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A Common (Internet-Based) Language? 472

Silaron asks: "With the new 'Internet age' coming upon us, and more and more people see the Internet as a means of getting a level playing field with other countries through e-commerce, will we adopt some sort of 'common' [language] that we will all speak? Will it be English, or something like Esperanto? Or how about Lojban?" Assuming we don't take the path of least resistance and use English, something like this is only eventual. But would such a language be a niche language, or do you think it could come to rival even English for dominance?
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A Common (Internet-Based) Language?

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  • Language is evolutionary. English will be the base, but new words are coming into it every day, creating a custom vocabulary for the web.

    Words and concepts like dotcoms, fulfillment houses, privacy policies, tracking numbers, clickthroughs, wishlists, ISPs, DSL, packet loss, winmodem, etc., are either new or have augmented meaning on the net.

    Language has always been an evolutionary phenomenon; here we just get to watch it evolve faster. The idea of a new language popping up and being universally accepted is about as likely as everyone switching over to IPv6 on the same day.

    Kevin Fox
  • by MadDreamer ( 143443 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:23AM (#1102171)
    What, you mean babelfish.altavista.com isn't GOOD enough for you??

    I mean it will work fine until we try to open up trade relations with another country and end up insulting their women and complementing their sexy sheep by accident.

    But seriously, it seems more than likely that English will fall into place as the world trade language. I'm thinking back to a lame video I saw a few years back in high school (one that I didn't sleep through) that showed how English was already becoming a world language. Many trades are made in it, and I'm pretty sure air traffic controllers in almost every country have to speak it.

    And then there's the fact that no American is going to bother to learn another language. There's the old joke: A person who speaks three languages is trilingual, two, bilingual, and a person who speaks one language is an American.


    -Mad Dreamer
  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:24AM (#1102172)
    Just look at /. where geeks and trolls roam using :-) and other stange stuff. So IMHO it exists today.
  • by mbaker ( 176346 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:25AM (#1102174)
    There seems little to warrant the use of an artifical language, when English has emerged as the dominant scientific and business language.
    Certainly it shouldn't be expected that everyone everywhere will use English for communication, but its dominance as the convergence language isn't apt to be usurped by Esperanto.

    For non-business related, or perhaps also non-multinational business related communication, individual natural languages will probably remain the same. This is, of course, one of the reasons we're moving all of this technology from ASCII to Unicode, is it not?

    It would also seem that an artificial language would have a large barrier to entry, due to the limited number of people that know them, the lack of a cultural presence to preserve them, and the need for their existance at all.
  • I suggest looking at the ever popular jargon file. While it is a hacker language in it's own right, it also gives insight into how an artificially developed internet language might develop, especially the logical nature of computers.

  • The other problem is that not everyone in the world will join the internet at the same time - the more developed nations (such as those in Europe, the US, and so on) will have a larger and earlier influence on the evolution of the language as compared to the other, less developed nations. Global internet access for all is still a pipedream I'm afraid...
  • by MicroBerto ( 91055 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:30AM (#1102181)
    I feel that human intelligence is going to get to a point where, if we want to become anymore intelligent and learn faster, we will need a better language. Something that linguists agree is fast, easy, and not redundant (this a huge problem for most languages, especially English). It also must be able to typed very well, of course.

    Of course it's not going to happen, languages don't just come up out of nowhere and stick. But it will get to the point where English is just too damn slow.

    Mike Roberto (roberto@soul.apk.net [mailto]) -GAIM: MicroBerto

  • by Wiwi Jumbo ( 105640 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:31AM (#1102182) Homepage Journal
    "Language is evolutionary."

    This is IMO, why the french language is not long for this world. Quebec (and I believe to some degree France itself) creates laws to keep the french language "pure". This is what I think is the fastest way to kill a language or a culture.

    Things die in stagnant water....
    Wiwi
    "I trust in my abilities,
  • by Paul Johnson ( 33553 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:32AM (#1102184) Homepage
    The thing about English is that it is already the de-facto world standard language, and has been for some years. I'm embarrased about this because I am English, as well as anglophone, so I don't have to learn another language. I'm also relieved because I am very bad at learning other languages. I do fine until I hit the irregular bits, and then my mind rebels. However thats by the by.

    The thing that kills any other language, including nice regular ones like Esperanto and Lojban, is simply the network effect. Learn Esperanto and you can speak to a few (tens of?) thousand like-minded enthusiasts around the world. Learn English and you can get by just about anywhere with a capitalist economy because the locals all learn English as their second language. I once tried learning Esperanto, but gave up because there was simply nothing out there to read in it beyond newsgroups written by other Esperanto enthusiasts.

    Back to network effects: we all know why MS Windows and Office have become the de-facto standard systems on 90+% of the worlds PCs. English will become the world language for exactly the same reason.

    Paul.

  • What we need is some sort of a universial translator. So depending on a browser setting, all text on a website would automatically be converted to the language set as default in the browser. That way, we could all communicate in our native languages. Like Star Trek, where everybody SEEMS to speak English :o)

  • What do you mean...a perverted english? English has always had plenty of foreign words in it.

    The magic of english is that you can throw anything into it.

    Lakota words, French words, Hebrew words, Arabic and German find thier way into my conversations all the time.

    So I'm not sure what you mean by perverted.
  • by wowbagger ( 69688 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:33AM (#1102188) Homepage Journal
    The problem with "designed" languages like Esperanto vs. "evolved" languages like English is much the same as the problem with Pascal vs. C.


    People use languages to get a job done: communicating with each other. Most designed languages, while pretty on paper, aren't able to cover the whole problem space they need to. Then one of two things happens: either the language begins to evolve, and loses the "prettiness" but becomes functional, or the language is replaced by one that works.


    For example, Pascal. Designed as a language with training wheels, it didn't fit the problem space for systems programming. You had some bastardizations like Object Pascal (Delphi), but mostly it's fallen by the wayside while C (a language that has evolved) took over.


    Now, look at Esperanto: Nicely designed, but does it cover the whole problem space of human to human communications? Now, look at English: need a word or phrase for a construct? Make it up via concatination, acronym, or onomonopia.


    I think the language of the future will be a mix of various languages, with English as a base but constructs from other languages. Personally, I'd like to see a construct like the French "si" enter the language. (si is an true response to a default false question: "You're not going to a movie, are you?" "Si" (yes, I am going to a movie).

  • by legoboy ( 39651 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:34AM (#1102190)
    In related news, it seems that most unilingual English speakers tend not to realise just how many sites exist on the web in other languages.

    There's a huge number of sites out there in Spanish, German, French, and Japanese that I frequent at least occasionally, and surely a similarly large number in languages that I can't speak, as well. (Korean, Chinese, Russian, etc)

    Simply put, you're really missing out if you think that English is the universal language of the internet (as a couple of people have already commented).

    ------
  • Language is evolutionary. Well, maybe. I think English will be the base because it is not orthogonal like more synthetic languages. This is in spite of all of our 6th grade grammar teachers trying to jackboot a standard on us. For example, my Slovene friend says: "Please, no be smoking" I understand it. Sure, it is a grammatical nightmare. But when I asked her if I could say the same thing like "Ne kadite, hvala" she said it really didn't mean the same thing as the more sensical "Hvala, ker ne kadite." But her statement in English made "imperfect" sense

    English adapts along curved lines. Evolve implies adapt. English will probably do the job best not because it will change, but because of its current nature: the Swiss Army Knife of Languages.

  • by MoNickels ( 1700 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:40AM (#1102198) Homepage
    I'm reminded of a story that applies here.

    A fakir in India a long time ago travelled from town to town putting on a performance. He had the ability to speak nearly all of India's 400 or more tongues fluently, as if he was born to them. He would stand in the center of town and challenge passers-by:

    "Win a piece of gold! I can speak any language in the world! I challenge you to stump me! Price of playing is a hand-full of rice. Nobody has stumped me yet! And you can win ten pieces of gold if you can tell me the language I learned at my mother's breast. One hand-full of rice only!"

    And eventually, people would pay their handful of rice, and try a few words of the language their old grandmother taught them when they were young. The fakir always responded in kind, usually with a clever bit of poetry or doggerel, so he not only won, but was amusing and soon gathered a crowd. Then the old grandmothers themselves would come out, speaking languages out of the mountains, or from across the sea, or sacred tongues they had been taught on the sly by past lovers. The fakir spoke them all!

    Then one day he landed in a little town in Andra Pradesh where lived a clever little farmer who had a small rice paddy and two oxen. He was very successful but had never been educated. The farmer listened to the fakir tease and win and flirt with the crowd. And he considered the matter.

    At the end of the day, when the fakir was about to wrap it up and move on, the farmer spoke to him and said, "Please, stay with my family tonight. You are a very educated man and I think we may learn a thing or two from you."

    The fakir of course accepted and they spent the night eating bowls of rice and drinking wine and rice beer and laughing at each other's stories.

    That night as the village was sleeping, the farmer rose from his mat where he had been resting but not sleeping. He padded down to the river and drew a deep bucket of water. He hauled it back to the tent and threw it on his guest.

    "Aiiieeee! Oh Shiva!" The fakir called these out in his birth tongue, a language from people far up the Ganges. "Why have you done this? Are we not friends?" he asked the farmer.

    The farmer replied, "Last night I fed you my rice. More than a handful by my count. And now I seek the ten gold coins in return. For the language you speak is..." and he named the language.

    The fakir laughed and laughed. "You are the first! No one else knew the trick, because they forgot a simple truth: we are what we were when we were in the houses of our mothers. We can build on top, but we cannot remove the foundation."

    ...........

    The Internet will be like the world: each community using its own dialect, language, patois, lingo, argot, code or jargon. There will be a lingua franca. Now it's English. In 100 years it might be Spanish or Mandarin.

