A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dying forest language

Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by thegrimmest on Friday July 09, 2021 @08:18PM (#27789912)

Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity? Wouldn't being able to have a meaningful conversation with someone completely and totally different than yourself inspire you? Isn't that what made the internet a thing? It's really just a set of communication protocols that everyone agreed to speak.

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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by zepto on Friday July 09, 2021 @08:21PM (#27789934)

I think if you take a look at the internet, you’ll discover that there are large numbers of people who speak the same language who can’t have meaningful conversations or inspire one another.

Language isn’t the barrier here.

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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by rogerclark on Friday July 09, 2021 @08:38PM (#27790046)

The sadness of losing a language is distinct from the question of whether it would be better if everyone spoke the same language.

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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by MiddleEndian on Saturday July 10, 2021 @12:32PM (#27794563)

>Don't you think everyone speaking the same language would promote flourishing in human creativity?

Not necessarily. Sometimes creativity may flourish better if developed independently without common influences.

>the internet

Websites could be analogous to language in this case. Why use hacker news when you could use twitter or reddit? Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.

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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by thegrimmest on Saturday July 10, 2021 @01:19PM (#27794947)

> Independent subgroups can produce more interesting or unique discussion.

Right but the point is that all of these independent subgroups use the same protocols to communicate (i.e. web standards). Anyone who has a client that can understand these is able to interact with the entire internet. As we can see, standardizing protocols does not limit the ideas which can be expressed over those protocols.

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Re:A small town in Sweden fights to preserve Elfdalian, a dy... by MiddleEndian on Saturday July 10, 2021 @07:05PM (#27797110)

I guess it depends where you consider the separation. Even among the web, people don't only post in one language. And among the English-speaking web, Reddit has absorbed forums almost entirely which I would consider to be a negative.

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