the same things, so I see no reason why that wouldn't apply to languages.
- saraid216 13y ago> I never indicated that I thought my opinions were universal. This wasn't the problem. The problem was that your opinion was to have a universal language. This is textbook imperialism. This is why English has such major influences from French and Latin when it's essentially a Germanic language. Because a couple of empires invaded England and imposed their language. > The US have had immigrants from all other the world a few centuries ago and I have never seen any problems directly related to education with 2-3 generations descendants, so I think it was a safe assumption. It can be discussed. The US prints out reams of extra paperwork precisely so that it can be offered in multiple languages. The US fought and continues to fight proxy wars dealing with how these immigrants are integrated into the culture. New York City used to be a battleground between the Italians and the Irish. Read just about any significant span of American history and you'll find a disagreement between two different sets of immigrants. Don't need no West Side Story to explain it. Of course, at the same time, the US invented the network standard dialect of English while making fun of Californian versus Midwestern versus New England versus Southern accents. Odd... those are also some of the clearest political battlefield lines historically. And it's the US who is internationally laughed at for having the least informed and most cross-culturally inept population in the world. Furthermore, do you really want the US to be the de jure overlord of the entire world? Because I don't. And lastly, linguistic mutation. Even if you buy into the Chomskyian notion of a universal grammar inherent in the biological human brain, you still have the fact that language evolves differently for different groups of people and there isn't any way to reliably intermingle them on a regular basis unless you use top-down imposition. > IMO, it is actually much more akin to an engineer proposing that we set a standard so we could stop focusing on component integration so much, and actually get to work. I think many engineers prefer standards to having a large variety of systems that achieve the same things, so I see no reason why that wouldn't apply to languages. So, basically, you want to do this: http://xkcd.com/927/ http://xkcd.com/927/ Protip: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Esperanto
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- deleted 13y ago[deleted]