Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it's eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it's tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it's grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.
Not against Esperanto but creating a “universal language”and then making it gendered seems a little stupid.
It’s not as bad as other languages on this front, but if I remember correctly there’s still no agreed-upon gender neutral singular pronoun in Esperanto is there?
There's a daughter language called Ido that's done away with gender, iirc. And I believe there's some gender neutral ways to get around it in the community, but it's been a long time since I've attempted to do anything with it
The whole idea behind it was radical unity, internationalism, and bringing disparate people together on equal footing. Instead of me speaking a language I've known since birth, and you speaking a language you are just capable of understanding, and both of us trying to plead our case to the government, the idea is that we would all have an auxiliary language to compliment (not replace) our mother tongues, and we would both be capable of making yourself understood equally.
Those ideals don't really jive with hard nationalism and pseudoscientific ideas around superior races
Esperanto. it's not the statisically-average best lingua franca but it's the best known that's not tied to a single nation. Plus Hitler and Stalin both hated it.
Yeah Ogham would be fucking awful for modern communication but I thought it'd be really funny. In a more serious sense I actually think it'd be super interesting to see how humans adapted to it and adapted it to their needs.
Anyway I also picked Gaeilge because it makes for great lyricism
I feel like Indonesian is a decent start. There are already a lot of people speaking it, and it's REALLY easy to learn.
There's no conjugation and no cases/agreement. I'm a native English speaker and picked up a functional amount of Indonesian in a matter of months, just from reading a couple books before we went.
Esperanto. It's an artificial language designed to be easy to learn and communicate in. Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.
I think this is actually a success: this is the process of all languages. A usable language will evolve and grow, and something as geographical dispersed and isolated as Esperanto will certainly show divergence if it is being used.
So rather than a failure, I think this demonstrates it can be a real language. Though my interest in language isn't for communication. So eh. Your milage may very.
I think it is easy, but I speak only european languages. Not sure if it is really easier or I just feel that is easy because I know the languages I do.
I would love to say mandarin/chinese, but tonal languages scares me.
I made a grammar rule set (not a complete conlang yet) where verbs don't need to be conjugated, and information about time is separated from the verb; A new lingua franca, IMHO, should not have verb conjugation.
I've been enjoying studying Mandarin. The tones are a bit weird but the grammar seems surprisingly simple, everything can be written pretty universally in pinyin, and Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.
Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can "fix" the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.
Fucked if I know 😂 I'm studying it on my own from textbooks and online resources, not in a classroom setting taught by scholars much much smarter than me. I assume the reduced complexity of simplified characters makes it more accessible though, which is why I understand the PRC makes Pinyin required on road signs as well.
The ultimate goal was to transition Mandarin to Roman letters (which had happened naturally in Vietnam, so there was precedent).ao's party realised that going straight from Chinese characters to Roman letters would be too abrupt, so took a first step of swapping out complex characters for characters that look simpler but are easier to write. This was surprisingly well-received, and became standard in mainland China (but Taiwan did not adopt the new system on the entirely reasonable grounds of fuck the CCP). The CCP intended to do a second round of simplification, but the people balked at this on the grounds that it made the written language to difficult to read, and so they stopped at the current set.
I'd honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.
Don't think it's going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.
I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that "watermelon" would be "kili telo" (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that "kili telo" would not be understood as "watermelon" unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived "kili telo".
If you're going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.
I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.
I've heard good things about Indonesian/Malay. It probably helps it was a regional lingua franca for a long time.
English was legit the best choice in Europe - analytic, with vocabulary drawn from a couple major families, and (almost) no grammatical gender. If only we could unfuck the orthography...
Dit zelfver-nederland-cultuurtje moet blijkbaar
nog altijd blijven opkijken naar de taal waar het hoofdland
op dit moment verder afglijdt naar het fascisme.
This selfhu-miliationland-culture^*^ apparently
needs to keep looking up to the language where it's main country
is currently sliding further and further towards fascism.
Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.
Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.
My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.
everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.
This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.
Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.
As an example the character for book (書) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is 聿 (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and 者 on the bottom (the meaning of 者 is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but 者 in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)
When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn't really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.
Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana
Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it's polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)
So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.
China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.
The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.
I disagree. I doubt you read any alphabet letter by letter. You read words or you don't read fluently. So the reality is: alphabets aren't inherently better, and I think the continued existence of Chinese as a viable writing system shows this to be the case.
The one advantage alphabets have is they have a more gentle ramp up, but I don't think they are inherently better. In fact your example of Roman vs Arabic numerals is a preference for logogram over atomistic writing system.
I agree that alphabets are easier to learn. However, I don't think that is the ultimate standard in what makes for a good writing system. I would like to learn Chinese. Someday. But I do like the logo-syllabic writing systems I do know
Language is a medium of communication between two or more parties. So long as they understand each other, all is good. whether they used klingon or Martian, it don't matter.
What i do know is that, if, hypothetically, internet throws a poll for people all over the world to choose language they will use for communication, every one, myself included, will hold their conner, defending how real and original the language that they are familiar with (and most definitely biased towards) is.
if you put it on a vote on the other hand, something different happens. In fact, it's been happening all along, silently and quietly at the back of our heads. From the first day surfing through the internet to buying your first own smartphone/laptop and choosing the default language for these devices, I know on my part I was driven by convenience. As the majority of media outlets use English. From the shows i watched to the role‐models i looked up on while growing up, they all circled around this fascinating slang that made them even more interesting. The internet's influence towards english made it easy (at least for me) to catch up real quick.
I will say this tho, hearing hakuna matata on the lion king was awesooome
One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We're still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can't really imagine how that doesn't have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.
I would argue no one could choose one. A lingua franca is silently agreed upon over long periods of time. No committee sat down to make old Frankish the language of trade, modern French the language of diplomacy, and nowadays English the language of internet arguments.
If I had a magic wand though my vote is Klingon as well. Qa'plah.
One of the South American variants of Spanish, probably Argentinian. And I say that despite not speaking any Spanish.
The language itself is a contact language and heavily influenced by centuries of cohabitation with speakers of Arabic. That simplified a lot of the Indo-European complexities away.
The phonology - the sounds - of the language are clear and predictable and sufficiently different that a non-native speaker and their accent are not too troublesome in comprehension.
The language itself is already a world language, ranking 4th in number of native speakers.
I like the suggestion of Esperanto, which I do personally speak and which has all the advantages above, except already being a world language.
One of the South American variants of Spanish, probably Argentinian.
I'd agree on the sense that everything in argentine spanish can be said with thousands of curse words interspersed. ¡la puta madre que lo parió, boludo de mierda!
Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
I've heard that it's a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
Lojban sounds like a cross between Romansh and a lost native American language. Not good compared to my two favorite sounding languages, Japanese and French, but at least more neutral than Esperanto. Esperanto sounds Spanish and Interlingua sounds like an Italian that thought that Esperanto should sound Italian and I don't like how either of those two languages sound.
I have no clue, but it'll be better than a language that thinks it's acceptable for words like "read"
to not just have two different meaning, but two different pronunciations,
while also having words like "sense", "scents" and "cents" be pronounced exactly the same.
And while writing this, I just learned that pronunciation should be spelled with "u" instead of "ou".
That makes no sense.
The sounds English makes is pretty good,
but I don't know if it's the culture or the language itself,
but it has a giant tendency to want to use a
euphanisms and dysphemisms to emphasize superiority
over other languages and cultures
and also has a giant tendency to use weasel words,
to weasel in authoritarianisms.
Globasa. A constructed language, but with most world language families represented, and a process that ensures new words meet a few other good criteria.
This seems like a pretty solid option. I feel like this type of algorithmic language construction could be ripe for a big push forward, both in terms of constructing new languages and benchmarking them for use.
