Hacker News Reader

Comment by gotchange | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid that the only one not making any sense on this thread is you. We didn't drop the use of our indigenous writing system in favor of that of the Romans or the Arabs because we thought that theirs are superior than ours, we dropped them because we were conquered and dominated and we had to adopt the cultural norms of the invaders.

Also, you're EXTREMELY overestimating the individual agency of the ancient Egyptian in this matter. Most of the citizens of ancient Egypt were illiterate and only a certain class or caste had the privilege to be able to read and write but the rest of the population were completely oblivious to those icons and therefore your argument is just baseless.

View on HN

> only a certain class or caste had the privilege to be able to read and write

And in fact that's why they're HIEROglyphics, they were the priestly writings. (compare to demotic, as also seen on the Rosetta stone).

Hieroglyphics and demotic are the same writing system using the same letters. They're like print and cursive.

Colonial conquest is not the primary methodology of linguistic propagation. Trade is.

English is the primary programming language, not because a team of dedicated Anglo-Saxons are pointing rifles as the head of brown people, but because American trade provides the most profit motive between 1974-2008.

>Colonial conquest is not the primary methodology of linguistic propagation. Trade is.

A "primary methodology" only applies in "most" cases, not all of them.

Lots of languages have perished for outside forces other than trade -- the Hebrew wasn't abandoned because a better trade language came around, but because Israel was conquered and the locals scattered. Other languages were persecuted by decree. Others died because their native speakers were eliminated. And several other ways (e.g. Mussolini tried to smooth out local dialects of italian using the powers of government plus radio and early cinema).

Aramaic was the primary language of trade for the first civilizations during their initial rise. As other trade empires blossomed, more languages appeared, and as trade empires collapsed, those languages vanished.

Religion can and does preserve memes and linguistics, but only trade can scale it out.

>Religion can and does preserve memes and linguistics, but only trade can scale it out.

If it was just for trade, language learning would be relegated to merchants in those countries and few others.

Government, bureaucracy and occupation matters more than trade in this regard. That's how latin become the norm in a large area during the roman empire -- and not because everybody in those regions traded directly with Romans or couldn't agree on pricing otherwise.

Same e.g. for French -- it's not because of trade they got big as a language in the 18-early 20th centuries, but because the french run a big colonial empire.

And English, beyond trade, were the language of the big British colonial empire, and afterwards of the dominant culturally power that was America (Hollywood, rock, pop culture etc.).

On the other hand, if not for the previous several hundred years of western europeans pointing rifles...

Mostly at each other.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com