[Foundation-l] Klassical Chinese

[geni]

2008/9/8 Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.yu>:
> Fayu is an extreme example. But for even a small language such as Serbian (at
> most around 10 million of speakers), it would be cheaper to translate entire
> English Wikipedia to it than to educate all Serbian speakers in English; not
> to mention that the former is actually doable, while the latter is not.

Oh I don't know the level of English spoken in say Poland is quite impressive.


> I hope you don't think that people are contirbuting to English Wikipedia
> solely so that they could practice their English.

It does appear to be a motivating factor in some cases.

> (Most) human languages arose spontaneously, without conscious effort, and so
> barriers among them are natural and not artificial.

Serbian though is a dialect of Serbo-Croatian where the barrier is
highly artificial (and people now want to divide it further with
Montenegrin).

An increasing number of languages only exist through large scale
government support. Increasing levels of international communication
means that we should see non major languages start to die off.


-- 
geni