[Foundation-l] New projects opened

[Milos Rancic]

On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 10:54 PM, Mark Williamson<node.ue at gmail.com> wrote:
> I disagree. All languages that have had a chance of becoming world
> lingua francas - English, French, perhaps Spanish, are some recent
> examples - were not only the languages of economic or political
> powers, they were also the languages of vast colonial empires.
>
> Is it likely that English would be the second working language of
> India without India's colonial past? Would French be the official
> language of dozens of African countries if they had never been ruled
> over by France? Chinese has a very large speaker population but the
> number of speakers outside of the Han ethnic group and/or the PRC is
> negligible. Almost all non-Han speakers of Chinese are ethnic
> minorities in the PRC, virtually all Chinese speaking people outside
> of the PRC are ethnic Chinese. Is this because Chinese is difficult to
> type (which it isn't, by the way, on modern computers)? Highly
> unlikely. People don't choose to learn or not learn languages because
> of the perceived ease of typing or even the perceived difficulty of
> learning that particular language, they do it because of the perceived
> level of prestige and economic and political power it will bring them.
>
> What could the motivations be for an aspiring professional in for
> example Congo be to learn Chinese? There are few and almost all of
> them are related to business dealings with China.
>
> Hindi is in a similar position - it has quite a large number of
> diaspora speakers, but outside of a single country and/or national
> origin, it has virtually no reach.
>
> Mark
>
> On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 12:39 PM, Bod Notbod<bodnotbod at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:59 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> (What's the next lingua franca going to be? When?)
>>
>> It would have been Chinese if you could get a workable keyboard.

There won't be new lingua franca. ~30 years is now very small amount
of time for changing behavior of the global society, while it is very
large amount of time for machine translators. (Translation engines
between similar languages are very very good now.)

I suppose that our next stage is babelfish.

But, what's the stage after that? Probably, some more sophisticated
babelfish... If one planet would be colonized with 50% of Dutch and
50% of Korean population -- assuming that relations between those
groups are very well and without oppression toward young children --
the next generation will speak some Anglo-Dutch-Korean as a native
language, which wouldn't be sanctioned immediately, but in a couple of
generations. So, they'll still need babelfish to communicate with
people from other colonies.