Hmmm, looking at Lojban in a bit more detail it sounds like the consensus is that the conative load of having to construct perfect logical specificity makes it suboptimal as a secondary intermediary language. If people are learning it as a second language it will be very hard to pick up.
Also note that script is historically mostly used for communication over large distances and times.
Historical scriptures (such as the bible) got transported across half the globe and copied and passed down for more than a thousand years. The scripture transcends both space and time.
If you only want to communicate with your neighbour, you don't need a lingua franca. Lingua franca is exclusively for writing down, and communicating over very large distances (such as the internet). In that case, no pronounciation is needed. So it is possible to have an abstract sign language that doesn't even have a standardized pronounciation.
This might sound absurd at first, if you never thought about it, until you realize that is how a lot of our information is already transported. There are a lot of sketches and visualizations of important data that are graphics, plots, charts, drawings, and such, that don't have a standardized pronounciation. The information is transported visually.
For who? As in I have to stop using English and start using the language or as in the world will all now just speak this language, no qualifications? If it's the former, probably something like Esperanto. If it's the latter, Lojban.
And you lost me. Irregular pluralization at the very core of the language does not smack of a the ideal neutral language, whether it is shared by Germanic and Romance languages or not.
IIRC there still are dialects. Like, a gesture exists on a continuum of possibly trajectories, and one "speaker" might do it slightly differently from another.
Yeah, there’s different sign language “languages”, with other variations and slang. No perfect system. Plus words for things thar only exist in that area, like a schnitzel vs fried chicken. It’d still be great if we could codify a thorough set of words that are the same across the board for basics like bicycle, toilet, hospital, food, drink, face, leg, etc., things we all have generally in common, so that learning the area specific words would be all that is needed.
Yeah, but like, something that's signed on the face might be signed higher or lower, even if it's the same variant of the same sign, for example. Kind of like how my "oo" might be different from your "oo" even if we're both saying "roof". And then maybe people start doing it on the neck...
I'm not sure it's any different or better in that way.
Exhausting to do for a long period, and requires a direct and deliberate sight line to work - there will be no shouting "fire".
It's actually been suggested the earliest languages could have been sign languages, since other apes don't fully voluntarily control their noises. I would guess the above are why we moved on.
Hmm, interesting. Do you have reasons, or was that just a random choice? I know pretty little about it. Actually, I'm not even sure if it's Turkic or Persian or something else.
Maybe wrong, but I believe this is from a language learning sub on reddit where people would ask what language they should learn without any other qualifiers. It was asked so frequently that people just started replying Uzbekistani.
Yup. Jurisdiction is very important, but a lot of people seem to have never considered it.
And if you're not aware, Saudi is still a medieval-style absolute monarchy with public beheadings for, like, adultery. ^(And^ ^a^ ^valued^ ^Western^ ^ally)^
mathematics or cartoons work great for communicating ideas to people who don't speak the same language you do.
essentially, all languages are made up. we therefore need to focus more on universal languages that are the same everywhere. mathematics are one example, but surprisingly, so are comics. many of the emotions displayed there are widespread and close to universal.
Lingua franca is technically two words. Lingua franca refers to an old Germanic language lost to language evolution and time, not modern-day French. And using the term to denote a language that is widely understood by different people who don't all speak it natively is perfectly understood, 20 years ago and today. The admittedly very eurocentric expression fills a useful niche because any explanation in vernacular English inevitably becomes much longer than these two established Latin words. But because it's Latin the expression is also widely understood on the European continent as well.
It wasn't, the term lingua franca originates from the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, also known as Sabir, a pidgin language made up of bits from primarily romance languages (notably those of northern Italy) around the Mediterranean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
I mean, I would argue that trade is a form of diplomacy, but whatever. My source points to the first example known as a lingua franca, and shows that the phrase "lingua franca" has nothing to do with the French language; however I can acknowledge the wide acceptance of French as a lingua franca much after the times where Sabir was widely spoken. Anyways, I think that's enough arguing with strangers on the internet for me today.
