Another nifty tidbit to add to the Chinese vocabulary.

Question as a non-native speaker: Wouldn't it be possible to shorten it by saying "同个世界，同个梦想"? Or would that make the slogan, as I suspect, too colloquial? (The four-word phrase aesthetic appeals to my inner linguist.)

I understood Mair's concluding paragraph as meaning that he would prefer
一个世界，一个梦想.

同个世界

I have never heard anyone use ge4 right after tong2. I think you have to use tong2 yi2 ge4. You could get away with tong2yang4 de shi4jie4, but that still doesn't get you down to a four character expression.

Wow, the definition for loka is grandiose. The English cognate -low or -ley is just plain old "place" or "unwooded area", as in Winslow or Billingsly.

I had been thinking along the lines of "他是个美国人", where you could drop "一" and still have it make sense. I guess it doesn't work quite that way with "同". Ah well. Thanks.

loka probably started out like that

Cf. the various meanings of saeculum.

Thanks for the link! It strikes me that if this was happening in Japan, the official Japanese slogan would probably just be "wan waarudo, wan doriimu", thus preventing all this excitement.

One of the "world" expressions, 天下 (tian xia), plays an important role in the movie Hero as an expression for a unified China. This leads to some oddness in the English subtitles: In the English subtitles, the Chinese lines "Why did you change your mind [about going to war with the other kingdom]?" "Two characters [兩字]: 天下" became "Why did you change your mind? Three words: All under heaven."

It makes for a jarring experience if you're listening to the Chinese and looking at "天下" in the shot, and then happen to glance at the subtitle..."What! That's not three words! ...oh, in English it is..."