2008/9/5 dex2000 sir48@lite.dk:
This line of thought has been abandoned since the failure of the tower of Babylon. :-) -- Sir48
Babel perhaps and no. The reason the process has slowed significantly is that imperialism gave it a bad name. Which is understandable. The use of force by governments to enforce languages is no longer acceptable. So well fall back on natural processes.
Cornish is effectively dead. Indeed if it wasn't for scholars hobbyists and the Cornish nationalist movement it would be dead. But there are no monolingual Cornish speakers a I seriously doubt if there is much in the way of day to day communication that goes on in cornish. Welsh was pretty much killed of. Massive government support has revived it to an extent but I doubt it would last a generation without that. Even with government support scots Gallic is dieing.
The Irish language has an even higher level of support but isn't looking too healthy. Such is the fate of minor languages in a free country.
Access to a major language gives you access to science, technology ideas and art beyond what can realistically be translated. Indeed a look at the amount the EU spends on translation will tell that the translation model is a failure.
So how do people defend the minor languages. The most popular is cultural. The language is needed to preserve the culture. I take the view that any culture that requires that those within it do not have access to the kind of information that a major language can give is not one who's passing I will morn. Heh the classic case is old apartheid South Africa where the government discouraged certain groups from learning English.
Another popular argument is that it pollutes the local language. I tend not to see why this considered a problem. Living languages grow.
Another argument is the loss of information in that language. Now this is something of a problem. For smaller languages like Fayu it isn't to bad. I don't thin there is a written form of Fayu so the amount of information in Fayu is what a few hundred adults (population estimates are tricky I've seen one of 400) can hold in there head. A fair chunk of that already exists in German and a lot more would be shifted out into a switch over to a major language. Perhaps some information would be lost but I'm not prepared to deny people access to the science, technology ideas and art stored in major languages for the sake of the fairly small amount that would be lost.
Larger languages need more stuff shifted over but since the shift would take longer I imagine that could be done. Where the language had a written form I doubt we would ever lose the ability to read it due to the amount of duel language materials created by the shift.
A world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge is realistically a world that speaks one language.
Thus long term our focus should be more on simple english chinese german french probably russian probably Japaneses and spanish. Than trying to create wikis for all minor languages.