In the 11th annual John Boynthon lecture delivered in Melbourne on 20th October 1994, Murdoch said, Indian leaders have long been desperately worried about disunity in their vast, teeming, multilingual country. But the effort has failed for a number of reasons. With the coming of the electronic mass media, Hindi is finally spreading because everyone wants to watch the best television programming. And I suspect we will see this story repeated throughout the developing world, not least in China with Mandarin. The richness and complexity of Nature outstrips our understanding.
Language is a both a cultural product and a natural phenomenon.
Its richness and complexity demands our respect in the same way that the biosphere does. Although grammarians and lexicographers have been around for millenia, linguistic science did not really take off until the late 19th century. One century later, our best linguists admit that we have so far achieved only a little understanding. Even a well-studied language like English is not yet understood completely. For example, there is no adequate descriptive theory of the syntax of English, let alone the semantics.