It should go beyond that, a second official language, so that all signs, documents and government interactions should be just as valid in both languages.
I think that if it were to become a official second language that would be a natural second step, if nothing else just for efficiency in regions that currently have multiple languages.
I am fluent in one language and speak three others passably, and have order-a-beer/ask-for-a-toilet/get-directions ability in a few others. It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it? The one I am fluent in is not the language of any of my ancestors if I go back just a couple of generations. So what?
My children are natively fluent in two languages. Neither of their languages is a second language.
Which language should I tell them is their primary language?
Are you trying to make a point or..? It's a bit unclear. People can have multiple languages they're native in, that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English.
> that doesn't mean we should try to replace every language with English
Where did I say that everyone should speak only English? I do not care what language people speak.
> Are you trying to make a point or..?
Why are you being unkind? Or hostile, or whatever this is?
I was asking a question. I understand that people think they will lose something if they speak a different language. My native language is not the same as any of my ancestors from just a few generations ago, and I want to know what difference it makes?
Speaking a different language than your great great great grandfather ("a few generations ago") is not always very impactful, though even this means you can no longer read letters or poetry or novels that they may have written or just loved. You can no longer understand laws that they might have obeyed, understand speeches that influenced them, and so many other things that keep a culture going beyond generations.
However, that pales in comparison to what the transition means, not speaking the same language as your grandparents. You get a huge gulf of distance from relatives who, for the majority of humanity, are some of their most beloved and close relationships.
Language and culture go hand in hand. I don't understand how you've learnt 1 fluently and 3 passably and are deemingly completely missing this aspect to it. So to standardize language is to attempt to standardize culture which I would imagine we don't wanna do, right?
And it doesn't matter what your ancestors spoke, of course. But it does matter what those around you speak, now. Neither the person you originally responded to or me have mentioned ancestors.
Usually people have one primary language which is usually the one predominantly used in the home they grew up in (or maybe the one used for their primary education).
If you have multiple, that's fine, but your disregarding the reality for 90%+ of people if you don't think most people have a language that is their "primary".
> It does not matter to me which language I use to communicate. Why should it?
For most people language is tied to their culture and history. I'm just saying that we should not mandate that people use a certain language as their "primary". It would be nice if we had a global way to passably communicate though.
I think something changed culturally as well. When my parents grew up any moderately educated person was expected to speak different several different languages.
Very few in my generation speak three languages, even in my rather international field. Yet my older colleagues speak french, German and Spanish like it is nothing. And my international colleagues often speak 4+ languages.
I am fine with English being a de facto Lingua Franca, but I can't help feeling something has been lost.
Speaking and using professionally is not the same. One of my friends speaks 6-7 languages, but can't use most of those for work, it's better to know 2 sufficiently well than imagining yourself being a polyglot.
Yeah, I get what you are saying. I would never want to mandate any language. I think it is dumb when countries have official languages as opposed to e.g. operating languages.
I just think that people are more worried about the homogenization of language than they need to be. In fact, with how quickly culture is homogenizing around the world, I think that it is even possible that language differences outlast cultural differences over the medium term. Teenagers in a lot of the world I have been to in the past years dress/behave/express themselves ... not very differently.
Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
> Everywhere I go in the world, old shit is different, but modern shit is depressingly the same, or really similar anyway.
That seems like a very reductive take. Of course trends and culture is more global since we now communicate globally, but there are definitely regional cultures and values and those are expressed many different ways.
If I travel from my small european city to a city in the american midwest or a city in nigeria that are going to be massive differences regardless if the teens are doing the same tiktok dance or whatever metric of homogenization you pick. But in all of those places I almost everyone I will meet can speak english.
I imagine having offical languages dictates that all the state functions have to operate in said official languages. If you have a government office for example, your website, pamphlets, administered tests etc for example have to be printed in the official language. Would be a mess if that was not enforced
Having worked in an international organization where most people communicated in English and most people were ESL, going back to a company where my native language was the norm was a huge benefit in clarity of communications.
Languages certainly form how we think, a universal language undoubtedly leads to worse communication and worse ideas.
