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A Common (Internet-Based) Language?
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?
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
Kevin Fox
A common internet language would be great. The thing that keeps a common language from existing on Earth is the fact that so much area seperates people. If everyone is on the internet, everyone will always be talking to people from other parts of the world, and the language will develop globally. Everyone will be included and therefore there won't be all the branches that developed from the first few languages. Now, getting people to learn it and use it consistently would be a problem, but if someone developed it, and publicized it enough, and maybe even had it taught in school, then it could become great.
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
Just look at /. where geeks and trolls roam using :-) and other stange stuff. So IMHO it exists today.
The bad news is that such language would be probably English (bad news for >95% of mankind who doesn't speak English as a first language). The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words. Seing how many French words and expression are being integrated in English is already impressive, n'est-ce pas ?
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.
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
Well, although the population of China is quite large, China is doing their best to not be part of the Internet so we can eliminate the Chinese languages from consideration.
It's already happened. English is the universal language on the Internet. Get to grip with it. Nobody can ever control this anyway.
Latin would be an excellent common language for an internet world. While it has not been used much for some time, many European languages are based on it. Were it to become a useful language to know, people would begin to learn it, and in doing so would increase their basic language skills greatly. I know many people who know Latin, and they all speak very good English.
Another advantage would be this: if certain parts of the internet were in Latin, i.e. certain newsgroups, websites, mailing lists etc, one would have to be reasonably intelligent and mature to have the Latin skills to read them. This would eliminate much of the crap that is on the net now, at least in Latin sectors.
----------
for email:
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for email:
perl -e "print pack 'H36', '6c636c656767406a6176616e65742e636f6d'"
Okay, you've stopped laughing now....
However, since a linguist developed the language for ST, I'll bet it's pretty straightforward to learn.
I mean, if you were to sit down and think up a new language, would you think up English? Me neither.
GRH
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) -GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Don't look now, but the Web is only the latest place that English has become the dominate language. It's already been the standard for communications for Airline pilots the world over, and the VAST majority of amateur radio communications takes place in English as well ( and has been like that for decades.)
;-)
There was a PBS special some years ago that presented all the places English was in use throughout the world. The show claimed that maybe 1/3 the people on earth speak some form of English already. ( Ignoring that 1 billion Chineese can't be ignored either
So - without being "nationalistic" or in any other way superior about it - English has already traveled along way to being the International standard language. I think the Web is just another aspect of this path.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
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.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
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)
"Theres alotta savages in this town.."
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.
Spelling reform is neded, but aul the proposals I've sene sufr frum trying tu fix everithing at wunce, in accordance with sumwun's idea w (="uv") a master plan. I'd say, du it incrementally, and tolerate old and nu in paralel, and see how it evolves.
I mene, it can't be THAT tuf tu figure out sum rules for reforming that monster knone as inglish spelling....
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).
www.eFax.com are spammers
http://www.jargon.org
"[Y]our wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick." -- Ian Anderson
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).
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
No.
If I speak english as my first language, I'll post in english, whether you say esperanto, lojban, french or swahili. This is how people work. People will always make their web-pages in the most convenient language. This is frequently english. It will never be esperanto. You're wasting our time with stupid questions like this.
Something that linguists agree is fast, easy, and not redundant (this a huge problem for most languages, especially English).
Will I retire or break 10K?
.. of course everyone will start speaking moneyiski sooner or later
/anton
It is just a question when and where to get a place for your IPO
English is already the language of buisness between US,Europe, China etc ... But I don't think that is good enough. The whole point of language of the world is that you can listen to Joe Shmoe in Swisserland who didn't ever bother learning English. You have to admit. In most of the countries, it is only the buisness eleet that speaks english.
Creating a new language is out of the question. Much easier to just learn english.
But lets not forget about translation services. As far as I know there is aleady technology in work to do real time translation between two parties on a phone line. And Altavista or something like that is bound to get better.
Maybe in the future we will all be tought the same language, but for the next 30 years it lickly to be translators : ) And as they get better you would not even know that the person is speaking a different language.
- my two roobles
An Internet Language?!
This is a computer network. We'll use whatever language works.
English dominates in many areas today, partly from economics, partly from its richness in ideas. Show me a monument to another language that can rival the OED and I'll consider it.
first_post
Live it. Linux.
first_post
Live it. Linux.
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.
Wordnik, a dictionary project which aims to collect
2)Every router pushes it.
These little packets are the true common language on the internet.
Everything else is just fluff.
___
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"
Ok... English may or may not be the next "offical" language of the world... but in terms of a internet language, I just have one request... lets make it easy to type with on the qwert keyboard layout. I, for one, really don't feel like learning a whole new layout for the keyboard that some study says is "easier and faster to use" I am happy with qwert so lets keep this status quo
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
I don't actually exist.
but it seems that Lojban beat me to it. There are many things I would do differently, though. I would base it heavily on Greek and Latin roots, and I would allow people to add words to a dictionary on the web. Others would vote on whether the entry should be a word, and if it gets enough of a majority in a specified time, it becomes a word. I also made a phoenetic alphabet based on what the mouth would look like while making each sound, but their version might be better since mine isn't exactly ASCII-compatible :). There may also be value in a completely written language of the internet, since it wouldn't have to have rules about where letters could be plaaced or even how many letters there should be, just grammar and meaning.
--
Seeing is believing; You wouldn't have seen it if you didn't believe it.
See the Espe-Ranto 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...
--
Xenu loves you!
It would be doubleplus good!
I am fully prepared for the coming of the Esperanto Age. I know exactly one phrase of Esperanto:
Vi estas malbelo kamela.
This one multipurpose phrase will ensure that I need not learn any more of the language.
PS: That may be wrong. It's been a couple years.
===
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
What, you mean babelfish.altavista.com isn't GOOD enough for you??
If you're translating something other than Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, or German, the current version of the Babel Fish page does nothing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
What about perl?
"Some people see things as they are, and ask why. I dream things that never were, and ask why not."
There is no such thing as a "level playing field" in regards to the Internet. This is an erroneous buzzword developed by Internet marketeers and ecommerce web goons.
The fact of the matter is things still work the same in the long run as they always have with "bidness". The organization/person/business with the most marketing and PR dollars can afford to blitz the market place with banners, billboards, commercials on traditional media channels, and mailouts (consider how many web sites you see advertised on TV and radio).
In the end, (five years from now), most web sites will be the product of some big institution or commercial concern. How we will laugh/cry thinking about the "good ol days".
Eric S. Raymond edits the Jargon File and keeps a mirror at his home page.
Will I retire or break 10K?
We don't even have a common HTML. Maybe the W3C can release a human language standard that we can all follow the way the browsers follow the HTML standards.
but i dont think my girlfriend would like me talking at her in something like C++
i'd get a plain old response in english involving some naughty words.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
Ich bin Englischer, und now je lise tous les langue (mauvaise, mais well enough to extract the tech) con ayuda de diccionario en linea. Das Internet changerons nosotros.
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.
However nice it may seem to have a simple elegant internet based language, it isn't going to happen.
There are many things conspiring against it, such as...
A) For the short term, English will be dominant. Think about it, most people who have enough money to get a computer speak english. It is taught in nearly every country in the world and has been for many decades. Thus, until computers get to the few dollers each necessary for mass world-wide acceptance (like the radio) english will dominate the internet.
B) Even if computers get to that broad market, most people won't bother to learn a new language, and thus Lobjan or Esparanto won't profiliate. (Except in Indonesia where the main language is an artificial one.)
C) Accurate, dynamic translaters will nullify the need for a common language. Already, stuff like bablefish does a decent job of translating languages using the english charecterset, and I don't think adding asian and other languages should be too hard in the future) , and stuff like WindowNT and BeOS have totally integrated internationalization support. I forsee browsers dynamically translating some form of unicode to a native language and character set, and displaying that to the user.
So in the end, each country will have a body of nativly written web pages, and global content will be accessed through translation services built into the OS.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The purponderance of web content currently available is in english, and the largest web businesses are english based. Granted there are alot of reasons for this (high american consumption rates, etc) but there is momemtum. In order for it to be replaced, it will require a significant impedius. Espiritu never really caught on and their is no current indication the english will be surplanted in the near future.
