Wikibooks: Novial/AIL Future

• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Novial/AIL_Future

Simple Page Navigation BookName=[[Up to AIL contents]] CurrentPage=[[ Novial version ]] PrevPage=[[Previous Not so good as existing languages]] NextPage=[[Next Number of proposed languages]] =Future Differentiations= From linguists (philologists) one very often hears the following objection even if all inhabitants of the earth learnt one and the same language the unity would soon disappear and different languages would arise in the same way as the Romanic languages were produced by the splitting up of Latin. Against this objection I have two critical remarks in the first place the argument from linguistic history is not sound and secondly if it were that should not hinder us from working for an international language. It is quite true that the history of languages often shows us a tendency to differentiation it is well known that most European languages have taken their origin from one and the same language. But the tendency towards differentiation is by no means inevitable. Those who believe that a language must everywhere and always break up into a number of dialects forget the most important law of linguistic biology namely that constant intercourse creates linguistic unity even where it did not exist and that discontinuance of intercourse produces linguistic differences where there was once unity. If after the colonization of Iceland the Icelandic tongue came to be different from Norwegian this was due to the cessation of constant communication and if nowadays the speech of California is in perfect agreement in all essential points with that of Boston this is due to the fact that the inhabitants of the western and eastern parts of America are in very active intercourse with one another. Antiquity witnessed many cases of differentiation of languages we nowadays see more of the reverse process dialects are everywhere disappearing and unity is constantly increasing an ever growing number of people speaking the great national unity languages. Thus the only condition under which an international language once ...