Sure, but how would I teach my children English as a first language, when my English is only ESL. And even if I could, I would never do that, as a diversity in languages directly leads to a diversity in thought.
I agree about diversity in languages being a good thing. I also see minor languages gradually dying out.
First languages do change with time so it does happen, and it can be induced to happen. My grandparents all spoke English as a first language, but if you go back a few more generations only one of my great (or possibly great great) grandparents ancestors would have done.
Diversity in thought is great, but I don't think that distinct native languages are a prerequisite for that. Throughout history, the societies that were able to achieve the greatest accomplishments, according to most any measure, are those with the most people using the same language.
I (native dane) work in robotics. Our company has a disproportionate amount of non-danes employed, who also are not native english speakers. I've been reading and writing english since I was very young, but having almost never spoken it makes face-to-face communication challenging. And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to. It's really a Tower Of Babel type of situation here. Effective communication is a frustrating chore, especially since we're talking about highly technical subjects. Upper management thinks our diversity is a strength, but I'm just not seeing it from where I'm sitting.
In my next job, this is a situation I will seek to avoid.
> I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to.
This is really rude of them, and it's something management should work very hard to fix. Because as you say, in addition to being rude it's terribly inefficient for the company. If they employ people from all over the world, they should probably mandate English as the only allowed language in just about any situation.
If you have speakers of different languages in a conversation or group, it's just common sense to use a language everyone can understand and use.
Yes, it's easier for Danes to speak Danish when four out of five in the group understand it, but standing around there being the fifth person who can't understand a word of what's being said is not a nice experience.
>And not only that, but I encounter colleagues conversing in Hindi, Russian, Hungarian, Polish, Greek etc. Any of those conversations is one I'm locked out of, and unable to contribute to.
I had that happen on occasion, every time it felt pretty exclusionary and somewhat rude, so I tried to always speak in english if that was the only common language among people tangentially involved in a conversation.
But even that is certainly not ideal, it has been pretty clear to me that, even though I have absolutely no problem speaking and understanding English, talking to a native speaker in my native language leads to much quicker and clearer communication.
Driving on the left
Speaking creole
The metric system
The 09/06/2024 date format
The Kelvin scale
The french decimal time system
The AuthaGraph projection
Would you please stop posting low-value comments that break the site guidelines? They explicitly ask you not to (a) go on about downvotes or (b) sneer at the rest of the community.
I can agree on all of the points except "Speaking English". The way things are going it's going to be either that or mandarin regardless, but there's so much culture in language that IMO it'd be a shame to hurry it up.
English is more likely than Mandarin, because lots of people (including the mainland Chinese working in sectors that interface with the outside world) can speak some English, but very few people outside China speak any Mandarin.
I don't know enough about Mandarin to have an opinion on it.
The language has more characters than what fits on a keyboard, right? I wonder how typing on a keyboard feels. I guess only people who have experience in writing Mandarin and English can compare the feeling.
Writing Mandarin with pinyin is way easier, you just type the first letter of each sound in a sentence. “I like to eat ice cream” is 我喜歡吃冰淇淋, written entirely by the letter sequence wxhcbql.
Not worth discussing until some serious improvements to the spelling system. Currently learning it requires learning two obnoxiously independent systems, the written and the spoken.
On a serious note: compared to the other inconsistencies, this seems like a very minor one. If we wanted to standardize time, we should agree on ONE timezone across the world. But of course that seems almost impossible: Having to convince 8 billion people on a change that has little benefit in their everyday life.
How would one timezone work? The sun sets at 8:00 in one place and sets at 20:00 on the other side of the world?
In terms of working or traveling between time zones, it seem like it would be much harder to remember the fact that, for instance, people in New York stop work when the clock says 17:00 and people in LA work until 20:00, than to remember that they are three time zones apart.
IIRC the more serious proposals for a global time scheme deliberately abandon the old 24:60:60 so that daylight expectations, locally as they would be, would have to be re-learned anyways. Up to that point that doesn't sound that bad to me. But where i don't see any chance is durations, how many seconds/minutes/hours. I suspect that a change to duration units would be even harder to adapt to than metrification of lengths.