There will be a common language on the internet, and it will probably evolve from english. English is probably the most-used language on the internet, and it's the language the internet was made in, so it's the easiest to use when talking about technology.
For most of the internet to chnage to other languages like Esperanto and Lojban, there would have to be a good reason - either it's much easier to use (and can be used) or everyone else uses it (the reasons english is used).
The common language will be based on english, and as the internet grows, new words will be added and old words removed. The structure of sentences might change too - when we're typing an email, we use normal english, but when we're chatting or playing a game, we drop words and change the structure so we can send the fast as fast as possible and still get the idea.
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
The EU is actually working on such a solution, because there is to much paperwork in translating all documents into 15 languages.
:)
The idea is to make a new "middle" language, so when i type a document in danish the computer translates it to the middle language, and then when someone from France want's to read it, he just opens the document, and it is translated from the middle language to French.
The middle language is just for computers, and is not supposed to be read or understood by any human. It consists of words which gives a 100% clear diffenition of what they mean, and
this makes missunderstandings almost impossible, in fact they say that you even can use metafores and they will be understood.
It becomes even cool'er cause they are also developeing the system for voice recognition, an thus eliminating all use of translators... too bad for them
Was it the GoToWorld IE-engine browser?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Just about everything on this planet evolves at some speed, and language is no different. Language actually evolves at an extremely rapid pace, for example the words that were thought of as slang in the English language are now becoming mainstream terminology. I don't think that a language needs to be adopted world wide or that language standards need to be set. It seems to me that the fact that we can learn and communicate in multiple languages can do nothing but benefit us.
The variety in our new community is what makes this portion of time great, millions of people communicating in multiple languages is essential for our evolution as a species.
And besides with a standard language you begin to lose cultural diversity, and that is a lost that is immeasurable. My ancestors were Alaskan natives and because of the widespread adoption of the English language my native language is all but none existent. Not that I don't think that knowing English is essential to my life, but it would have been nice to be able to learn my native language.
In conclusion a "common" language would be useful but, eventually (maybe a couple generations down the line) that's what we would be: "common".
flatrabbit,
peripheral visionary
"Never wrestle with a pig, you both get dirty and the pig likes it."
that would be rather interesting to have another language (even one that is based from the computer world) introduced into the world... but that would mean that most would speak something that is spoken throughout the world. does that mean the american tourist rule of 'if you speak slowly enough, everyone understands english' would be outdated?
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
I start hearing the Eagles go though my head:
/know/ it's Desperado.
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
A Universal Networking Language for the Internet?
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
It seems that English is going through a transitional period to becoming a common internet language.
With all the net-junkies bringing in all sorts of net-created words like dot com, slashdot, and on and on (sorry I just got up), they are being integrated into the English language.
Even though this may be happening in other languages also, English will most likely become the standard language for the net because of the sheer number of people in the world who speak it.
Biggs
(BTW: I'm usually open to discussion about my posts)
Visit my site at www.samizdat.cx
Biggs
AIM:Biggs0016
The future language of the Internet will probably be a heavily acronym-based derivative of (American) English. The list of frequently used acronyms is already very long and the idea mixes well with the use of buzz-words and technical terms like mp3, html etc.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
...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.
I completly agree with your point of vue.
I admire the ability of english to create new concepts and new words, it makes it much more evolutionary. English speaking people don't have the same relationship with Englis as the one the French have (I am not speaking about Quebec, Switzerland, Belgium, and French speaking African countries wich are less "cool" about the language). I have the feeling that the French feel that their language is somhow "sacred", their approch is : hey don't that touch it, don't bring new words especially if they are englis it will bastardise our so beautiful language !! Many french people think also that it's the best language in the world (because their are often laguage impaired, and speak only their native language, so they don't know what an other language might be).
I tend to use english for my work, I prefer to use english version of software even when a french version is available, because it's much easier for me to search for a problem in the the Web or Dejanews; thanks to the ability of english to create new words. This is really important, new words and concepts gather people around new "emergent" ideas. When you "feel" (this is kind of emotion) that a new concept is emerging, you give a new "name" (this is somethin rational), adn english is really good at this. That's why this language is much more powerfull, because it accepts evolution in a much naturel way.
PS : My native language is arabic, and in many way it has the same problems as French, arabic sepeakin people "sacralise" their language they think it's the language of the Coran, so it must stay the way it's in the Coran, this mean don't evolve for 15 centuries.
In conclusion the language reflects what a community thinks and act about it's evolution, it's just the tool it uses.
2nd rule of using computers (the internet): What was/is might not be 1,5,10 years from now (the first is : is soon as you bought it, its obsolete)
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
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Anyone ever read this old sc-fi book? It's more to the point than where this discussion has gone.
Be Seeing You @
I mean look at it: the 'English' we are using on /. and elsewhere on the net is not the English you neccessarily use in everyday conversation. We have all the acronyms, emoticons, and, yes, words from other languages coming in... so this is a language still very similar to English, but I think it will eventually branch of more and more during the next decades/centuries, with the net (and it's laguage) becoming more and more international. I guess this is language evolution at an accelerated pace...
English as an international second language seems likely for the next few years to go to the top instead of a made-up language.
In particular, some form of "plain English" (as proposed by Al Gore among others) or restricted vocabulary/simplified grammar/spelling might be a good project.
In our common language we need richness, so we can distinguish, for example, "sensual" from "sensuous." But such richness is bad when we need to prescribe instead of describe--our laws must be understood by all. Note, for example, that international standards now almost always have a glossary with agreed-upon definitions (even the Microsoft anti-trust case has them).
Many have made a try for a Basic English. See for example the 850-word language by C. K. Ogden (1934) at http://www.marshallnet.com/~m anor/basiceng/beweb.html
It might be interesting to make a Babelfish computer translator to Basic English. Any takers?
:)
:P
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
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
Jouni Mannonen | Game Designer, Consultant
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.)
---
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
Why don't we just build a real-life C3PO? It would be much easier to build an army of ditzy droids with bad english accents than to teach over 6 billion people a new 'internet' language.
On top of that, robots are just damned cool. I hope to see the day where they are walking among us just like on the Jetsons or some crap.
indierock / punkrock band photos and more... http://www.digitaldefection.net
<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>
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
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.
English already is, and will continue to be, the primary language for the internet. English is an incredibly virulent and successful language, and many culture find themselves pushing to maintain their native languages.
:)
But languages that seek to maintain "purity" from other languages are doomed because they won't adapt. For example, the Vatican has to regularly try to fit modern concepts into the existing ancient vocabulary of Latin, sometimes to amusingly complicated results. And we know how popular Latin is today.
French, the language most recently considered the "international language," is the next language that will suffer this fate of resistance, which I find amusing since it came into existance as "impure" version of Latin.
English is incredibly successful largely because it very easily assimilates vocabulary from other languages. Most of the words in English were absorbed from French when the English and French were busy occupying each other. We've been more than happy to add words lifted from other languages as needed. German seems to be good at this too, but doesn't have the advantage of being spread around by the British Empire.
Grammatical purists, however, will be pulling their hair out, since the "common" English won't be the Queen's English but rather a vulgar version of American English. I don't think anyone reading this would disagree that a very large amount of content on the internet blatantly ignores proper rules for spelling and grammar. Blame the American public school system if you like, but I think this has more to do with not needing to go through the editorial process to publish. And when no attempt at all is made to keep language within some kind of guidelines, it changes very rapidly. (Think pre-Shakespearian English.) So it's possible that "English" one hundred years from now will be nearly unrecognizable.
There's also the recent explosions of acronyms which goes hand-in-hand with the need to name all of this new technology. It's likely that acronyms could grow to a point where they make up a huge portion of the vocabulary and speakers don't even remember for what the letters stood. In some cases, this is already happening. Think of the last hardware conversation you had, or of the way new lusers are coming to use computing terminology. (So I need to buy a RAM? Why would I want to get a [CD-]ROM burner?)
Disclaimer: IANAL (I am not a linguist
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.
Use Adsense for Charity
English I predict will always dominate programming languages but beyond that I predict that we will see the creation of some rather powerful translation engines (server side perhaps). That would allow everyone from English speakers to Tadjikistanian speakers to view the same page in their native language without there having to be a dominant language.
