(KH)
But surely, Prof Daniel Abrams' thesis is *not* valid. He is trying to maintain that minority languages can be protected. I originally wrote that this is not possible. PW, EW and I have each been saying that once a new way of life becomes communicable, tradable and geographically possible, then minority languages disappear. Prof Abrams would do better to spend his time and research money in recording as many minority languages as possible for future study and analysis, than trying to save them in the here and now while our present type of economic system is still sweeping the world.
(EW)
Much would seem to depend on the size, status and power of the linguistic group. There is no doubt in my mind that Quebec will maintain French and do its governing and business in French in the foreseeable future. The people
it will deal with in Ottawa will have to be able to use French.
I'm sure you must be right. However, Quebecian French will die in the end if Quebec wants to stay in the mainstream of the developed world. When is another matter. It's interesting that the French Academy have given up their long-time attempts to exclude American and English word imports. Almost all middle class Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Dutch and what-have-you can speak fairly fluent English because that's the language of modern commerce and science. Almost no middle class Englishmen could put more than a sentence or two together in another language. Once upon a time I used to be able to read Simenon and Pushkin in their own languages fairly comfortably -- and enjoyably, too -- but I could never speak the languages.
Although I think that English is a strong candidate as a world language, I wouldn't bet on it. Chinese is a much stronger candidate in the longer term. It is basically easier to learn than most others. It has lost all the appendages that other languages still have -- conjugations, declensions, irregular verbs, subjunctives, ablatives, and so on -- nightmares that plagues learners of most other languages. Chinese has also lost inflections, cases, persons, genders, degrees, tenses, voices, moods, affixes, infinitives, participles, gerunds and articles. It lost all these in the course of several thousand years of a largely unified culture and literature. There are no words of more than one syllable and every word has only one form. It proceeds by means of subject and predicate -- that's all -- and explicates by means of metaphors. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them. More poetry has been written in Chinese than in any other language.
Chinese is just about the most finely chiselled language in the world -- the most fully developed. And when China gets to the forefront in science, technology and commerce I think it will probably whop the confused and convoluted language that we call English (much as I love it).
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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