[newsbinator]

The analogy is reasonable, although it breaks down because human languages are not nearly as varied in usefulness for different things as programming languages are.

Human languages are much more generalized.

Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human language being preferable to another though, like when Korean Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though perhaps what if" suggestion.

On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term, and probably even in the short term too.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

> On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I’m a native English speaker and any time English was established as a country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and suppression of other people, even in England.

[newsbinator]

There are several examples. Here's one that involved fining people for not speaking the lingua franca in public:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen,_speak_Turkish!

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this. I hope we can get everyone to a global language without so much as a $1 fine, but if it did require a generation of fines and public shaming, it could fall into "the ends justify the means" territory.

In my modern/developed country we fine citizens heavily for entering without presenting a valid PCR test against covid. That's because we believe the public good of having everyone free of covid outweighs the public evil of fining people for simply existing as they are.

Would the public good of switching the globe to a unified language be worth fines and social pressure?

I don't know the answer to that, which maybe correlates with my score on the "Darkness Measure" we've recently seen posted here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734100

[hypertele-Xii]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[newsbinator]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

[jcranmer]

> On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

Well, what do you call beating school children for not speaking the "proper" language? Because that's basically the minimum you need to do (see: US, Canada, France for specific examples).

[newsbinator]

We don't need to beat school children to get them to do all sorts of things they'd rather not do. Currently we get most school children trained to be effective factory workers and low-grade administrative assistants by age 14~16 without beating any of them.

People used to beat school children all the time. They used to beat minorities and torture people who have developmental problems.

We don't do that anymore, and we still find ways of achieving our aims.