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Comment by snowpid | Hacker News Reader

As a side note I do think Latin language should be become the official language of the EU. It's dead so - its a compromise for all member staes - you can change as you like - it was used millennials as a law language so it fits

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I think that is a reason the catholic Church still uses it for things like papal encyclicals. It puts different groups on a more equal footing.

Far more people understand it than things like Esperanto. Quite a lot of people know it a bit. I did it at school. My kids learned some (their choice to do it up to GCSE level).

That said, in practice, English is the international language. It is what is most likely to be used at an international conference in most fields, or when people with two different native languages speak.

English is a living language so it's a bad choice (at least from my criteria ;) )

Yes, agreed. That was intended to be a BTW and Latin is probably the best choice on your criteria.

English is the international language now. About a century ago, the lingua franca of the technological world was German. Half of my father's university text books were in German, pretty much all of mine were in English. Things can (and do) change.

Except now the whole world is in a common meme pool. Thanks to the internet, Metcalfe’s Law applies to languages globally. China may stave it off for a while by firewalling its population... but the rest of the world won't care.

It's not going to change again. Not even if the US and UK both sank into the ocean.

There are large number of people in China learning English. While China might firewall some things, learning languages does not seem to be one of them.

> Not even if the US and UK both sank into the ocean.

Lots of English speakers in other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

I think its likely that list greatly undercounts the number of people who speak English as a first language because of difficulties around the data about things such people who are bilingual and (cultural, not necessarily on the part of the people conducting surveys) assumptions about ethnicity and language, sources of numbers etc.

> that is a reason the catholic Church still uses it for things like papal encyclicals.

Nah, it's just because that particular institution tries very hard to be internally consistent, for historical reasons. They immediately publish translations of such documents into "common" languages as well, and that's what non-clerics will actually read.

I said a reason, not the reason. Both can be true.

Or Esperanto. But Spanish or Italian would also be great as they sound so nice.

Esperanto being created by L.L. Zamenhof ... a Polish Ashkenazi Jew. Full circle!

Among the constructed languages that I have seen, I believe that Interlingua was the closest to how a language that could replace English as the international language should be.

I disagree with some grammatical choices made for Interlingua, but in any case it had a simple grammar and the vocabulary was well chosen among the words that are common to the greatest number of European languages. Thus I could read and understand Interlingua without knowing anything about it before that.

Interlingua has a vocabulary bias towards Romance languages, but that is due to the fact that Romance words, mostly coming from Latin or French, are also widespread in English, and also in other language groups like Germanic or Slavic, while much less Germanic or Slavic words are found in languages from other groups. Therefore when selecting the words that are found in most European languages, there are more Romance words than from the other groups.

The EU has already started expanding to countries whose prestigious classical language was Greek, not Latin, so Latin would no longer look like a compromise but favoritism towards Western Europe.

Latin still had some prestige in the east of Europe. I was surprised to learn recently that Vladimir Lenin read Roman classics in the original for enjoyment.

> Latin language should be become the official language of the EU

It would be more practical, if everyone spoke the same language, but the EU does deliberately not want that. The EU wants to preserve language and culture of its member states and regions. "United in Diversity" is an important idea of the EU.

nah I disagree. Because a dead language helps preserving the living languages of the nations.

Parts of the EU say that, then at other times other parts act inconsistently with it. I was just at a meeting of an EU body where it was emphasized that, when considering the language of European patents written in English, courts would deliberately interpret the text as having been written by a native English speaker, even when it was clear that the author was a native speaker of a different EU language, for example, in cases where the author was clearly following a grammatical convention of their native language (eg, in comma placement) that might be awkward or ambiguous in English.

While that might make sense from a legal standpoint, it seems like it makes it risky to hire patent lawyers in Europe who are not native English speakers, which in turn, along with many other similar inconsistencies, does in practice create an EU-preferred language.

I think the emphasis is on official. That is, it would function as the common language of administration, communication, diplomacy, etc. (i.e., lingua franca), but it wouldn't replace vernacular languages. This was the norm centuries ago in Europe.

One advantage of it being "dead" is that the meanings of terms are much more stable. They don't undergo the usual slippage and mutation of spoken languages. This advantage would be lost if it were to replace existing vernacular languages.

It certainly also sounds cool to me, but it has the disadvantage, that you need to invent a lot of terms for concepts invented in the last 200 years.

Another advantage of a dead language. You can just change word meanings if the administration needs it.

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