It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish, german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.
We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese, latin or greek. That is not a problem, it's just how things go so that people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work together.
I apologise, I did not mean that people who were 'unwilling' to learn other languages are lazy. It is hard to demand that everyone know every language, so a lingua franca (English in this case) is all right.
What I meant to say is that languages are becoming more and more plain. It seems people - and sometimes with language institutions with them - are accepting that the languages should be less complicated, so we can say the same thing with fewer words.
An obvious example is people writing 'u' instead of 'you', but is actually even more obvious in other languages than English. For instance, I am not a fan of people saying 'issues' in Danish, when we have the word »problemstillinger«, simply because the English word 'issues' is shorter. Should English use »arv« instead of 'inheritance' because it is shorter?
Languages' vocabularies shouldn't cherry-pick.
I do not oppose a lingua franca, I merely advocate keeping each language separate.
I can't really get behind you on this. What do you think of the word "niveau" in Danish? Or "risalamande"? Would you advocate their removal? Languages did not sprout fully-formed from the thigh of Jupiter, they evolved organically.
At the same time, I do understand where you are coming from. Having such a large proportion of your population be fluent in English - and thus more influenced by its culture, is potentially an issue for the Danish culture.
What you are referring to is history. Languages borrowing terms and lending them out back then is nothing something I have a problem with.
Today, the Internet, globalisation, etc. have decreased the number of languages in the world dramatically (last thing I heard is one language dies every two weeks) and there are approximately ~7000 languages alive.
While I know that most of these languages that are dying are spoken by very few (otherwise it wouldn't die). It is now more important than ever to keep each language unique.
What was great before (loanwords and such) may actually be a problem now.
First, as you say, these languages were spoken by very few people. I remember reading not long ago, the obituary of a Scottish dialect spoken in a single village. You can't really expect a language with such a small group of speakers surviving the advent of the automobile and the radio for very long. And these languages did not die by a thousand loanwords: the young folk didn't learn them, and the old folk who could speak eventually died.
There is also another factor at play here. "Proper" languages (that is, not dialects) have hundreds of years of written material behind them, and this is critical to ensure a language's survival.
It has nothing to do with laziness and everything to do with being able to communicate. Would you learn all of japanese, chinese, russian, spanish, german, french, italian, polish, swede and english in order to be able to contribute to projects in these various languages? Unlikely.
We need a "babel fish", and currently that babel fish is simply "learn english". At various places and times in history it's been french, chinese, latin or greek. That is not a problem, it's just how things go so that people can talk with one another across countries and cultures, and work together.