• YuriMihalkov [comrade/them,any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    I think if everyone in the world started speaking only English (or any other single language) it would be a much less cool place. For the same reason, I don't think it makes any sense to say it would be "objectively" better if all the Slavic languages were condensed down into a single language that everybody spoke. Multilingualism is great and it's probably a good thing to have a lingua franca that helps everybody communicate, but that's a totally different concept than getting rid of differences between languages.

    An example of the end result of a desire to rationalize culture is the McDonaldsization / Americanization that's happened all over the globe.

    (That being said, the policies of the Académie francaise tend to be pretty ridiculous in the way they try to arrest any natural change in the language)

    • kristina [she/her]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      i mean i can see that argument, but there is still a trend for languages to merge into a larger one the more interconnected a society is. the only real way to preserve language and culture is full anprim seclusionism, but obviously that concept is antithetical to communism and socialism

      maybe my pan-slavism is showing lmao

      honestly, i just dont have a strong opinion either way. in the limited context of being a czech speaker i usually just see people who jerk off to preserving our language as ultranationalists. obviously, i dont wanna apply my experiences here to other small languages.

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        Esperanto is interesting but imo you'd have better luck taking a big language in the same group and making a simpler version of it for the rest of the group that almost everyone can understand. So for Slavic, take Russian and simplify it to the point that everyone can understand it and use it to learn other Slavic langauges and speak 'Simplified Russian' with little effort. The Soviets did do this a little but not entirely, though I think they were limited by how much of a statistical analysis of language they could do at the time. If they were still around... :thonk-cri:

        • CTHlurker [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          I feel like that sentence by itself should be classified as a chud cognitohazard.