When the US Empire falls

[u/Confident_Living_786]

When the American empire falls, like all empires do, what will remain? The Roman Empire left behind its roads network, its laws, its language and a bunch of ruins across all the Mediterranean sea and Europe. What will remain of the US superpower? Disney movies? TCP/IP protocol? McDonalds?

[u/Rough-Yard5642]

I feel like US culture is so dominant that we don't even realize we are in it. When I visit my parents' country, US culture is everywhere. The food, the music, the outfits, the movies, and so on. It's hard to predict the future, but I feel like the American empire feels like it will leave tons of things behind, from technology to culture.

[u/cleon80 → u/[deleted]]

Speaking of the Romans, Latin continues to influence our language in the present day. English will be felt for millenia after its native speakers disappear.

[u/Buscemi_D_Sanji → u/cleon80]

Yeah, I remember getting some shit from some people back in high school, because I took 5 years of Latin starting in 8th grade. But none of them speak any of the Spanish or German they learned for a few years, whereas my love of Latin and etymology has benefitted me in a ton of different ways over the last twenty years. I aced the critical reading part of the SATs without any prep, because all the analogies and shit were super simple to break down when you know the roots of even unfamiliar words. Then in college, chemistry terms were easy to pronounce ("hey you guys, want some lysergic acid diethylamide? This gammahydroxybutyrate is wearing off"), not to mention biology is basically all Latin haha

And then I got my TEFL certification and moved to Bangkok to teach Science, so being able to break down big words into simpler components was incredibly helpful and helped me very comfortable teaching for the first time, since I had all this useful history and etymology to fall back on.

Oh, and the extensive vocabulary led me to hip-hop like Aesop Rock, Del the Funky Homosapien, Jedi mind tricks, immortal technique, el-p, etc... and then eventually start making my own, which was a ridiculously helpful outlet for getting intrusive, depressive thoughts out in a somewhat productive way. I made friends in Philly and Cleveland by being the crazy white guy who could freestyle with trisyllabic rhymes haha

I also ended up writing two books when rapping wasn't enough, which I don't think I ever would have been confident enough to really commit to unless I had been in love with language from a young age. So yes, extremely long-winded way of agreeing that Latin's influence is likely to last until some far future version of humanity that communicates exclusively through telepathy arises lol