I propose infinite timezones, you simply calculate the true noon from your latitude. Smartphones can do that for us.
The time at your workplace would be some minutes off the time at your home. And when your phone is off, you are screwed.
It's like in the old days before railroads when every town had it's own time, but even worse.
That’s the opposite of what we should do. If a plant monoculture is susceptible to diseases, then a language monoculture is susceptible to mind-viruses. What would the world look like now if every country spoke German in 1933?
That was already sort of the case though, at least among the intellectuals.
Up until WWII, a huge part of the scientific discourse was held in German. The language's relevance had waned a bit by 1933, but it was still a widely spoken and understood language in Europe, much more so than today.
Mostly the same as today, if that was the only difference?
Same language is a result of cultural similarity much more so than a cause for it. If there is no political or cultural pressure to speak the same language, they relatively quickly diverge.
What I was implying is, language barriers are a firewall against charismatic, manipulative psychopaths trying to brainwash you into doing unspeakable things.
They do so by turning "he has a point" into "who is this funny little moustache guy and why does he sound so angry?"
But having one gives a platform for those narratives to spread and potentially become dominant.
To be clear, I'm not saying freedom of press between countries should be eliminated (quite the contrary!), only that diversity of languages should be preserved. In my opinion, this does two things:
1. Allows more diverse ideas to come into being, as language directly affects on one's way of thinking.
2. Slows the spread of dangerous ideas, due to some of their appeal (or the charisma of their advocates) being lost in translation.
While I fully agree with you that the diversity of languages should be cherished, not squashed, I don't think those are good arguments. We've gone over argument 2 and why I don't think it works in the other thread.
For argument 1, that is known as the Sappir-Whorf hypothesis, is mostly discredited, at least in its stronger versions. By and large, people speaking the same language have a huge variety of differences of ideas, but you can also find areas with remarkable cultural similarity between people speaking different languages.
For an example of why this is not true in practice, look at Canada. The French speaking parts of Canada have far more in common with the rest of Canada and with the USA then they do with France, and even more so compared to Guinea or French Guiana.
The reason why language diversity should be preserved instead is that it gives access to a trove of cultural history that would be lost and forgotten, at least outside of scholarly circles, if it people could no longer understand it. This is by far the most problematic for oral cultural history, but even for written culture it is highly relevant.
Sapir-Whorf states that language affects the way you perceive reality. I only stated that it affects your way of thinking, i.e. the set of ideas you are capable of having. It is ironic that the existence of this very concept in the English language, "Sapir-Whorf", has a gravitational effect that makes one associate similar ideas with it and automatically label them as wrong. This is a tool very often used in politics, and it only works if the idea you want to discredit has a sufficiently close relative in your language with a succinct name and a negative connotation.
For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.
As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.
The Sappir-Whorf hypothesis is precisely related to cognition, ideas, and not perception of reality. In fact, the only aspect of linguistic relativism that was somewhat confirmed was the part related to color perception, so you seem to have this reversed.
One of the more infamous notions of purely cognitive S-W that dorm peddle that is entirely discredited is the idea that people who speak gendered languages tend to associate "feminine qualities" with feminine nouns describing even inanimate objects, and "masculine qualities" with the reverse. This has been measured in various ways and is simply false.
I would bet that your example of "foreigner hatred" vs "xenophobia" would also turn out to be wrong if studied. The much, much more likely reason Japanese people don't consider themselves xenophobic is that people don't typically think of themselves as holding bad views. I would bet lots of English-speaking white nationalists also don't consider themselves xenophobic for the same reason.
Finally, I think your outlook on the level to which Hitler manipulated the German people is highly optimistic about human nature. I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII, they wanted to do most of that and all they needed was someone who would allow and organize them. And to be clear, I'm not only speaking of the German people here - atrocities against Jewish people and other minorities were committed in many European countries where people didn't speak an ounce of German, they just needed to be let loose. Including, shamefully, my own country (Romania), to be clear that I'm not just pointing fingers at others.
