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Comment by Renaud | Hacker News Reader

Certainly won't happen anytime soon. English is certainly the lingua-franca of the modern world and will probably stay that way for a while. While mastering English is hard, you can get quite far with a modicum of English.

Latin is an extremely important language and we should keep teaching it as a large portion of the grammar and vocabulary of Europe's languages derives from it, but it's fraught with complexities that make it really hard to master unless you really want to spend the time and energy to specialise in it; certainly a worthy goal in itself, but not what most people would aspire to.

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The true power of English is that you can say it's the de facto lingua franca and everyone gets it : the language seamlessly adapts. Some languages care about purity, e.g. French, whereas English gleefully absorbs new words.

I agree with your main point, but you're making an unfair comparison. If Latin were an internationally popular language alive today, then I imagine you could also get quite far with bits of broken Latin.

Also, if you think English isn't "fraught with complexities that make it really hard to master", I know an entire nation made (mostly) of people who've been learning English since twelve and still failing miserably at basic reading comprehension...

I bet you mean Spain but it would be nice to know another example...

South Korea (shrug). From what I heard, China & Japan aren't much different.

I know an entire nation made mostly of people who've been learning English since birth and they still fail at basic reading comprehension.

I spent a good few years studying Latin at one of the last few state-operated high schools in Australia to offer it. Later, I spent a decade in China.

Though I've been to Europe and did find the formality of Latin grammar useful for dalliances with Indian classical language, on the wohle I wish I could have learned Sanskrit or classical Chinese instead.

Europe is young and, in unpopular reality, rather monotonous. It just doesn't feel as philosophically broad-minded or historically interesting as Asia, where so much more has happened and continues to happen.

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