Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for October 24, 2011

Tower of Babel here we come.

:D So much for taking over the world with good girl behavior! LOLOLOL

If it’s a common world-wide, global language, I vote for Assembler.

pretty soon we’ll all be speaking Cantonese

Yeah? Something tells me that you’re not going to like the answer, either…

Based on the number of countries that use it for commerce, tourism and general communication – English is the winner here. If you want to look at numbers of people using a language then there might be an argument for Cantonese.

Read the instructions? What guy ever does that?

New TV’s come with instructions?

Garrison Keillor once claimed he had listened to a lecture on "Esperanto: The Universal Language (if everyone would learn it…)

Yes, Danae, someday you will rule the world!

If we all spoke the same language we wouldn’t have websites like Engrish funny.http://engrishfunny.failblog.org/

Many countries have an official language. Might be helpful here.

don’t forget, a short 600 years ago, the main language of civilized europe was french. before that it was latin. it may be english now, but that is subject to change.

The manual was probably a poor English translation from Mandarin anyway.

The reasons we will never have a world language. Because: 1) Polish has no vowels2) Hawaiian has no consonants3) English has no sense.

:-)

I thought the universal language was chocolate? Or was that coffee? Or maybe chocolate coffee?

Damn … made myself hungry/thirsty. Need another cuppa ….

But then we’d understand everyone’s narcissistic nonsense.

If there were just one language, local dialects would soon create a new Babel.

Spoken Mandarin, but the written is a bear. English is commerce and transportation (as at airports), but it’s amazing how many “English speakers” no longer actually speak, write, or read it.

It won’t have to “make” it anything; that will follow simply because it is the most powerful and influential (i.e., wealthiest) nation, and everyone else will want to do business with it in the most convenient way…no coercion needed..But coercion works too, of course. That’s why the common language of the Roman Empire was Greek rather than Latin, long after the dominance of the Greeks had ended. The Greeks imposed their language and culture on everyone they conquered, and it stuck; the Romans were more tolerant..No matter who ends up calling the shots eventually, I suspect that most of this century will be confusingly (and entertainingly) multicultural and multilingual.

Oho, oho….we bettah all look our….gonna be somethen am afraid…..

Nice 01, Rodney.

The rules state this is the language to rule us all.Please note, all rules are subject to change.

Mhfiewj jklcemw ejwollkje!

Zamenhoff was about her age when he invented Esperanto.

More people speak Klingon than Esperanto. And you can at least tell when you are talking to a Klingon. What do Esperaunties look like, and where do they come from?

English is already the language of trade. Every First World nation now teaches it in mainstream schools simply because of that fact. But also keep in mind most nations are not First World, so no, it’s not the most widely spoken. Too many are busy struggling for the basics of survival to bother learning a second language like English, the second-most difficult language in the world (Basque comes in at first since it’s both entirely unrelated to any known language and spoken largely in my ancestral Euskal Herria).

The universal translator would be recognized. We have to transmit the message in Klingon.