The reason why I always pray for more wisdom in the World. The reason behind ALL inter-human problems is human stupidity. So if most humans are stupid, why bother listening to what they think? If most Europeans are going to believe a commercial for Coca Cola why not do the same with a dead language? Tell them it's good and it will be.

Wow. I haven't heard such a clear synthesis of a materialistic and relativistic worldview in a while . Can't say it lines up with my view of the world...

By your reasoning: If humans are stupid and that's the cause of all our problems, then why not just educate the beheejies (is that how you spell that? ) out of them. Teach them languages, philosophy, etc. and they'll be good Plato and Aristotle tried that a looong time ago...didn't work.

Anyways, there is some truth to the thought that if you tell people it's good they'll be naïve enought to believe it. But after this discussion, I think it's pointless to try and establish a universal language...

But the thing is: do the people running the EU have something to gain from this? Or would they just have the people stupid as they are minding their own business, spending all their money on globalized products? Surely they would have them stay stupid as they are rather than just have them get their own political opinion. Human stupidity has been around for ever, 'human nature does not change', as the ancient Greeks said, and i firmly believe it is so. It is in our nature to be volnerable and history has proven that the masses are extremely easy to manipulate. Look at the state of the world today! So much for Democracy, the United Nations and Equality! War against terrorism! Such lies! You have numerous channels just lying into your face *points at CNN and FOX* and government raging wars for 'the benefit of global democracy' and people just fall for it. But then again that has always happened, it doesnt come as a surprise... Pfff, we need a change right now. Thats what we need right now, a change. Not talk about how wonderful the world would be if we had a european superstate. We first need to let go of all our national and international problems (which i think will never happen) and then dream about a society where there will be no borders. In our world such a society can not exist because the people running the world will not allow it to exist.

A dead language is called a dead language for a reason...

I guess you guys answered your questions.

And socrates too. And what did they do to him? They sent him to exile... See what i mean?

Your position toward Ancient's Greek dative case makes me think you're most likely just led by the general prejudice against it in your society. 6 cases or fewer doesn't a problem to me, and probably even help making word order a little freer. Now a language from West Africa marking tense with tones, an Oceanic language using serial verbs producively, a Semitic language marking plurals moving vowel patterns all over the place, with semi predictable patterns; now that seems interesting.

Plus, case marking is awesome per se. Hmmm... though none of the languages I've studied have them because they either lost them (Spanish, French, English, Arabic) or probably never had them (Mandarin). That's probably a reason why all my conlangs have case as well.

Ahh... That idea that English is simpler than other languages...again.

In the old forum we used to have a thread in which we exposed that English is NOT easy, coming up with the conclusion that learning English is pretty much like learning French or any other nice language for that matter. I don't really know how you dare to say it's easy, maybe because it's allegedly "your mother tongue"?

I'd really want to give you a link to there, why did the database have to be lost?! T_T

You should be aware that in general, learning another language imposes a, not huge, but ridiculous amount of effort.

Meh...exile was nothing...the man killed himself! So much for "education and reason being the key all the problems of teh world..."

I'm afraid I'm not really following this conversation about the EU. Superstate? It's a federation of nation-states and I don't see why that would change. Europe is too diverse for anything else to work.
Not Toki Pona!

Okay, every natural language has a large enough vocabulary to meet the needs of its speakers - they just develop that way. But I've heard some languages have more extensive lexicons than others. English, Spanish, Arabic and Russian seem to come up a lot in these lists.
Oh, I know it's a pain, even for a native speaker like me, but so many people know it already whereas Latin has been steadily declining for at least a century.

I don't and I'm not even trying to.

Oh c'mon! Toki Pona is a conlang designed to dare reliability on huge vocabulary.


Spanish is sometimes a pain for me too! The written standard I mean, but mainly about writing style, not all the grammar bits students of Spanish have to deal with of course.

It will be hard for another language to replace English, unless another Cold War starts with... I don't know, China against the United States or something crazy like that—China being the winner; let alone Latin which is only official in... the Vatican. Plus, with all these guys' fear toward cases, it would be even more difficult.

Oh no! Cold War II!
But I think Chinese characters and the idioms are much more crazier than English orthography and grammar.
齉... How do you write that character again?