Not like esperanto. Everyone becomes filipino basically, but for everything, not just being filipino by itself
Kial ne Esperanto? :(
Stalin wrote a lot about this. IIRC some marxists at the time thought that national differences could dissapear in favor of internationalism, including having only one language. However, Stalin argued that this was unrealistic in the short term and also detrimental because it would erasue national culture, encouraging sessesionism and also causing the state to supressing minorities, like the tsarists had done, and that thus ultimately the best approach to handling nationaliam and language is to support every culture and its language (including basically reviving languages and making new written ones) and by doing that achieving unity among the working class. China has an essentially equivalent approach to nationalities, minus the formal right to secceed which the Soviet republics had (which is probably a good thing)
right to secede
This was such a terrible idea. Was there any rationale for this at the time?
There was no such thing as a formal centralized Soviet Union in the early years following the civil war. If a state wanted to break away there wouldn’t have been a damn thing the central government could have done to prevent that, and the right to secede was presented as a way to show that the Soviet Union wasn’t just a continuation of the Russian empire.
Like ComradeSalad says, it was partly a recognition of material reality.
The idea in general is that by supporting the rights of nationalities, the contradictions between nationalities lessen, and all workers can join together in the (more or less) unitary workers state. So the point isn’t really federalism, but rather democratic centralism/unitarianism through the unity of opposites within the working class. In this context the “right to secede” is a formal right which is never supposed to be used, but which is granted to make republics not want to secede. Although republics had the right to secede, the CPSU tried to support internationalist nationalism and discourage national chauvinism for most of its existence.
The issue is that when the issue of nationalities and the contradictions which it exists with is not handled carefully (which Gorbachov in particular fucked up spectacularly, although IIRC Kruchev and Breshnev could also have done better in this area (room for improvement for Stalin too definetly although he was a pioneer in the correct treatment of nationalities in socialism)) then the theoretical right to secede becomes a political bomb - especially ehen combined with national petite bourgeois elites from the shadow economy and right-deviationist (and disfunctional) economic reforms and political reforms which made politicians only dependent on national constituents.
There are two main problems.
First, global languages as a whole have barely anything similar to each other. For example, there are languages there isn’t any way to tell relative direction (so I would call one of my hands my “west hand” and the other the “east hand”, but if I turned 90 deg I would call them “north” hand and “south” hand). This is just scratching the surface.
If you had to list common features present in all languages globally, it would probably go like “all languages have vowels”, “all languages have nouns”,
“all languages have pronouns”, “most languages use m sounds to refer to mothers and d/p/f sounds to refer to fathers” etc. Like, the bare minimum. You can’t even be sure if all languages have recursion (see Piñaha, although in my opinion the claim that this language doesn’t have recursion is bullshit). There is so much variation that any “composite” language speakers would necessarily take some choices. If you had to take the features of the most spoken languages of the world, then the result would sound like a tonal European language. European languages are the most widely spoken because of colonialism.Second, languages carry culture. Change a language, you lose poetry, puns, traditional history etc. Change a language enough and you end up killing it.
Why is “to shit” a slur and “to defecate” is not? Because poor Anglo peasants spoke a Germanic ancestor of English (where the word “shit” come from), and the aristocrat Saxons spoke an ancestor of French (where the word “defecate” come from). Why care about Anglos and Saxons, and their respective social positions? Because the Saxons invaded England and your “is this word profane?” sense came in part from their social status. (This paragraph might not be accurate. See the comment from La Dame d’Azur)
Also, if you want to see a “composite” language, you are reading one right now. English took features from all over the world due to colonialism and it’s a mess. However, it is still relatively stable.
Btw if you are curious see Creole languages. Creole languages are an absolutely amazing example of language “merging”.
all languages have pronouns
IIRC, there exist languages without pronouns, where instead constructions like ‘one who speaks’, ‘one who listens’ and so on are used.
Yeah, it was a mistake on my part. I forgot that Sign Language (at least the Brazilian one) works this way for example. Thanks for the correction.
This does make my point even clearer though: languages are really diverse.
Angles invaded Britain alongside the Saxons (and Jutes); that’s why the period is called “Anglo-Saxon”. French was imported by the Normans after 1066 - several centuries after the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes invaded Britain. By that point the distinction between the three was largely gone and everyone was simply English and spoke the same language (Old English/Anglisc).
Thanks for the relevant context. I should really stop trying to talk about stuff that I heard on youtube.
Hard to look at this “neutrally” when the history of colonialism is right there, with forcible erasure of native language being used, in addition to other means, in order to colonize/genocide peoples.
If anything, I expect there to be a resurgence of prioritizing the teaching of native languages as imperialism and colonialism get dismantled.
I feel like it makes the most “logical” sense for everyone to pick up an existing language. The most spoken language in the world is Mandarin Chinese. Basically a billion people. Looks like the rest of us gotta get our shit together.
Honestly if America was even a little bit serious as a nation every child would be learning Mandarin as a second or third language
But the most spoken is English isn’t it? Mandarin has the most native speakers but English is known to more people overall. At least for now since not as many people learn Chinese as a second language.
Well, there’s Spanish lessons in the US as far as I know. It’s not Chinese but it’s the language of their neighbors.
Probably varies from school to school but Spanish in the US is more like elective two trimesters in highschool, not the every year throughout elementary school it should be for actual language acquisition.
I think machine translation will eventually be good enough that such a project would be redundant.
But also, learning multiple languages is good for you. It literally makes your brain healthier. It’d be a shame to get rid of that.
Hypothetically if that happens I doubt the human mind will be capable of knowing the language in all its breadth which would defeat the purpose of this melding.
Besides this I think different languages existing is good actually. I am not a linguist but I feel different languages have embedded in them subtle differences in how their respective culture preceives and interprets the world which goes beyond surface differences alphabets, grammar etc. Also cross cultural dialogue is a beautiful and rewarding process.
Besides the obvious reasons why diversity is a strength, here’s an interesting video (4m) of why maintaining minority languages is a good idea.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
i feel like it’s not a matter of should and instead a matter of how language develops along with the material and social conditions globally, and it’d be quite hard to merge languages anyway globally, due to how even the most encompassing known old languages (indo-european) can still be unrelated to someone else in the world, and variations (dialects?) always tend to pop up, even in English, for example
no. what we should normalize is low language levels amongst non natives
I think Yugoslavia could be studied here. Serbo-croation as a sort of official language along with the languages of all nationalities in the federation is a probably a good basis for a form of international language. Perhaps something more along the lines of conglomerates of a language group used between speakers of languages in the same group, with a certain international language taught to everyone. However I do think the third language is a bit of a reach, (being trilingual-ish), but two languages could be managable for most people.
i propose portuguese, everywhere shall become Brasil
no
Too bad
Just make it Chinese and be done with it. They will be the new leaders of the world soon enough anyway.
As someone learning Chinese, I think that is an exceedingly bad choice for a global language, just due to how hard it is to reach fluency or even basic comprehension, not to mention the very complex writing system and variations in dialects. Spanish, English or Indonesian seem like much more “learner friendly” choices imo.
just learn esperanto, saluton!