113 Comments
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net · 51 pts · 300d
Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it's eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it's tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it's grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.
Plus, the fascists fucking hate it
0_0j@lemmy.world · 17 pts · 300d
Lol was waiting for this kick-back
AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 7 pts · 299d
Not against Esperanto but creating a “universal language”and then making it gendered seems a little stupid.
It’s not as bad as other languages on this front, but if I remember correctly there’s still no agreed-upon gender neutral singular pronoun in Esperanto is there?
Mi forgesis, ke mi lernis ĉi tiun lingvon.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net · 6 pts · 299d
There's a daughter language called Ido that's done away with gender, iirc. And I believe there's some gender neutral ways to get around it in the community, but it's been a long time since I've attempted to do anything with it
geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 300d
Might as well choose English at that point.
Una@piefed.europe.pub · 3 pts · 299d
Actually wondering, why would fascists hate it? Idk much history behind language, just know that language exists.
dharmacurious@slrpnk.net · 10 pts · 299d
The whole idea behind it was radical unity, internationalism, and bringing disparate people together on equal footing. Instead of me speaking a language I've known since birth, and you speaking a language you are just capable of understanding, and both of us trying to plead our case to the government, the idea is that we would all have an auxiliary language to compliment (not replace) our mother tongues, and we would both be capable of making yourself understood equally.
Those ideals don't really jive with hard nationalism and pseudoscientific ideas around superior races
Una@piefed.europe.pub · 4 pts · 299d
Yeah make sense, thanks
funbreaker@piefed.social · 29 pts · 300d
Esperanto. it's not the statisically-average best lingua franca but it's the best known that's not tied to a single nation. Plus Hitler and Stalin both hated it.
0_0j@lemmy.world · -3 pts · 300d
The Fascist crew 😂
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org · 26 pts · 300d
Python
NorthWestWind@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 300d
Wenyan
0_0j@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 300d
Woa
Cowbee@lemmy.ml · 21 pts · 300d
Something with a consistent phonetic alphabet, like Korean with hangol.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml · 17 pts · 300d
Gaeilge just to fuck with the brits. We all have to write it in ogham too, I don't care how inconvenient it might be.
That or serbo-croatian because we are all serbs anyway
Infrapink@thebrainbin.org · 6 pts · 300d
Tabhairfaidh mé mo vóta duit.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 300d
Such a pretty language. I should learn it someday!
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 300d
Mé fresin.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 300d
I would have picked gaeilge too, since it's the only other language I know (kinda, I'm terrible at it). Ogham sucks though.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 299d
Yeah Ogham would be fucking awful for modern communication but I thought it'd be really funny. In a more serious sense I actually think it'd be super interesting to see how humans adapted to it and adapted it to their needs.
Anyway I also picked Gaeilge because it makes for great lyricism
jrubal1462@mander.xyz · 16 pts · 300d
I feel like Indonesian is a decent start. There are already a lot of people speaking it, and it's REALLY easy to learn.
There's no conjugation and no cases/agreement. I'm a native English speaker and picked up a functional amount of Indonesian in a matter of months, just from reading a couple books before we went.
spittingimage@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 299d
Esperanto. It's an artificial language designed to be easy to learn and communicate in. Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.
dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 14 pts · 299d
WHAT!? OK biggest failure of an artificial language in my book then
echindod@programming.dev · 2 pts · 298d
I think this is actually a success: this is the process of all languages. A usable language will evolve and grow, and something as geographical dispersed and isolated as Esperanto will certainly show divergence if it is being used.
So rather than a failure, I think this demonstrates it can be a real language. Though my interest in language isn't for communication. So eh. Your milage may very.
arthur@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 299d
I think it is easy, but I speak only european languages. Not sure if it is really easier or I just feel that is easy because I know the languages I do.
