Comment by roysting
2 days ago
That seems to me like a really worthwhile effort, especially for the continental Europeans if they want to keep the EU alive, even if it needs major, structural reform that I am not confident it can implement without total deconstruction first. If the EU wants to survive it simply cannot allow English to dominate it, nor is even French ideal, making Dutch the official language is of course silly for obvious reasons (regardless of my affinity for it), contemporary German seems to be self-deleting in many different way for many different reasons, and nonsense like Esperanto speaks for itself. But a kind of merging or integration of the German languages of central Europe would be an ideal candidate to bring about European unity in a sustainable and healthy manner... a meeting in the middle, maybe a restoration of old high German even that is the common node.
I am generally even just sad writing this because even my proposal invariably means the total destruction of many languages, traditions, cultures, and true and healthy diversity that has defined Europe over all of recorded history; but at least if this effort of trying to mash Europe into a kind of neo-communist of uniform sludge, at least try to create something new and beautiful out of it, not some disgusting brown mush where the non-english EU speaks English, while by the end of the century the majority of people will not even be indigenous Europeans anymore.
It is sad realizing that what we are all currently witness to is a cataclysmic collapse and destruction of civilization in Europe on an order that humanity has not witness since the civilizational collapse of the Americas or even the Bronze Age collapse and minor cultural collapses and ethnocides that were perpetrated through the French proto-communist Revolution, the Russian communist revolution and the Chinese communist revolutions. It is astonishing knowing that I am living through a historical event that may even never be recorded, let alone well, because the likelihood that it will be recorded at all, let alone accurately is very low.
If a common German language could be created, along with maybe a common Romance language for Hispania and Italy, etc. at least there would be a kind of remaining legacy akin to how the Egyptian icons are enigmatic, even if their culture did not survive.
Trying to put your bizarre ethnonationalism aside, as HN is not the place for that:
Firstly, you're conflating German and Germanic, while ignoring that the common ancestor here dates to before the High German consonant shift between the 3rd and 5th centuries, that further split the German* languages, that had already long since split from the other Germanic languages.
Secondly, my point was merely that there is a closer relationship between the Germanic languages historically spoken around the North Sea, than with modern standard German that has carried with it the consonant shift, and so if you take into account Low German/Plattdeutsch, the similarities are more visible and obvious.
I see no reason to try to mush them together, but it would be interesting to see German take the approach of Norway: Norwegian have had a few fairly successful reforms actually moving it further away from Danish in some respect, but which also in some respects have mean allowing older forms closer to Norse in the majority form of Bokmål, that were retained/included in Nynorsk.
If German did the same thing and started encouraging and allowing those of the forms of minority Low German dialects that are closer to the older Germanic forms (e.g. Dag instead of Tag, for dag/day), it might over time restore some of the continuum.