    That is how languages go. They resist control. They change despite language Academies. They remain static despite invented words and languages. They persist. They are uncontainable. They resist attention and inattention. They rebel.

    Until the Internet is a Mother, a father, a schoolyard chum, there will never be an accepted universal, Internet-only language. Never. For that is how languages are taken to heart.

  • 1)Every 'puter on the net speaks it. [freesoft.org]

    2)Every router pushes it. [freesoft.org]
    These little packets [freesoft.org]are the true common language on the internet.
    Everything else is just fluff.
    ___

  • by myamid ( 179896 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @05:44AM (#1102202)
    Try telling that to the 5+ billion people who don't even speak a word of english! I personnaly would love a standard language cause I just hate it when I land on the Japanese or Russian pages, but I don't think english would make everyone happy. I'm from Quebec (canada) where language has always been an issue, and beleive me, adopting a defacto language isn't as easy as it may seem... This concept might be hard to understand for someone who has never been truly exposed to such a debate, but it truely is VERY complex since nobody wants to give up their culture (especially for the american culture, no offence intended, but that's still the case...) "Welcome to the real world"
  • I tend to agree with this. I must also add that while the technical process of parsing is simplified by artificial languages like Lojban, Esperanto, or Klingon ;-) , they lose by their very accuracy and lack of ambiguity the richness, slight nuances, and shades of meaning that most naturally evolved languages possess.

    All stereotypes aside about how the Japanese communicate mostly via implied meaning and nuances, and how Americans tend to beat each other over the head with blunt statements, it seems to me that in reality, most communication, in a personal, business, or casual setting relies on implied statements, shades of meaning, and so forth, in all natural languages

    These artificial languages are similar in spirit to bondage-and-discipline computer languages (no, I'm not naming any ... just by saying that I'm already going to be flamed to a crisp). They are certainly usable, but though the technical creation of statements in both an expressive and imperative mood may be easy, getting across the exact idea that you want might be needlessly hard.

  • I live in canada, and i know french and english (and go to a french school), but i only use french when i have to. I don't like the accents (they make typing slow), and there aren't enough technology words. At school, we're always forced to talk in french, and they even take english words and change the spelling to make stupid words that they say are the "right" words (one example is ouebe. Guess where that came from).

    French isn't used enough, and it doesn't have enough techonology words, to be popular. For some reason (im not sure if this is true or not), it seems that french has a lot more grammar and spelling rules - I can write nearly anything in english with no trouble, but when i write something in french, i have more mistakes. And it doesn't help that most french organisations are trying to stop the language's evolution.

    It will evolve or die.
  • Instead of a language everyone speaks how about a language NO ONE speaks...
    A universal language that acts is sort of a middle ground. Something the computer can easly translate to other languages.

    Websites that do this could gain non-english speaking traffic while not effecting it's english speaking traffic.

    Would the translation be two way? Likely not...
    Instead the language would be missing words and notions needed to translate a given language to it.

    It would only contain words that move easly to diffrent languages and specal metawords that clarify words when SOME languages need but not all.

    Web authors would be stuck with learning the language and web browsers stuck with translation...
    What about webchats like Slashdot?
    Here is where it gets sticky...
    An inline translation may be needed but it wouldn't be from "Language" to "Universal" instead it would be the same old "Language to Language" as converting to Universal would produce the same sillyness as babblefish and likely worse...

    The reasonning behind this is people are unlikely to take the path of greatist resistence (learn a new language) or even put up with a sloppy translation (Babblefish) like the more dedicated techs on Usenet have done.
    Instead the avrage user will stick to websites that speak the language he/she allready knows.
    So in order to gain a wide audence right now websites are taking the move of setting up diffrent websites..
    However many diffrent websites is also the path of greatist resistence.. in this case on the company.
    Translation CGI is an answer some are looking at but then you get back to babblefish results...

    The answer that comes to my mind is a universal language... at first translated by CGI and later on by webbrowser...
    Implemented as say an HTML5 spec...

    With other protocals it depends on the system...
    When it's just server sending data like a website universal will do the job... on interactive systems like Usenet and on-line chat english default with some clients implementing a translator...

    I can just picture two people who speak say.. french.. on IRC using french to english translation and not understanding eachother due to the translator distortion
  • See the Espe-Ranto [demon.co.uk] for a breathtaking list of serious problems with Esperanto that pretty much negate most of the advantages its supporters claim for it. While you're there, learn how to be be like Bill Gates [demon.co.uk]...
    --
  • Re: "Back to network effects: we all know why MS Windows and Office have become the de-facto standard systems on 90+% of the worlds PCs. English will become the world language for exactly the same reason." Because americans will use monopolistic and preditory practices to suck the life out of all compeeting languages?

    ;)
    ___

  • It's scary to see how much English has invaded other languages. English words appear often in languages such as Spanish (particularly in Chicano dialects), German, and even in far unrelated languages like Chinese and especially Japanese.

    English is widely taught as part of required public schooling worldwide as a 2nd language if it's not already the local primary language. World documents like passports and such are printed ALWAYS in English, French, and then the local language if its not one of the two former, and the need for French is falling off.

    The ASCII character set, promulgated by the internet tends to favor English usage by not supporting diacritical marks used in other roman-alphabet based languages (French, German [extra characters now officially deprecated by German gov't], Spanish, etc.) Non-roman writing based languages are very much hindered by 7-bit ASCII (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, The Cyrillic based languages, also Georgian, Hindi, the list is long).

    And with global communications, languages have ceased diverging and evolving each in their own directions. Without global comm and fast worldwide travel, American English would have diverged from British English to become as different as Spanish and Portugese are today. These processes have halted and in fact have reversed and will eventually result in a nearly uniform version of English.

    It's not really the internet that's causing this, but instantaneous global communications in general. Language has always been an evolutionary phenomenon; here we just get to watch it evolve faster. The idea of a new language popping up and being universally accepted is about as likely as everyone switching over to IPv6 on the same day.

    Totally incorrect. The evolution has already slowed and reversed as I described above. A new language? Unlikely. One being adopted until nearly all understand it (like English) it'll happen. Not instantaneously but over time. English is already understood in more places on Earth today than just 75 years ago. Why? Satellite TV boradcasts, people traveling 10,000 miles regularly many times per year. Global business partnerships. If there's any evolving going it, it's everything evolving to merge together.

    The odd man out? Space travel.

    The difficulty of space travel and slow light speed communications will mean that the first settlements beyong the Earth will be isolated for long periods of time with only sparse contact with the Earth and cartainly no interactive contact (light time is neearly 1 hour just to get to Jupiter, and you though satellite delays were annoying!). This isolation may result is some new diverging and evolution of language again.

    Until then look for one language growing at the expense of others and many languages to even die out. For good or bad, a common language has advantages and is necessary. It will happen.

  • I start hearing the Eagles go though my head:

    Esperanto, why don't you come to your senses?

    Come down from your fences, open the gate

    It may be rainin', but there's a rainbow above you

    You better let somebody love you (let somebody love you)

    You better let somebody love you before it's too late

    Oh Esperanto


    ARRRRGH

    PS: Yes I /know/ it's Desperado.
  • The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words.

    Not will be, ARE foreign words. A large number of the words for food in the English language are already of French origin due to the Norman conquest. Beouf, etc. There are many other examples of non-English words in common use as well.

    English has a HUGE vocabulary, more than any other language. Part of the reason for this is the long history it has of subsuming words from other languages.

    English has some real positive attributes to recommend it over other languages as a lingua franca - the rich vocabulary, the great body of literature (rivaled only by Greek and Sanskrit), the fact that there is no central body that tries to control the vocabulary (like the notorious and highly xenophobic Academie Francaise) and keep out foriegn cultural influences.

  • ...and that's why english is and will be the language of the internet.

    English will change of course, with new words meaning new things.

    For many years to come, the people building the net will be technicians of some kind. They will be working with programming languages, markup languages, and hardware. I have yet to see a real-world ``computer-language'' (programming or mark-up) that isn't based on english.

    I'm not native english myself, but I tend to write source code comments and program output in english anyway. So anyone using or digging into programs I've written, will be using english too. I see everyone else doing the same thing.

    Sure, the technicians are not the ones necessarily deciding the language of the program input/output in an application, but I bet that as soon as you look under the hood of 90% of the non-english programs out there, you'll see comments in english still. As long as more than a few people have to work with code like that, english will be the common language of the many.

    Even if you decide to not use english, you still will:
    open(OUTF, "min_fil") or die "Kunne ikke åbne min_fil";

    Sure, some company tried to translate the macro language of their international products into using words from the languages of each of the translations. I have yet to meet someone who found that anything but catastrophic. Macro packages for the english version wouldn't run on the german version and vice versa. Even worse, you couldn't share experiences across borders, or read foreign language books about the macro language.

    Anything that constrains the benefit of communication between people to within national borders, is doomed. Be it a macro language, or a nationalized internet.

  • Unlike French, there is no common group of social "overlords" who determine what will go and what will stay. Words come and go in the english language like fads. Slang terms slowly replace more traditional terms, and more traditional terms sometimes make comebacks...and the evolutionary process of the english language continues (Webster knew his kids would always have a job).

    If you look at the English language now...it is in fact a far cry from the days of Shakespeare and such. A new dialect certainly.

    The point is that language is a process of evolutionary communication. As the internet grows, and the world becomes closer and closer...English will most likely become a standard amongst the vast majority of the world population...but most certainly it will not become a standard in the next 50-100 years. We're talking about a signifigant lingual/cultural change. Terms like "carte blanche" and "caveat emptor" which have become a part of the english language help us identify more than just what we're talking about. They're also an indication of where the language has been (btw - the reason english is so "bastardized" and irregular, so to speak, is because it's an agregate of many languages...but that's another lecture for another time.)

