Re:Mongolia to restore traditional alphabet
by pbhjpbhj on Tuesday April 14, 2020 @08:30AM
(#22865050)
If there's no word for the colour you're perceiving then surely you make one or transliterate one? That's going to tend to create linguistic enclaves but mutual intelligibility should survive.
You can place where I grew up in the UK to within about 20 miles based on the word we used for lunch. Like the difference between bagged lunch (en-us) and packed lunch (en-gb) I suppose.
That is linguistic relativity / Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[1], and intuitively I think it does hold. On the most simple level, there are groups of people who do not have a name for a certain color and they simply can not distinguish them from a related color which may be very obvious to us. And in fiction there is of course Newspeak from 1984.
So yes, I think killing off all other languages apart from English / Mandarin / Esperanto is a bad way to go, I'd rather go for early bi- or triligualism.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity