You deceive yourself.

Yes, of course, it’s English, at the moment. I don’t think it’s just confined to multinational corporations. Most university educated Europeans and Asians speak it as a second language. English is considered to be one of the easiest languages to learn to speak, at least to a functional level.

I do think that there is a compromise to be made for less common languages. It’s to have an easy to learn language like English (or Spanish) that everyone can learn and then to leverage the prosperity that comes from having a common language to promote more traditional languages.

You see this in Canada with French and in Scotland with Scots Gaelic, for instance. There is a limit however, and it is not for free. To be successful, countries do have to decide which languages they are going to promote and finance.

“It only means that a purely logical “deep” representation (as assumed in Desperanto) does not capture all significant correlations between word meanings.”

Yeah. I agree. For instance, it’s often hard to translate irony.

There are folks who claim that such a lingua franca has already evolved within the community of people working for multinational corporations and doing business internationally, in the form of English with a restricted vocabulary and simplified syntax (“Globish”). There’s a book, web site, etc.

Yes, I believe that’s true.

I’d add that if you are going to push for trust and better communication via linguistic homogeneity, the lingua franca that works best is:

- one that is easy to learn
- one in which the speakers tolerate and can understand imperfect speaking

I’m thinking of situations in history where there were insiders and outsiders based on one’s complete mastery of a difficult to learn language (Attic Greece, for instance.) The increasing number of outsiders who could not speak Attic Greek undermined trust of the greater society of Classical Greece.

I can imagine a book about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

For example, a culture that has a primarily fatalistic outlook – someone else is in charge, the deity did it, it’s all luck, you need the king’s ok, etc. – has a very poor record of any progress in either democracy or economics.

Same thing for a culture that sees all goods are limited – in short supply. If you have a lot that means I have few, etc. The developed nations tend to see goods as something we make up, or create! Less developed nations see everytying as a competition for the few goods out there – like gold and diamonds, oil, etc.

Just at thought. Thanks for the ideas.

1) my opinions as to the fact of particular correlations are provisional and subject to correction. i’m weak on the empirics, aside from what i know in my head, but i think my theoretical reasoning was robust

2) i think too often those of us interested in culture and history and anthropology, broadly construed, have been scared off by the jargon and normative framework ascendant in modern american cultural anthropology. my post, and my snark and frank unpleasantness, comes from having to deal with the fact that i’m a person interested in ethnography and cultural variation who has to run into a mound of totally unintelligible “discourse.” i’m interested in naturalistic anthropology in the tradition of sperber, and modeling in the tradition of boyd and richerson. but this mode of analysis is pretty alien to most anthropologically interested people.

3) i’ll have more to say in the near future. i have decided that i’m not going to shut up about this topic.