OT: Languages are the biggest lock-in + market barrier for others an economy has (best example is China). Great that English has got even bigger as a lingua france since the Internet started. I think every try to spread local languages is just wasted time. I am rather afraid that more tech leadership comes from China (I am looking at all the Chinese Githup repo READMEs).
Dear tsanummy, help us to find the irony in my post or better the message in your post. So, what's your point? I'd love to know what you are talking about.
Just to give another example: Imagine all countries in the world had the same language and people could move freely: You had massive and full competition between all nations/cities/economies for the best people and competition is good. Nobody is locked-in because of odd languages or would you dare to move to Beijing tomorrow?
Or imagine you had the same with languages and a nation forced people to only use Cobol and ignore newer developments. You get it? English is btw also a language which is easily extendable, something like creating verbs out of nouns is not that straight-forward in other languages. It keeps English alive.
Interesting thought, and looking at how many Romance languages evolved from Latin in the past, there might be something to it. At the same time there are languages that managed to re-unite the different dialects, at least in education and literature, I am thinking about the Hochdeutsch for German [1]. So we have at least a counter example. Would be interesting to know what are the factors that lead for similar languages/dialects to become one or the opposite.
I kind of doubt that. The Internet, movies, TV, etc would keep us all connected enough that we would still all be able to understand each other. This article[1] even mentions some grammar forms where America and Britain diverged that have joined back together (I assume due to the Internet etc) ("can I", subjunctive, and British slang).