Sapir-Whorf, in its original form, claims language influences your perception of reality. Its "stronger" form, linguistic determinism, claims language determines your thoughts. I claim neither of those things. I claim that, since language, as a highly intellectual cognitive function, obviously has some sort of effect on your thoughts (but not to the point of determining them), having more of them makes us, as a collective, capable of having ideas we might not have had otherwise, some of which might be effective vaccines against mind-viruses (or mind-viruses themselves, in which case it's lucky we're not a monoculture).
That language affects thinking isn't the extraordinary claim, its contrary is. It is hard to believe that your method and efficiency of solving a problem is invariant to the format in which you represent that problem, especially when that format can be so varied.
> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII
They needed a decade of sophisticated propaganda and indoctrination, and even a change in the language itself, with words like "Übermensch" and "Lebensraum" being added to the dictionary. It didn't happen overnight.
I also don't know where you're getting the claim from that the countries where the Holocaust took place "didn't speak an ounce of German", given that a large part of it took place on former Austria-Hungary territory where German was presumably the most prevalent second language. But even supposing they didn't, how would that disprove my point? I'm not saying language barriers make you immune to mind-viruses, I'm saying they can slow down their spread. The effects of this one were devastating, but they could have been much more devastating without any language barrier whatsoever. Because one country I can realistically believe not to have spoken an ounce of German is the UK. And they had no shortage of like-minded individuals either, but the local moustache man, Mosley, while said to be a good orator, was no Hitler. I think the public having the ability to understand what Hitler was saying would have been demoralizing at best and galvanizing at worst. It definitely wouldn't have helped Churchill's cabinet, which at one point already had half the mind to strike a deal with him.
I'm aware that this is just a form of security through obscurity, but practice shows that security through obscurity often works. Might not be the strongest argument for preserving languages, but in my mind, a language monoculture is just like any other monoculture, with all its drawbacks.
They had Europe's most accomplished public speaker and its best propagandist at their disposal, both of whom had a better understanding, or at least a more insidious approach, to crowd psychology than perhaps anyone at the time.
This is a cute ideea and one I'm sure many have believed over the years, and one that Charlie Chaplin perhaps made most famous with his gibberish-spewing dictator character.
However, in my opinion, the truth is that Hitler's ideas and the way they fit German culture at the time were far more powerful than his speech-giving skills. His speeches and style did not resonate with American or British or French audiences (to the extent that they didn't - he was in fact a pretty popular politician all over Europe before he began attacking them) not because they didn't understand German, but because they weren't Germans.
His speeches preyed on German bitterness after losing World War I, they preyed on German poverty because of the reparations, they preyed on German conceptions of national pride, and, of course, they preyed on German antisemitism and xenophobia more generally.
Many of those elements were not present in, say, France (who had defeated Germany in the recent war), so even if the French had spoken German, they certainly wouldn't have been swayed with arguments about how they had humiliated Germany, or about how Germany needs more "living space". The Spanish or the Polish would not have been swayed by Hitler's notion that blond blue-eyed Germans are the chosen people who rightfully rule the world. And the Japanese would have barely even understood what he was talking about, even if they had all been native German speakers.
And conversely, Hitler had no shortage of allies before and during WWII, not because Mussolini or Hirohito or Stalin were such fine speakers of German that they were mesmerized by his carefully crafted speeches, but because they liked his actual ideas and plans for conquest, regardless of language.
Look at what date it is today, and then try to guess which one of these format is the one they are referring to.
Also: one of these is an ISO standard format. The other one is a format that no one would use. (DD/MM YYYY is in use, but no one would write YYYY-DD-MM.)
Nobody ever should write YYYY-DD-MM, its the worst of both worlds with the structure being both in a non-logical order AND not conforming to how dates are pronounced.
Just in case it isn't clear, the usual European date format (DD-MM-YYYY though the separators vary) reflects the usual pronunciation — even in Britain and Ireland, where today is the ninth of June.
Just use uppercase numbers for the month and lowercase for the day. That way you will always know which is more significant without any prior knowledge of how the order of the digits in decimal numbers work.