    English most likely will become the standard for the world...at which point it would logically become the standard for the internet, not the other way around...although the internet may facilitate its growth. But by the time this occurs...once again our decendents won't be able to read our current literature without being told to by their 10th grade teacher...and it probably won't really be English they're speaking anymore...it'll just be called that by default!


    FluX
    After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
  • Unless English becomes more universal quickly I think translation software will replace the need for a universal language. Quickly is relative. I am thinking in the next 10 years. The number of internet connected people is still small and for much of the world they are not going to have the option to be connected anytime soon. Today a clear majority of internet users are native english speakers. It makes sense that today the language of the Internet is english. This won't always be the case. Even now, think of the number of German news stories that get posted to /.

    English is the dominant language of the Internet today and is somewhat universal. As non english spaekers join the Internet they will adopt english to better communicate. However there is a strong interest in computer interpretation of natural languages. This will lead to good translation software which would fill the need of a universal language.

  • It may lose its status as the majority language, but will it ever lose its status as the plurality language? That is to say, will some other language overtake it in popularity? Will some other language become the de facto language for addressing a global audience? It seems unlikely. The only possible trend away from English in general that I can see is simply an increase in sites that are multi-lingual.
  • by Jouni ( 178730 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @06:11AM (#1102255)
    What a silly question. :)

    Language is a means of communication that evolved to fit the Instant Messaging needs between you and the people in your community. Languages have differentiated from each other because these communities have traditionally been local to a physical space, and have thus had very little interaction with communities or individuals further away. It's not random chance that borders between countries and cultures have largely grown to be physical barriers (bodies of water, mountains, inhabitable areas), it's not just because it's easier to draw a line on the map along the river but because the people were split to either side.

    Now, the Internet changes all this, we speak often of the "Internet community", but in actuality there is no such thing. Internet is just a different distribution of people from that which exists in the real world, but there is still no singular, universal community, nor can we see one forming in the foreseeable future. The direct communication of one individual may now reach to many more than it did in the old days, but very few of us have a need to directly interact with millions. Most people are quite happy with maybe a hundred people or less in their lives.

    The Internet makes it easier for us to communicate with people, making it much less laborous for messages to traverse over a physical distance. It does not, however, create a need for us to speak directly with everyone on the planet.

    New communities do form daily on the Internet, and they adopt their own chosen models of behavior and communication. SlashDot, which can be agreed to be a community of sorts, has adopted English. The idea of SlashDot changing English for some other language is quite absurd, for English seems to fulfill the need of our communication here just fine.

    Feel free to run a SlashDot poll to prove me wrong. :)

    Jouni
    --
    Jouni Mannonen
    3D Evangelist

  • Nearly correct, it will be the dumbed down version of english also known as US english or even american. I'm not trying to insult people here but I'm just trying to make clear that the US population consists of immigrants from all over the world. Most of them adopted the local language (brittish english), with varying results. After 200 years of language evolution the result is a dumbed down version of brittish english (simpler spelling, smaller vocabulary). As a non native english speaker (I'm dutch) I have no problems understanding american english (spoken & written). However, brittish english is much more difficult.

    So american english is perfect for the internet since it already is a language for immigrants. As such it is rather easy to learn for non native speakers (much easier than brittish english or even french with its rigid grammar).

    However, I don't really believe in global cultures and other crap like that so i think an increasing portion of the content will in other languages than english.
  • You people got it all wrong. English isn't the language of the Internet, neither is Esperanto.

    The language of the Internet is TCP/IP!! I mean, c'mon, without English, the Internet still exists. Without Esperanto, the Internet still exists. But without TCP/IP, there is no Internet! I don't understand why you people are still looking for the "Language of the Internet". You all disappoint me. I mean, of all people, shouldn't Slashdotters be the people most clueful about the fact that TCP/IP is that language of the Internet?! Why are we still looking for a universal language when we already have one??

    (Disclaimer: moderators without a sense of humour should not read this post.)


    ---
  • by The Famous Brett Wat ( 12688 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @06:18AM (#1102261) Homepage Journal
    There's a huge number of sites out there in Spanish, German, French, and Japanese that I frequent at least occasionally...

    <PEDANTIC>
    Frequent occasionally? If you do it occasionally, then you occasion them, not frequent them. Drat this English thing, hmm? No doubt it would have been clearer if you'd said it in Lojban. But then, of course, approximately zero percent of the Slashdot audience would have understood it (myself included).
    </PEDANTIC>

  • by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 29, 2000 @06:19AM (#1102262)
    For example, I don't know japanese, but a friend who stayed there was telling me that most of the youth slang is English-based.

    Ah, but English words, bashed to fit within the confines of the standard Japanese syllabary (which lacks certain English phoenemes, hence the age old bad joke "flied lice" (fried rice)), bear little resemblence to the original English borrowing. Many borrowings get shortened so as to be completely unintelliblble to the English speaker. Some aren't too different, but others... Examples:

    (minor) News => NYUUSU
    (minor) Taxi => TAKUSHII
    (condensed) Word processor => WAADO PUROUSESSAA => WAPURO
    (condensed) Producer (like from a movie) => PURO
    (mutated, no 'di' sound) Radio => RAJIO
    (condensed) Sexual Harassment => SEKI HARA
    Even place names: Los Angeles => ROSANJERESU => ROSU
    (just plain bizarre) England => IGIRISU

    My favorite? The Japanese word for perverted is Hentai. While normally written with two kanji characters, it is romanized to the English writer as 'hentai'. This romanization was then reborrowed back into Japanese as 'ecchi' (the Japanese pronounchaition of the first letter, 'h'). Ecchi still means 'perverted' but carries a lessened degree of intensity over hentai.

  • Actually I think you might be quite wrong there.. Just from the top of my head and not having verified it again, my memory sais that the man who developed looked for a grammar which was very uncommon. Only a couple of tribes seem to have a similar grammar to Klingon. Also the words that Klingon uses seem to be very difficult. I am sure the Klingon Language Institute has something on this.
  • by bjk4 ( 885 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @06:21AM (#1102265) Homepage
    <humor>
    I mean it will work fine until we try to open up trade relations with another country and end up insulting their women and complementing their sexy sheep by accident.
    Personally, I think we should work on improving our native language skills to the point that we can compliment our own women while complementing their wardrobe with sexy sheep products.

    <\humor>

  • by AmicoToni ( 123984 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @06:21AM (#1102266)
    > Now, look at Esperanto: Nicely designed, but does it cover
    > the whole problem space of human to human communications?
    > Now, look at English: need a word or phrase for a construct?
    > Make it up via concatination, acronym, or onomonopia.

    I'm afraid you are missing the point: Esperanto is not a static language designed by some mindless expert. Only its *grammatical structure* has been designed to be regular and easily understandable.
    The language evolves every day pretty much in the same way as any other language: new words are created, others are forgotten and so on. Otherwise, how would you explain that a 100-year old language (as Esperanto is) has an internet-word for "@" ("heliko"), for instance? :-)

    On the contrary, while many languages have "holes" in their grammatical structure, Esperanto encourages speakers to be creative in inventing their own words, and makes trivial learning the meaning of unheard ones. An example:

    - in English there are cases in which you cannot obtain a noun or a verb from an adverb. You cannot just because the word just "isn't there". Unfortunately I don't have an example ready, but I'm sure you can find many yourself.

    - In Esperanto I once heard someone using the word "purigistino". Although I had never heard the word before, I immediately understood the meaning: The woman whose job is that of making things clean. :-) That happens because Esperanto is an agglutinative language: -ino is a woman, puri- is clean, -igi is to make something -- and so on.

    The current dominance of English (likely to continue) is due neither to its intrinsic elegance nor to the fact that it's easy to learn for beginners (although later they'll discover a nightmare of exceptions), but merely to the economic power of the English speaking world (read: USA).

    I can speak English, and I frankly like the language. However, as a non-native speaker, I can well notice the weird aspects of the language. Believe me: there aren't few.

    Learning Esperanto is a joy for the mind. Easy and compact, completely orthogonal, creative and endless. Pretty much like programming! :-) Try.
  • Artificial languages, like Esperanto, Lojban, and Klingon, are never going to catch on. Most people just won't bother to learn a language when there isn't an established user base somewhere. If the masses somewhere won't adopt it, then there's little point. Why waste time learning a language that is spoken by a handful of weirdos (not a bad thing, of course) on the planet, when you could learn a language actually spoken by actual nations that you will use?

    Or, as the one-eyed evil aliens on the Simpsons say,

    "We can speak all of your Earth languages! Well, except Esperanto, we could tell that one wasn't going anywhere..." :-)

    (Semi-related fact: William Shatner starred in the only motion picture spoken in Esperanto, "Incubus.")
  • by David A. Madore ( 30444 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @06:48AM (#1102290) Homepage

    I don't mean this as a troll: I rather like the language, it has this rather quaint quality to it (if you've never seen examples, try fortune -m ESPERANTO, and also fortune -o -m RFCRENAGB | rot13 if you have the off fortunes installed). And it has enjoyed a remarkable popularity for a constructed language: when you consider that many natural languages (and not just languages you've never heard of) have fewer speakers than Esperanto, you should be impressed.

    In a way, Esperanto is a historically first example of an "open content" view of things: before Esperanto there was Volapük, and Volapük was on its way to be a big success, only the inventor of the language (whose name I can't remember and won't be bothered to look up) wanted to keep a tight control over it. On the other hand, Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto, had the smart idea of immediately giving up control over the language, and letting the speakers themselves make the usage decisions they wanted. Also, he made the right choice in deciding not to associate too tightly his constructed language and his mumbo-jumbo philosophy (of the kind that was en vogue in those days). Because he made those smart moves, Esperanto still exists, relatively, whereas Volapük is sleeping in Tumbolia (the land of used light-bulbs and forgotten languages).

