[Foundation-l] Klassical Chinese

[geni]

2008/9/5 dex2000 <sir48 at 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.

-- 
geni