Should A Global Language Be Adopted?

[Revoltingest]

English is the obvious choice because it's the language of gentlemen, and of course Great Britain civilised the world and invented democracy, cricket and steam engines.

But it took Japan to invent engines that didn't leak oil all over the garage floor.
And it took Americastan to invent the extended warranty.

 

[Revoltingest]

Yes, at least for a generation or two. But if we adopted that approach, two writing systems would have to be taught in order for future generations to read the old literature. It's bad enough that "Johnny can't read" today. But I suspect this will happen anyway, because all languages change unless they are deliberately preserved, e.g. Icelandic and Sanskrit. Icelandic (my new favorite subject ) has changed only minimally since the 12th century. Icelanders can still easily read Old Norse (Old Norse = Old Icelandic) and even speak it (maybe with a bit of an accent). Iceland has a language committee that approves or rejects new words. In fact, Icelandic uses native words to represent foreign words. In Icelandic 'meteorology' is veðurfræði (vethur-fry-thee, 'weather science') from Old Icelandic, whereas 'meteorology' is from Greek. For English I think the genie is out of the bottle vis-à-vis aligning speech with writing.

No need to teach 2 writing systems to all. Literature written in the old style need only be converted to the new, which could be done by simple software.

 

[Jainarayan]

That's true too.

 

[Shadow Wolf]

Case endings have all but disappeared.

This, combined with a loose word structure, is what can make English difficult. Whereas in a language like German you can say anything in just about any order and still be understood because of case endings, in English a grammatically correct sentence may need clarification because we lack the case endings that make identify the different parts of speech.

English has only two tenses, past and non-past.

Past, present, and future tense. The "other" tenses are also just as important as they indicate things that have happened, will happen, or are happening, and when. We actually have 12 tenses, though a couple of them are rarely used. They cannot be excused as an other because these modals and auxiliaries are necessary for conveying time and progress.

 

[Jainarayan]

This, combined with a loose word structure, is what can make English difficult. Whereas in a language like German you can say anything in just about any order and still be understood because of case endings, in English a grammatically correct sentence may need clarification because we lack the case endings that make identify the different parts of speech.

Yes, if an English sentence is not spoken in a certain order to mean a certain thing, it can become nonsensical:

"Name is my Thorbjorn", "my Thorbjorn is name". In more inflected languages different word orders can often produce more desired results. George Harrison took an ancient Sanskrit hymn and set it to music. The lyrics start "Govindam adi-purisham tam aham bhajami". Literally, "Govinda (Krishna) First Lord the I worship". Grammatically that's perfectly correct because it's all in the accusative case, "Govindam adi-purisham tam" being the direct object of "aham bhajami", I worship. But the literal "aham bhajami Govinda tam adi-purusham" doesn't have quite the poetic ring. In fact, though it's the standard subject-verb-object, it sounds like crap.

Past, present, and future tense. The "other" tenses are also just as important as they indicate things that have happened, will happen, or are happening, and when. We actually have 12 tenses, though a couple of them are rarely used. They cannot be excused as an other because these modals and auxiliaries are necessary for conveying time and progress.

Yes they are necessary, but I'm saying how they are considered and categorized in linguistic studies. We call them tenses because it's just easier to think of them as one group instead of splitting academic hairs like I did.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

But it took Japan to invent engines that didn't leak oil all over the garage floor.
And it took Americastan to invent the extended warranty.

But it was Britain that invented industry and engineering, and of course British products were always so well made they didn't need warranties.

 

[Revoltingest]

But it was Britain that invented industry and engineering, and of course British products were always so well made they didn't need warranties.

Sure, you arguably started industry, but it didn't take off until we invented design standards, quality control & interchangeable parts.