Does any one remember the bit about pictograms in the The Diamond Age? I think the language if the internet is going to be graphical in nature. At least from the user perspective, and all of us back end guys will end up speaking XML directly.
When someone yells "Stop" or goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over.
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.")
I think that for a successful transition to the new standard language, it will have to follow some sort of progression path from English, Mandarin & French the same way that java was designed to be familiar to C++ coders while simultaneously incorporating a host of new features.
IMO, English will rule because of the simple fact that no one is trying to dictate it's structure. Instead it evolves and grows by invention and adoption from other languages.
No person or commitee can forsee all the different uses a language will be put to, the same way a commitee can't efficiently control an economy. The Soviets tried it with the economy, look where they are now. The French are trying it with French and they are failing pretty miserably too. There are simply too many nooks and crannies that 10 people around a table can't possibly see.
Another reason for English dominance is that all programming languages are essentialy in English.
But really, what difference does it make as long as the dominant language can be typed in ASCII?
It's not just a matter of government contol of the sort that France exercises; it's cultural. English speakers (at least Americans) see the evolution of the language as good and necessary. I would even go so far as to say that Americans love new words: remember the "bobbit" craze a few years back? People were dying to use that word wherever they could!
As a side note, I remember an Indian friend of mine telling me that English is the common language in India, largely because it's viewed as neutral to the various ethic groups. (I'm not sure how the language of the colonist oppressors could be viewed as neutral, but it was!) Anyone else know of this happening in other culturally-charged areas?
(Of course, in places were people really hate America, e.g. Iran, it is unlikely that English will ever dominate.)
-- Diana Hsieh
-- Diana Hsieh
GeekPress: The Weirder Side of Tech News
#!/usr/bin/perl
/usr/local/another/night/of/whacking/it.alone;
# Girlfiend Cracking Scheme v.47
# This is where we try to get her into bed
#
# First we set up som ENV variables
$ME = horny_boyfriend;
$LOG =
$lie_to_score = "I love you"
open LOG;
print "God you're beautiful\n";
$response = $argv[1];
if($response =~ "tired"){
print "I know...I could go straight to bed.\n";
print LOG "try again when you get her home";
}
elsif($response =~ "thanks"){
die "awww - try again later luser!";
}
else($response =~ "back to my place"){
print LOG "Booh yah! we're scoring tonight!";
print "$lie_to_score\n";
exit;
}
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
Please stop spreading misinformation (lies?) about Unicode. Unicode has no licence fees. Unicode is being implemented for GNU/Linux as we speak. See here for links to further info.
The point is, as other regions continue to develop their economy and internet presence, they may not choose English as their common language of communication because they simply won't have to. They will choose a language that is best suited to their needs, that may be easier to learn and use, etc.
---- I'm going to lead you kicking and screaming, giggling and laughing into the future.
Why would a "new" language be neccessary? Commerce conducted on the internet and the communication of it could be performed the same way as the "old commerce" which a "new language" was not developed for. I don't want to sound like a flaimbait, but why was this posted?
"spare the lachrymosity when the fulminations have inveighed"
"spare the lachrymosity when the fulminations have inveighed"
-madd
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, 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.
We are the English Speakers of the World
You will be assimilated.
Your linguistic and cultural distinctiveness will be added to our own.
Resistence is futile.
Yes, it's been said, but only from an "assimilation" point of view. But English is a very rich language because it is a promiscuous language. Like the Borg, it borrows words from everything, especially German, French and Latin, because of its history.
The English were originally German immigrant/conquerors, with the Celts (Welsh, Irish, Scottish) as aboriginals. Then the Normans (French) conquered them, and ruled them. French was the language of the Aristocracy. Latin was the language of the Church.
English was the vulgar tongue, spoken by the ignorant masses. They weren't proud-- if a word was useful, they'd take it. Sometimes twice, like "loyal" and "legal".
In my opinion, the network effects means that English will increase its dominance over time. Since it is already the most common language for international communication and for the entertainment industry, it will be tricky indeed to dethrone. And it will have all the words you could possibly ask for-- from any language you can imagine.
But I don't deny it is possible for a language to become widely used due to deliberate efforts. Before the 20th century, Hebrew was a dead language. But now, because of deliberate human action (specifically that of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and many others), Hebrew is a living language again. It still has bit vocabulary to catch up with, despite the efforts of the Hebrew Academy. So in the meantime, they borrow words from other languages like, well, English.
Another major problem is lack of free tools. This should be rectified soon though.
If anyone wants to help us, please get in contact with me.
I think the universal internet language should be jive. It's been spoken for more than 3 decades, it's not that hard to learn either, for example: English: Today I'm going to buy a new pair of shoes. Jive: Today Ah'm goin' t' jack some tight new kicks. Bizaatch!
Languages are placeholderes for concepts.
HTML gives us the ability to mark-up plaintext into a hypertext document. Applications exist to create HTML docs without any knowlege of the language. We need a mark-up language that converts concepts into the language of your choice. Then applications can be created that let me write in my native tounge information that can be read by anyone, hopefully without any distortion.
I'm sure they meant well. So did the makers of Thalidomide.
Language will evolve and with any-to-any communication will merge into a fabric of langauges. Kinda like taxilinga out of Snow Crash.
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.
.02
Yeah, we're egotistical pricks but we do make up most of the internet.
My
Quux26
My
Quux26
www.crashspace.net
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.
Everyone will learn to use ANSI C! (After all, it's a complete, simple, portable ...)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I agree that English is becoming a universal language, but it will not happen "all the way".
Foreign people are only going to want to learn just enough to communicate relatively efficiently. They are not going to want to learn all the little details and rules of the English language (there are a lot of them).
In conclusion, I look for simple English to be the "standard international language", even though there will never be an official one.
"...we are moving toward a Web-centric stage and our dear PC will be one of
EverCode
I'm voting for 'battle-language' from Dune, which was the normal language, but wih the syllables shortened, allowing rapid communications during combat.
think about all he bandwidth this would help save.
Out of interest I've looked at esperanto 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.
No idea what portion of the web speaks Perl, however. It might rival English, but I'm not sure :)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
Isn't there already an internet-based language? Granted, it uses Roman characters and English expressions, but the now-becoming-archaic LOL, ROTFL, , etc., not to mention the internationally-recognized :-), B-(, ;-P, etc., are already an internet language. We could get more specific with HTML, Perl, etc., but wouldn't an Internet language that uses hard-to-understand symbols for emotions and English expressions serve us well in the 21st century?
-----
all i have to say
I've been toying around with the idea of a language. Its called earthian. It will be based around English, and many new words will be added to the language to fill in meanings that aren't in English, but in other languages. Just think about how much time, energy, and resources are wasted trying to get a correct translation when surfing the net, or trying to communicate with a foreigner. We are all from the same planet, we are the same species, now why don't we speak the same language? It would only make sense to speak the same language, maybe somebody more knowlegeble about worldwide languages could fill us in.
Elijah Chancey www.elijahsadventure.com nomadic IT consultant, bicycling across america "all that you touch / and all
Isn't Chinese the most spoken language in the world? I thought third of earth's population live in China so Chinese logically Chinese should be the world language. And just think how cool it would be! Nearly as cool as klingon!
y,IafcolwebeciA.
IANAL
IIRC
JlatetoM.c
h://s.o/c.p?s=00/04/28/1411231&c=134
Ihsa, awaatb.
No, the problem with losing information when you compress things is that it's sometimes hard to get it back when you uncompress it. I still haven't figured out "FWIW", for example. I just hear it in my mind as "Effweeou."
For this reason, the language can never be "entirely converted into Acronyms." A side note: if it did, it would still be English, just acronymized and unreadable.
-- LoonXTall
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Phantasy Star Online (or whatever it's called), which is coming out for the Dreamcast later this year, has a 'symbolic' language that players can use to speak to each other, even if they don't speak the same language in Real Life.
The languages we are using are typically in the spirit of "Open Source". Put it in this way, how many of you are speaking English with those "Thy" "Thou" word? And there are new vocabulary coming out everyday. Nobody control the one language, and they are ever changing, change according to the need of the society, and change from every individual. (Mostly TV characters nowadays).
