| What citations do you want me to provide? This is purely theoretical discussion. Do I need to cite that after millennia, we still have different languages? Do I really to dig up some academic paper to acknowledge that humans find it hard to agree on standards? That doesn't even include the geopolitical implications of this- as if China would ever agree to make English the One Language that all government and business runs on, etc. If you make a theoretical conjecture, I don't need to provide academical papers to provide a rebuttal. Please, treat academical papers with rigor, not as a fallback for when someone challenges you on, again, a theoretical conjecture. I also don't need to provide papers for basic human intercourse. > This worked for one country, so there are chances it works at a bigger scale. No, you cannot extrapolate based on one country. Human beings are irrational and proud. Again, look at it from a geopolitical view. > Yes. Things are imperfect. We will loose in the process. Guess what is also imperfect ? Communicating at the scale of 7 billion people with different culture, believes and needs. Yes, different cultures, beliefs, and needs. All of which would be lost by -unilaterally- forcing one language, since reaching agreement won't happen. Nations are still figuring out how to solve their own issues, so why should a Korean person care to be forced to learn some random language? That already happened when Japan occupied Korea and forced Koreans to learn Japanese- why don't you read some history and tell me exactly how much Koreans liked that. [This also goes back to my previous statement about military domination being the only real way of forcing a language change.] > The fact it takes 5 years to a chinese to be able to write english and 10 for an english to learn chinese is not subjective. [Citation needed again]. Of course English writing is easier to learn, it has a phonetic alphabet... However Chinese has much more simplified grammar than English. There is no subjectively "better" language, unless you specifically mean in 1 single aspect, maybe. But languages don't exist in vacuums, so this point is moot. (5/10 years is way off, also. This is anecdotal evidence as well, and years vary by each individual person.) Discussing the merits of Chinese or any other language is really another discussion, but Chinese people do just fine. > Again, that's funny comming from somebody who is all emotional about this. No, this is coming from somebody responding to a shortsighted conjecture. > Also, thinking I'm talking about engineering and not politics and sociology "is a very stereotypical hacker news viewpoint". No, I don't think that you're talking about engineering. I'm specifically pointing out that you are treating a human and cultural issue from an engineering perspective, as if it's merely something that can be "fixed". It's a myopic viewpoint, because that's simply not how humans work. |