Avishai schrieb:
I couldn't agree with you more about English :) But it seems like the whole world wants to learn English (or American which is a completely different language). Very strange, but such is life. I have one foot in the West and one foot in the Middle East.
Just scientific research requires an world-wide standard. In the beginning it might have been Persian or Egyptian, followed by Greek, Latin (life), Arabic, Latin (dead), and nowadays it's English.
Perhaps it's my limited local view that all these languages are Mediterannean or European. Other languages (Maya, Chinese, Japanese, Russian) certainly also played a role in science, but there was not much exchange with the western world, due to distances or politics.
Esperanto, Interlingua or Volapük are interesting attempts to create simple synthetic languages, but I don't know much about their role, except that they have their place in Wikipedia. Indonesian is another such attempt, and that language is really spoken by many people nowadays, but again I couldn't find scientific contributions or wider distribution.
Wikipedia contains other interesting languages, like Boarisch or Alemannisch, which I understand immediately. I'd like to add Schwäbisch, but that's very hard to write, and even harder to read ;-)
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