    Despite this positive aspect, Esperanto came too late to be a success. English was already on its way to becoming the universal language (as a famous French author wrote (in French) "you don't want Esperanto? too bad for you: you will get English instead"). Note that the battle was perhaps tighter than you might think: evidently English has always had far more speakers than Esperanto, but China was all in favor of Esperanto at some point, and with its considerable population, it could have made a difference. (I don't think, however, that Chinese will become a world language at any point.)

    Logic is perhaps a criterion for geeks, but it isn't one for success. Regularity is, certainly. But logic isn't. Esperanto isn't so very logical (at least not in the eyes of a mathematician with a special interest in logic, plus who's a computer geek, like me). Lojban (and the rival version of the same, what's it called again?) is a failure at that (i.e. it has the disadvantages of a logical language without being truly logical, only logical in its syntax). It is, I think, possible to build a completely logical language, but it will never be spoken, simply because we do not think logically, and the ideas we want to express are not logical: even if everything can be expressed in the language, it will be far too tedious. On the other hand, logical languages might be of interest to artificial intelligence researchers, but then it is an abstract language that is to be invented, not a concrete realization (who cares whether "man" is called "fubabusti", why not call it "man"? language is much more than a set of meme-to-sound translations).

    A more interesting class of constructed languages is represented by Interlingua [interlingua.com], a mixture of the Latin languages which has the property that someone speaking a Latin language does not have to learn Interlingua in order to be able to understand it (though he must learn it to speak it, of course). I can assure you: it's true.

    English is the fourth lingua franca of the Earth (that is, of the "interesting" parts of the Earth :-). The first was Greek, which was the real language spoken in the Roman Empire (everyone spoke Greek, only Romans spoke Latin). Then came Latin, in the middle-ages, being the official language of the Roman Catholic Church. Then French in the Enlightenment (Voltaire, then at the court of Frederik the Great in Prussia, pointed out that german was only used to speak to horses in Prussia in those days). So English is the fourth. There are similarities between all these linguæ francæ. The Greek spoken in the mediterranean basin during the Roman Empire, the mediaeval Latin and the "internetican" English are spoken and written by people whose it is not the native tongue, and who consequently modify it (to use a neutral term) in various ways. English has, therefore, much more changed since the XIXth century than French or Italian, for example, in much the same way that the "Koine" Greek of the New Testament or the Latin of the Vulgate would have horrified Euripides and Cicero; under, notably the influence of people like myself who have to speak English to make themselves understood, but whom list fain speak vilely than beware lest some vile words mar the purity of their discourse (ahem).

    I do not think there will be a lingua franca beyond English. Simply because we have reached the global stage, there is no exterior influence that would cause is to switch to another language. But, of course, English has yet to evolve considerably under, this time, a whole planet of influences and locutors.

    (As a friend of mine likes to say, if the French had not had the stupid idea of winning the hundred-years war instead of losing it as they seemed prepared to do, everyone would be speaking French nowadays.)

    Just my EUR 0.02.

  • I'll be the first to deride American's "we're the only ones who matter" mindset, but I work for a datacenter with colocos all over the world, and bandwith flow follows a predictable curve that kicks in when Americans wake up and dies when they go to bed.

    Yeah, we're egotistical pricks but we do make up most of the internet.

    My .02
    Quux26
  • I only speak English. I tried to learn Spanish in High School, but was just not good at it. The only thing I can say in spanish is Mi casa es su gatto!

    But, seriously, I think English will continue to be the dominant language for me. It is not that I am being a language-phobe. I would love to be able to read some other sites by not having to use the fish. I think the web will have English as its dominant language too.

    English is the one language where new words are thrown in on a daily basis. New words are invented to describe an invention and we don't really think twice about it. It is the dominant language in science for that reason. It is very accepting.

    Esperanto has already been tried - for years. When it was invented it was said that most ham radio operators would be using it by now because anyone anywhere could talk to one another. Well, that never happened. In fact, English is the usual language.

  • You've brought up a topic I'm very involved in, since I'm Australian (by the way, that means I speak English) living in Germany. Some of what follows is definitely going to be flamed, so put on protective gear before you go in.

    Out of interest I've looked at esperanto [esperanto.org] but not tried to learn it - most people I bounced the idea off seem very unenthusiastic about it because they think it is either (1) too simple to express complex concepts and subtle nuances, or (2) not backed by an interesting "culture", and hence not as rewarding to learn. These arguments don't convince me much, especially after reading a few Esperanto sites, but I do think that (3) you gotta think carefully about learning a World Language that almost noone speaks (2 million or so). Put in all the hard work for how much benefit?

    A historical point which may be of interest (and is almost certainly flamebait ;-)) is that Esperanto was suggested to the League of Nations or somesuch early in 20C as a candidate inter-language. The French didn't support it, probably because the language of diplomacy at the time was French. Things have changed since then. ASCII and standard computer technologies have made it harder for languages with accents, non-english characters, or (much worse!) pictograms like Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Unicode is much more than a nice-to-have for these people.

    My experience is that people tend to learn a second language which is spoken in the land(s) they aspire to become or go to. A lot of Germans learn English. A lot of Spanish learn English. Dutch and Scandinavian people seem to be born with at least 4 languages. A lot of Eastern Europeans seem to be learning German. (Not sure what the French do, but they sure have a lot of different cheeses.)

    Now, if DARPA decided to fund the development of a decentralised language which could survive and flourish under heavy cultural attack, and then this were to slowly snowball over the course of twenty years, spreading through universities and research institutes, to become The Interlingua... that would be cool.

  • Statistics I've seen [but can't cite now -- sorry] show that 85% of web pages are already in English[1] and that efforts to "internationalize" the web are proceeding slowly. I'd say we already have a de facto common internet language. What would you want to replace English with -- and more importantly, why would you want to replace English? People all over the world already speak it, it is the official language (in many ways) of commerce & industry, etc. I'm all for diversity, and really wish I weren't monolingual personally, but I can't help but wonder what you would gain in ditching something so well entrenched. It's ludicrous to me.

    No idea what portion of the web speaks Perl, however. It might rival English, but I'm not sure :)





  • I think that before Americans give up english, and other countries decide that instead of learning Englis to learn another language, voice recognition will progres to a point where language will not matter. In about 5 years voice recognition will probably be in a state where everyone who uses a computer will e able to use this too. It will allow us to create transulators from one language to another at a cost that most people will be able to afford too. It may even be standard. If you notice the trends even Microsoft is getting into voice recognition as well as Linux and Redhat. In the enxt versio of Palm Pilots and handheld devices like that they are all going wireless. Why? So that you can have the internet to the palm of your hand. They are integrating this in with phones, and voice recognition tech already exists. We WILL start using this, it is only a matter of time. Therefore I think that if new language emerges on the internet it will be more likely to be xml based not a new language.

    send flames > /dev/null

  • by Jerf ( 17166 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @07:27AM (#1102315) Journal
    Language is a construct of humans. As others in this thread have pointed out, English is spoken more slowly then Spanish... yet written Spanish to communicate the same concept as something in English may be 30% longer. The answer? Spanish is spoken that much faster to make up for having to say more words. Rate of communication will be held roughly constant, regardless of the language. If you feel English is slow, it's not English's fault, it's just that _you_ want to communicate more quickly. If you managed to do so, few would be able to understand you! (Eventually, my teachers learned to stop calling on my to read aloud in class; I just read too quickly, trying to keep up with my natural reading speed.) You really want humanity to speed up, which isn't about to happen.
  • It's scary to see how much English has invaded other languages. English words appear often in languages such as Spanish (particularly in Chicano dialects), German, and even in far unrelated languages like Chinese and especially Japanese.

    True. However, this is a far cry from the linguistic coup you suggest. It's really more akin to the American penchant for French toss-offs. But spouting "c'est la vie" hardly qualifies me as a francophone.

    Here in Taiwan, it's difficult to escape English. From street signs to advertisements to T-shirts and notebooks, to pocket GameBoys, everything seems to be covered with it. Pseudo-English is a trendy toy amongst teens -- nearly everyone knows "hello", "good-bye", "Happy Birthday", or "I [heart] you". Pop singers liberally sprinkle English around in their songs. But for all that, the level of English comprehension even amongst young people is abhorrent, and doesn't appear to be improving. The only English word I know of that's really been "adopted" into the language -- meaning near-universal understanding and usage -- is "bye-bye". And this is heavily-westernized Taiwan.

    ...with global communications, languages have ceased diverging and evolving each in their own directions. These processes ... will eventually result in a nearly uniform version of English.

    Don't get out much, do you? :-)

    In fact the number of English dialects and creoles worldwide is on the increase, to the point where native English speakers often have great difficulty communicating with each other. I suggest placing a Scotsman, a Nigerian, and an English-speaking Malay in the same room and giving them a copy of, say, the Taipei Times (an English-language Taiwanese publication). English-speaking Taiwanese who have no problems comprehending American English are often reduced to blank stares by Aussie accents.

    In fact, like Latin before it, English may be devolving into a family of related languages.

    MacLuan's global village has failed to erase our cultural and ethnic differences; neither do I see it conquering linguistic barriers.

    Without global comm and fast worldwide travel, American English would have diverged from British English to become as different as Spanish and Portugese are today.

    Some say it already has. :-)

    There's a world of difference between lexical borrowing and syntactic adaptation. Picking up the odd English word or phrase is one thing. Morphing from subject-object-verb to subject-verb-object -- the way Anglo-Saxon did under the influence of French to give birth to modern English -- is another ballgame entirely. So far, I don't see English exerting this sort of influence.

