From: "Thompson Freeman" <tfreeman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 06/13/2007 09:16:26 PM, Tim wrote:
On Wed, 2007-06-13 at 09:37 -0700, Tim Alberts wrote:
> 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.
I can't see any benefit for one world language but can see a severe
loss from it. We'll pick programming languages as a case in point.
Some programming languages are really good for string manipulation,
perl and so forth. Other languages are really dreadful for string
manipulation but the make up for perl's pathetic math performance,
FORTRAN and its kith and kin. Then we have the languages like lisp
which are good for many things that are hard to express in perl or
FORTRAN.
Having native speakers for different languages is a good thing for
the world. It makes it easier to find someone who can express new
ideas that might not come to mind when someone speaks English,
French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, or any other language
which might become a world language. (Although at the moment it
seems generic English of one flavor or another is at least a second
language for most of the world. It certainly is in China and India.
So that right there makes most of the world when you consider the
English as a primary language nations, right?)
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.
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