I would love to say mandarin/chinese, but tonal languages scares me.
I made a grammar rule set (not a complete conlang yet) where verbs don't need to be conjugated, and information about time is separated from the verb; A new lingua franca, IMHO, should not have verb conjugation.
communist@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz · 2 pts · 299d
Why not lojban?
spittingimage@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 299d
Haven't heard of it.
fubarx@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 300d
Screeching 9600 baud modems. Now with more emotion!
PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 300d
anoriginalthought@lemmy.ml · 11 pts · 300d
I've been enjoying studying Mandarin. The tones are a bit weird but the grammar seems surprisingly simple, everything can be written pretty universally in pinyin, and Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.
0_0j@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 300d
True, I will ask this: Why does it have 2 variants? Traditional? Modern?
sylver_dragon@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 299d
Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can "fix" the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.
anoriginalthought@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 300d
Fucked if I know 😂 I'm studying it on my own from textbooks and online resources, not in a classroom setting taught by scholars much much smarter than me. I assume the reduced complexity of simplified characters makes it more accessible though, which is why I understand the PRC makes Pinyin required on road signs as well.
Infrapink@thebrainbin.org · 4 pts · 300d
The ultimate goal was to transition Mandarin to Roman letters (which had happened naturally in Vietnam, so there was precedent).ao's party realised that going straight from Chinese characters to Roman letters would be too abrupt, so took a first step of swapping out complex characters for characters that look simpler but are easier to write. This was surprisingly well-received, and became standard in mainland China (but Taiwan did not adopt the new system on the entirely reasonable grounds of fuck the CCP). The CCP intended to do a second round of simplification, but the people balked at this on the grounds that it made the written language to difficult to read, and so they stopped at the current set.
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz · 10 pts · 300d
Toki pona
Thus making everything open to interpretation
morgan_423@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 300d
I'd honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.
Don't think it's going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.
isyasad@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 299d
I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that "watermelon" would be "kili telo" (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that "kili telo" would not be understood as "watermelon" unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived "kili telo".
If you're going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.
I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 299d
Isn't toki pona supposed to be an art language?
Is Esperanto similar to what you're talking about?
morgan_423@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 299d
No, I think a true universal language is going to need minimal friction, and be as simple and vocab-limited as possible, to encourage mass adaptation.
For all its intent on being easier than other mainstream languages, Esparanto is still more complex than what I'm talking about.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 10 pts · 298d
I've heard good things about Indonesian/Malay. It probably helps it was a regional lingua franca for a long time.
English was legit the best choice in Europe - analytic, with vocabulary drawn from a couple major families, and (almost) no grammatical gender. If only we could unfuck the orthography...
timkenhan@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 298d
I feel like Indonesian is what Esperanto could've been.
RabbitMix@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 10 pts · 299d
dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 299d
I think it's worth it learning dutch if you nail the accent, especially common ones found 50 years ago (as in dubbed Pipi Longstocking).
folaht@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 298d
Nou ja zeg!
Dit zelfver-nederland-cultuurtje moet blijkbaar
nog altijd blijven opkijken naar de taal waar het hoofdland
op dit moment verder afglijdt naar het fascisme.
bochy992@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 298d
Hey, can you translate this to English?
Because what Google gives me doesn't make sense:
This self- Dutchifying culture apparently still has to look up to the language, while the main country is currently sliding further towards fascism.
folaht@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 289d
Tsk tsk!
This selfhu-miliationland-culture^*^ apparently
needs to keep looking up to the language where it's main country
is currently sliding further and further towards fascism.
^*^ Wordplay on the Netherlands and humilation
isyasad@lemmy.world · 10 pts · 299d
Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.
Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.
My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 9 pts · 299d
everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.
ylph@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 298d
This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.
Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.
As an example the character for book (書) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is 聿 (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and 者 on the bottom (the meaning of 者 is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but 者 in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)
When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn't really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.
Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana
Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it's polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)
So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 3 pts · 298d
yeah :)
you're right
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 299d
isyasad@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 299d
China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.
The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 298d
echindod@programming.dev · 3 pts · 298d
I disagree. I doubt you read any alphabet letter by letter. You read words or you don't read fluently. So the reality is: alphabets aren't inherently better, and I think the continued existence of Chinese as a viable writing system shows this to be the case.
The one advantage alphabets have is they have a more gentle ramp up, but I don't think they are inherently better. In fact your example of Roman vs Arabic numerals is a preference for logogram over atomistic writing system.
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 298d
echindod@programming.dev · 2 pts · 298d
I agree that alphabets are easier to learn. However, I don't think that is the ultimate standard in what makes for a good writing system. I would like to learn Chinese. Someday. But I do like the logo-syllabic writing systems I do know
_deleted_@aussie.zone · 9 pts · 300d
Latin, or even better, Klingon
Apeman42@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 300d
All I know is "petaQ" and "Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam", but I suppose that should be enough to get by.
irelephant@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 2 pts · 300d
Duolingo has a Klingon and latin course
0_0j@lemmy.world · 8 pts · 300d
Swahili speaker (native) here, fluent in English.
Language is a medium of communication between two or more parties. So long as they understand each other, all is good. whether they used klingon or Martian, it don't matter.
What i do know is that, if, hypothetically, internet throws a poll for people all over the world to choose language they will use for communication, every one, myself included, will hold their conner, defending how real and original the language that they are familiar with (and most definitely biased towards) is.
if you put it on a vote on the other hand, something different happens. In fact, it's been happening all along, silently and quietly at the back of our heads. From the first day surfing through the internet to buying your first own smartphone/laptop and choosing the default language for these devices, I know on my part I was driven by convenience. As the majority of media outlets use English. From the shows i watched to the role‐models i looked up on while growing up, they all circled around this fascinating slang that made them even more interesting. The internet's influence towards english made it easy (at least for me) to catch up real quick.
I will say this tho, hearing hakuna matata on the lion king was awesooome
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 300d
One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We're still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can't really imagine how that doesn't have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.
FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website · 7 pts · 300d
I would argue no one could choose one. A lingua franca is silently agreed upon over long periods of time. No committee sat down to make old Frankish the language of trade, modern French the language of diplomacy, and nowadays English the language of internet arguments.
If I had a magic wand though my vote is Klingon as well. Qa'plah.
manxu@piefed.social · 7 pts · 300d
One of the South American variants of Spanish, probably Argentinian. And I say that despite not speaking any Spanish.
The language itself is a contact language and heavily influenced by centuries of cohabitation with speakers of Arabic. That simplified a lot of the Indo-European complexities away.
The phonology - the sounds - of the language are clear and predictable and sufficiently different that a non-native speaker and their accent are not too troublesome in comprehension.
The language itself is already a world language, ranking 4th in number of native speakers.
I like the suggestion of Esperanto, which I do personally speak and which has all the advantages above, except already being a world language.
vfreire85@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 299d
I'd agree on the sense that everything in argentine spanish can be said with thousands of curse words interspersed. ¡la puta madre que lo parió, boludo de mierda!
manxu@piefed.social · 2 pts · 299d
That's why they call it the Silver Tongue!
mathemachristian@lemmy.ml · 6 pts · 300d
Türkçe not gendered (at all, everyone and everything is "o") and one of the easiest languages to learn
Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 6 pts · 299d
Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.
Xaphanos@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 300d
Sindarin
folaht@lemmy.ml · 5 pts · 299d
Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 298d
Are we sure it's actually usable as a natural language?
folaht@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 298d
I have no clue, but it'll be better than a language that thinks it's acceptable for words like "read"
to not just have two different meaning, but two different pronunciations,
while also having words like "sense", "scents" and "cents" be pronounced exactly the same.
And while writing this, I just learned that pronunciation should be spelled with "u" instead of "ou".
