Capitolo 2
earth doesn't practise but the language of Dante you/he/she had not been never yet
associated with some great national defeat or the dishonor. The idea
doesn't catch me a small; because it exposes such depth
equivocal of what language is, and because people use him. The discourse of
the world won't be definite on the mere motives for the feeling: the language
that survives it won't survive because you/he/she is so admirably adapted for
the product of rhymes or epigrams. Austere need forces. French and
German, in assembled congress and looking for around them a means of
intercommunication, would agree indeed to accept then and there Italian
as an international compromise. But congresses don't do or they undo the
the habits of the life of every day; and the growth or expansion of a language it is a
thing as very over our human and deliberate control as the increase or fall of
the barometer.
However, the comment of my friend put me thinking and what is looking
really the languages now earning and spreading on the civilized world;
it put me speculating what will be the consequence of this profit and expansion
in another half century. And the results are these: Vastly the more anymore
growing and to absorb of all the languages to the present moment I am the
English of which you/he/she is almost swallowing everywhere on the flood
German, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Russian. Following to him, probably in point
of the vitality, it comes to Spanish of which is swallowing on the flood
French, Italian and the other Latin runs. Third, perhaps the lines
Russian, it destined becoming in duration the language spoken of an enormous line in
Northern and Central Asia. Among not-European languages, three seem to
you/he/she is earning fast: Chinese, Malayan, Arab. Of the languages condemned, on the
other hand, the more without hope it is French that you/he/she is losing every round;
while Italian, German, and the Dutch I am completely one to a standstill or
slightly regressing. Now the world is round. From the middle one of the
twentieth century, in every probability English it will be his dominant