For John, BLUF: I'm glad lots of folks speak English. Nothing to see here; just move along.
I am poor at learning languages. Eight years after I left high school, a 2300 student three year high school, my next youngest brother, Lance, showed up in class with my French Teacher, Monsieur Bibiloni, who remembered me with the comment, "He never went to college, did he?"
So, the idea that there are 6,000 different languages out there is almost overwhelming for me.
Today's "Saturday's Essay" in The Wall Street Journal looks at today and then forward to the year 2015. Of course, as Yogi Berra tells us, “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” Even so, here is the effort, What the World Will Speak in 2115: A century from now, expect fewer but simpler languages on every continent.
Here is an item on English:
Two thousand years ago, English was the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark. A thousand years after that, it was living in the shadow of French-speaking overlords on a dampish little island. No one then living could have dreamed that English would be spoken today, to some degree, by almost two billion people, on its way to being spoken by every third person on the planet.Who knows what we will be speaking 100 years from now?
Regards — Cliff
Perhaps the more germane question would "IF we will be speaking anything in 2115?"
ReplyDeleteI had enough trouble recognizing Beowulf as any language at all, let alone English. Suggesting Iron Age Denmark was home to anything but one of thousands of progenitors to what we now attribute as English is a bit of a stretch. There's Greek, Latin, French, German and any number of other languages in my vocabulary--English stands as the most successful (to this point) polyglot the world has yet seen, and I'm guessing that whatever evolves to supersede it will be as much English as whatever else it claims as a parent.
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