So unless you can find a better open source mechanism to design an internationally accepted internet-based language, if we all use one single language, it will be the mixed of English with many different language, as if you've seen in the ICQ world.
A sig is redundant.
The most compelling reason to use english is that the internet is mostly english now, isn't it?. My first lnguage is spanish but not all spanish speakers are fortunate enough to know english, at least in such a level that would let them take advantage of most of the info out there. Having an english-only internet would mean denying the opportunity of sharing the wealth of the Internet to non-anglo people in the world. Now, you might argue that, being the world a "globalized" one, it is in their best interest to learn english anyways. True. But that means they would get behind in the game *while* they catch up with the language.
A while ago I was on #linux Dalnet and I helped quite a few people *in english*, when someone from Spain came in the channel and asked for help in spanish because he didn't know a word of english, I talked to him in our common language. Result? I got kicked out of the channel because it's "english only".... they didn't care I helped many other english speakers before. So much for tolerance!
English is not that bad actually: trivial grammar, many words. It has one huge deficiency though, which makes learning it unnecessarily difficult: there is no strong correlation between spelling and pronounciation. That needs to be fixed. The whole point behind a phonetic alphabet like ours is to tell the reader the correct pronounciation even if they have never seen the word before, based on a small set of simple rules.
I'm sure English will go in that direction, and we should accelerate it: through -> thru etc.
--
Is "virulent" the word you really want to use? Do you believe that English is extremely poisonous or venomous? Many French speaking Canadians may think so, but this doesn't seem to be what you mean to say. Perhaps you meant to say "virile" (characterized by energy and vigor).
:-)
Yes, I'm being annoying, but the irony of a mis-use of of English in support of English was just too much for me.
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.
Fight Spammers!
Why doesn't everybody just speak the language The Sims use? We could all walk around talking about soccer balls, sailboats, and rain clouds.
Laugh if you want, I'll just sit here with a thought cloud above my head containing a picture of the cute babe in my circuitry class.
Judge Pag, the Learned, Impartial, and Very Relaxed
I read most of the posts in this threat, and I was surprised to find out that nobody noticed a simple fact regarding the current dominance of the English language.
I'm my view, the reason for such control was because the English Language was the lowest common denominator and in most cases the only alternative!!!
Think about it, if you have a meeting with 5 people that speak 5 different languages, then the only way to communicate is to find a common communication standard and use it. Since English is a relative simple languages (I'm Portuguese) and has two great worldwide marketing agencies (technology and Hollywood) it gradually become the standard for business communication.
The big reason for this is due to the current cost of accurate translation. The current methods are too slow and expensive to be used in most communications.
But what if the translation of content become relatively cheap, accurate and fast. Then there would be no such thing of a standard language since everybody would be communicating in their own language.
I'm not talking about automatic translation, since we are still far away from achieving a reliable, cheap and fast solution, I'm talking about utilizing the power of the internet to create a worldwide translation network that would allow 'real-time' translation by humans!
We (at DDPLUS.CO.UK) are developing systems and solutions that will allow such system to be developed, our problem is that we are too small (based in London) to move very fast and the translation industry is not really interested in what we are talking about (so far).
I am (dinis@ddplus.co.uk) quite happy to continue this discussion with whoever fells strongly about this issue, or wishes to be involved in our project.
Dinis Cruz (dinis@ddplus.co.uk)
Managing Director
DDplus Computer Solutions ltd
Innovation Labs
Watford Road
HA1 3TP
tel: 0181 3577352
fax: 0181 3577326
http://www.ddplus.co.uk
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 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
You don't "adopt" a de facto language, it adopts you. That's how "de facto" works.
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? 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.
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
I thought Esperanto went out with The Partridge Family, Foghat, and the Metric system. I guess what goes around comes around...
My idea is this: no common internet language. At least not one that anybody sees. Instead, machine translation into a common meta-language from which the translation program can quickly translate into any language. And good old latin as meta-language. Why? Latin has no accents or inflections. Latin is even faster/shorter than english, and by quite a large amount. But most importantly, latin contains extended information about syntax in its word endings-there's more explicit information in the language itself and less implicit, order-sensitive information. For words that don't exist in latin, we'll do what the Romans did with greek words: put the root word into roman letters and add latin endings. Hackare: to hack. icqabat: he was icqing.
I simply don't see anyone wanting to learn a new language for the net. Language is evolutionary: esperanto and other artificial language show the difficulties of artificial evolution. Why not re-invent the lingua franca, but this time in an invisible, seamless fashion?
"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.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
My wife's family is Russian. All speak Russian
at home. Kids don't know much English until
3.5 years.
Kids all prefer to speak English by 5.
Our kid has been bi-lingual from his first words. But, he went faster in English despite spending most of his time with mother or grandmother speaking Russian.
English words are shorter, grammar is easier (or at least lower learning curve to begin communications).
I concur with the 'evolution' position. English is an amalgum of languages, and natural selection in the minds of users prefers short and simple. The continual mixture of cultures has prevented development of an 'in-crowd' language of nuance, which has been a major advantage in a multi-cultural, technological era.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
The current issue of Wierd magazine is all about this subject. What is says is that people will use their natural languages and that we will use computers to translate for us. Something kind of like Star Treks universal translator. Bablefish is one example of the technology that is in development to make this happen. Researchers are also using voice recongnition software along with translation software to try and get voice to voice, real-time, translatoins.
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
As cool as universal language is , its impossible to force a people to change, the language is part of thier culture , asking to change thier language is asking to change thier culture...
like asking a linux man to fdisk is ext2 partition and install windows 2000 and nothing else.
Oh, please. All anyone can learn from that "ranto" is that the author doesn't like Esperanto. There are no facts on the page, only opinions. He thinks it's an ugly language. Well, courses for horses.
It amazes me that someone would actually moderate a link to a pointless troll rant like that to +3.
Yeah... There is a paper I read some time ago where a guy went to great lengths (100 pages or so) to describe all the problems/issues with C++.
Any inteligent enough person can make up quickly 10 reasons to like a thing and 10 reasons to dislike it.
Like a philosopher once said: "Any idiot thinks that if the world will be guided after HIS ideas everything would be better".
There already is a new language surrounding the internet though - it's a modification of English. I have to be very careful when speaking to my parents and grandparents, where I'm likely to slip in acronyms or phrases that are "common language" on the net, but totally foreign to them.
sig fault
English may be today's world language, but that's just temporary. The two emerging economic blocks in the world are the EU and China, none of them accepting English as a standard. They just use it, by lack of alternatives. The french and the germans will never ever accept english to be the standard language in the EU (not only because of the retarded attitude of the UK (and the US) towards Europe), and the chance of China accepting it is even smaller. I presume the EU will at some stage, because of the mere impossibility of good government with dozens of representatives of countries speaking different languages, come up with a general 'language' to use between the different member states at the highest level (European Parliament, legislation, military, maybe even schooling in all countries) and this will be done in cooperation with China, Russia and maybe other countries like India or Iran. The common drive behind this might be the dominance of english-speaking countries. It might be an esperanto-like language, initially only spoken by the governing elite, or used for schooling, or interaction with intelligent machines,... Anyway, it probably won't be english, and certainly not today's english.
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.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
How about Universal Networking Language? Has anybody heard of it? My father worked in the portuguese part here in Brazil.
With UNL you have an artificial mathematical language -- understandable only by computers (like a criptic HTML). There's work in progress to build EnConverters/DeConverters to the 10 most spoken languages.
This way you could build your site, EnConvert it to UNL, and publish it in the internet. Browsers would have the DeConverters to the user's language. Somebody could also build real-time converters to use in chats.
--
This space left intentionally blank.
Frankly, I will only accept a new language if it can properly describe the power of HOT GRITS DOWN PANTS, the beauty and splendid of NATALIE PORTMAN NAKED AND PETRIFIED, all of which, of course, are great for me to poop on.
Ok, someone must have thought of this before. Are there any plans/work-underway for translation software that would integrate with a browser? A plugin for Mozilla? Commercial? OpenSource?
Of course, I keep forgetting about that Babelfish Javascript 'translate' button in my 'Personal Toolbar'. But I've not used it once since I put it there... there hasn't been any English pages with links to interesting things in other languages!