    Languages tend to be surprisingly resilient. I'm constantly amazed, for example, at the continued vibrancy of Taiwanese, a local with perhaps a few hundred thousand speakers in central and southern Taiwan. It has remained unscathed and nearly unchanged in the face of the overwhelming domination of Chinese, despite that fact that Taiwanese still has no writing system and nearly all its speakers are natively fluent in both Taiwanese and Mandarin. It would seem to be almost completely superfluous, and yet it remains vibrant and living.

    Lee Kai Wen

    Lee_Kai_Wen@hotmail.com

  • by David A. Madore ( 30444 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @07:38AM (#1102320) Homepage

    I don't buy that.

    First, I don't believe in the Sapir-Whorf (sp?) hypothesis. In any case, we are talking about the lingua franca here, the language used to communicate worldwide, and that is not the same as the language we use to think in, which is most likely to be our native tongue (not strictly true: I think in English about half the time, and it is not my native tongue).

    Second, I don't see any hints that human intelligence is evolving at all (I mean, on a small scale of a few thousand years); in fact, it would be very surprising to see a rapid evolution like that when natural selection is probably gone for humanity, and, even if it isn't, is much slower in action.

    Third, I do not think any constructed language has any chance of being adopted in these days. And I do not see any natural evolution of the language going in the direction you suggest, even if it is desirable. You make this point yourself.

    Fourth, since about a hundred years, we have a theory of formal logic. Note that to benefit from it you do not need to actually speak it (if that means anything, which I doubt), merely to learn it (and to think about it). I do not see the point of trying to.

    Fifth, redundancy is good for language. Logic is bad. The way we think is redundant and illogical. Language should follow this system also.

    Sixth, there isn't such a big difference in efficiency between all existing languages. Even if there is, English is pretty good in this respect.

  • I was talking with a linguest a couple of weeks ago.

    He told me that Esparanto was a joke. It was a language that was developed for people who did not want to learn another language. Ok, so you learn a new language because you don't want to learn a new language.

    He's working on teaching multiple languages simultaniously.

  • This language was created originally in the '60's and was known at the time as loglan (the logical language). This name even showed up in some period scifi books. :)

    I saw a presentation about it maybe ten years ago-it sounded quite interesting. For example, they tried to design the language to have phonetic "hooks" into the six most widespread world languages. For example, the word for blue was "blanu". This is easy to remember for an english speaker because of the initial "bl" and final "u" sound (hell, I've remembered it for ten years :) ) and is supposed to be easy for speakers of other languages as well. In Spanish, the word for blue is "azul" and the "u" is similarly positioned and pronounced as in "blanu". If I remember correctly, the system works by taking a core set of words (1300'ish) and then having a small set of modifiers to the words. These modifiers specify whether the word is being used as a noun, verb, or other part of speech.

    Here are some highlights from the lojban.org [slashdot.org] site:

    Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.

    Lojban grammar is based on the principles of logic.

    Lojban has an unambiguous grammar.

    Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words.

    Lojban is simple compared to natural languages; it is easy to learn.

    Lojban's 1300 root words can be easily combined to form a vocabulary of millions of words.

    Lojban is regular; the rules of the language are without exception.

    "Many", "enough", "too much", "a few", and "at least" are among concepts that are expressed as numbers in Lojban.

    Another interesting thing about lojban is that because it is phonetic and because of the patern of the phonemes in words, it should be very easy for voice recognition software to distinguish where word boundaries are and words from one another.

    Also, just because the language is logical, it does not preclude creative works-it has a very rich system for metaphors and analogies and there has even been poetry written in the language.

    All in all, I'd recommend looking into lojban if you have any interest in languages

    -e

  • Rather than trying to decide what language should be the norm, or developing a new one what if we did this....

    Why not have a web proxy that essentially performs the same action as the Babelfish [altavista.com]? You could configure your proxy to automatically translate everything into your native tongue.
  • An internet-based language will succeed about as well as the metric system in America... If you thought people seemed overly reluctant to learn a new form of measuring distances and such, try to get them to learn a whole new language.
  • by Stephen VanDahm ( 88206 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @08:01AM (#1102336)

    Because americans will use monopolistic and preditory practices to suck the life out of all compeeting languages?

    Of course! We perfected the art of unethical, preditory diplomacy way before Bill Gates was even born. Check it out:

    Microsoft unfairly bundles its web browser with it's operating system. Americans bundle English with their exports. American Movies? English. American music? English. American operating systems? English. (I'm thinking of UNIX and MS-DOS commands.) American-designed programmic languages? English (if, then, foreach, printf, etc.).

    Furthermore, compare Microsoft's relations with other corporations with the history of American diplomacy. Especially the period around the Mexican war and the period around the Spanish American War. During those times we (1) aggressively bought up new territory rather than developing what we already had, (2) picked fights with smaller, weaker countries to get what we wanted from them, (3) didn't give a rat's ass about anyone who wasn't American (4) never gave a damn about the poor and the powerless, even if they were American.

    Microsoft, of of course, is famous for (1) aggressively buying up small companies that have innovated rather than innovating on their own (2) picking fights with smaller weaker companies to force them to do their will and (3) not giving a flying fuck about anyone who isn't one of its own employees or stockholders (4) mercilessly screwing the consumer at every opportunity, even though Microsoft employees and stockholders are themselves consumers.

    Microsoft is the subject of well-deserved global hatred and resentment, and apparently so are Americans.

    American embassies are sometimes attacked by loosely organized bands of anti-American terrorists. Similarly, Microsoft is being attacked by a loosely orgranized community of Linux developers.

    So, I'm streching things a little, but, hey, it works!

    Take care,

    Steve


    ========
    Stephen C. VanDahm
  • It sounds like this universal language could be lojban. It would take a while for people to come up with all the words necessary to represent any idea in any major language using lojban's word-inventing rules, but it'd be possible. lojban is completely unambiguous and is made of a few hundred well-defined rules, so that it can be parsed by a computer.

    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • "I don't know what banks will be programming in in twenty years, but they'll call it COBOL."

    English has already won. Few, if any, languages have more phonemes, so very few languages can adopt words from as broad a base. English has no concept of linguistic purity; any pretensions to such were destroyed by the croissandwich.

    I'm not sure if it's linguistic qualities, or the fact that the first country to get widespread net access was, roughly, an English-speaking one. Either way, it's already won.

    The good news is, you're welcome to import new grammatical constructs, words, or whatever else from your favorite languages.

    I don't think anything like Esperanto can ever have a chance; simply put, I don't think the fluid nature of natural languages is a misfeature, I think it's a feature, and unnatural languages never have that quality.
  • Now it's English. In 100 years it might be Spanish or Mandarin.

    Or even more likely, a combination of the three. The more people interact, the more their tongues merge.

  • Actually, that's one of the great reasons English has done so well as an international language. It is a living language that is constantly growing, changing, and is not afraid to adopt foreign words if it likes them. Think of it as the capitalist language. Much like America, which is a melting pot of other cultures, constantly adopting new ways of doing things from newcomers of all stripes, so it is with the English language.

    Other language seem much more bound up with a national culture. The best example here being French, where the notorious Academy attempts to impose its vision of language purity. Stagnation is more like it.

    French, Spanish, and Portugues are widely spoken international languages, though I'd say French is the most important of those. Various Chiense dialetcs have lots of native speakers, but there is so much history of mutual animosity among the principal Asian cultures that it's very unlikely they'd agree to speak each other's language. Thus English does well there as a neutral tongue.

    So I expect English dominance of world commerce and the Internet for quite some time, with the best of other languages imported in. No IP in languages so they work like the GPL and English can adopt other people's code whenever it wants.
  • I think that in the not so distant future, good computer translation from and to any language will make the language you happen to speak largely irrelevant. Not next year, likely not this decade, but still soon, you will be able to look at anything on the net and not know what language it was origrinally written in unless you click on view->untranslated.

    The same will happen for spoken lanuage. An actual computerized babelfish you buy from a vending machine and drop in your ear is something I expect to see in my lifetime.
  • It's surprising lojban doesn't catch on more among geeks.

    You can obfuscate the language. It has shorter ways of describing mathematical equations than any other language. You can pronounce hexadecimal numbers. (0xf00f is "vainonovai"). It has words for "foo", "bar", and "baz" ("da", "de", "di"), it has words for "iff" and "xor" ("go" and "gonai"), and even a "lambda" word if you really like messing with people's minds ("ce'u").

    Even if lojban never ends up being widely used for ordinary speech, I can see it becoming used for technical purposes.

    --
    No more e-mail address game - see my user info. Time for revenge.
  • Wow, and I thought I would find a bunch of stupid comments under this article. But this guy hit the nail on the head. Language is evolutionary.

    More specifically, evidence suggests that language co-evolved with the human brain; that the brain is specifically engineered to learn, use, and adapt language. It's a behavioral adaptation. (evidence: No human culture has ever existed without language. Pidgens - where speakers of different languages develop broken "hybrids" between their languages to communicate - become creoles - languages with full nuance of meaning - when children grow up in the environment of a pidgen.)

    That means that language has no "right" or "wrong." Whatever is in use is right. And what's more, languages which were created, like Esperanto, are bound to fail, because they attempt to reverse-engineer a part of the human brain (and evolution is one top-notch engineer).

    Basically, I think the internet will have a great impact on both written ("31337") and spoken ("fyi") language in EVERY language, but I highly doubt that languages will begin to evolve into one. A new language with multiple bases can really only be formed when children grow up speaking only that language, and obviously in this case they will be raised into a native language first.

    For more info on language and the brain, I recommend MIT's Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct or Words and Rules.

