wtsdv wrote:
>> If you want, you can belive in this scenario.
>
> Why would I _want_ to believe in it? All _I_ want is that
> my beliefs correspond as closely to reality as possible.
>
> Keep in mind that people living in the time we're discussing,
> didn't necessarily share your modern view of nationalism.
>
> David
I don't guess this has something with nationalism to do. In fact it
seems we do not understand the same thing for nationalism. For me
"nationalism" is the _normal_ feeling of an individium as belonging to a
group which is mostly identified trough its language. My child is
already 5 and speaks no English. He could not learn it "from birth"
since none of his family is an English speaker even if both parents
speaks English more or less _if necessary_ .
There are many people which will learn English day by day, that is true.
If they ever will abandon their language is a hypothetical scenario
where myself I doubt about. If ever something like this will happen,
this won't happen in the next 200 years, that is sure. It seems you
forget that the big mass of the people in each country is not working in
fields where an international language (like English) is required. I
take you with my car and we will go trough Europe from Black Sea until
Norway, from Russia until Portugal. We will speak with the workers,
peasants, with that big part of the folk of each country. They do not
speak English, they do not care about knowing that.
David, there is a certain percent of people who are obliged to speak a
foreign language due the nature of their work, there is a certain
percent of people with intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) interests,
people who need a communication language, an another as their mother
language, a language for communicating with each other for satisfying
their interests; there is an another percentage made up off some other
things. But the biggest part of people, doesn't need, won't need, will
not speak an another language. And this is a thing which intellectuals
usually forget seeing the rest of the world trough their own criteria of
necessity. It happens this "intellectual necessity" is not a necessity
for the rest of the folk , thus the scenario we are talking about has
the very best chances to remain just a scenario on the paper.
Alex