Re: OT: Proto-languages as national/international languages

From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>

> Somle of years ago, I read an article by a guy arguing, apparently fully
> seriously, for the EU to develop to an "United States of Europe" with
Latin
> as it's official language. The idea was that it'd be unfair to take a now
> spoken national language as the official one of the entire Union, and that
> Latin has a long history of use in the entire region. As an added bonus,
> it's of course the source of a big chunk of the vocabulary even of the
> non-Romance languages of the EU. The revival of Hebrew in Israel was cited
> as evidence that it was doable.
And Hebrew united a people with a common religious-ethnic heritage, but a
diversity of languages, from English to Spanish to Russian to Arabic. Modern
Hebrew actually has some "reconstructed" vocabulary, if I'm not mistaken,
derived mostly from Aramaic and Arabic words, not to mention a lot of
non-Semitic borrowings, much of it from Yiddish or Ladino.

I also forgot to mention the Arab nations speak a diversity of languages,
all of which are commonly referred to as "dialects" of spoken Arabic, with a
common diglossia of Modern Standard Arabic. A similar case could be made for
the Philippines and the "Swahili Zone" of Africa, but those are natural
languages of a specific people in a "central" position for each area.

> >The United States, very certainly the most linguistically diverse nation
on
> >the planet
>
> Is it? I'd thought that that distinction went to a country like Papua New
> Guinea, Indonesia or India?
>
> Or are you refering to diversity also of language families and groupings?
It would be diversity of families and groupings. The United States has both
a diversity of native languages and immigrant languages, yet has a single de
facto national language (English) with a heavy presence of Spanish in much
of the country. Canada has French instead of Spanish, and more presence of
native American languages. (Inuktitut has official status in Nunavut
Territory, doesn't it?)

The nation with the most diversity in languages, that is the most languages
per capita, is Vanuatu in the Pacific. ~Danny~