Lingua Franca Revisited

Language Wars: Is English bound to remain the dominant global tongue?
Stephen Henighan

This summer, in Russia, I saw something different: crowds of Chinese tourists entering shops and restaurants, typing their orders into their iPhones in Mandarin, then pressing a button to translate them into Russian and holding up their screens for Russian clerks and waiters to read. Plenty of trading took place, yet no one uttered a word of English. Translation technology that dispenses with the burden of cross-cultural verbal communication at a basic level may yet rein in our language’s global ambitions.

http://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2015/11/language-wars/

Reminds me of how very similarly Chinese script works across dialects: as a bridge.

And so for day 1828
15.12.2011