Every South Korean turns a year younger

Re:Every South Korean turns a year younger by adventured on Tuesday June 27, 2023 @07:55PM (#36500405)

The US heavily uses metric, just like other nations also use English while having a different primary language. The US leads the world in technological and scientific output and has for over a century, it very obviously and very commonly uses the metric system.

Communication is more important than measurement. Nearly everybody else needs to abandon their languages and adopt English, Spanish or Mandarin - because standards. Half the people of Europe share no common language and can't communicate properly with one another, if only we could talk some sense into them and get them onto a standard.

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Re:Every South Korean turns a year younger by tommiegannert on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @03:43AM (#36503545)

I liked that Estonia said "f*ck it, English is now the official second language."

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, Zürich is contemplating making school children study English before French/Italian. That's great, except Switzerland is already quad-lingual, depending on canton. Making it more difficult for a german-speaking person in Zürich to go to Geneva probably won't be great for unity. Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems.

(As an immigrant observer.)

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Re:Every South Korean turns a year younger by jhugo on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @08:55AM (#36505731)

> Instead of all cantons adopting one of the existing four as the universal language, they are now trying for English, it seems.

That’s likely deliberate and quite sensible, as elevating one of the existing four would probably cause disunity.

Something similar happened at the creation of the modern Indonesian state. Rather than elevating e.g. Javanese, they imported Malay as the neutral foundation of the Indonesian language.

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