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Location: Northern Ireland and temporarily England
7,668 posts, read 5,239,594 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Even if those forces were to lead us in that direction, it would only be a partial "victory" for that common language.
Lots of exposure to a common language or way of speaking doesn't necessarily eliminate all differences.
Close to 50% or maybe more of the TV and movies my kids have watched in their lives have featured the European French accent from France. This is true of their friends as well. And yet they don't speak with a Parisian accent at all! Yes, they know expressions and terms from European French that the generations before them would not have been familiar with, but they still greatly retain our national language characteristics.
British people have been exposed to American media and culture for several generations, and yet they haven't stopped "sounding" British (accent, vocabulary or expressions).
And look at how much exposure English Canadians have to American culture, and they still don't sound exactly like Americans nor do they use the exact same terms for everything.
Even within the U.S. there are big regional differences in speech even though there is a single overarching media and cultural scene.
Human differences aren't going away anytime soon.
We don't sound American because we aren't American but obviously we are using more and more American words.
I don't believe the Irish abandoned it completely willingly.
Indeed, but this was in the past. Ireland is an independent authority (or better a "Free state") since 1921, during the last century Irish has remained an extremely marginally spoken language.
For comparison Poles, despite a 100 years old oppression and war on their culture by Russians, Germans and Austrians, fiercely maintained their language.
The same applied to Catalans for example.
Location: Northern Ireland and temporarily England
7,668 posts, read 5,239,594 times
Reputation: 1392
Quote:
Originally Posted by xander.XVII
Indeed, but this was in the past. Ireland is an independent authority (or better a "Free state") since 1921, during the last century Irish has remained an extremely marginally spoken language.
For comparison Poles, despite a 100 years old oppression and war on their culture by Russians, Germans and Austrians, fiercely maintained their language.
The same applied to Catalans for example.
Irish was abandoned hundreds of years ago. It only exsists because it keeps being regurgitated and reguritated by Republican fantasists.
it's fun communicating with other people, if it was simple to communicate with everybody in the world that would be awesome
If the entire world spoke the same language (presumably English) you'd be able to communicate with them more easily but those conversations might be potentially less enriching as you'd likely find yourself having the same conversations you could have with people in Iowa but instead you'd be having them with people in Indonesia.
Some cultural differences would persist due to ethnicity and geography but they'd be on the lines of what you have within the US as opposed to true foreignness and cultural discovery opportunities.
We'd all probably be talking about Big Bang Theory, March Madness and maybe Top Gear with anglophone Tibetans, anglophone Quechua people and anglophone Xhosa tribesmen...
Worse, plurilinguism is good for the brain and vs the Alzheimer disease.
Correct. In fact, people who are bilingual experience Alzheimer's about four years later than monolingual people. One of many such studies which all came to the same conclusion:
So a life of enforced monolingualism among all people in the world would shorten cognitive life by about four years. And require huge economic expenditure in caring for such people.
Irish was abandoned hundreds of years ago. It only exsists because it keeps being regurgitated and reguritated by Republican fantasists.
Irish was still the mother-tongue of hundreds of thousands of Irish at the beginning of 19th century.
It wasn't "abandoned", it was destroyed by Britons, as well as Cornish and almost Scottish Gaelic.
Then, Irishmen have a huge deal of blame in this for forsaking their own language though.
Anyway, a monolingual world would mean the loss of countless cultures and tradition, all of which are as worthy as Anglophone ones to be preserved.
As already said, it wouldn't last anyway: English would quickly diverge into several different patois as it is already doing (English L2 speakers have already outnumbered native speakers and soon English will gradually absorb many linguistic features of L2 English speakers, like different accents, pronunciations, verbs' use etc).
Correct. In fact, people who are bilingual experience Alzheimer's about four years later than monolingual people. One of many such studies which all came to the same conclusion:
So a life of enforced monolingualism among all people in the world would shorten cognitive life by about four years. And require huge economic expenditure in caring for such people.
What happens if you know five languages? Will you experience Alzheimer 20 years later? Some of those papers are preposterous.
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