>>21352379You simply dont know what the fuck you're talking about on english, mandarin, the latin alphabet, hanzi, or language in general.
> each language should have its own word for a thingYeah, "steak from hamburg" -> "hamburger steak" -> "hamburger" -> "(ham) burger" -> "burger". thats how language works.
There was no word for pulsar or logogram or keystroke or blackouts before these concepts were introduced to the human brain and we needed a word for them.
When we become a spacefaring civilization and we need a common word for "the condition where sinovial fluid in your knees swells too much in zero grav", whichever is the global language at the time will name it and that will be a new word and if it isnt english then english will adopt the word and call it "shiwan" simplifying 膝关节液 if the chinese name it, because thats how language works. There's ZERO languages that formed on their own with no borrowed words from other languages.
> English thrives on this degradation, which is both how its country of origin became an empireThe american founding fathers were fluent in french because that was The Global Language at the time, Charles V of Spain was educated in Medieval Galician because it was closer to Latin and it was the highbrow poetic thing to learn if you were a nobleman, Phillip II learned German because it similarly was "the next global language", never bothered to learn english despite being de jure King of England because english was an island language.
Even in the early 1800s English was considered a language for industrialist upstarts and merchants, something you regrettably have to learn instead of something you aspire to master (that was french still), like Chinese will be in 20-30 years.
This whig history idea that american english always was the global language (or worse, it was fated to become) because it just works better, or because of some convoluted directed history, is historical revisionism. It wasnt even the "good language" in its own country until the late 1800s.
When something else becomes global language they'll make similar arguments.