  • However, I don't think people realize how little of "English" is really still around. English is a mongrel language, combinations of French, Norse, Latin, Spanish. It would be hard to find a language in the world that didn't have some influence on English in some way (where do you think words like "shampoo" came from? :)

    There was a wonderful commentarty by Joe Slesinger on CBC regarding the recent flap in France about air traffic controllers using English over radio waves, causing a big flap (mostly in Quebec, where if it isn't French, it's possibly illegal). He peppered his commentary with at least 20-30 Frech words, and then pointed out that every one of them was in the English dictionary.

    So in short, English will prevail, but "English" circa 2100 won't probably sound a think like the archaic "English 2000" we speak today.

    (but will there be a W3C document defining language? :)

  • Any universal language has to have the flexibility of English. Most romantic languages are too hard core about syntax and purity. English is the bastard of bastards and allows you to put nouns and verbs from many other languages into it (hence the ability to use foreign maxims in the middle of speech and still be grammarically correct). I'm biased because I've been speaking English my whole life but I've come to understand its versatility.
  • by Savage Henry Matisse ( 94615 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @09:38AM (#1102384) Homepage
    What you're talking about are called pidgin dialects [ucsd.edu]. What one should keep in mind, though, is that even the most evolved pidgin languaged (like, for example, Yiddish [britannica.com] ) never quite make it to the level of being a really broad language-- they'll be good for plenty of uses (for example, Yiddish is very well suited for trade and discussing inter-relationship affairs) but very poor for others (Yiddish is really low on abstractions. There's a lot of literature, poetry and drama written in Yiddish, but never any scientific research or hard philosophy written in it-- Yiddish is way to dependant on metaphors.)

    At any rate, I don't think that there's any reason to believe that instant-Inernet-communication will cause a language shift any different than that of folks of varying cultural backgrounds living in the same town. Despite the profound cultural mixing in New York (esp. in comparrision to, say, North Platte, Nebraska), you'll note that New Yorker English and North Platte English (save for some few vocab differences) are basically the same-- certainly not diffrent dialects, let alone different langauges.

  • I've been told that German used to a requirement for chemistry students, since most of the literature was in German. Similarly, Latin was required for students in the medical and pharmacy schools.

    Someone once showed me a ~1900 yearbook from the University of Wisconsin, a land grant school in the United States. It looked like every student was expected to learn Greek and Latin, with a heavy dose of classic literature. Their idea of a proper education was very different from the modern one.

    German and Norwegian used to be common languages in Wisconsin. Church services were often given in German instead of English. The use of these languages has almost vanished, along with the immigrants who used them as their primary language.

  • I think we will eventually evolve down to a common language (Or telepathy or something) but I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. People won't change unless it's more convienent, and it appears that a lot of people in the culturally diverse Europe simply find it more convienent to know five or six languages. I've found you can generally get by there, even if the person you're talking to doesn't know any English.
  • by Lucretius ( 110272 ) on Saturday April 29, 2000 @10:12AM (#1102394)
    > The first was Greek which was the real language > spoken by the Roman Empire.

    First of all, Greek was not the de facto spoken language of the Roman empire. It all depended on who you were and where you lived. The language of buisiness in the Eastern half of the empire was indeed in Greek (as the Greeks had been there long before and their influence still existed at that point). However, the Western half of the empire spoke almost exclusively Latin as there was no Lingua Franca over there, and Latin filled in quite nicely.

    Greek's place in the Roman empire was very interesting, as it was the language of the educated (aka the Lingua Franca). Anybody who was anybody in repubublican politics studied Greek and the great orators. However, if you gave a speech in the Senate, you most likely used Latin (little conversations aside). It is also interesting to note that when Julius Caesar was assassinated, his last words to Brutus were ('kai su teknon' = 'and you child?') as reported by Suetonius, rather than the 'et tu Brute' reported by Shakespeare.

    By the time you get to imperial times, you get more use of Latin, especially as anti-Greek sentiments rose. I'm not sure, but once you get beyond the first couple of emperors I doubt much Greek was spoken at all (especially when you get emperors coming from Spain and the like).

    Basically, what happened here can be viewed as a switch between the Lingua Franca's of the time. Greek was the Lingua Franca during the years of the Roman Republic, but the fall of the Republic can be almost viewed as the rising of Latin to the heights that Greek had once attained. Latin then went on to be very popular among the educated for a very long time (helped out a tad by the Catholic Church).
  • English could use a good word for
    "free" as in free speech.
    In norwegian we have the word "fri",
    pronounced a bit like "free", and it
    isn't confused with "gratis".

    Since you have the word "gratis" already,
    it may seem like it has been a distinction
    in the past, but it has been wiped away using
    the word "free" in a way too wide for it's
    original meaning.
  • English is a good language. It has over one million words - far more than any other language. It changes rapidly, and happily assimilates words from other languages. It doesn't have an official version, so it can adapt to a changing world. It has more speakers than any language except possibly Chinese, and Chinese has mutually incomprehensible dialects (actually, written Chinese does not have these dialects). It has speakers in every part of the world, so it can spread quickly. It has good provisions for forming new words - "houseboat" is a good example of this.

    The advantage of having lots of words is that it is possible to be arbitrarily accurate, and also very vague. "Set" has 450 meanings (according to the OED). "Baud" only has one meaning, AFAIK. The only word we're missing is "libre", meaning "Free as in freedom." I'm attempting to subvert free into libre, and to import gratis as "free of cost." If this fails, I'll use libre.

    English is also (apparently) hard to learn. But then, so is Perl, but we still use it!
    -Dave Turner.
  • For those of you who have read Snow Crash :-)

    If anyone shows you a raw black & white bitmap that looks like static, LOOK AWAY, or we WILL be speaking Falabala.

    Finux, for industrial strength text processing!

    --
    grappler
  • >That is how languages go. They resist control.

    And they should! Any English-speakers out there who have taken a Latin or Greek course know what profound insights about Western culture and history are accessible through language.

    I think it would be a tragedy if the whole world were to end up speaking one language.

    LL
  • English is the dominant language for you simply because you don't speak any other language.

    I have travelled long enough to learn seven languages, and as the old proverb says: the more languages you speak the more human you are (the last may be truth for human lanugages, however I noticed that with the increasing number of programming languages that I learned over the past twelve years, the less human I appear even to myself.)
  • The French wish like hell that English would go away and French would be the, er... Lingua Franca.

    But there's really no chance of that happening. Because of Britain's recent Imperialism English is now the language of diplomacy and trade in half the third world. Also since it was the nearest thing to a de facto international language in the century that saw the widespread development of telecommunications, it's even spoken widely in the developed world.

    So that's pretty much that: English is already widely used as an international language. By now it would require an act of God to replace it with something else.

    That's irony I suppose. Anybody see a parallel between the internet and the old Bible story of the Tower of Babel?

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • that I had to encounter in my life was the fact that a completely forgotten languages such as Hebrew was revived, reformed and incorporated in the heads of at least ten million people around the globe. Just think about it, the language was forgotten for something like two thousand years and then some guy from Russia shows up, calls himself Ben Johuda (forgive my phonetics) and writes out a language, teaches this language to his family and in about 120? years ten million people speak it. How is that possible?
    This of-course has nothing to do with the common world language of the future, however I don't see how anyone could be forced out of their own language.
  • English could work. Problem is it will probably be the defacto internet language, just out of shear momentum, whether it is cleaned up or not. Much can be learned from other languages like Esperanto (fix the spelling) and even Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian (genderless pronouns)

  • China was all in favor of Esperanto at some point

    Are you sure about that? I was told a long time ago that lack of interest from the Chinese was the primary reason for Esperanto's failure to gain acceptance. The Chinese weren't interested in Esperanto because it contained no contribution from Chinese languages. It is basically Indo-European in structure; no surprise there really since it was invented and developed predominantly by native speakers of European languages. It's doubtful that you could translate much serious Chinese writing into any European language without losing a great deal of the meaning.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction

  • I've heard it said that up until at least the early Roman Empire, the city folk spoke Latin, but the peasants spoke Etruscan.

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • The idea of limiting the scope of human expression in the name of easier commerce is one of the most frightening aspects of the free-market agenda.

    Language isn't merely a means of communicating ideas, it helps define the range of what you can and can't consider. Language isn't thought, but it crystallises thought (and that one's not mine, I paraphrase Samuel R. Delany). If thought is the probabilistic wave function, language is what lets it collapse into a finite meaning and nuance and emotion that you can express to another human (that one's mine). But when you collapse a wave function into a particular state, you irretrievably lose an infinite number of other possible states. Killing off the hundreds of non-English languages on this planet will cut us off from things that we simply can't imagine (precisely because we'll never again have the words to express them).

    I used to be bilingual in French and English, though in recent years I've lost the sexier of those two languages for the more technical (how dumb am I). At one time I could think in two languages, and I was often struck by the fact that I had different thoughts available to me depending on which one I was in, and even more resulting from the play between the two. If you've never taken the time to learn another language (and by that I mean the only way that really works, by moving somewhere where people will talk to you in it exclusively until you think it when you wake up in the morning), you can't imagine how much it can enrich your experience and insight, and I can't recommend it highly enough ( for which I blame the limitations of language ;).

    A weak example of the sort of thing I'm blathering about is the different perspective that some native North and especially South American people have about the nature and passage of time. Hopi people are (somewhat but not entirely apocryphally) credited with an picture of time as a sort of frozen landscape, for instance. It is possible to get that sort of insight from a European speaker's perspective (peyote helps, just ask Carlos Castaneda), but it's a lot harder. If you could learn Hopi from a native speaker, it might make a lot more sense. Maybe you'd go on to build an FTL drive, who knows? One might argue that it's only a common *additional* language that's under discussion, but history has shown that pressing for one dominant language will slowly kill off the others (to seriously argue otherwise now seems naive, not to mention insulting to those cultures we've already killed off 'round here). The point is that that's about as smart as extinguishing all those possible cancer cures in the rain forest. You just never know what you're losing.

