49 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Vinlander
Groupie
Canada
Joined 5827 days ago
62 posts - 69 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French
| Message 49 of 49 30 May 2009 at 8:18am | IP Logged |
pmiller wrote:
Actually, German almost became the language of the United States. The US Founding Fathers voted on whether English or German should be the national language going forward. Remember, they hated the Brits at the time, and a substantial percentage of the American population was German (still today more Americans claim German heritage than any other). For example, the Pennsylvania "Dutch" were/are actually Deutsch (German). Anyway, German lost by only one vote!
EDIT: I just checked and apparently the above is an urban myth. I remember hearing it a couple of times, including from my high school German teacher, whom I took to be a credible source. (DOH!)
But if the above scenario HAD occurred, and if German had won, it's very likely that the US and Germany would've been closer by the time WW I (or something like it) came around, so that the US likely would've sided with Germany instead of Britain, in which case the German-speaking countries would most certainly have won, so that by now English would be a language in decline while German would probably be the international language.
German and Japanese had a big chance in WW II - that war could've easily gone the other way. Suppose those two countries had better coordinated their war strategies. Instead of attacking the West and the USSR at the same time, they could've attacked them one at a time, in which case they probably would've won the war. For example, instead of attacking Russia when it did, Germany could've redoubled it's effort to defeat Britain first. Or else Japan could've helped Germany defeat Russia before attacking US and British bases in the Pacific.
Or they could've won if either Germany or Japan had perfected the atom bomb before the US (they both had their own programs).
In any case, German and Japanese would've been the two major languages in the world.
In preceding decades the Japanese had already almost completely Japanized Korea and Taiwan (the people spoke Japanese, had Japanese names and were punished for speaking Korean or Taiwanese). They planned to do the same to the rest of Asia, wiping out all the native languages over a generation or two. They had even worked out a system of writing English using their katakana script in anticipation of winning the war and enslaving the English-speaking nations of the Pacific rim.
As for Europe, the Nazi plan was for Czechs, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Russians and Ukrainians to be enslaved and eventually eliminated, leaving all of the European part of the former USSR as part of Germany proper, which would be populated entirely by Germans. (Some allowance was to be made for especially nordic/Aryan-looking young people of these lands to be absorbed into the German population).
It would be a very different world indeed.
My language fantasy? That one language becomes truly universal ASAP (maybe Esperanto - I don't really care which - but that would be the only language of school systems all over the world, so that kids who are 6 years old today will grow up totally fluent in it). Everyone can keep their heritage languages as well, but humanity needs to have more holding us together if we're to avoid WW III (nuclear + biological), which no language is likely to survive.
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thanks for a minute I the word German could be mentioned without some reference to the Nazi's.
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