What has been going on is that the modern nation state has spent the last two centuries killing diversity. The nation states are utter bullies in this respect. It's what they do.
It will work out for some languages who become vehicles for a national project, but not for those which don't. Linguistic nations like Welsh caught under a bigger neighbour like England needs to get out from under there and establish a national project of their own asap. Same thing with for instance Finnish and a lot of other languages. We can of course adopt a kind of social darwinist approach to this and say "So what?" and claim that if they fail to become the vehicle for national modernity it's their fault. But I think that would be to misunderstand how modern states operate and what they do to minorities. There's nothing neutral or inevitable about these processes.
I'd entirely agree with you. Of course that sort of thing is bad. My point is simply that it doesn't follow from that fact that trying to do the reverse - ie artificially create diversity - is therefore good. The reason why the attempts to stamp out minority languages was bad is that it was cultural imperialism: trying to force people to change, against their will. It's not because having lots of languages is
intrinsically preferable. It would be just as bad to force speakers of a majority language to switch to a minority one. That is, the wrongness lies in the compulsion, not in the final result. At least, that's how I see it. And if that's so, I don't see any value in trying to reverse the process; it doesn't stop the wrong from having been perpetrated.
As for "clinging to the past" these languages are completely contemporary. There's nothing to indicate Welsh or Sami or whatever can't be an excellent vehicle for modernity, it they're just allowed to be that. The figure of thought relegating them to represent "the past" is always current among the people with the language perpetrating their strangulation. It assumes that history has a progressive direction, and these languages aren't part of it. One can hardly be surprised their speakers tend to fight back as best they can, preferably setting up their own independant nations if possible. When they are inhibited to do so, they tend to languish.
Now I didn't say that these minority languages can't be contemporary. By "clinging to the past", I didn't mean the languages themselves; I meant the situation in which they were more commonly spoken. I haven't been given a good reason to think that a situation where more languages are spoken is intrinsically preferable to one where fewer languages are spoken. It seems to me that much of the motivation behind preferring the former to the latter is that it is felt necessary to preserve the current or past state of a culture. But of course you can never do that.
I don't think that history is progressive or that those languages that are now the majority ones are intrinsically better than the others, or that it is right to try to wipe out the minority ones, or anything of the kind!
I think Herder would claim they all have equal intrinsic value. It's a culturalist thing.
But that's exactly what I was trying to say. They all have equal intrinsic value, because they all have no intrinsic value. In my opinion, at least.
He surely does. And Plotinus, the thought experiment you proposed couldn't even exist if everyone spoke the same way. That exotic culture you're interested in wouldn't exist. What's next, should we all eat the same food and listen to the exact same music, because it doesn't matter anyway? Language is inextricably tied to culture.
I'm not so convinced by that, to be honest. It's certainly possible to have very different cultures speaking the same language. Having different food and music doesn't create barriers between people in the same way that having different languages does. And I'm always suspicious of "slippery slope" arguments of that kind anyway. You can't argue against a position simply on the basis that a more extreme version of it is wrong.
In anycase this discussion has become tedious.
Now there I can agree with you at least. This can always move to OT if anyone wants to talk about it further.
