This is Sapir-Whorf thinking. My understanding as a non-linguist is that this has never been proven. I know there is a strong/weak form of the hypothesis, but can't remember what the distinction is.
Perhaps, but y=x+1 and u=v+1 are the same, even if they use different terms. Likewise, y=x+1 !== y=x-1, even though they use the same terms.
It's really unclear to me that much harm will be done if everyone speaks the same language, and it's clear to me that there will be great benefits. That's an easy position for me to take as a primary speaker of the world's dominant language. It's also no skin off my back if other language groups wish to continue maintaining their own languages. But I guess that those which aren't strong enough will fade over the centuries, as many already did in the past.
That's just not how language works. Gödel, Escher, Bach really hammered this home for me. Many ideas are easier to express in one language or another, to the point that they are practically inexpressible in another language.
This is even true in math. Based on the set of axioms you allow, you can prove certain facts. A math with different axioms may have completely different theorems, and some observable real world behavior can be better modeled under one set of axioms than another.
Language could be described as a math for personal expression and everyday life, and each language has its own axioms and theorems.
> That's just not how language works. Gödel, Escher, Bach really hammered this home for me. Many ideas are easier to express in one language or another, to the point that they are practically inexpressible in another language.
I am very skeptical that this happens commonly, or that the necessary terms couldn't be ported over to the common language if needed.
Yes they do. Look at popular music around the world. It's all slight variations of American popular music. I don't think this is only because of the dominance of English, but the two phenomena are definitely symptoms of the same disease.
Well yeah, looking at popular music will do that. There's a massive amount of advertising money to make it popular.
Look at the less forced genres of music. Rap in the USA, Grime in the UK, similar but different. The UK has a very different type of indie (named from coming from an independent label) music. And Country is only popular in the USA.
If you have a quick look on the surface it can be similar, but if you look deeper, where it matters, then the variation is there.
That said, I do think having more languages is better, a more diversified ecosystem is more likely to survive. And from my point of view, it's more interesting to live in.
Also, styles of music aren't equivalent to the culture that produced them.
American rock has its roots in Jazz and Bluegrass, which has its roots in the African slave diaspora. Japanese Visual Kei was influenced heavily by American glam rock bands. Does that mean Visual Kei merely an imitation of American culture, or that it expresses the same things that American rock does? Of course not. You can borrow the sound and the style but still make something culturally unique.
K-Pop is probably more "Americanized" than Japanese pop, but it's still distinctly not American. I don't think anyone would confuse either Japanese or Korean culture for American culture, even though both incorporate Western aesthetics and English into their cultural expressions.
I'm kind of sorry to hear that about country music; some time ago I occasionally caught a country show on, I swear, BBC World Service, featuring singers clearly from the British Isles.
Actually it kind of does of does;
https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2013/11/multilingua...
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/03/speaking-second-lang...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/life-bilingual/201111/c...
https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-o...
At the very least having multiple languages ensures a diversity of thinking.