However now that I think about it, I keep forgetting about babelfish all together when my google searches turn up 80% of their hits in a foreign language, which happens all of the time.
I was doubting for a moment that an integrated translation plugin would be worthwhile, but for the average person, who doesn't have a babelfish javascript shortcut in their personal toolbar (do IE people have anything similar?), it would be nice if their browser recognized the foreign language in search engine results and what not and translated it automatically, without asking. I guess then we'd need 'language' tags. ( Or XML perhaps?)
And we need either a well known or an integrated point and click method (for average people) of creating hyperlinks on webpages in different languages that automatically cause the 'viewing' of such pages to be translated. I presume that us knowledgable people can do that now with babelfish... so why haven't we?
Clearly there are some tools and enabling mechanisms that aren't widely known or in place yet... if we want large scale cross-language linking and interaction to come to fruition.
BTW: Is anyone else as annoyed as I am by the restrictiveily small 'subject' box? Come to think of it, a wider composition box would be nice too. Hey! It should be user configurable!> people) of creating hyperlinks on webpages in different languages that automatically
> cause the 'viewing' of such pages to be translated.
Ack! I preview! I preview!! Then something like this slips through.
What I *meant*, is that I want an easy way for my Mom to put a hyperlink on her English homepage to a German webpage such that when my Grandma follows the link, the German page gets translated into English.
I think that English will remain the standard, but Spanish will become nearly everyone's second language. Most other languages, however, will probably die off eventually.
-----------------------------------------
Perversely greped and groped by PowerPenguin
Don't more folks speak Klingon than Esperanto anyway?
--- Speaking only for myself,
According to this link (http://www.sil.org/ethnologue/top100.html) the top most spoken languages are (by population) :
1 CHINESE, MANDARIN [CHN] 885,000,000
2 SPANISH [SPN] 332,000,000
3 ENGLISH [ENG] 322,000,000
These are the first language speakers only.
So far we are about 6 billion people on earth => 322/6000 = roughly 5%, which is exactly my estimation. I'm affraid that only US and UK have an important population - Canada, Australia and New-Zealand, as big as some of them might be in surface, are small player in population (and then an important chunck of Canada speaks French or Chinese, and many Americans speak Spanish more than English).
Don't forget that many "English speaking" countries only speak it as an official language, and most of the population speaks local languages and knows hardly about English at all.
Did you have some other language you'd like to propose as an alternate? Why do you believe that is superior?
Spanish : it is spoken by most of south/central America + an millions of people in the USA, and of course Spain. It is also easier to learn than English for many people who use latin-based language (including Portugese (Brasil), Italian and French).
or Chinese... it's not convenient by any means - but as far as the number of speakers go, it is well ahead of anything else.
So much for the Anglo-saxon big ego !
Ok, someone must have thought of this before. Are there any plans/work-underway for translation software that would integrate with a browser? A plugin for Mozilla? Commercial? OpenSource?
Mozilla actually has a built in translation feature. Before they put in their new UI, it was really prominent. Now, it's hiding in one of the menus. It also seems to be broken, which is too bad. The translator they were using was much more accurate than Babelfish.
------
If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
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?
Actually it is France that has laws to keep the language pure, and government branch that does this. In Quebec, there are language laws as well, but they slanted towards making sure that French is used rather than towards what is French.
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.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
Much Love,
"S"HM
*****
(I refuse to spellcheck out of contempt for your belief system)
The real sorry aspect of Englísh as a lingua franca is that it assures some idiots that they don't have to learn any language at all. As evidenced... Here you are right. He was asking (provoking ?) you to think. Which is a waste of time.
f.
You'd have to know every European language to carry on a conversation. Why not just pick one?
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.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
I don't how far away we actually are, technologically. But regardless, in the Star Trek (TM) universe, the technology which many starships from the United Federation of Planets (UFP) use, is very advanced. They call it a universal translator. I am not sure of the semantics of this device but it sure sounds pretty nifty. It would certainly solve any language difficulties the internet community could encounter in the future.
He asks:
For myself I still feel the frustration that other geeks have expressed to me in the poor quality of communication that resulted from a number of years of studying just one foreign language and the thought that there were undoubtably many delightful nuances contained in that or any of the thousands of other world languages that I was never going to get.After reading about the people trying to preserve dying languages (Whole Earth, Spring 2000), I came to think that everyone should have a local language that ties them to their own culture and then another regional/global language. Fishman suggests that these languages will have different functions (cultural identity, religion, commerce etc.) If these languages are around children from their early days, then learning these languages will presumably not be the problem it was for me.
I am prepared to believe this kind of mental flexibility is an intellectual benefit. But, I would be interested in a comment from /. readers in Quebec or some other heavily bilingual country. I have been given to understand that there are parts of Quebec for which it is difficult to speak in English. Is that true? If so, is it (solely) a cultural resentment of English or is biligualism realy tough for lots of people? Do geeks in Quebec have trouble with multiple languages?
----------------
If someone speaks three languages they are trilingual, if they speak two languages they are bilingual, if they only speak one language they are American.
That's why you need a language that is, um, with a lack of a better word, object oriented and with other such "features". In that, I mean that you would have concepts such as inheritance, polymorphism, modularity, etc. One could even go into the idea of operator overloading. For example, window has two completely different meanings depending on how you use it. You could mean that it is one of those things that you look through to look outside at the nice scenery and children playing, or a window as in something on your monitor (or whatever you would be using, it doesn't matter) that lets you control and view what a program is doing and outputing. Both allow you some kind of insight to something. For the former it is an insight to the outside world, and for the latter an insight to a functional program. Window is "overloaded" with two different meanings, which are objects. The basic idea of window as being this "object" that allows insight is inherited by the member uses of it.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." ~Confucius~
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.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Sacre Bleu !
Sounds like the extreme form of Spanglish that exists here on the US-Mexico border.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance." ~Confucius~
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
Vidi, Vici, Veni
Right On!
De best thin' about downgradin' all Internet pages t'Ebonics be dat it kin be done by slight modificashuns t'de Jive webfilter. Ah be baaad...
Learn from your parents' mistakes: use birth control.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/strict.dtd">
The EN specifies english FR does French....
Read my plan to save the Bengals
Features William Shatner as the main actor (pre-Star Trek)...
And yes.... he stilll..... pauses.... in Esperanto....
I for one, recommend adoption of the Westron, or Common Speech, on the internet. j
Also, I would absolutely hate it if some artificial language (like, ugh, esperonto) became the international standard. That is just a horrific nightmare of a possiblity. An artificial language has no heart, no history, no soul.
Any existing language would be better than some ersatz replacement. Not just for the natural beauty of organic human language, but for all the pre-existing materials that you gain access to when you learn that language. For example, when you learn English you gain access to so much. You gain access to great works of art from Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Robert Frost, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and so much more.
You shouldn't give that up for the "advantages" of a fabricated language.
Babel fish is definetly a step to the right way. But there always is bad part. Now let's see I'm Finnish so the Babel fish can't do anything for me (assuming I don't know any larger language... which I don't atleast not too well :). Some languages are just so very different to each other that translateing via a program is not possible in the neaaaaaar future. Let's take a word to demonstrate: Finnish - hyppelisimmekö? English - Could we jump up and down? (not the perfect translation...) It shouldn't be too hard to translate from English to German, because they are related to each other, but when the languages are really different it is impossible. So we still need a common language. But maybe we can chooce from a couple languages that are related.
