Scripts that were developed in the age of stone tablets will change when the tablet and chisel are replaced with paper and brush, and again when the brush is replaced with a fountain pen, and again when the whole setup is replaced with a computer. People will naturally adopt the style that allows them to convey meaning the most conveniently in a given medium.
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean were all written vertically from right to left (|||) until only a few decades ago. Now they are very often written horizontally from left to right (≡). A lot of factors have contributed to the change, such as the ease of embedding Western, mathematical and scientific symbols in a CJK sentence, the need to keep one's hands clean when writing with a modern pen, and of course the introduction of computerized typesetting.
Nobody forced anyone to write horizontally. People just gravitated towards what they found more convenient given the availability of new writing tools. And of course, many artists and calligraphers continue to write vertically when it suits their intentions better. Even better, new calligraphical techniques have been developed to take advantage of unique opportunities that horizontal writing offers. As long as everyone gets what they need (art for artists and utility for utilitarians), I don't see any problem with this arrangement.
And it's not that I think that English is somehow inherently a better language, it's more that there is a lot more people speaking it. It's kind of like if you are deciding what open source project to use. Having a big community around it is a major deciding factor, if not THE deciding factor.
The analogy to open source projects is spot on; while you might have some "emotional" attachment to a library/technology that you learned early on, you probably wouldn't make significant decisions based on that. I learned to program in VB5, yet I dropped it as soon as I learned Java because it was just an awful language (though I guess human languages don't really have notions of superiority or inferiority like some programming languages might).
Except that when an open source project dies, its code remains in full -- to study, take ideas from, or even potentially be revived at a later time.
When a language dies though, it's pretty much gone. Even if it's received a lot of attention from field linguists, it's near impossible to fully codify the grammar and document the nuances of any language.
Almost all the languages that we "lost" did not have a rich literature or sometimes even an alphabet.
The # of languages currently spoken is typically pegged somewhere between 3000-6000 and it's thought that we lose around one a week. Most have almost no documentation whatsoever, and even so a couple papers written in the 1970s aren't going to capture any potential unique aspects of a language let alone allow for reconstruction at a later point.
The analogy to code is way off.
In the several millions we are able to speak and write, there have been lots of languages taking that role.
And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.
Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.
I'm aware of that.
> And even English is not as common as many people think, just traveling around the world will teach people that there are many places where knowing English will be of no help.
I guess it's not just about sheer numbers but also about what sort of stuff is produced in the language. E.g. the expert books are mostly written in English. You don't even have to go that far, e.g. there aren't all that many say compiler books that were not translated from English, that are up to date and not terrible. This is for me more important than being able to have a discussion with Bhutani farmer.
> Besides languages represent culture, not all concepts are expressible across all languages and they are also a door to our past as mankind, sure they are worth preserving.
Well it's a tradeoff. And I think that at some point the cost of preserving them outweighs the benefits.
This depends very much on the domain.
Feierabend (German) - expresses the concept you are finished with the work duties for the day and can enjoy your private time with family and friends
Saudade (Portuguese) - a mixture of loneliness, melancholy, sense of loosing part of you feelings, even mixed with a kid of sad joy, while remembering something that is no longer there.
If they were popular enough, we'd say: English does have words for those ideas! They're "feierabend" and "saudade".
Exactly the same as "gesundheit".
Expressing means there is a similar word.
You should compare Orhan Pamuk's treatment with Fernando Pessoa.
Although you might spend far more words on it, and it might be hard to properly capture abstract concepts in another language, these are not examples of concepts that cannot be expressed in English.
From linguistic point of view, I explained them.
Expressing means there is an English word with the same meaning.
We were talking about concepts being "expressable" in any language. Of course many words are not directly translatable (half of Chinese isn't, that isn't news to anybody), so that's not particularly interesting. But you'd be hard pressed to find a concept that is not at least explainable in English.
My native language doesn't force feed gendered personal pronouns on me, so when other languages (English, Swedish, German etc.) do , I feel they are forcing me to be sexist.
(The Swedes are actually trying to take some steps fixing this aspect of their language, by introducing a gender-neutral pronoun.)
Even worse (i.d. feels even more unnatural) are the languages with gendered nouns (German, Spanish etc.).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_genderless...
As a writing style, cursive is basically dead. This would have made an awesome analogy for the original article essay. Very few Americans in gen X and younger actually write cursive and there are efforts to remove it from the curriculum.
I can sign my name in cursive when I write a legacy paper check (a couple times a year) or sign forms. Thats about it. I now write legacy paper checks in block capitals and only use cursive for my .sig. I would have to check wikipedia to see how to make a cursive capital "F" and some of the weirder letters (what is a cursive Q?)
It presents some problems to genealogy, I have trouble reading centuries old census forms because I haven't read cursive since grade school, some decades ago. In grade school we were told we will have to write all our papers in cursive in middle school and up; not so; all typed, mostly on computers.