That makes no sense.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 298d
Yes, the spelling is terrible, even if the spoken language is not.
folaht@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 298d
The sounds English makes is pretty good,
but I don't know if it's the culture or the language itself,
but it has a giant tendency to want to use a
euphanisms and dysphemisms to emphasize superiority
over other languages and cultures
and also has a giant tendency to use weasel words,
to weasel in authoritarianisms.
davidagain@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 298d
Esperanto. Logical. Clear. Easy.
daggermoon@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 298d
Mi amas Esperanton!
dessalines@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 298d
Globasa. A constructed language, but with most world language families represented, and a process that ensures new words meet a few other good criteria.
Barring that, toki pona.
PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 300d
Klingon or Quenya, both sounds like music (just of different genres)
HubertManne@piefed.social · 4 pts · 300d
one that told me what that means. Seriously though an additional language or changing my base language?
lemmyknow@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 300d
Interlingua
mukt@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 299d
Sanskrit.
marcie@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 299d
Swedish, very pretty language
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 300d
Lojban, it's culturally neutral, and that makes it all the more nice. Plus it's got an interesting punctuation style.
Coopr8@kbin.earth · 4 pts · 300d
This seems like a pretty solid option. I feel like this type of algorithmic language construction could be ripe for a big push forward, both in terms of constructing new languages and benchmarking them for use.
Coopr8@kbin.earth · 4 pts · 300d
Hmmm, looking at Lojban in a bit more detail it sounds like the consensus is that the conative load of having to construct perfect logical specificity makes it suboptimal as a secondary intermediary language. If people are learning it as a second language it will be very hard to pick up.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 4 pts · 299d
Also note that script is historically mostly used for communication over large distances and times.
Historical scriptures (such as the bible) got transported across half the globe and copied and passed down for more than a thousand years. The scripture transcends both space and time.
If you only want to communicate with your neighbour, you don't need a lingua franca. Lingua franca is exclusively for writing down, and communicating over very large distances (such as the internet). In that case, no pronounciation is needed. So it is possible to have an abstract sign language that doesn't even have a standardized pronounciation.
This might sound absurd at first, if you never thought about it, until you realize that is how a lot of our information is already transported. There are a lot of sketches and visualizations of important data that are graphics, plots, charts, drawings, and such, that don't have a standardized pronounciation. The information is transported visually.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world · 3 pts · 299d
For who? As in I have to stop using English and start using the language or as in the world will all now just speak this language, no qualifications? If it's the former, probably something like Esperanto. If it's the latter, Lojban.
zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 300d
Novial
Coopr8@kbin.earth · 1 pts · 300d
Person Singular Plural
1st me nus
And you lost me. Irregular pluralization at the very core of the language does not smack of a the ideal neutral language, whether it is shared by Germanic and Romance languages or not.
gray@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 300d
I would prefer some kind of sign language
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 300d
I like this idea. Generally somewhat simplified, and no “pronunciation” needed if it were standardized.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 298d
IIRC there still are dialects. Like, a gesture exists on a continuum of possibly trajectories, and one "speaker" might do it slightly differently from another.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 298d
Yeah, there’s different sign language “languages”, with other variations and slang. No perfect system. Plus words for things thar only exist in that area, like a schnitzel vs fried chicken. It’d still be great if we could codify a thorough set of words that are the same across the board for basics like bicycle, toilet, hospital, food, drink, face, leg, etc., things we all have generally in common, so that learning the area specific words would be all that is needed.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 298d
Yeah, but like, something that's signed on the face might be signed higher or lower, even if it's the same variant of the same sign, for example. Kind of like how my "oo" might be different from your "oo" even if we're both saying "roof". And then maybe people start doing it on the neck...
I'm not sure it's any different or better in that way.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 298d
I understand that, which is why I suggested a codified standard for those "sames" we have in common so that they're all signed the same.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 298d
Exhausting to do for a long period, and requires a direct and deliberate sight line to work - there will be no shouting "fire".
