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Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language by ur-whale on Thursday June 28, 2018 @12:26PM (#17418274)
I am very much with you.

The standard knee-jerk reaction of wailing at the passing of yet another little-spoken language always fails to take into account the other side of the equation: a huge number of problems on this planet stem from the fact that people speak different languages and profoundly fail to understand one another.

Paying the price of losing little-spoken languages and the bits of culture that tag along with it is a very cheap price to pay when compared to what is gained.

Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language by rando444 on Thursday June 28, 2018 @12:47PM (#17418494)
a huge number of problems on this planet stem from the fact that people speak different languages

I strongly disagree with whatever led you to believe such a thing.

Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language by ur-whale on Thursday June 28, 2018 @05:15PM (#17420540)
You disagree with traveling?
Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language by zephyrfalcon on Thursday June 28, 2018 @04:11PM (#17420076)
> a huge number of problems on this planet stem from the fact that people speak different languages and profoundly fail to understand one another

That was the original thought behind Esperanto... the idea was that there was strife between different groups of people because they speak different languages, and that a universal language would solve this (or at least bring them closer together). [1] Whether this worked out or not is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto#Creation

Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language by obmelvin on Thursday June 28, 2018 @12:57PM (#17418585)
> people speak different languages and profoundly fail to understand one another.

How much of this do you really attribute to different languages? By and large everyone in America speaks English, but the past couple years in particular has very much demonstrated that we profoundly fail to understand one another. To me the language is obviously important for literal communication, but to an extent pretty irrelevant to the communication barriers in society.

Re:Switzerland's mysterious fourth language by njarboe on Thursday June 28, 2018 @12:32PM (#17418344)
I would imagine that there is less than 1% of people under 50 that speak Romansh natively that don't speak another language fluently, most likely Swiss-German, but also English. With the huge amount of homogenization of culture around the world, I think its cool if some corners try and keep some differences. These Swiss are surely not suffering in some backwater area, unable to move to the big city if they want.