The importance of Latin Alphabet

Yes. There are a lot of factors: number of speakers, number of countries, number of students, economics, military power, internet users, etc.

Anyway, the first one is very important, and a lot of European languages have a dicrease in their status. It is not the same to be the 5th that to be the 17th.

<<<economics is one of the most powerful influencers in determining the status of a language, but it has a serious rival that is in my opinion more influential...strength of arms...English would not be as strong as it is today if it had not been for strict enforcement and domination of Great Britain and the United States during the 1800-2000...People were not learning English because they liked the language, or they felt it was superior to their native languages. There were learning it because they had to!<<<

Yes, so true...

I apologize.

I knew this was going to go down that road, and that is not what I wanted.

I was not talking about military power...although that is part of if. I meant aggressive and oppressive domination. (Which includes military power.)

I am going to use the United States as an example...

When the United States began to settle lands belonging to Native Americans we had a very strategic battle strategy. This is the same strategy that Europe was using at the time also. We would go and clear it out threats with the military. Once we had secured the area, we began to take its resources and colonize the area. But when it came to the Native Americans who were still in the area we went through the next phase.

We tried to "civilize" these "savages." We did this several ways: conversion, employment, isolation, education...many different ways.

There was a motto in the 1800's "To save the soul we must kill the Indian."

And the first thing we did was attacked their language. We were brutal with these people. We publicly beat, humiliated, and sometimes killed men and women for speaking any language other than English. This is one of the darkest chapters in American history. And the children? We separated them from their culture, tribes, and families. We taught them that their language was a sin and that our language was the only way. We were very strict and extremely harsh with these children.

The point is we never let up...it was not a military conquest. It was an English speaking society conquest.

And it was very powerful...we killed so many languages. We don't know how many languages went extinct because of what we did, we can only guess.

The United States was not alone, Great Britain was doing the same in India and Asia, France was doing the same in Africa. The Australians were doing this to the aborigines. Spain and Mexico were doing this to people in Central and South America. It was happening everywhere!!!

And if you look at the language distributions of the world...you can see who was in control for a measurable period of time because that's the language of the people.

It only had very little to do with a nation's military, economics, number of speakers, or internet users ;-)...it was all about domination of the land and the people there....we are all guilty of this.

We are getting better, don't get me wrong...but we are still doing this.

Sven,

Forgive me, I am an old man...I was going to address your comment in my post above and I forgot.

Yes. Russia's military is large and strong.

But let's go a few decades back to the height of the former Soviet Union. Now what affect did they have on the surrounding areas?

How many satellite countries adopted the Russian language? Was it by choice or was it by domination of a foreign element? Even today Russian is very strong in countries like the Ukraine. Now that they are independent...the Ukrainian language is slowly growing in strength. But the majority of the country still speaks Russian...

Back to the original discussion, most scientific standards are written in the Latin Alphabet: The International System of Units, chemical symbols, etc. Maths and physics sometimes use greek letters but never Japanese symbols or cyrillic.

"...most scientific standards are written in the Latin Alphabet: The International System of Units, chemical symbols, etc. Maths and physics sometimes use greek letters but never Japanese symbols or cyrillic...."

This is true, however, when these standards were being established there wasn't an equal representation of scripts. The people who created these standards all used the Latin alphabet. And the other nations conformed.

This doesn't make the Latin alphabet any more important or valuable. In fact, the reason they brought in Greek letters is because they saw the use of the Latin alphabet only would cause confusion. And it has.

Anyone who has to work with a lot of acronyms on a daily basis knows what I am talking about.