It's actually been suggested the earliest languages could have been sign languages, since other apes don't fully voluntarily control their noises. I would guess the above are why we moved on.
rigatti@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 300d
Toki Pona.
JackbyDev@programming.dev · 3 pts · 299d
I wouldn't, because everyone would just have to learn another new language if they learned English because it's the current one.
Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml · 3 pts · 300d
Uzbek
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 300d
Or Ubykh.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 298d
Hmm, interesting. Do you have reasons, or was that just a random choice? I know pretty little about it. Actually, I'm not even sure if it's Turkic or Persian or something else.
Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 298d
As piwakawakas said, Uzbek is a meme.
piwakawakas@lemmy.nz · 1 pts · 298d
Maybe wrong, but I believe this is from a language learning sub on reddit where people would ask what language they should learn without any other qualifiers. It was asked so frequently that people just started replying Uzbekistani.
Again, that's my memory of it, could be wrong.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 298d
Could be! Like "under the laws of Saudi Arabia..." in the legal advice community.
piwakawakas@lemmy.nz · 1 pts · 298d
I assume people asking legal advice but not specifying where they are?
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 298d
Yup. Jurisdiction is very important, but a lot of people seem to have never considered it.
And if you're not aware, Saudi is still a medieval-style absolute monarchy with public beheadings for, like, adultery. ^(And^ ^a^ ^valued^ ^Western^ ^ally)^
piwakawakas@lemmy.nz · 2 pts · 298d
I knew things were grim, but that's worse than I thought!
piwakawakas@lemmy.nz · 1 pts · 298d
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/4sok49/is_uzbek_like_a_meme_on_this_subreddit/
If you want to brave Reddit
vfreire85@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 299d
realistically, lojban, aui, mirad or kotava.
out of fictional languages, quenya, klingon, or the language of the culture from iain m. banks' books.
daggermoon@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 298d
Esperanto, Ido, Indonesian, or Afrikaans.
aeternum@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 300d
gray@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 300d
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de · 1 pts · 299d
mathematics or cartoons work great for communicating ideas to people who don't speak the same language you do.
essentially, all languages are made up. we therefore need to focus more on universal languages that are the same everywhere. mathematics are one example, but surprisingly, so are comics. many of the emotions displayed there are widespread and close to universal.
CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 298d
It's pretty hard to express general, commonsense ideas in math, or abstract/complex ideas in cartoons, though.
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · -12 pts · 300d
FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website · 11 pts · 300d
Lingua franca is technically two words. Lingua franca refers to an old Germanic language lost to language evolution and time, not modern-day French. And using the term to denote a language that is widely understood by different people who don't all speak it natively is perfectly understood, 20 years ago and today. The admittedly very eurocentric expression fills a useful niche because any explanation in vernacular English inevitably becomes much longer than these two established Latin words. But because it's Latin the expression is also widely understood on the European continent as well.
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 299d
FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website · 1 pts · 299d
Thanks for the correction
moody@lemmings.world · 10 pts · 300d
Lingua franca has nothing to do with French.
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 299d
MoonPatrol@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 299d
I'm pretty sure the first diplomatic language was Latin.
gallopingsnail@lemmy.sdf.org · 1 pts · 299d
It wasn't, the term lingua franca originates from the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, also known as Sabir, a pidgin language made up of bits from primarily romance languages (notably those of northern Italy) around the Mediterranean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
PiraHxCx@lemmy.ml · 0 pts · 299d
gallopingsnail@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 299d
I mean, I would argue that trade is a form of diplomacy, but whatever. My source points to the first example known as a lingua franca, and shows that the phrase "lingua franca" has nothing to do with the French language; however I can acknowledge the wide acceptance of French as a lingua franca much after the times where Sabir was widely spoken. Anyways, I think that's enough arguing with strangers on the internet for me today.