MANDARIN...![]()
Mandarin is also a language family with its own languages.
MANDARIN...![]()
Oh my, I have a streak? That must mean I'v had other arguments or opinions that have been decidedly deterministic.. Or were you just referring to this thread?
I admit, determinism has some merit to me. That is, I believe that the world as it is exists in what is the most probable outcome overall, the majority of the time (else my understanding of "most probable" is flawed but I don't really believe that's the case)... Therefore, the more different it is from this TL, the less probable, given this simple logic. I do believe that anything short of ASB could have happened (or may happen, regarding the future), though I regard all of these possibilities on a spectrum on plausibility. Given what we know from history and geography, a German industrialization doesn't seem to be that far of a stretch, but an Egypt-first industrialization just seems to be significantly more unlikely.
So yes, I do believe Industrialism in some way, shape or form is inevitable, save for a change in something major, such as human ability or drive or what have you.
Mandarin is also a language family with its own languages.
Oh, if you're going to go that route, then there's no such thing as a language. Just a bunch of ephemeral dialects that disintegrate into smaller ones the moment you get a close look at them.
There is a problem with the idea that OTL represents the most probable timeline. You can't make a blanket statement like that when you have a sample set of one. It suggests there haven't been any improbable events in our history, no unpredictable black swans. It says the history we happen to have was the most likely, because it did. That's just begging the question.
So why join an AH site if everything is basically inevitable anyway?
Great power kingdom of all the Finns didn't arise for good reasons. But that is because of those practical reasons, not because it doesn't happen to have occurred in our history.
Putonghua is something I would call a language. As for that huge language family with eight subgroups that spans Northern China and almost 1 billion people? That's Mandarin to me.
One possibility that I haven't seen mentioned here rather surprises me: Latin. I've seen some brief mentions of the Romans, but nothing that implied Latin could have become/remained the "world language." I'm not much of an expert in linguistic history, so is this something that could have taken root as one language, and expanded across the globe, rather than branching out into the Romance language tree and centering primarily on Europe?
About spreading and not changing. Most languages change much quicker when the are learned and become the language of choice. As an adult languages we after have trouble making all of the sounds and translate saying and some gramer to the new language.
On the edges of Empire the children won't here lots of native Latin speakers but there parents who are the new latin speakers.