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I can't help thinking this takes the wrong direction entirely. The real solution is to make human languages mono-lingual!
by hxa7241 17y ago
I can't help thinking this takes the wrong direction entirely. The real solution is to make human languages mono-lingual!
- jacquesm 17y agoI live in a country that is 20,000 square kilometers, next to nothing. Within that 100x200 Km rectangle there are 4 languages, 'regular dutch', 'Gronings', 'Frysian' and 'Limburgs', each of those differ from each other so strongly that you'd have to live in a place for a long time to get the hang of it, they're that different. I really don't see how that is even a remotely attainable goal. You can't force people not to speak a language (and besides that, even if you could you probably shouldn't). If we're going to converge on a single language then it will probably be a Chinese/Spanish/English hybrid of some sort, and it will take a very long time (tens of thousands of years ?) before it will happen. And landmasses being separate from each other there will still be plenty of pockets where 'old' languages will linger long after the majority of the world will speak a single language, asymptotically approaching unity.
- mechanical_fish 17y agoYou can't force people not to speak a language You can certainly try. Lots of governments have tried, at one time or another, to suppress minority languages. But as it happens you don't need to stop people from speaking Frysian. You just need to convince them to learn more than one language, which people do fairly easily, as you obviously know very well. [1] Preserving existing languages, while conducting national or international business in a lingua franca, is one thing. Trying to move your internationally-connected business from a lingua franca to a mutually-unintelligible language that you have just created (and which, therefore, isn't being routinely learned at age 2 by kids with native-speaking parents and grandparents) is going to be much more difficult. You are fighting Metcalfe's Law all the way, and now that Google and Stack Overflow have been invented Metcalfe's Law is more powerful than ever. Frankly, if the French or German versions of Python didn't evolve pre-Web, pre cell-phone, pre-Skype, it's hard to imagine them evolving now. [2] I fear they will have to be constructed under laboratory conditions and maintained on life support. --- [1] By "people" I of course mean "people who weren't educated in Central Ohio, USA". [2] Mandarin Chinese is a more interesting case, though. It could be that poor Chinese-character support in computer hardware and software -- and the fact that the Chinese economic powerhouse was just that much smaller -- was what prevented a Chinese-native programming language from evolving before now. (It can't be from a lack of speakers!)
- jacquesm 17y ago247 Ohians take exception to that footnote ;) : http://www.polyglot-learn-language.com/meetings.php?region_id=US::39&session_langue=123 http://www.polyglot-learn-language.com/meetings.php?region_i... As for two, there is a certain status attached to using English in China.
- hxa7241 17y agoI must concede there are indeed implementation difficulties in my revolutionary plan. Chinese(Mandarin?)/Spanish/English seems reasonable; I suppose it could be introduced over several decades. But aren't there serious formal deficiencies with Chinese systems? That would need a major redesign effort . . .
- ilyak 17y agoIt's interesting why the smaller the language is, the dialecty it gets. For example, Russian has no dialects worth speaking about, but Basque has four, for less than million native speakers.
- barry-cotter 17y agoUkrainian (waits for the hordes of Ukrainian nationalist to descend)
- herdrick 17y agoWow, really? I'd never known/noticed that. That's really weird.
- gaius 17y agoEnglish is the de facto lingua franca for the simple reason that I can say something like that and be perfectly understandable to any English speaker (and without a college of cardinals breathing down my neck about the purity of the sacred language).
- pg 17y agoThat is a fine thing, but it is not the reason English is the lingua franca.
- astine 17y agoDoesn't that have something to do with the British Empire?
- mechanical_fish 17y agoYep. Guns. Lots and lots of guns. Big ones.
- gaius 17y agoYou say that as if there were no French or Spanish Empires.
- wheels 17y agoNo, actually. Well, not directly anyhow. English became the lingua franca post-WW2, mainly because of the powerful position of the English speaking countries militarily and economically after the war.