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A comment on China now the most prolific contributor to physical sciences, engineering, math. Parent comment

Re:China now the most prolific contributor to physical scien... by stickfigure on Thursday September 13, 2018 @12:07PM (#17979688)
It's funny that in a startup/techie forum like this, nobody's yet brought up Metcalfe's Law. The network effects of language are incredibly strong, the switching costs are high, and English is well established.

It's hard to imagine what could shift this trend, especially to Mandarin. China's population is probably not going to get dramatically larger than the current 1.4 bn, which is only 20% of the world total. Maybe some sort of civilization-destroying world cataclysm like a meteor impact, pandemic, or nuclear warfare.

If I could live long enough to see the payout, I'd be willing to bet that far future humans will speak only one language, and that language will have evolved primarily from English.

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Re:China now the most prolific contributor to physical scien... by rsj_hn on Thursday September 13, 2018 @03:07PM (#17981448)
I also think that the long run future of humanity is speaking a single language. The trend has not been to fragment languages but consolidate them because of the metcalf law effects you pointed out.

But even if that language is almost certain to be English, because english changes and has so many loan words, it would probably be unrecognizable to the english we speak today.

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