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worldaffairsjournal.org - 19 days ago

The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

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I n depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense. Not long ago, 33 of the FBI’s 12,000 ...

Blog Reactions

Lakeshore:  [links] Link salad flies home

Velcro City Tourist Board:  Links for 2nd November 2009

Futurismic:  One world… one language?

Reactions

Interesting take on the death of languages & the inevitable rise & dominance of English: http://tiny.cc/dNR4X (via @paulsaxton) 7 days ago

Lunch read for the day: Why Languages Vanish. http://tinyurl.com/yl59jqj (via @vboykis) 8 days ago

Counterpoint: One linguist questions whether allowing languages to die is a bad thing. http://bit.ly/bpieT 9 days ago

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[links] Link salad flies home
Lakeshore — A reader reacts to Escapement [ Powell's | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Borders ] xkcd with "Movie Narrative Charts" — Pretty damned cool. The Stonemaker’s nitpicking Argument — Hahah. Worldbuilding be damned! The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English Molecular Sunglasses for Macular Degeneration — Is this nanotech?

Links for 2nd November 2009
Velcro City Tourist Board — Fresh from the clogged tubes of teh intarwubs… The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English "As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world’s language being, say, Eyak." Tagged with: ...

One world… one language?
Futurismic — ... While we’re discussing matters of global cultural diversity, here’s an interesting essay on language extinction by a linguistics professor called John McWhorter [via ...