Re: language shift ( it was Celts & Cimmerians)

Peter P wrote

> Getting back to English as a universal world language, is this bad
> or good? I would argue that it has more benefit than detriment,
> in that the more easily we, the inhabitant of planet Earth can
> communicate the better. I think we see the process in small scale
> right at this Yahoo group.

Peter, I think we need to recognise that the current hegemony of
English is a part of the Anglo-American cultural hegemony that
refuses to accept any multicultural reality.

> I know there are those who would preserve their linguistic,
> cultural or ethnic values, but aren't we all decended from a few
> hundred (maybe thousand) emigrants from Africa? We all have two
> parents 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on. We don't
> have to go back thousands of years before the number of ancestors
> equals the total population of the earth. That doesn't mean that
> an ancestor of a thousand years ago is shared by everyone today,
> but trying to preseve a culture or language based on inherited
> values become more suspect as we regress further in time. I would
> think that everyone reading this list would be related distantly
> to all those who remained in Africa or left to populate the rest
> of the earth.

Agreed, but in populating the Earth successfully we learned to adapt
to differences in ecology and environment. We invented words
for "snow" or "kangaroo" that would not have been in the original
language. It was this linguistic flexibility that enabled us to
live sustainably in environments that no other African species can
have adapted to. As Anglo-American culture is arguably the *least*
sustainable on Earth at the moment, the loss of those languages that
were spoken by people who did not have the fossil fuel subsidies
that the Anglo-Americans have monopolised. What happens to
languages once these fuel subsidies disappear is anyone's guess.
Perhaps we might regret the loss of locally adapted languages then.

Regards

John