[tmountain]

It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring.

Culture is embedded into language, and suggesting that we should standardize on a handful of languages for the sake of convenience places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation.

As someone who's been working very hard for the last two years to become bi-lingual, I had no idea how much I'd learn about my own native language from studying a different language, and incidentally, I've learned a ton about the underlying culture of the target language I'm learning. Every time a language dies, we lose a another piece of our global cultural tapestry, and I think that's a loss that's hard to quantify.

[gruez]

>It'd also be easier if everyone painted all their houses the same color, ate the same foods all the time, and lived in a universally cookie cutter world, but that'd be terribly boring.

not a fair comparison. learning a second language takes much more resources (time and money) than having different paint colors or food choices.

[tmountain]

Putting energy into cultural preservation of languages (learned at birth in the case of the article), is a different proposition than asking someone to learn them from scratch later in life. The question boils down to what is worth saving and investing in, and why we place value on those things.

[nitwit005]

> places very low (or maybe no) value on cultural preservation.

All the cultures that exist today will die, no matter what actions we take today. People see cultural continuation, but if we hopped in a time machine and went back 100 years, none of us would fit in.

I understand the urge to preserve things we appreciate, but it's not possible to preserve living things.

[thefounder]

You can't experience much of that said culture without learning the language and something tells me you don't speak more than 3 languages so you end up with houses painted in 3 different colours while the rest are hidden in a dark wood.