Re: language shift ( it was Celts & Cimmerians)

I actually agree with most everything you write here, but
I would still hate to see all of the worlds linguistic and
cultural diversity reduced to an English-speaking copy of
America and Canada, or Britain. I think that most linguists
(by this I don't mean to misrepresent myself as a linguist)
feel the same way, just as most zoologist would like to
prevent further extinctions. I have no problem with there
being an international lingua franca, but I'm not sure that
English is the best choice. It's a historical accident that
it has come to be, not necessarily its fitness for the role.
It's spelling system is one problem that I've already mentioned,
but in addition, English is a "mutt" language, and as such
its structure is less obvious. So it must, all else the same,
be more difficult to learn.

David

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Peter P" <peterp@...> wrote:
>
> I am not sure what 'related' means. If I look at a Finnish
> etymological dictionary I discover that 50% or more of the words
are
> borrowed from IE. Especially Finnish but Italian too, borrow
> extensively from English. There are Latin loans in Finnish. Both
> languages presumably can be traced to Nostratic or Eurasian
(asuming
> there is a real basis to those theories).
>
> True the ancient connections are vague, but the modern connections
> are real enough. Perhaps I see relatedness slightly differently
from
> the traditional view. If two languages use mumerous words that can
> be traced to a similar etymological sources are they related? I
> would say at least partially.
>
> Yes, I know there is a great difference in the historical
development
> of Finnish and Italian, and in that respect of course the languages
> are not related.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Peter P