Create an Account
username: password:
 
  MemeStreams Logo

The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

search

noteworthy
Picture of noteworthy
My Blog
My Profile
My Audience
My Sources
Send Me a Message

sponsored links

noteworthy's topics
Arts
  Literature
   Fiction
   Non-Fiction
  Movies
   Documentary
   Drama
   Film Noir
   Sci-Fi/Fantasy Films
   War
  Music
  TV
   TV Documentary
Business
  Tech Industry
  Telecom Industry
  Management
Games
Health and Wellness
Home and Garden
Miscellaneous
  Humor
  MemeStreams
   Using MemeStreams
Current Events
  War on Terrorism
  Elections
  Israeli/Palestinian
Recreation
  Cars and Trucks
  Travel
   Asian Travel
Local Information
  Food
  SF Bay Area Events
Science
  History
  Math
  Nano Tech
  Physics
  Space
Society
  Economics
  Education
  Futurism
  International Relations
  History
  Politics and Law
   Civil Liberties
    Surveillance
   Intellectual Property
  Media
   Blogging
  Military
  Philosophy
Sports
Technology
  Biotechnology
  Computers
   Computer Security
    Cryptography
   Human Computer Interaction
   Knowledge Management
  Military Technology
  High Tech Developments

support us

Get MemeStreams Stuff!


 
The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English
Topic: Futurism 6:05 pm EST, Nov  8, 2009

John McWhorter, in World Affairs Journal:

Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.

Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed?

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information.

O'Reilly:

Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages!

Peter Norvig:

Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.

Michael Chabon:

If only there were a game, whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English



 
 
Powered By Industrial Memetics
RSS2.0