Stockholm: arrival (Thursday)
We landed about 15 minutes late, at 7:45 AM local time. I arrived at Arlanda airport, and found somewhat to my relief that most of the signs were in English as well as Swedish. Speaking the modern lingua franca as a first language makes life a lot easier sometimes. I found my way to customs with no problems, all set to proudly answer that I was
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Chinese works well as a common written language because writing conveys ideas rather than sounds (and indeed the written Chinese language is the 'common language' that has for centuries allowed Chinese people who speak distinct dialects to communicate with each other. However, learning written Chinese is a time consuming process (their are thousands and thousands of characters), and to understand spoken Chinese well requires cultural context and a familiarity with the Chinese classics.
Esperanto is an interesting idea, but it's foundation is pretty Europe-centric, and because no one speaks it, no one is motivated to learn to speak it, which is I realize rather a catch-22. It is not an idea whose time has come, at the least, although perhaps someday a constructed language such as Esperanto will become the Universal second language. More likely, I think, is a pidgin mixture of languages such as English and Chinese (or whatever the languages of the dominant cultures are when globalization reaches a point that a universal language is a necessity).
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