<deinx nxtxr> wrote:
>> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of R A Brown
> 
>> <deinx nxtxr> wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> Yes, English as a world standard will erode away even the bigger of 
>>> the local languages over time as the local languages become less 
>>> useful.  It's just a matter of how long it will take.
>> Welsh is still going well enough after some one and half 
>> millennia of coexistence with English on this small island. 
>> If Welsh can manage it, I don't see why others cannot (If I 
>> thought you & I would live long enough I was hazard a sizable 
>> wager that there will still be Welsh speakers about at the 
>> end of the current millennium).
> 
> Welsh is still alive, but only with political backing. 

No. There is currently political backing, and that does help. But it is 
simply not true that it survives *only* because of political backing 
because .......

> Politics are fickle,
> and someday these feel-good ethnic policies that support minority languages
> are likely to disappear.

Politics are indeed fickle. But Welsh survived into the 20th century 
through periods when it was politically discouraged or, indeed, actively 
suppressed (as in schools in the 19th century with the notorious 'Welsh 
knot'). It was only during the second half of the 20th century that 
political backing became positive. You may be right in your cynical 
assessment that it is merely "feel-good ethnic policies,'; but some of 
us see - at least in the instance of Welsh - it as an example of 
enlightenment and _respect_ for the cultural of other people.

Welsh has survived because, as Jörg, observed:
"When it comes to chances of survival of minor languages,
a key issue is how much the language is considered worth
preserving by its own speakers, and AFAIK in Wales there
indeed is a strong awareness that the Welsh language is
worth preserving."

An even better example, of course, is Basque which, against all odds, 
has survived the encroachment of Romance for an even longer time that 
Welsh has survived the encroachment of English (and Basque on the French 
side of the Pyrenees does not have the political support that is 
currently enjoyed by Welsh).

>>> I'm betting on Spanish to have the
>>> longest staying power.  
>> I see - altho there are far more speakers of Chinese and of 
>> Hindi than there are of Spanish? Do you really think these 
>> people with their long history will supinely give way to 
>> English? Also I find it very difficult to imagine that the 
>> Arabic speaking world will simply keep Arabic for reciting 
>> the Qur'an and use English among themselves as their daily language.
> 
> Mainly because Latin America has a lot of monoglots and seems to be the
> slowest in accepting English.  Nations like India and China are already on
> the English bandwagon.  

English is being used as a matter of convenience, but I see no evidence 
at all that either Hindi or Chinese is on the decline.

> I would expect the liturgical languages to remain "alive" but only the
> academic context, something like Ancient Hebrew is today.  I wouldn't expect
> it to survive as an L1.

Qur'anic Arabic may be considered a liturgical language (and related 
Classical Arabic is the literary auxlang of the Arabophones countries), 
but spoken Arabic, in its several varieties, from Morocco through to 
Iraq shows no signs of decline. The only change that may happen is that 
with more traveling and modern means of communications, regional 
differences may well level out and the spoken variety become closer to 
the standard literary norm. I think it most unlikely that these peoples 
will cease to use Arabic in normal speech and reserve it only for 
worship & reading the Qur'an, unless Islam itself declines in these 
countries.

>> No - I suspect the world will remain multilingual, tho the 
>> number of languages will probably decline.
> 
> It's already declining, it's just a matter of how long it will take to get
> down to 1.  

Never, I guess. Nor is there any reason why it should. Switzerland seems 
to hold together as a political unit, despite its having four official 
languages.
=================================================

Paul Kershaw wrote:
 > ----- Original Message ----
 > From: "<deinx nxtxr>" <[log in to unmask]>
 > Those were different times...
 >
 > I hold that it's nothing but naive (and ultimately dangerous) 
ethnocentrism to think that 21st United States society is so special in 
such a way that it will persist for so long that it will eradicate all 
the other languages in the world

AMEN! AMEN!

[snip]

 >Cultures come and go. I find it arrogant to assume that we will be any 
different.

Quite so - who knows what effect the emergence of China and/or Indian as 
global economic powers might have. If, indeed, the Chinese did come to 
exert global economic influence it is not beyond imagination, surely, 
that Chinese might come to have a similar dominance on the world stage, 
especially if Pinyin (or something similar) were adopted as the 
'international' way of writing the language.

 > Besides, native languages survive within empires. British influence 
in its heyday was very significant in India, for instance, and yet while 
English remains a powerful language in India today, the native languages 
survived, enough to drive a successful push to rename Bombay back to 
Mumbai.

Exactly - and Madras is now _Chenai_ etc.

 > Even though the Middle East was firmly ensconced within the Roman 
Empire, the Semitic languages survived, with the New Testament being 
written largely in Aramaic.

Greek, actually (tho there is a tradition that the 'original Matthew' 
was written in Aramaic) - but it wasn't written in Latin. The idea that 
under the Romans Latin supplanted native languages is erroneous. It 
happened only in certain areas.

 >The Soviets even made a concentrated effort to stamp out everything 
but Russian, with no success.

Yep.

 > I think you're assuming that the only real purpose of language is 
communication. Were that so, we'd have settled on a global language 
years ago. Latin, possibly, if not Greek (or Egyptian, or Sumerian). A 
lingua franca of the past would have taken hold. English certainly isn't 
the first language to have a go at that. But language has several other 
purposes that are at odds with linguistic globalization. For one thing, 
people have a great deal of pride in their native languages ......

EXACTLY!!!

[snip]
 >
 > We will never get to the point on this planet where there is but a 
single language spoken, not until we get to the point where there is but 
a single being capable of communication.

Or - heaven forbid - a single monoglot community that has disposed of 
all dissidents far more thoroughly than Hitler managed to do in his 3rd 
Reich.

But as no one on this list is likely to live long enough to see if the 
world becomes depressingly monoglot or not, I'm not sure how useful 
continuing this thread will be. It seems to me that participants have 
made their positions quite clear.

-- 
Ray
==================================
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CENEDL HEB IAITH, CENEDL HEB GALON.
(A nation without a language is a
nation without a heart)
[Welsh proverb]