  • What he was talking about was human language. He raises some good points. Unfortunately, the scientific study of language goes largely ignored. People seem to have the attitude, "I speak a language, so I'm a language authority!" With a bit of objective observation, a linguistics student can quickly verify that people don't know much at all about even their own language use.

    If you're after linguistics jargon (and note that I Am Not A Linguist), you'll find that a pidgin is not strictly a dialect at all. A pidgin is not a language because it doesn't have native speakers. If it did, it'd be a creole. There's also a rule of thumb about the distinction between a language and a dialect: A language is a dialect with a standing army. So-called "dialects" of English are unintelligible to other English speakers. I'm told it's even worse between some dialects of German. Since you mention Yiddish, by the way, it's pretty intelligible to German speakers. Some "dialects of German" are more intelligible to Dutch speakers than most Germans, but since it's spoken in Germany...

  • While Chinese is #1 by number of speakers, I don't think that's a particularly good criterion for a world language. A world language should be spoken, or at least understood, in every part of the world. Mandarin is basically only spoken in China/Taiwan (not counting Chinatown :)... on the other hand, if you go to some random country, chances are pretty good that you won't have to look too hard to find someone who understands English. English is even the official language of quite a few countries...

    Not that I have anything against Chinese... I'm fluent in Mandarin :)

  • by toh ( 64283 )
    > computer languages are completely trival when weighed against computer languages

    Uh, replace the second "computer" with "natural" or "human". Oops. Maybe I should go back to expressing myself in C for a while.

  • One of the widely used methods of communications between North America Indian tribes was sign language. IIRC, the Kiowa believe it originally came from their ancestors and spread out to the other tribes. It's obviously not a direct map to what we do on the Internet today, though some icon things fill a similar function.

  • Hopefully the days of anyone ruling are over. (Fukuyama's The End Of History argues that this sort of thing is obsolete.)
    English's prominence is largely from British Empire conquests as well as US trade, and of course from the decline of French colonial and economic power, though French is still the language to use in much of Africa.
    The primary alternative will be machine translation, probably with English as an intermediate for most pairs of non-European languages.


    How else do languages spread widely, other than conquest and trade? Religion is one way, though that's unfortunately related to conquest.
    Until Vatican II, Latin was pretty universally findable - most people might not know more than the Latin they used in church, but you could at least find a local priest if you had to get communication done. Arabic is also widespread,
    not only in the Middle East and North Africa, but also in Islamic Southeast Asian island areas such as Indonesia, and becoming wider spread in the US.
    I've heard it argued that Hebrew fills some of the same function, though I'm not sure how true this is outside of Europe, North Africa, and North America.

  • The recent edition of Wired has a set of articles on machine translation. Certainly Babelfish is a helpful start, and there's a large economic incentive for at least basic translation capabilities. (In practice I tend to use it as a crutch for my bad German and worse French, but it'll get better and handle more languages.)


    An alternative to machine translation is access to real human translators. Language Line (started as an AT&T business) provides telephone access to translators for a large number of languages. The Internet will make it easier to access translators for a much wider set of languages, both for real-time translation and non-realtime. This is especially useful for finding native speakers of non-English languages to translate into those languages, which generally produces higher quality than non-native speakers who understand the source language well. Of course, for translating technical documentation on complex things, you need to find translators who understand the subject matter as well, and the ability of the Internet to access a large number of people makes this more convenient.

  • I think it would be a tragedy if the whole world were to end up speaking one language.
    This is offensive elitisum. You wish to keep people from being able to freely communicate just to feel superior. "...take Latin or Greek like me and you'll have profound insites like I have..."

    The sooner everyone can speak with the same tongue, the sooner we'll all find out how similar we are, the the less likely one ethnic group will want to oppress another ethnic group...

  • No, free is not an exact translation of libre, precisely because it is ambiguous. Libre is not. It never means free of cost. There are probably other cases where exact translations do not exist, but English is perfectly happy to bring in these words ("otaku", for example).

    What's wrong with englsih tenses? I guess it's a holy war, but I like having fewer forms for words. Having fewer morphological forms of word is not a bad thing in any way.

    I don't know Japanese, but I do know that English has good enough provisions for forming new words, especially if you use them like I do :). "Nodelet" (and other dimunatives), "houseboat" (and other compound words), "bletcherous" (and other suffixes turning words into nouns, adjectives and verbs), "feep" (onomotopoeia). If there's some other ways to do it, I don't miss them.

    You would probably call me an intellectual. I just used perl to do a statistical sampling of 200 words from the 38260 words (excluding proper nouns or any other words containing capital letters) in /usr/share/dict/words. Out of the 200 words that perl gave me, I knew all but 5. And that's not a very thorough list of words. It doesn't include a large part of my technical vocabulary, like shareware, admin, nybble or avatar. Actually, it also doesn't seem to include many foreign-derived food words, such as teriaki, linguini, or ravioli. There are probably other sets of words that it's missing as well.

    At any rate, My day to day vocabulary is certainly above 1000 words (I haven't counted), because I talk about food, computers, and whatever else crosses my mind.... Not that daily vocabulary is the point. The point is to be able to say exactly what you want, even if you want to be ambiguous. And that's why I like English.


    -Dave Turner.
  • I'm amused by the comments about Dr. Brown's Loglan, (now: Lojban). I knew Dr. Brown when I was with the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, where Loglan was developed. Used to go out to his place on a lake east of the town. He was a very entertaining person. I realized that it was a futile effort then (back in the late 1960s) as one of the most important functions of any language was to allow ambiguity, obfuscation, and other acts that we don't often think of as verbal things. Usually we think they are some limitation or defect of a language instead of a necessary part of the language. A language that attempts to eliminate that is not a language that people will use. That is the fundemental flaw of Loglan/Lojban. I think the Lojban name was created as Dr. Brown had a copyright on the Loglan language and a splinter group wanted to control the development of the language.
  • For being a linguist, your friend has surprisingly little idea what he's talking about.

    Esperanto was developed as a means of intercultural communication, not as a "language for people who didn't want to learn another language." Toward that end it was designed to be easy to learn and regular in its rules.

    The only way I can parse his argument so it makes any sense at all would be something along the lines of "I learned Esperanto because I didn't want to learn English." When you phrase it that way, suddenly it doesn't sound so ridiculous for two reasons:

    1. English could be extremely hard to learn, especially when you're trying to figure out verb forms and spelling. (That's not just a failing of English, of course.)

    2. Flash back to the 1940s and the independence movement in India. When the various groups fighting for independence from the British got together, because they had no indigenous common language to fall back on they were forced to communicate in English -- the language of the oppressors they were trying to drive from their country!

    This is a case of a phenomenon known as "cultural imperialism." It's the attitude that "everybody should learn English because if it was good enough for the people who wrote the Bible, it's good enough for you." It's the attitude that you can't be properly educated if you can't speak French (especially if you're a Francophone to being with).

    Esperanto was developed in part to break down the cultural imperalism Zamenhof experienced in his native Warsaw, where anyone who wanted to be anybody or who wanted to advance in the government was expected to speak Russian instead of Polish (and God forbid you should speak Yiddish).

    Granted Esperanto hasn't entirely succeeded in being a univeral medium of communication. Geez, it hasn't even come close. But it's by no means the worthless toy its detractors seem to make it out to be.
    --
    Iun vi kunfidas, kun ni tiu sidas.
    --
  • He considers it a joke that people want to learn one language to communicate with almost everyone, instead of 10 or 12?

    It's not Microsoft. They can't force everyone to learn Esperanto.

    I can't imagine learning 3 languages at a time. I have a nephew, he speaks Farsi, Spanish, and English. He was raised in a three language environment.

    I have a hard enough time with Spanish conjugations.

  • Oh yes. For a couple of years in the seventies I subscribed to a magazine in Esperanto called El Popola Cxinio (From People's China). They tried hard to give the impression that Esperanto was a Big Thing in China. Probably whatever success it had there was due to its supposed utility in spreading the Maoist revolution. I haven't kept up with la movado for quite a few years so I don't know if the Chinese are still as big on it as they were 25 years ago.

    As for serious writing, I don't remember at the moment but I think Mao's Little Red Book was translated into Esperanto, and somewhere in my collection I still have a copy of a couple of children's books in Esperanto from China. One, The Secret Bulletin (La Sekreta Informilo) was pretty much just dada about the Revolution, but the other was a charming little book called "What The Monkeys Did To Get The Moon Out Of The Water" (Klopodoj de la Simioj por Elakvigi la Lunon).
    --
    Iun vi kunfidas, kun ni tiu sidas.
    --
  • For some reason the altaic languages (at least the ones I study, which are mostly the Eastern branch) acquire and lose vocabulary very very quickly.

    Korean and Japanese, which are certainly related, have virtually no cognates aside from words that come from more recent borrowings from Chinese. Compare that with English and other low-Germanic languages (Dutch, Frisian) which have many cognates.

    Likewise, Classical Japanese of only 400 years ago is completely incomprehensible to any Japanese who has not been instructed in it. The verb endings, cases, and personal pronouns of (for example) the 'Tsurezuregusa' are not even remotely similar to modern Japanese.

    Again contrast that with English, or just about any other language. Shakespeare is difficult certainly, but it can still be parsed by most English speakers.

    Contrarywise, *phonologically* Japanese (and Korean, etc.) remain very pure, where pronunciations of English vary quite a bit from place to place.

    I have just accepted the fact that Japanese likes to completely replace its entire lexicon every 1000 years or so as a feature of the language.

    When someone tells me Japanese has acquired a new vowel, or an additional sentence-final consonant, then I'll be alarmed.
  • The resaons German was the language for cutting edge work in chemistry (and engineering) is that it was one of the few languages that easily allows new words to be added.