now - my first language wasn't english. but it's as much my native language as any. I've read and written a lot of different languages. But in the end it's the question of being understood. And English doesn't do it for me. :)
Actually when I'm writing notes, these days I've been adding in written chinese, as it's easier to read for me
(and it's the ummm 6th or 7th language I've been learning)
I don't know. I keep dithering about writing a computer language completely in something like Chinese. (regardless of spoken forms which I don't understand, written chinese -is- a common writing language for lots of languages) I don't know. But to comment on previous - English has one of the largest bodies of poetry of any language. Whether any of it is good? Well that's another story. The art forms that appear in a language are shaped by how people think in that language. Ah well, signing off... (winterlion@geocities.com)
First off you need to understand that the Internet opens written language up to the dynamic enviroment that spoken language has always had. Also it brings together people from a wide range of locations and experiences. There will be two primary forms that change the language as a whole: those who get their first, and those who get their in the largest groups. English, I think, will remain the basis for a large subset of the universal-language as will languages that already have wide-spread use on the Internet such as German and Spanish. I think for the most part languages that don't share the common alphabet will mostly be dropped or mutated to fit the common alphabet. Of course some new letters may be added also. As each new language adds to the Internet there will be a lot of pressure on the users of that language to learn the UL and as they do they'll fill holes where the UL doesn't have words for what they are meaning. Often words may be highbreeds of several words of one or more languages. Each group will make slightly less impact on the UL excepting large groups that can change the UL by the very size of their group. There will of course still be various sub-dialects, jargon, and slang that exists and new words that are invented over time. The basic idea is that most people won't or can't sit down and learn four or five new languages and people will never agree on a language that isn't already wide-spread. These people will still want to communicate and tools such as translation software will always fall short (I know, I write that kind of software.) so the languages will merge over a period of time. Expect these changes to the UL to reflect not only online but in real life (five years ago did you hear talk of URL's etc in public?). As our language changes so will the way our mind works, it'll be interesting to see happen. I hope to see the mental boundries between cultures and countries to continue to break down among other things.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
...would be if the balance of power started to change and some other language started gaining dominance of English. _Then_ we would see efforts from English-speaking countries to adopt a neutral common language. :-)
(8-DCS)
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.
You can't handle the truth.
What I always wondered is why people would spend all that time and effort to learn something like Esperanto when they could be learning a REAL language.
I've got plenty of languages on my "to learn" list, and I've made some significant progress on at two of them already, but Esperanto isn't anywhere on that list. Why would I want to learn Esperanto? What country would I want to visit where knowledge of esperanto would enhance the experience? What literature would I gain access to from learning esperanto?
Sorry, it just makes no sense.
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)
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It would be plusgood to have globalspeak because then no one could commit crimespeak or say unpersonful things. Any party worker that uses nativefulspeak is a doubleplus crimethinker. We must work plus speedful to make a newspeak for the good of Ingsoc. Brother Silaron is a doubleplus goodthinker.
There are considerably more native speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese than any other language in the world, and a growing number of non-native speakers.
English may be our latter-day lingua franca, but Chinese languages, especially as written, are more of a world language than any other based on sheer numbers, and written Chinese has long been a sort of lingua franca throughout Asia.
It's incredibly arrogant to underestimate the significance of the Chinese language.
Many french people think also that it's the best language in the world (because their are often laguage impaired, and speak only their native language, so they don't know what an other language might be).
Reminds me of how Americans think of English (Note: I live in America).
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
There already is an Internet-specific language. Undoubtedly, most people in the world use at least one term of it per day. For example, how do you say HTML in Spanish? HTML. How do you say Microsoft in French? Microsoft. WYSIWYG, LOL, IMHO, ROTFL, WTF, etc., are all becoming mainstream words in any language. Now, granted, most of these acronyms are from English words or phrases. Still, the words themselves have transcended the language barrier to be understood by all peoples, speaking all languages. This language isn't just acronyms, either. Internet, modem, webpage, Linux, Perl, Java, etc., are also understood by speakers of non-English languages.
Phyrkrakr
"God doesn't play dice"-Einstein
Psychic spies from China try to steal your mind's elation.
That's because you have a keyboard not designed to type accents. Specifically, the accents ought to be next to the rightmost letters, and characters such as quotes and ticks must double their use as accents. An acute mark is NOT a tick.
(8-DCS)
People think in words so they can analyze their thoughts.
We say that people speak without thinking, when in fact they are speaking without thinking MUCH. Of course they thought; where else did what they say come from? The reason what they say is usually stupid is that they didn't analyze it enough. Most of the time, people end up analyzing it enough when it is half out of their mouth, and they realize they shouldn't have said it, but it's too late.
Think about it. . . The time it takes to form an idea in your head is much less than the time it takes to say this idea to yourself. When you say the idea to yourself, though, you are analyzing it many times in your sub-conscious. It is very important that we do this.
We don't have to have words to think; it just makes things easier on us. It gives our very powerful brain enough time to do its work. The more time our brain has, the better the quality of our thoughts.
So just listen to the things people say just after they have formed them and not analyzed them, and then decide how much faster we need to think. I think you will find that we need to think MORE and not FASTER.
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.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
An American would feel very much at home here. After dropping the many redundant vowels and semi-vowels of English for the five used here, and getting around some consonant diferences, such as lack of paired consonants, and the "r" that English people never seems to get the hang of, s/he would them be able to use familiar words such as "hippu" (meaning ass) or "derikeeto" (meaning naive) without a problem! :-)
:-)
Anyone thinking English will dominate other languages just has to spend some time in Japan. They adopt English as fast as they can, and then they change it to become more to their liking.
(8-DCS)
Ah! So *THAT'S* where H comes from! :-)
:-)
Anyone thinking English is "taking over" around here really ought to stop by. It is the other way around that is really happening.
(8-DCS)
Speculation that the telephone would change people's dialects would have made a lot more sense, actually. Too bad they didn't know much about language contact when the telephone was introduced.
> 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.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Sure, but newspeak was distinctive not because it made communication more efficient, but because it made certain kinds of communication impossible. You couldn't say something like 'independant thinking' in newspeak, because it didn't exist. The very closest thing would be thoughtcrime. Newspeak didn't shorten or abbreviate words, it only killed them.
It appears that this pidgin language was not 'learnable' by the children in that it was too limited in it ability to express ideas and so the only solution was for the children to create a brand new language.
Hence I suspect that any attempt to deliberately create a language such as Esparanto is doomed from the start unless it is taught to young children who speak it as a first language and they will modify it until it becomes a useful language; which may not resemble the original language in more than some common nouns and verbs.
--
Mark Hanson
Alas, I prefer Japanese MUCH more in this respect. The way the spoken language co-evolves with the written language is very powerful.
(8-DCS)
The thing some people don't realize though, is that languages like Esperanto are not meant to be primary languages. Two million people speak Esperanto worldwide, but that doesn't mean that these people speak only Esperanto... usually it is used for businessmen who need to communicate internationally. Many Esperanto words come from various languages, which makes it more logical. Also, it is more logical in general. It can be learned four times faster than most languages.
Nobody seems to have brought this up, so here's one direct answer to the original question, grounded in basic linguistics:
Esperanto and Loglan/Lojban are not full human languages at least because they have no native speakers.
Someone brought up pidgins in another post, pointing out that they're not full languages, either. Scientific language study has shown that when children grow up in a community where a pidgin is spoken, they will invent words to complete a new language, called a creole.
It's hard to think of a situation where children could be brought up with Loglan as their native language that wouldn't be abusive to those children.
He screwed up trying to say "You are an ugly camel." (I was about to wonder whether there are any native speakers of Esperanto, but I vaguely recall hearing of some Esperantists bringing up bilingual children who could thus be argued to be native Esperantists.)
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.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Me pense que alions preferablae lern Eurolang.
The latter, I'm afraid. That's interesting, though; how did you come to be a native Esperanto speaker? Is it a first language?
===
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
What, that it's not perfect? The nits are mostly the nits of a perfectionist linguist, and not that of someone learning the language. Oh wow, the sound structure isn't perfectly regular. No language is, and few speakers will notice.
The only really valid complaint is the one about sexism inherent in the language (-in- part for female, but none for male.)
The Summer Institute of Linguistics's publication on the languages of th world, the Ethnologue, gives 470 million first and second language speakers. One usually sees higher numbers claimed, like 1 billion-- the SIL, however, has quite strict criteria in its work.
The idea of a common language is far more complicated than it appears if you want to ensure an arrorfree communication between different cultures and times. /much/ easier to learn, and especially to master, having pure grammar, needing to memorize only 1/5th of words, 26 letter sounds instead of the ~150 sounds of english and an almost magic way of staying free of accents or change. It is orally superior, and deals with the physical language progblem beatifully. Emotionally, I miss the sound/text variations of english, making shakespearearean lyrics possible in all their old stylishness and great pronounciation. But the major problem is how to ensure that a word is getting the right connatations, if I say the sun is yellow, do you understand it as a bright yellow, a warm yellow, a cold yellow or is simply offended by the idea that the sun can have a colour (it is a light, right?)
