ELL: Wall Street Journal editorial

[Pierre Bancel]

Hello all,

Thanks to all, and in particular to Gerd and Hartmut.

In fact, it seems that the answers to Miller's edito
come from another field than that he choosed himself.
I mean most things I have read until there are more on
the ground of human right to diversity than economic
efficiency. All this is well and good, for sure. I
would however be quite interested to learn whether one
might find an economic efficiency (either actual or
prospective) for language diversity, in the same sense
as it may be said of biological diversity as a
reservoir of potentially exploitable genomes (I do not
mean that I find this OK, only that there is a lot of
money to make with it). I know of only very rare cases
(and not strictly economic ones) where minority
languages have been highly useful for major societies,
e.g. during World War II when the US Air Force in the
Pacific used Navajos as operators to prevent Japanese
radiotapping (obviously a double-edged example again).

However, I could word my belief that languages are
very precious things, including from the economic
viewpoint, as follows: every language represents an
enormous amount of intellectual investment from
millions of individuals over many millennia. This may
NOT be worth nothing, even if we don't know exactly
how YET. (Until recently, no one did exactly know why
biological diversity was fit for.) And many "crazy"
cultural investments have proved quite profitable on
the long run (Versailles or the Pyramides are typical
examples).

One may expect that the one who will discover the
economic value of linguistic diversity will (1) become
rich (2) save thousands of languages. Will (s)he
really divulgate it on this list tomorrow morning?
(Thanks in advance.)

Or must we concede that saving languages entails a
non-financial view of human beings and societies and
is contradictory with liberalism? (I have no definite
opinion here. Once again, the question is not for me
to know whether liberalism is bad or good, only to
know whether or not it entails the linguistic
uniformization of humankind.)

**Regarding the interesting excursus on gastronomy.**
Someone wrote here that most people did indeed prefer
McDo's to grubs, otherwise McDonald's would sell
GrubDo's (I would like to try that). I think this may
be true only in basic economy readers, not in the real
life. In the real life it happens quite often that you
deprive large groups from their preferred food, cloth,
and so on, and sell them things they don't like but
must buy because there is nothing else at hand... To
have killed all the buffaloes does not prove that the
Lakota preferred cow meat and blue-jeans. And having
the rivers and sources polluted and delivering
undrinkable water does not prove that everyone prefers
either Beaujolais or Coca-Cola.

Best,
Pierre

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