Posted: Apr 15, 2011 8:54 am
hackenslash wrote:
Bingo!
The real problem here is provincialism. There is no one language better than any other, but there is definitely a case for having one single language spoken by everybody. There are only a few contenders for that role, and English is by far the front runner, being already spoken by the vast majority of people as at least a second language (which is the case for the majority of native speakers, sadly). It also has the other advantage of being completely malleable in ways that most other languages are not, in that you can form new words without ambiguity based on just a few simple rules. It also embraces words from other language. especially where the non-English word describes something that English has no word for. This, of course, makes it supremely evolvable, and in this sense it is difficult to find another reasonable candidate for global language.
Chinese, of course, is the best of the runners-up, and indeed is rapidly being taken up in business circles, but it still has a long way to go in terms of being spoken broadly, and is hampered by saturation of dialects, often raidcally different. That's not to say that English doesn't have its dialects, and indeed there are dialects of English that cannot be understood by other English speakers (once a scouser gets going at full speed, forget it, unless you're a scouser, and that's not even dialect, only accent).
There is no case for everyone to have one language, there is a case for people to be able to communicate with others and that means translation technologies. Second, english is not embracing new words as much as new words are entering into it given the huge number of non-english native speakers taking it. The rest comes from the number of people taking it, else wud you expect the same amount of words entering into it say 300 yrs ago?.
Power changes the world, they get to impose not just their language but also their culture, dressing styles and a lot more, it is due to the asymmetric power relationship.Otherwise people must choose(in which case it becomes random) or perhaps make a new language which is the best, but there is no scientific evaluation of which language is a better one.