Difference between revisions of "Thus Spake Zargrabowski/StandardMeasurements"

Revision as of 21:14, 31 March 2004

On 9 Jan 02, at 13:03, John Verkuilen wrote:

Not remotely the same thing, though. As Eric pointed out elsewhere, local units existed under the Roman Empire. The Hanseatic League had a lot of power but they didn't eliminate local units either. I doubt the Guild cares one way or the other so long as they get their money.

Speaking as developer, I agree here. I'm sure the guild has uniform internal measures of account. I'm also sure they don't give a rat's ass if you use them for your own dealings, because enforcing standards on other people is a costly action, not a profitable one. People who enforce standards are centralizers, interested in randering an arbitrary area (be in intellectual or geographic) homogenous. The expend the effort of promulgating and enforcing for the sake of a percieved reward -- typically interoperability (as with the metric system or commo standards) or a political end. The Guild is not a centralizing agent, and any standardization they undertake is going to be internal -- its a hell of a lot cheaper to bring your own scales than propagate uniform units of measure.

It took states a lot of effort to stamp out local units in the 19th Century. Same goes for local languages. Heck, the 20th Century saw a huge resurgence of local languages even when the advantages of standardization should seem obvious.

Okay, totally off-topic, not as the developer,

This is largely because of the various attitudes that caused the initial suppression of those local languages. Most of them were stamped out in draconian attempts at nation-building by 19th century statesmen. The Basques, the Occitanians, the Irish and a variety of others were all told they needed to speak the language of the central power because that was check mark #11 on the How To Build A Militarized Empire list, and that was what everyone wanted. Once everyone speaks one language, you can indoctrinate them with the National Cult and convince them to run towards a 1 pdr pom-pom gun in the interest of The State. Sound absurd to us, but people were both frank and earnest about it at the time.

As you can imagine, when people do things like, "Speak the proper language or get arrested as a political dissident and face indefinite detention or execution by a drumhead military court." it riles folks up. Since most European nations followed the philosophy of militarized nationalism to its logical extreme and spent the period between Napoleon and the atom bomb bleeding one-another white or preparing to, they lost their grip on those regions they had tried to crush when they became too frail to maintain it towards the end of the era. The obvious backlash to heavy-handed propaganda and armed enforcement of lingual laws was a resurgence in the use of local languages, because they served a political end and expressed the percieved identity of the speaker as well as allowing communication.

Likewise in colonies, "standardizing" and speaking the language of the colonial power was quite rightly seen as collaboration. If I was from the Congo, I wouldn't be eager to speak French or Flemish either, I don't care what benefits it brings.

I can also question the usefulness of lingual standardization. While it is useful to have a lingua franca, there's no real reason it should be in daily use, and there's even less reason when anyone who cares to speaks English and we can expect to see realtime idiomatic mechanical translation within 20 years at the outside. In situations where multple cultures meet without some would-be hegemon trying to crush them all out of existence and forge them into a unified body, wide-area lingual standards emerge without prompting and without interfering with the use of the local lingo.

There's a good reason to standardize things like math and commo networks, but unless you're a would-be hegemon trying to reduce the world to one homogenous mass, or a would-be social engineer trying to promulgate a standard language as a form of mimetic or cultural warfare, there is at this point not a lot of benefit in trying to make everyone learn English, Swahili or Cosmoranto, the language of universal peace. Languages evolve to meet changing local needs, and enforcing standards on them, especially when the global lingua franca's greatest strength is its flexibility and lack of standards, seems to me more like a politically expedient act than one that brings actual benefit.

G.

Comments:

Okay, part of this one borders on violating the "let's-not-archive-Geoff's-political-rants" maxim, but I think it's useful to know the developer's take on real-world history. --MF