I'll go with everything which you want to continue into the future needs caring for, but purity of the Chinese language seems like a strange thing to be optimizing for and expending effort on instead of, say population happiness or ability to trade with other countries or healthcare or whatever.

Who is keeping score on language purity and what makes it a metric worth doing well on?

Here, the geolocal minority language is Welsh. It is kept on life support by a smallish and dwindling number of native speakers (virtually no only-Welsh speakers remain, 600,000 people identify as Welsh speakers, but the Wikipedia article suspiciously avoids mentioning how many of those consider themselves 'fluent'), and a government mandate that all official documents, announcements, roadsigns / etc. must be in Welsh as well as English, and mandatory teaching at school.

I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse. It certainly isn't a form of educating children in a way that is in their best interest at least, which I'd think is a pretty strong heuristic for a useful education system.

The main out against that argument is that language education in school is so ineffective and accounts for such a small amount of time that it's hardly a thing worth complaining about against the backdrop of all the other things which could be improved.

> I was wondering recently if it would be interesting to argue that forcibly teaching children a globally useless language for the sake of pleasing the adults who arbitrarily want it saved is a weak form of child abuse.

Actually, killing the language and the culture of a child because it is "useless globally" is cultural genocide.

And it has happened way too much.

Now for people conditioned to think that "evolution" should be applied to human matters, culture, this might not seem much.

But go read the experiences of smaller cultures oppressed and eliminated by "global" or local mightier forces, and you can plainly see it's a different kind of holocaust.

I want ways of life to change, die and whither organically, by their own cultural momentum. Not by "global forces" and market influence. And surely not by cultural imperialism.

I have no problem with that. Culture isn't something which suffers when you kill it, only humans/animals do. Trying to apply the horror that goes with the word "genocide" to killing "a language" isn't a clean argument.

Besides, I didn't mean mandate that nobody is allowed to speak it, and thus quickly finish it off, I meant do not mandate the use of it, and if it can't stay in use due to interested people choosing to learn and use it, then let it fade away.

But go read the experiences of smaller cultures oppressed and eliminated by "global" or local mightier forces, and you can plainly see it's a different kind of holocaust.

It isn't any kind of holocaust unless the people are slaughtered. "Nobody knits jumpers, cooks or speaks in the age old traditional ways anymore, they all sold out to factories and convenience, waah" is not a cause I can work up much sympathy for. If you like cooking, knitting, speaking in those ways then do it. But there's nothing inherently great about traditional ways, so if nobody can be bothered then it's better to leave them to history than to life support them.

Yes, some things, those that are vulnerable, need protection. The Bengal tiger needs protection. The tribal languages in the Amazon need protection. English is in no way vulnerable, so it really doesn't need any protection.

On the other hand, maybe you need to read the history of how English evolved into what it is today. It certainly isn't because of prescriptivist nonsense like "protect[ing]" the language from "decay and dilution".

to coding?

Funny you mention that -- one programming language that's been "protect[ed]" from "decay and dilution" a lot is Java, and look what a boring, unimaginative cesspool that's become.

Huh? Java "protected from decay and dilution"?

Witch the exception of SUN never liking native interface linking, Java was ANYTHING BUT protected from decay. Java went about adding and adopting stuff, from Swing to generics to annotations to functional stuff, to remoting, to various EE fads of the day, without ever thinking about whats best about the core language and how to keep it clean and agile.

I would have liked it if in place of Java we had a purer language, like, say, Smalltalk.

Compare Java to C#. C# was originally a Java clone, but the designers liberally borrowed from everywhere, worrying about actual use cases and not purity of any sort. Today C# is at the boundary between mainstream and academic programming. (It has monads for God's sake. They don't call it monads, of course. They call it LINQ.)

Java? It added generics after C# did, and only now is it finally going to add proper closures.