Great article on science, science is not your enemy. It made me think about how I see languages in a very pragmatic way.
To me languages are tools to communicate. We reached a point where if you use English, a majority of human beings can understand you. I mean to me it’s almost all there is. It’s huge. Imagine if human beings had been able to at least understand each other for most of our story. Things would be different, in a good way I think.
English won because of wars of course, but also because of its efficiency: I’m often amazed at how things are simpler explained in Shakespeare’s updated language compared to French, which is a very precise language. So precise that it tends to get superfluous. You have to read extreme academic things in English to reach a pompousness level like French does commonly in magazines.
What about culture? Culture acts like a reward to me which is why French don’t know much about German, the reward didn’t look so great compared to the massive Anglo-American cultural wave. Mostly people learn languages best when they have to: the computing era from the 80s to today demanded the French to understand English whatever local dialect we were using: I had to get the dictionary to understand words used to navigate game menus and computers (My 1992 born sister though doesn’t need English because everything in the digital world is translated in French today even though everything is English-based) as Swedish kids growing up with subtitled movies.
The start of home computing converted more people to English than the British Empire ever could, without being messy and slaughter-ish. No one in the world in the 80s/90s except people moving to France, needed French.
So I don’t really get why people learn a language just for the cultural aspect of it. You can’t practice everyday, you don’t have any need for it and the environment is not in this language. So it’s like an intellectual workout? I mean it’s pretty hard so why the pain? Africans speaking like five or six different dialects, they don’t do that for fun.
People connect language and culture like they’re inseparable but you don’t need Italian to read about Italian culture. I’d go faster by reading a lot about Italy in English or French or have a trip to Italy where I can ask smart questions about Italy to Italians in English, still following?
I don’t know. Sometimes it bothers me when people are doing things with no real purpose. Also I smile when I see all the “West” sharing stories on Reddit, spreading knowledge faster than people can absorb. Americans learn tons of shit they didn’t know and they didn’t know stuff for way too long and seriously question things like guns or health care. That is progress. That’s what effective communication does. Thanks, common language.
I love seeing that. Between flying across half the globe and reading people from all over the world sharing their views and ideas on a website, I feel like living on a planet with my human people. Thanks, English.