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A comment on The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English. Parent comment

Re:The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English by blue1 on Thursday October 29, 2009 @01:44PM (#910444)
The Vatican does this with latin too. It became a dead language nonetheless.

English always absorbed lots of words from many different languages. I suspect that this is a better recipe for language vitality than the "National bureau of new words" approach.

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Re:The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English by zemoo on Thursday October 29, 2009 @02:09PM (#910499)
The Vatican started doing that millenia after there were no native populations of latin-speakers left.
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Re:The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English by huherto on Thursday October 29, 2009 @07:18PM (#911133)
Latin lives on in Spanish, Portuguese, et al.
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Re:The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English by req2 on Thursday October 29, 2009 @07:58PM (#911195)
And in the same sense, your great-grandmother lives on in you. I'm not sure what you're getting at, especially because the Vatican has had an imperceptible effect on Spanish, Portuguese, et al.
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