alt Hacker News> I don't necessarily personally feel like preserving European Portuguese in amber is a worthwhile goal (anymore than it is productive for Brits to be prickly about the meteoric rise of US English).
That's easy to say when you're not on the other end of US defaultism.
Replies
swiftcoder • today at 6:52 PM
> That's easy to say when you're not on the other end of US defaultism.
I mean, I’m a Brit who lived a long time in the US, so that’s a dynamic with which I am rather familiar
To be fair, it is only natural: Portuguese itself only came to be because the Roman Empire conquered the Lusitan land [1], a lot of English comes from Norman French from the Norman conquest [2], the Americas didn't speak European languages until 500 years ago or so, etc.
If you give enough time, all languages will change, and some of them because of major political changes/conquests
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_French_on_English
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...