too much sugar not good for the health

[torhu]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> One reason English is successful is its shamelessness in adopting 
>>> useful words and phrases from other languages. Sort of like what D 
>>> does <g>.
>> 
>> Huh? I'm under the impression that that also happens a lot in other 
>> languages.
> 
> Yes, it does. But some actively work to try and prevent this.
> 
>> In fact it likely happens much more often in other languages, 
>> who borrow a lot of *english* words in these modern times. ;)
> 
> Sure, and I suspect that a language that refuses to do so is one that 
> will fade away into irrelevance.

The languages that I'm aware of that do this, also create replacement 
words.  If not, people will just use the foreign words, they often do 
anyway.  One example would be Icelandic.  I don't see how a living 
language would become 'irrelevant' because of the lack of words.  People 
create, alternatively 'borrow' the words they need.  But I'm sure there 
are counter-examples anyway.

A language generally dies when parents teach their children another 
language in place of their own mother tongue, because they consider 
their own language to be of little use to them.  After a couple of 
generations there is noone left that can speak the original language. 
This also probably happens when all the users of the language are spread 
to areas where other languages dominate, so the concentration of users 
is too low to keep the language alive, maybe there is little of use the 
language in writing, etc.