An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Jan Kaliszewski]

30-08-2009 o 14:11:15 Hendrik van Rooyen <hendrik at microcorp.co.za> wrote:

> a nightmare of Orwellian proportions - because the language you get  
> taught first, moulds the way you think.  And I know from personal  
> experience that
> there are concepts that can be succinctly expressed in one language, that
> takes a lot of wordy handwaving to get across in another.  So diversity  
> would be less, creativity would suffer due to lack of cross pollination,
> and progress would slow or stop.

That's the point! Even in the case of programming languages we say about
'culture' and 'way of thinking' connected with each of them, though
after all they are only formal constructs.

In case of natural languages it's incomparably richer and more complex.
Each natural language has richness of culture and ages of history
-- behind that language and recorded in it in many ways.

Most probably such an unification would mean terrible impoverishment
of our (humans') culture and, as a result, terrible squandering of our
intelectual, emotional, cognitive etc. potential -- especially if such
unification were a result of intentional policy (and not of a slow and
'patient' process of synthesis).

*j

-- 
Jan Kaliszewski (zuo) <zuo at chopin.edu.pl>