Wouldn't Spanish be a BETTER choice?

DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:36 GMT
What do you mean by LatAm "kidnaps anyway with brain cells". If you mean IQs are lower in LatAm, then that is correct, but this is not the right way to express such a concept in English. Maybe you have been kidnapped with brain cells?
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:38 GMT
Historia magistra vitae est? Does this mean "historia magister vitae est"?
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:40 GMT
Is it possible for English to fragment into several languages in the days of mass communication?
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:44 GMT
Travis, is wrong. Hispanics are the one community that are hanging on to their language in the US even though the youngsters learn English at school. His post struck me as political propaganda more than anything else.
Travis   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:46 GMT
Well, DJW, it is quite likely to in the future (not immediate, but somewhat distant) fragment at the everyday spoken language level, but I myself doubt whether it would fragment at the formal literary language level. If anything, the formal registers of the language, both spoken and especially written, are more likely to stay together as one language, while the informal forms of English which are spoken by most English-speakers in most of their actual usage, are more likely to break up and disperse. This is rather analogous to what happened with Latin, where the informal language that was used split up into a number of different Romance languages, slowly but surely, but yet the formal literary language stayed as *the* literary language par excellence throughout the whole of the Middle Ages in general, long after no one really spoke Latin itself natively themselves.
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:48 GMT
What about Klingon? I know the Unicode consortium has refused to encode the Klingon characters, upsetting Trekkies everywhere...
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:50 GMT
When Mexico ceded what is now the US South West to the US, excluding the Amerindian population, there were only 10,000 Mexicans in the area. It is a gross exaggeration to say that, eg a bilingual New Mexico, is just a continuation of the historical situation and not a totally new situation. Travis does so for political purposes. Cut the propaganda. You're on the wrong site.
Travis   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 18:51 GMT
Okay, now I don't understand what Klingon is supposed to do with any of this in the first place...

/me blinks
Travis   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 19:00 GMT
You're quite the person to complain about "poltiical propaganda", DJW, with your blathering about how the US is a "white nation" and whatnot. And, by the way, you're the person bringing politics into all of this, not me. And also, well, what you've said about Hispanics holding onto Spanish in the US quite goes against everything I myself at least have read on the subject, which has been quite to the contrary as a whole.
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 19:27 GMT
Go to www.langmaker.com for links to 1,400 constructed languages!!!!!!!!
DJW   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 19:33 GMT
Klingon is relevant, as it is a constructed language that could be used for international, or even interplanetary, or intergalactic, communication!!
sw yank   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 19:39 GMT
Exactly, immigrants should speak the language, because English has been the established language in this region for the past 150 years at the least. And you who say immigrants should not be expected to learn the language, how do you feel when a fat stupid tourist comes to your country and demands that you speak English. If you're not from the Western USA don't even make claims about Natives, because you just don't know anything about them.
sw yank   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 19:41 GMT
Travis are you from the US even? Have you ever talked to Hispanics?
Travis   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 19:47 GMT
Considering that I've lived in Wisconsin my entire life, yes, I'm most definitely from teh US. As for Hispanics, well, honestly I don't have very much contact with them here myself, but as for the Spanish thing, that's just from figures I've read about language usage with respect to Spanish versus English across multiple generations removed from initial immigration to the US, and also what I know about the history of this area of the US, and in particular immigration of (extremely large numbers of) German-speakers to this area in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and how it compares and contrasts with immigration of Spanish-speakers today, and about how the whole controversy over Spanish-speakers immigrating to the US today really is not unique on a historical level at all. Unfortunately, though, I've forgotten where I specifically got the figures at the moment, so I can't refer you to them here.
sw yank   Sunday, April 03, 2005, 20:03 GMT
Wisconsin, hmm. I think you could compare it more to a larger scale Hmong immigration, rather than a German one. Imagine hundreds of thousands of Hmongs in your community, with the majority unwilling to learn English, and you've got a typical Southwestern city. They aren't taking over completely, but they do have entire Spanish speaking cities (All typically less than 50 years old). And it is a unique situations. The Wisconsin of 150 years ago is very different from the Southwest of today.