    Here were talking about English as the world language but British English isn't the world language (it just started it), American English has because it accpets words more easily. Before I get flamed for this, is it a "tyre" or "tire" in places like Egypt?

    Keep in mind that English isn't just one language but a collection of a bunch of languages from all over Europe. American English started out the same but is thowing in a buch of Mexican Spanish as a number of Asian and Middle east languages as well.

    I'm in Australia. I speak the language just not the accent :-)
  • What would make a good language?

    Mandarin Chinese has more speakers than any other language in the world. However, the distribution of speakers is somewhat narrow, and a keyboard with the full Mandarin character set would be truly nightmarish to learn and/or use (you could use an abbreviated set, but this limits what you can do to some degree, and that isn't a Good Thing). Similar problems result from Japanese and many other Asian languages. There's also the problem of space-efficiency. Mandarin is very space-efficient because there's one character per word and 16 bytes per character (the only two English words which can actually be stored more efficiently than any Chinese word are a and I). Japanese, which uses one character per syllable, is about as efficient as English; the 16-byte encoding of Japanese tends to negate the shorter word length. For example, "Slashdot" takes 8 bytes in English but 10 bytes in Japanese (Su-ra-shu-do-tu being the closest transliteration I can come up with). Note that Unicode will negate English's potential advantage here, since English will then also be a two-byte language (as well as all the others).

    English is extremely widely-spoken, despite the fact that it doesn't have as many speakers worldwide as, say, Mandarin. Its character set is also relatively small, making keyboards manageable. However, because of its heavy reliance on inflection and context to supply meaning, it's actually not that well-suited to the Net. Also, when spoken it's not exactly beautiful (the only three which sound worse, of course IMHO, are German, English with a Brooklyn accent, and anything else with a Brooklyn accent. ^_^ And as someone who has several people with Brooklyn accents in the family, I've had much time to ponder this). However, if there's one thing English has going for it, it's flexibility; it can incorporate words from almost any other language with little or no change in the way it sounds. This is paid for quite dearly (just look at our consistent spelling rules, or perhaps better to point you to the seeming lack thereof), but it is an advantage that shouldn't be overlooked.

    Hawaiian has a very simple character set (12 letters). However, it's not widely spoken and is known for long words, which makes the language harder to learn.

    Latin's character set is smaller than English. It also seems to have a good deal of precision, and is the root of many other lnguages (giving many speakers, st least in the West, at least some familiarity with it). However, learning it is no easy task.

    Esperanto... I don't know. Seems simple enough to learn, and its character set is fairly small (slightly bigger than English). The major barrier is getting people to learn it. I actually still need to do this one; I'm rather intrigued by it. Can anyone think of any dis-advantages to Esperanto, but counting number of users?

    Logban... no. While the idea behind it is intruguing, it operates on the basic fallacy that all human thought is logical (which it not only isn't, but shouldn't be; the human mind's greatest strength is that it doesn't always have to follow the constraints of logic). Because human thought isn't always logical, it can't be completely described by logic, which is a big part of the reason we're having so much trouble with true AI. Besides which, there seems to be no art to the language; literary constructs such as the double entendre are impossible by the language's very definition. This is a huge loss, and not one that I believe can be ignored or afforded.

    French, the old lingua franca before English took over. We could go back to that. Pretty small character set, beautiful sound... However, it should be noted that there are estimated to be more BASIC-programmers than French-speakers, and while it's not as hard to learn as English it's still no easy task to learn it. If we're going to pick a common language it needs to be something that can make the transition as smooth as possible.

    And since I brought it up, what if we were all to speak BASIC? I'll let you off so you can go laugh hysterically at that idea for a few minutes.

    You're back? OK. Well, then, the question is interesting. Currently, English seems to be more or less the lingua franca of the Net. It has problems, of course, as with any other language. What if a modified version were to be created, with these problems removed or at least minimized (particularly spelling troubles)? The concept would be somewhat like the language Stark from Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series. It's a thought, anyway.
  • Yes, sorry that's what I meant to say. So its true then?

    Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
    Thought exists only as an abstraction
  • A fifth lingua franca which you forgot to mention is Aramaic which was spoken throughout the middle east and large parts of the mediterranean for many centuries. It is preserved today in a few isolated communities in Syria and in many jewish scriptures.

    I agree that English is effectively the new lingua franca for the foreseeable future. Maybe it's time to revive Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English [marshallnet.com] proposal - a subset of English that is more simple to learn than regular English. (yes, that's right, more simple, not "simpler")


    ----
  • Maybe I'm blind, but I don't get ouebe (or is it ouèbe like the other poster suggested?). I've even got a few years of high school French under my belt.

    OH HEY! Just got it, I think. "Web?" Silly me. Kept thinking ooh-ebb-ey.

    For the rest of it, I think you're mostly right. I read (in MS Word which was nit-picking about my French spelling), that French people have created a word--Canadianismes--describing words of Canadian origin that aren't acceptable in "official" French. Most notably, these Canadianismes include technical terms and descriptions of animals and plants foreign to France. While unacceptable in formal French, there are no replacements offered, so you have to describe it in context.

    So you can use the word for the word you can't use, but not the word itself! Silly French people!
  • I looked at the interlingua page referenced above www.interlingua.com [interlingua.com]. I only speak English, yet I can understand the text. Damn! I can understand it better than Spanish (and I had a year of that in high school).

    Wow.

    Ryan
  • creating laws to keep the French language pure won't kill French; it'll just widen (even more) the gap between spoken and formal, written, "pure" French. if the French-speaking people actually followed these laws, they'd end up like the Arabs, with a completely different spoken and written language. but I doubt they will anyway; written French will continue to lag 50 years behind the spoken variety, but I don't think that the laws and regulations will ultimately manage to prevent its evolution.
  • Take Shakespeare away

    Why should I take away the greatest playwright? Surely his work is significant component of what I am talking about.

    If you want more, there is a large body of drama from the Restoration, and you might want to investigate the York plays. The problem with English drama is that Shakespeare is taught amost to the exclusivity of everything else when in fact there is a lot more worthy of consideration.

    Take Poetry. OK.

    Yeah, there's Keats and Browning and perhaps a few others,

    You mean like Chaucer, Blake, Yeats, Shelley, Dunne, Burns? Or the Gawain poet? The Morte Arthure? The list of great English poets is a lot longer than you give credit for.

    Greek..while there are great works of art

    That's the point, isn't it? Volume isn't the criterea by which art is judged, otherwise the bodice rippers would be a great body of literature. Greek literature is unparalleled in it's quality and influence.

    Greek cannot compare to the literaric volume of any living language.

    I assume you mean classical Greek. Greek is by no means a dead language, as those living in Greece will surely attest.

  • Various things like this have been tried. You might try looking at Lojban [lojban.org]. Even if you don't think anything will work as an international language but English, or that anything will work as an international language at all, learn Lojban. It's a fascinating language and can really make you think and help you get a grip on some of the trickier aspects of language in general.

    Lojban's grammar (not its semantics!) is unambiguous and computer-parseable. We (I'm also on the Lojban board, as well as being Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute [kli.org]; I get around) have a YACC-based parser that really will parse Lojban sentences, if they conform to the baselined grammar. Lojban's not strictly LALR(1), but is with a little pre-processing. Anyway, so its grammar is computer-understandable, and even the ambiguities in its semantics are at least well-understood. By which I mean that you (or a computer) can know where the ambiguities lie, and what's more you have ways of asking clearly for further clarification of them. Lojban even has a set of exclamations that just express emotion, so something like "Ouch!" translates without relying on someone else knowing how English speakers express pain.

    There are some less well-known (to me and probably also to others, since I do try to keep up on these things) attempts in this vein. There are languages that were based on cataloguing all the various concepts to be expressed in a sort of Dewey Decimal System on steroids, with the hope that you could compartmentalize thought into neat nesting categories, and join them up with some mathematical glue. This goes all the way back to Francis Lodowyck's "Common Writing", published in 1647. There was one called... Lincos I think? I can't find my copy. I think that was it. It's more recent, very big on numbers and sets and mathematical notation and such.

    In short, your idea isn't new... not necessarily bad, but not untried either.

  • by RayChuang ( 10181 ) on Sunday April 30, 2000 @07:31AM (#1102578)
    After reading way too many responses on this topic, I have to make some comments on this subject.

    English became dominant in two phases:

    1. The first phase was the spread of the British Empire from the 17th to 20th Centuries. By 1900, the British Empire included the majority of the African continent, India, and Australia/New Zealand. The British also maintained a strong presence in China also. The phrase "The Sun never sets on the British Empire" wasn't a boast--it was reality. Don't forget, it was the major British presence in North America that resulted in Canada and the USA speaking English as their primary languages.

    2. The rapid growth of the USA as a world military and economic power from 1898 on. Given that the USA since 1898 has become THE prominent country in terms of science and business, note that most of today's scientific research and business developments are done in ENGLISH (as noted by the most important scientific and business research papers of the last 85 years). It's not a small wonder why the Internet did much of its early growth as a ENGLISH-based system.

    The problem with some languages like Chinese and Japanese is that typing out characters on a computer is extremely cumbersome, given that Chinese has 5,000+ characters and Japanese normally has 1,980 Chinese-derived kanji characters in addition to the hiregana and katakana characters. I've seen Japanese-standard computer keyboards and frankly, typing in Japanese text takes much practice, to say the least.

    This is not a problem in Germanic and Romance languages since they use the 26-character Latin-derived alphabet (plus a few additional keys for accented vowels and special-case consanants) and Slavic languages, since that uses the Cyrillic alphabet (which has close to the same number of characters as the Latin alphabet).

    Because English is now the "lingua franca" of business and science in 2000, most of the world wants to speak English, if only as a second language. What is interesting about the French Academy is that in many cases they have to change French to reflect technological changes.

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