Programming languages can be run (fairly decently) by most compilers, but human language is bound by human practical and emotional understanding of each item - how do you pronounce/place/stress/spell words/phrases and what is implicit due to background? Any sentence said in the us will be slightly different i europe and quite different i china, depending of the emotional content. If a person holds a negative life-attitude, s/he can assume just about any compliment to be negative (but fortunately vice-versa possible too - allthough then the person risks being called naive). I have learned esperanto (it was fun, made me far better in learning other languages and made it possible to travel and stay with natives all over the world) yet i certainly hold that english is more varied (I love tolkien and allways prefer original english to danish translations).
As for the internet, there is a major hassle against esperanto: the missing letters in ansi - (I have tried the 'solutions' to use the five extra letters, it doesnt work in email/webpages unless the reciever has the correct fonts) so that it could bea ssumed that english is simply bound to be the de facto language of the net/the world. Yet I know that english is mindboglingly difficult to master for non-europeans, taking years to learn jsut properly, and accents all over. Esperanto, with its shortcomings, is
If I tell a girl she is lovely, does that give her the idea that she is good, is loved is loveable or adorable by me or generally, now or always?. Or will she assume that it is an insult, as her connonation to the word lovely (due to her upbringing) is with dolls or small furry animals?? Hope somehow it can be brought clearer, maybe by thinking like isaac asimov in 'foundation' where the scientists used a combination of sign language and words to connotate exact meanings - on the net/written, this would have to be in the form of more words or signs - maybe a handful of emoticons will be ever so helpful to ensure real flawless communications.
angel denmark
Well, perhaps it doesn't make any sense to you -- fine, don't learn it. I find it fascinating that I could read serious novels in Esperanto without a dictionary after a couple of months of study. I've studied German for several years and I still can't read anything non-trivial without a dictionary.
Actually, as a foreign language enthusiast (I speak over 11) Klingon is based on the Athapascan Languahe Family (which includes Navajo, Apache, Chickasaw and Tlingit). Amerindian languages ave very complex, in that EVERY minor detail is conjugated...leaving no doubt as to what the speaker is saying. For example, in Navajo, there are 14 words for 'this', as in: this rigth next to me on the left, this living thing, this inanimate thing, this thing I once had, etc. From the studies I ahve done, it seems that native cultures were a "survival" culture, and no assumptions could be made. Interesetingly enough, many sentences we have multiple words for, they had 1 word for...they were mostly "hunting" terms. Like ?tok meant, "Go stand behind the tree on the left and aim your arrow at the deers heart"..there was no time for bullshitting when your out in the field. Men developed nouns....women developed adjectives and words of emotion. While the men were out hunting buffalo, the woman were back home weaving and gossiping :)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
Yiddish is a germanic language with about 3 million native speakers, which originated among Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe.
Once you can't past the "foreign" grammar (verbs, nouns and adjectives get conjugated at the beginning), it's actually prety easy. The only problem for a Indo_european student is that no words bear any resemblance to any words you already know. But then again..ANY language is easier than Finnish! My Goodness..i actually believe Satan himslef invented Finnish :)
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
I enjoyed the 5+ billion people comment since the entire world population is approximately 6 billion. English will win this war. In fact, it's already won. Americans learn no other language, nearly every European and Japanese person must learn English. It turns out that if you combine the economies of Europe, Japan, and the US you have nearly all of the worlds economic power. English is the most widely spoken of all languages. Instead of just making up numbers I'll use facts. English is spoken by an estimated 1/3 of the worlds population (according to the 1999 New York Times Almanac), about 2 billion people. What language do you suggest? French? Spoken by a very impressive 90 million people :P. Chinese is the only one that even comes close with about 1.2 billion (although there are different dialects), but I think we can safely say that hell will freeze over before Americans will start speaking Chinese (not to mention their writing system sucks). With the exception of the third world countries nearly the entire world already speaks English and when their economies expand they will adapt and learn English as well, it's only a matter of time.
Unlike most languages, English has grown by absorbing new words from other languages. Sort of like the BORG of languages. Unfortunately, the results of this is that it changes so that it is very difficult to read material that is more than 400 years old. When I learned Mandarin Chinese I was able to translate the poetry of Du Fu and Li Bai who wrote in the Tang dynasty about 1,000 years ago as Chinese had changed that little. Only a few characters were not in my dictionary. The internet should speed up the changes in English so that in 100 years they very well might not be able to read this message. Whether English remains the dominate language is something we cannot answer now. Yet there is no other language with the vocabulary and flexibility that English has, which is necessary to handle the complexity of our modern world.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
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.
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. Ludwig Wittgenstein
(How about Pig Latin?)
A nung dung hung O wung A bung O U tung Cung A bung bung yung lung A nung gung U A lung?
(And how about Cabbylangual?)
Heggow abeggout eggegg leggatinegg? (And let's not forget Egg Latin.)
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CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
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
In the future we will all speak Pearl._ ____________
_______________________________________________
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Let's create a base 2 language to speak with each other. Then, to make it a little more complex, let MS find out about it and make some "extensions".
The point here is, there will never be anything like a standardized language. Our nature prohibits it. Because someone will come up with his own words which only him and some people use, someone else will come up with another way to organize the words in a sentence, someone else will even invent a new alphabet.
English, too, is becoming an elephant, with all different dialects for here and there. American, British, Canadian, Australian, Indian, etc. Wherever there was once a colony of England, there's a different dialect, and even though learning new dialects isn't as hard as a new language, the english language will soon split into several languages - just wait and see.
When the pack animals stampede, it's time to soak the ground with blood to save the world. We fight, we die, we break our cursed bonds.
Chris 'coldacid' Charabaruk Meldstar Entertainment
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.
Logic is a tool; We think with logic, not in logic.
Thiking in logic would be like making a house out of hammers.
The cure for 1933 is 1917.
A language is what its users make of it. If French speakers want to adopt English words like "television" or "internet", there's not much the Academie Francaise can do about it, save sit and sputter in their ivory towers.
I think you overestimate the influence of the Academie if you think it can either prevent the adoption of foreign words or kill off an entire language by doing so.
As an aside, I'm not aware of any laws mandating linguistic "purity". Are they going to start throwing people in jail for uttering Americanisms?
I can just see it: a whole French underground whose goal is the bastardization of French, whose purpose is the overthrow of the "puristes", and whose methods are subversive acts of linguistic terrorism such as spray-painting English words on metro stops at the Palais Chaillot, holding secret meetings devoted to the reading of English verse, and hitting politicos in the face with (American-made) cream pies, all the while shouting "Vive l'Anglais! Vive le rouge, blanc et blu!"
Even if France did enact such legislation, it would hardly be binding on the whole francophone world, of which France is only a small part.
Lee Kai Wen>
Sure, lots of people claim to know English. But when it comes to SPELLING and pronunciation, well, that cuts it down to MAYBE a few million people who really know English. English spelling and pronunciation rules just don't make sense. And, despite Sam Clemens' attempts, they never will.
In Spanish, spelling and pronunciation have an almost perfect 1:1 mapping, except for the occasional silent 'h' and probably a few other things I'm forgetting. Verb conjugation is a little tough, as is the widespread use of reflexive verb constructions. And most native English speakers can't roll their R's properly.
But at least if we go Spanish there will be a more intelligible written record, while, as we see every day on Slashdot, native and non-native English speakers often mangle written English so badly as to render it unintelligible.
I like languages. Especially machine languages. I'm not so apt with natual languages. That's why my major in college was Computer Science and Phych with a concentration in Psycholinguistics was only my minor.
It may also be worth noting that Spanish was my first language which is only odd when you consider that I was born & raised in South Dakota. My Mother was a Spanish Major in college when I was born: I was her study aid. I had to be brainwashed to forget the Spanish and learn English before I went off to pre-school.
So with this background, Esparanto seems very Spanish to me. Now Spanish is a good language - much easier than English, though it does have it's rough spots. In any case, I don't think it'll come naturally to someone who wasn't raised with a mother tounge with a Romantic/Germantic root, in particular Arabic or any tonal language like any Chinese dialect.
