Do you see where it says "Next Blog»" on top of the page? I sometimes click that link and suddenly I'm in some unknown person's blog. A lot of times that blog is written in some language I don't understand but luckily English is the lingua franca of the blogosphere or anywhere else online or irl for that matter. Other times the next blog redirects you automatically to some... well let's just call them the shadier back alleys of Internet.
But the next blog is often enough so well written and/or that interesting that it's worth going trough a few bad blogs and the questionable ?free?/commercial side of the net.
Yes it happens that I'm bored when I'm here...
I tried that once....and was fairly frightened by what I found, so I don't do that any more!!
ReplyDeleteGASP.....I still have Mirelle's baby gift.....good thing it's for when she's bigger!!!! EEK, I am the WORST mail-er ever....now you know! Sorry baby girl...it's coming.....
I live in London and if anyone says to me “everyone speaks English” my answer is “Listen and look around you”. If people in London do not speak English then the whole question of a global language is completely open.
ReplyDeleteThe promulgation of English as the world’s “lingua franca” is impractical and linguistically undemocratic. I say this as a native English speaker!
Impractical because communication should be for all and not only for an educational or political elite. That is how English is used internationally at the moment.
Undemocratic because minority languages are under attack worldwide due to the encroachment of majority ethnic languages. Even Mandarin Chinese is attempting to dominate as well. The long-term solution must be found and a non-national language, which places all ethnic languages on an equal footing is essential.
An interesting video can be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_YHALnLV9XU Professor Piron was a former translator with the United Nations
A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net
Kristin: A few years ago "The Next Blog" was terrible. But they have cleaned out the worst spam blogs. It's a lot cleaner but not entirely clean clean nowadays.
ReplyDeleteNo worries but the 6-9M (months) size clothes we bought in Italy are too small now. I guess Italian babies are small but your kids have a Nordic heritage so I think you got the sizes right =).
Brian Barker: I think there will never be a world language. The Romans did a good job with spreading Latin in their empire but today it's called Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Catalan. Latin itself is dead. People still study it because it was the lingua franca until the late Middle Ages and it is still the official language of the Roman Catholic church, but it's still fairly dead.
Even if a world language was created people would still use their native language at home and with people who speak the same language. A lingua franca is essentially a language which you use with other who do not speak your native language. But a language is a living entity. Without native speakers it's a dead language.
We may not like the idea of domination in order to establish a a language as a lingua franca but I don't think Arabic is taught in schools in China or that you learn German before going on a trip around the world.
Esparanto is great idea. Communism was a great idea too, unfortunately it didn't work that well in reality. If esperanto was adapted as a world language, wait a few thousand years, actually a few hundred might be enough and it will have split up in to other languages and Esperanto will be dead as a language as it is now.
How languages evolve is very much like the theory of evolution. Survival of the fittest. And the big surviver and dominator right now is English. I still think Esperanto is a great idea but it needs more than great ideas to survive...