As to your second point—no government today is as large in scope as say Rome, the British Empire, the Persian empire, etc. The long-term sustainability of the EU and US are also far from certain. As we saw with both, federalism doesn’t work. As soon as you have a single voting polity, people will want to escalate everything to the federal level. It’s unacceptable to many in the US, for example, that Iowa might have a different minimum wage than New York. When climate change really hits, and California is fighting with Colorado over water and contemplating invading the PNW, we shall see.
Utter hogwash. In terms of scale and intensiveness if state powers even small nations can easily outstrip the bureaucratic complexity of any ancient empire. The challenges of maintaining a welfare state is no small thing.
And plenty of countries manage incredible amounts of diversity. India has 50 official languages on its own, and that’s ignoring dialects and weird subgroups. If things seem more similar in spite of that it’s because nation-sized economies are inherently homogenizing through creation of national languages and bureaucracies. But this is itself part of the complexity. Modern governments literally aim to educate ALL the children born within them. This would have been insane to a Roman.
Indo-Aryan is spoken by ~74% of India, with Dravidian spoken by ~24% of India. So in practice the real-life language diversity is very small.
As for 'managing diversity', India has historically 'solved' this through a caste system, not a solution I would propose.
Source: I'm trained as a general linguist, but are not specialized in ethno- and sociolinguistics. Check out https://www.ethnologue.com for more information.
True, but old-school linguists tend to revel in this diversity, whereas more modern linguists try to find commonalities between these very diverse languages.
I remember auditing a linguistics class in college largely because I was interested in NLP. Sadly, I got the old-school professors who were more interested in students memorizing hundreds of variants of sounds than understanding the links between them. I dropped the course. Maybe if I stuck around long enough they would get to more global insights, but I was turned off by their entire approach.
That is clearly not adequate if you want to take a look at languages and culture (in that language). Classifications of languages as languages are partly political, sometimes even highly political, and mutual comprehensibility is not a working criterion.
I don't recall the details, but the classification used by ethnologue.com are a fairly reasonable set of soft criteria. The alternative would be not to speak of languages and dialects at all, and instead only about varieties of various language families with a certain degree of mutual comprehensibility to other varieties, but that would be even more counter-intuitive to laymen.
As to your personal experience: That's sad, you merely seem to have ended up in the wrong department / with the wrong professors. Find some general linguists and computational linguists and you should get your global insights. Phonology was actually at the forefront of general structural descriptions, sometimes even earlier than in syntax. For example, they invented optimality theory. It's worth giving it another try!
It was a while ago (graduated in 2005), but I think linguistics was under the English or anthropology department (I do remember the building was in the liberal sciences area). While I saw a clear connection between linguistics and NLP, I got the sense that the focus was to understand culture through language, and less about understanding language and communication itself.
> It's worth giving it another try!
I'd like to, but in the ~15 years since I've graduated it feels like the entire computational linguistics field has grown so dramatically that many of the problems I was originally interested in have been more-or-less developed (e.g., segmenting words into their phonemes for machine learning models, building grammar trees). Today, I'm more likely to grab one of the many libraries that do all this magic under the hood while I remain ignorant.
Is this like saying Italian, French, Spanish are pretty much the same because they are Romamtic languages? Or English and German are interchangable, because English is a Germanic language?
Or, is much closer like British and American English- just mostly difference because of accents and dialects?
Trying to understand how different Indian subgroups of languages are.
It really varies. Some languages, like Hindi, Gujarati, and Punjabi, are about as similar as Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. In other cases the common languages can be very different. Telugu and Tamil, for instance, are probably much more like trying to go between English and German. Telugu and Kannada are kind of odd ducks. They're basically Dravidian languages that borrowed tons of their vocabulary from an Indo-European language (Sanskrit). That actually makes it a very good analogue for English, which is a Germanic language that spent a lot of time trying desperately to be a Romance language (French).
It's a bit of a tricky business, because what counts as a language is often also determined by political decisions. Mutual comprehensibility is not a reliable criterion. However, modern linguistics uses pretty good sets of "soft" criteria for the classifications.
To think that in one hundred years any outer space colony will be self sufficient compared to whatever is produced and available on Earth is highly unlikely even in our wildest dreams now. We have literally no pathway for complete self sustainability on other planets in sight, and as long as this remains true space colonies will have no power to break out from whoever they depend on.
Assuming some sort of breakthrough in cheap propulsion and living systems, I couldn't disagree more. If anything, you'd see efforts at a sub-state level with the early colonies in the Americas given as examples.
I think that states, and particularly nations, are well suited to large scale efforts with minimal or no immediate payoffs. It's hard to get a sufficiently large group to pull on a rope at the same time.
In fact, you don't even have to look beyond India to see a country which is doing pretty well for itself (all things considered) despite each state being a quasi nation with distinct cultural and language mores.
India is a wonderful country, but that diversity causes a lot of problems.
I mentioned the Kaveri River water supply issues in a different comment, but there's also all of the issues in the Indian controlled portion of Kashmir... and just everything surrounding the whole of Kashmir
The issue in Assam that the person you are replying to is mentioning is also important. It's quite similar to some of the issues we're facing in America, and it shouldn't be dismissed so quickly.
For those unfamiliar, one of the states in India has a significant refugee population, largely from refugees fleeing Indo-Pakistani and Bangaldesh Liberation Wars of 1971. Millions fled, particularly from Bangladesh and the rest of east Pakistan, to India. India, since 1987, lacks jus soli/birthright citizenship. Many of the refugees did not bring with them any way to prove citizenship in other countries. Many of the refugees forged identities to be allowed to stay. While this obviously is technically illegal, the end result is that there are people that have been living in India for 50 years, or were born there and know nothing else, that are having their citizenships revoked. Without the ability to prove citizenship from their other countries, these refugees and their descendants are at risk of ending up totally stateless - there are millions of people at risk from this. Bangladesh has not committed to accepting these people, and neither has India said they will allow them to stay and give them a path to citizenship.
It's hardly related to "big" problems like this, either. Casual statism and racism is a significant issue, both along the north/south divide, but also within regions.
Seems like a naive assumption. We don't see Virgin Islands and other US territories trying to sever their ties to the mainland. In fact we see the opposite with Puerto Rico.
Moreover, if mankind ever expands into space, it would be rather naive to think that earth's nations would play a role there in the long run. Earth's nations change all the time, they are mere human constructs, and of course the same would happen in outer space. It would take maybe a hundred years or so for space colonies to declare their independence. And afterwards, they form larger unions again, just like on earth, because forming unions is in their interests.
> The idea of a society that big being governable is part of the science fiction.
That's far off topic, but to reply to this aspect of your post: Claiming that you can govern countries like Australia, the US, and Russia, but not the world as a whole draws some pretty arbitrary boundaries. With a federal structure, it would be no problem.
People said about every country before it was united that it will never be united. Before Germany was united, people said that it's absolutely impossible to govern such a big country and that the cultures of Prussia and Bavaria are just too different. Before the EU was funded, people said that certain European countries could never closely work together or even form a trade union and that there would always be war between some of them. Heck, probably settlers in the US also were convinced that the South and the North could never live together or be governed as one nation, because it's just too big. And so on, and so forth, you get the gist.