Monday, April 28, 2014

How to safeguard against the coming extinctions

I was reading that one of the most heavily fortified facilities in the world is the Seed Centre in the Arctic, which preserves flora & fauna biodiversity so that if the day ever comes that we are threatened with mass crop extinctions (the cavendish banana, which is 90% of the world production & consumption, is threatened by a virus that wipes out the crop, each banana is an identical clone of another) we have a bio bank to start over.

During my travels it's increasingly obvious to me that English is the new Latin. Maybe a millennia from now different planets will spawn their own Vulgar English dialects that will emerge as lingua Franca in their own right. But as of right now the ongoing linguistic consolidation (the Tesot mother speaks Luganda as a first language and will only speak to her children in English) means that Uganda's tremendous linguistic & tribal diversity (in the dozens) is soon going to become Luglish (Luganda + English. Hinglish is not an isolated phenomenon..

Perhaps we need a linguistic bank where we record native speakers and record their language to store (after all our data capacity is rising on a geometric if not exponential level, apparently the internet weighs a millionth of an ounce) for the long years ahead.

Of course Baha'u'llah for saw this and cautioned us 150yrs ago to set an auxiliary language so that we both have global unity but maintain local diversity. But while we wait for the New World Order it may be prudent to save the bulk of the 6,000 or so languages that will soon diminish to a few hundred..

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