Joho the Blog
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I think what Ming says is true to an extent, but I'd also note that there are no plural markers attached to nouns in Korean. Not sure about Chinese.

When a technologically advanced culture (eg the English, French, Dutch etc) arrived in a land with an existing culture, not very advanced by comparison (eg Australia, with the Aboriginal tribes), they soon set up missions/reservations to "help" the overwhelmed natives, and deliberately prevented the children from learning their native languages. I'm sure it was the same in the USA with the native americans. Preventing the native language was seen as a key strategy to changing the culture, and more quickly assimilating into the dominant culture.

On preserving languages, there is a project called the Open Language Archives Community (OLAC) whose aim is to create " a worldwide virtual library of language resources by: (i) developing consensus on best current practice for the digital archiving of language resources, and (ii) developing a network of interoperating repositories and services for housing and accessing such resources. ".

Basically, they want to keep a record of all the fast disappearing human languages on the planet.

The language/culture discussion sounds rather like the nature/nurture, genes/environment argument to me. I suspect that the same things can be said about both; both have evolved together and affect each other.

Check out Quebec. After the last 100 years or so (in particular, the last 20), I'lll bet they vote for "language creates culture".

There must be many writers, pundits, academics, etc. in Quebec who must know as much as anyone else in the world about this - they will have made a career out of it.

Check out Quebec. After the last 100 years or so (in particular, the last 20), I'lll bet they vote for "language creates culture".

There must be many writers, pundits, academics, etc. in Quebec who must know as much as anyone else in the world about this - they will have made a career out of it.

Famous Icelandic poet, Einar Benediktsson, once wrote: "Ég skildi, að orð er á Íslandi til um allt, sem er hugsað á jörðu." which translates as "I understood, that there exists a word in Iceland(ic), for every thought on Earth."

I believe Einar Benediktsson loved the Icelandic language exactly because the believed it was capable of fostering rich and diverse culture.

Something for Bjarni to think about, perhaps?

This consistency of error is the effect of what in historical linguistics we call a "substrate." It explains, for example, the divergence of Latin into the variety of Romance languages we have today: French, Occitan, Romanian, Castillian, Galego, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalán, and others. The influence of other languages, such as the Germanic and Celtic language families, used in the Roman Empire accrued to the point at which "consistent errors" became common practice. No Internet to allow the metropole to impose linguistic order on the outlying colonies, the way that English does on Web developers today.

Remember the Latin lesson scene from Life of Brian? "What case should that be? ... Locative, right? So, 'Romani domo' ..."

You could imagine a similar scene between an English-speaking Webmaster and a 'foreign' student: "So, href is short for what? Hypertext ... REFERENCE! Img is short for what? Use your imagination, hint hint ..."

It would be nice to think that the confusion of singular and plural involved a different way of perceiving these concepts, but I taught English for three years in Korea, and the truth is really rather disappointing. East Asians simply don't understand plural at all. In the cases where they actually use the plural form, it is because that is the form they are more familiar with for that particular English word. So, units of measurement are always plural ("one inches, two inches", so they get it right most of the time), as are things that come in pairs (socks, shoes, eyes, and the "feet" you mentioned), and a few other incidentals, like "sports", for obvious reasons, and oddly, "shirts" and, sometimes "donuts" (I have theories for these latter two, which I won't go into here). Everything else is singular. I don't mean singular in their minds, I merely mean that the singular form of that noun is, in their mind, the sole English translation for their word, and it doesn't even cross their minds to consider whether to use the singular or the plural.

Noodle? If you were to believe my assertion, you would think they would always say "noodles", even when speaking of one noodle, since it is more commonly plural in English. What can I say. My guess is it's probably not a common word for them to use when speaking English, so they've learned the singular form -- the form found in the dictionary -- in that case.

People in Europe often have problems with male/female nouns. For example, die Buch (a book) in German is female and un libro in Utalian is male. That's really confusing, especially if you speak several languages.
Leann http://www.all-translations.com