Funny to see that 'Latin' is not in the list. Sure there are plant names with names in 'latin' but not the same Latin as the Romans used. Does anyone actually converse in Latin outside of the classroom?
Until the Industrial Revolution came along most people identified themselves as from the town or county where they lived rather than a given nation. People rarely travelled further than the next village and language was extremely regional. Same in France, until Napoleon came along France had hundreds of languages/dialects rather than an identifiable 'French' that everyone knew. In the UK, before television, it really was not that easy to be understood in places like Liverpool if you were from a place like Bristol - accents were too different to make that easy in everyday conversation even if written words were the same everywhere. The railways were the start of this process of making English universally understood amongst the English, before that there really wasn't much need to bother to read unless you were a book-reading academic type.
I am pleased that English is lingua-franca(!) for planet earth when it comes to computer stuff, science and little things like air traffic control. English may not be 'strongly typed Esperanto' but it does not have to be. It is considered courtesy to try and speak in native languages for Brits abroad, however, beyond 'please and thankyou' I think it is much better to stick to English and, in the process, help others that want to learn English. Just speak s-l-o-w-l-y and remember that something like 90% of communication is body language when face-to-face.
I do a fair amount of translation in the day job, and, amongst the foreign-language speakers that I pester for words 'n' phrases, I frequently find people preferring English as they can express so much more in it than their native tongue. As far as my Italian friends are concerned, Italian might as well be FORTRAN or COBOL, i.e. not as good. Consequently I look forward to a world that speaks English, that English being British English, of course!!!
I have had many a conversation with non-native English speakers on this topic and one theme that crops up often is the idea that it is easier to think "advanced" thoughts in English than in their native language.
But digging a little deeper, I think what is really happening is that these people learned "advanced" topics from English-language textbooks, papers, seminars, etc. and so they only have English vocabulary, phraseology, idioms and context for that topic.
> I have had many a conversation with non-native English speakers on this topic and one theme that crops up often is the idea that it is easier to think "advanced" thoughts in English than in their native language.
I personally find it much easier to develop "advanced" thoughts in German than in English, since for example in German building compound words is a very natural thing while in English it is rather clumsy. The same holds for nominalization of verbs.
Compare it with using a programming language that allows one to express complicated concepts in a very logical way (say, higher-order functions in Haskell). So when I try to write my thoughts down (say, for a scientific text) I find it much more clumsy to express them in English than in German, since I often feel that English lacks features that would make expressing them a lot more easy.
> Memories of pluskvamerfekt are still haunting me at night.
Plusquamperfekt in German is about the same as past perfect in English in the way it is formed and used (OK, in German it depends on the verb whether Perfekt and Plusquamperfekt are formed using "haben" or "sein" - this is ugly, accepted). So I don't really understand why you feel haunted by the Plusquamperfekt.
Despite the well-known schoolboy doggerel (Latin is a language / As dead as dead can be. / First it killed the Romans / And now it's killing me!), there has always been a live community of Latin speakers, via the church. At no point was there a 'with the death of' at which the last speaker passed away.
As for English, it's jolly nice if one happens to have the world's lingua franca as one's native tongue, but surely we could wish for something better than English as the world's language? If nothing else the orthography could be both simpler and clearer.
> Funny to see that 'Latin' is not in the list. Sure there are plant names with names in 'latin' but not the same Latin as the Romans used.
Seeing as it's actively used by members of the Catholic church and taught all over the world, it's clearly not extinct.
Botanical latin is/was used not only for the names of plants but also for the formal description of the species in taxonomic publications (although, as of a few years ago, this is no longer required). BL is grammatically latin, but with some specialized vocabulary.
Until the Industrial Revolution came along most people identified themselves as from the town or county where they lived rather than a given nation. People rarely travelled further than the next village and language was extremely regional. Same in France, until Napoleon came along France had hundreds of languages/dialects rather than an identifiable 'French' that everyone knew. In the UK, before television, it really was not that easy to be understood in places like Liverpool if you were from a place like Bristol - accents were too different to make that easy in everyday conversation even if written words were the same everywhere. The railways were the start of this process of making English universally understood amongst the English, before that there really wasn't much need to bother to read unless you were a book-reading academic type.
I am pleased that English is lingua-franca(!) for planet earth when it comes to computer stuff, science and little things like air traffic control. English may not be 'strongly typed Esperanto' but it does not have to be. It is considered courtesy to try and speak in native languages for Brits abroad, however, beyond 'please and thankyou' I think it is much better to stick to English and, in the process, help others that want to learn English. Just speak s-l-o-w-l-y and remember that something like 90% of communication is body language when face-to-face.
I do a fair amount of translation in the day job, and, amongst the foreign-language speakers that I pester for words 'n' phrases, I frequently find people preferring English as they can express so much more in it than their native tongue. As far as my Italian friends are concerned, Italian might as well be FORTRAN or COBOL, i.e. not as good. Consequently I look forward to a world that speaks English, that English being British English, of course!!!