On 06/13/2007 09:16:26 PM, Tim wrote:
On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 09:37 -0700, Tim Alberts wrote: > Here's a thought, how about quit making up new languages and start > combining others. Well, English already does that. I don't know if others adopt words from other languages, like it does. I wasn't aware of there actually being new languages developed, other than colloquial jargon. > It's a global society and it'd sure be nice if we all spoke the same > language. Being American I vote for English (because I don't want to > learn something new), but honestly, I don't care if it's > Spanish, French, Chinese, Russion, Arabic, pig latin, or something > completely new (that is efficient and makes sense). Sure it'd be nice, but I can't see it happening. It's all politics. It's going to be years, maybe centuries, if ever, before we all speak human. ;-)
I can see the attraction of one species wide language. I'm not sure that such a situation is necessarily all that good. From what I've understood (and I'm not a student of languages at all - barely handle 'merican thank you), your birth tongue has a lot to do with how you conceptualize the world. My understanding is that Japanese is excellent at indicating relative social standing. The Inuit with twenty something words for snow may well do a wonderful job of equiping the speaker for survival in a cold, largely frozen environment. English is apparently wonderful for messing with those of us with dyslexia.
And then we haven't begun to look at dialects, pidgen, and other variants.
On a tangent, how many here have heard Gullah (think I spelled that correctly) from the South Carolina/Georgia coast. Pretty much dead now is my understanding, but absolutely wild for a midwestern speaker of 'merican to run into.
