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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

What could the one common language be? English would seem to be the logical choice, but there is no way France would agree to that.

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The EU doesn’t even agree on which alphabet to use, Latin is the most common one but the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets are also official in the union.

English is my second language, and while I wouldn’t mind changing the official language of my country, I can’t see that ever happening, there’s just so much culture attached to the language, that would be forgotten together with our language.

Yep. A common European first language would start a process which would result in a terrible loss of local cultural tradition. Cultural suicude for the common good has been suggested before, but I can't imagine that there would be a lot of people who'd agree with it.

I'm sure that some wouldn't mind other's cultural suicide, however.

Definitely not. There's probably no shortage of people promiting their own culture's demise either.

I disagree, I live in Denmark where the majority speaks very good English. There's no shortage of Danish media.

On the other hand, economic suicide is assured by insisting on a high standard of living while doing everything possible to prevent innovation.

As a Swedish-speaking Finn, I can confirm that a culture can end up on the decline even if there's powerful legal backing to preserving it (including forcing the remaining ~90% of the population to learning Swedish in school). Incidentally, I'd say there's a large correlation with English being more and more accepted in Finnish society, but I suspect the actual root cause simply is that cultural production is mainly taking place in the first language (Finnish) and that it leaves less for the others.

The same would happen if you managed to get the entire EU to agree to switch to one single language (remember, it's likely that it would be French or German instead of English). As a result of pushing adoption of the new first language, it would mean increased cultural output in that language, and a reduced output for the others. After a while, the differences will start showing.

I've lived in Denmark for quite a few years and I agree that people in Copenhagen and the other larger cities wouldn't notice that much of a difference to begin with, but remember that this would mean a cultural shift that will take multiple generations. Ask the German speakers in southern Jutland in another 24 years, and compare how their culture thrives compared to how they did before the war and you will probably have a pretty decent view on how the situation would be for many, many of EU's minorities 100 years after the switch to a single European first language.

Latin is tanned, rested and ready.

Proto-indo-european would be a better unity option so as to not show favor to Romance-speaking countries.

PIE lacks the vocabulary for certain modern things like writing.

That's the best part!

Modern languages already have words for things like a mouse, a screen or the Big Bang, but it's all stupid stuff like an analogy to how a computer mouse looks like an animal because of its long cord-tail, a reference to the white screen a projector casts it's projection on, or a vulgar put-down of a theory being like God's orgasm.

If we take a dead language and start adding in vocabulary, we can quietly sweep that all under a rug before we encounter any alien species we have to explain ourselves to.

Alien species: "So you remodeled your language, removing all traces of history and culture from it, because you were worried about the impression you'd make on aliens you didn't know, you didn't even know existed?"

"You're the most pathetic people in the known universe."

I mean, we'll try, but we can only do so much. Even in ancient languages, every word for "tool" is also slang for "penis", and twenty percent of the verbs can also be used to refer to a sex act.

English may be more acceptable once the UK excited, leaving no favored EU state.

The UK has already left the EU (it's in the transition phase now) and Ireland and Malta both have English as an official language.

Ireland and Malta are both small enough that no one would mistake them for a dominant force in the EU.

Quite a few large french companies that are global in nature have switched to English first, but for the broader acceptance and the government to officially support English as the unifying language I share your skepticism

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