And I must say, what really irked me about Esparanto was this on their webpage:
"Infinitely easier to learn than Japanese?!? Oh please. . . Japanese is, IMHO, the easiest language on the face of the earth (with the exception of the Kanji part which was taken directly from Chineese). It was developed in relative isolation and hence doesn't suffer from outside influences bastardizing their grammar. It's not difficult it's just different. Jon Katz would back me on this: Being different is not a crime. Sorry, had to. In any case, it's rather like learning how to program in Perl (as your first real programming language) - it's complex and there's lots of ways to do things. Then you learn C - it's a much smaller, more eligant language, but not any less expressive. If you really want to make the analaogy work let's say that you can't use punctuation symbols in C - you must use the trigraphs. On a dvorak keyboard (which I do actually use).
For their critisim of Japanese, just two clicks latter they claim that:
Likewise in Japanese there is no grammatical gender, the word order is relatively free, etc. And while there are five verb conjugation, there are only three irregular common verbs (I think there are some obsure ones that have fallen out of useage and if you want to be technical about it, there is a sixth conjugation that seems very irregular, but that's only used when addressing his majesty, the emperor).
In any case, it seems to me that they haven't been open enough in their world view and that Esparanto suffers from some of the ills that it was attempting to solve. Kind of lends credence to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Anyway, for all it's failings (esp. spelling), I think I'll stick to English for now.
-"Zow"
The first significant scientist of Russia (Mikhail Lomonosov) said: "I write my friends in Italian, I write wonem in French, and I write my enemies in German" ;-)
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I think warez-speek will be the InternetLanguage. 1 \/\/1ll b3 3733+ d00d
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
http://www.ecocap.demon.co.uk/
...
Just read, how many languages have spawned English
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Actually, this has been discussed before on Slashdot. The United Nations University has a 10-year project to develop a Universal Networking Language, which is intended to provide an intermediate translation "universal language" to assist with machine-assisted translation between different languages on the Internet. No doubt /.ers will prefer to learn the UNL -- kind of like a verbal EMACS, I guess, and similarly elitist. :-)
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
how about this: any language that hae been spoken for mor then 10 generations.
As discussed before on Slashdot, the United Nations University has a 10-year project to develop a Universal Networking Language.
--
Paul Gillingwater
Paul Gillingwater
MBA, CISSP, CISM
I like English. Everyone uses it on the net (cause the URL/tld name system is based on it). Other latin languages do their own variations, but there is a definite underlying English flavor because of the roots (ARPANET). I'm not saying there isn't plenty of non-English content out there (altogether non-English content may outnumber English content, depending on how one makes the comparison). What I am saying is that English works very well as the lcd of Internet and world business, similar to U.S. currency in international business transactions. And English is expanding at an unprecedented rate yet still retaining its functionality. It will all meld together naturally (if allowed to) in the future as time goes on, but I believe English will form the basis and blueprint for that future International language with the better parts of other written forms becoming part of the conversation. That's why GUI's are great -- they communicate ideas without a specified language instead through purer, more abstract images. The common image library of communication is developing underfoot. (Hey, I had to post, my karma was depleting for lack of use -- was out of town for about a week.) I wonder when the language police will come knocking at my door (or last port)?
--
He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
In a time, still a while off, we won't be speaking English or any other recognisable contemporary language, but it will probably become one of the languages from which much of the contemporary language of the day is constructed. Just look at how much western language is based on Latin and Greek.
I wouldn't quite assert that English is invading Japanese. I'd say that the Japanese are creating Japanese words based on English. Any native speaker from any English speaking country would have trouble figuring out what they originally were. Also, their usage of these words is often quite different from that of English (ie. sumaato (smart) doesn't mean brainy but skinny). If you read the "English" that is written, sung, and spoken here you'll also notice its far from similar to the genuine article(s). If you look at the history of this country you'll see that their intake and modification of English is simply a repeat of their entire process of existance as a civilization. It started with China when they took in the Chinese writing system, Kanji. They took the characters and their rough Chinese pronunciation then added their Japanese pronunciations as well. Even now they can understand only about 50% of what is written by the Chinese (and this is after over 1000 years!)and none of what is spoken. I don't think they'll even get half that far with understanding writen (and especially spoken)English even in the same number of years. If anything, they'll create a new language. For lack of a better word I'll name it Japanglish. From the land of bullet trains and people who don't know if it snows in the USA.
As I understand it, the point of Esperanto is to remove arbitrary limitations and exceptions used by "evolved" languages, while in fact it does nothing but create limitations and exceptions of it its own. Perhaps not many, but enough to perclude its vaulted position as such a great language. Just the little bit about pronunciation was enough to turn me off as a native English speaker.
If I was going to create a universal language to replace the crooked system of modern linguistics, I'd call this guy up and get him to give it a once-over first.
I mean, if it's not perfect, what's the point?
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 proposal - a subset of English that is more simple to learn than regular English. (yes, that's right, more simple, not "simpler")
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Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
The language should be not only unused, but not clearly related to any other language, to be fair (Esperanto is very european, for example).
Another problem is that a completely unused language needs a lot of work and development, before it becomes useful. And this development is quite likely to split it into local variants, as some borrow from English, some from Madarin or Urdu.
No, we need an existing language that is almost unrelated to anything else, spoken by almost nobody, but still alive.
I hereby nominate FINNISH as the new international language! Spoken by only 5 M people, not related to other IndoEuropean language families, and has a well developed vocabulary also for high-tech stuff like the net.
In Murphy We Turst
The basic idea is this:
A few words.
only 4096 word stems to learn. All of these words are collected through a "filter" from natural languages from all over the world. The filter is that the word stems must consist of consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel and must only use the available sounds (16 consonants and 4 vowels). This way we get both the evolving nature of natural languages and the structure needed for new thinking (because of new world views such as quantum physics). A site for collecting words would be easy to set up and easily mirrored around the net.
Simple grammar.
64 prefixes such as pronouns, numbers and marks, to combine with the word stems into phrases. The grammar would have to be translated into as many natural languages as possible, but it would only be a matter of pages to do, not books.
An alphabet.
Based on segments, like in old LED calculators, the alphabet would be symmetric, and would easily be localized by cunning typographers and/or calligraphers from different cultures. It would also admit the reading of the text in all orientations, including the way japanese and arabs want their texts.
|_|
|_|
| |
Does that sound good enough?
Doesn't XML fill this role rather well.
smile
When shit hits the fan get some of these https://youtu.be/pY-GncsZ-UE
Computer translation is bound to come of age within a decade or two and then we'll be able to do everything in our native languages, even real-time conversation with someone speaking a different language, and the computer will translate everything.
We already have a common Internet-based language, it's called Perl :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
You confuse script and language. You could use the Latin script with Asian languages too (eg Vietnamese). Latin letters are known nearly everywhere, so you would just have to learn the language.
Claus
That seems to be a common notion--St. Francis Xavier thought Japanese to be of Satanic origin, and stories vary about Basque (one claim is of Satanic origin, and another is that Satan tried to learn Basque to assist with tempting the Basques, and gave up after a few centuries, having only learned a couple of words!).
I looked at the interlingua page referenced above www.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
I'm the Assistant Director of the Klingon Language Institute, and also a constructed language enthusiast, so I know more or less whereof I speak.
Klingon is not "based" on any particular language or languagegroup. It is certainly true that the inventor of the language (Dr. Marc Okrand) has his field of expertise in Amerindian languages, and therefore Klingon probably shows a stronger influence from those than anything else, but saying it's "based on Navajo" is grossly inaccurate. It has conjugations for object/subject combinations like many Amerindian languages (a feature not entirely peculiar to them, but not common); it has a word-order found in very very few languages (I think the one usually quoted is from South America). But he deliberately didn't "base" it on anything in particular. Notably, many students, on learning Klingon, confide that it's "just like" their favorite or native language. We've heard Basques say it was very Basque, Poles say it seemed Polish, etc. It's certainly simpler than the lot (which is interesting when you consider that unlike Esperanto, Klingon doesn't have simplicity or learnability as a stated goal).
Has Klingon got what it takes to be "the" International language? I tend to doubt it. But that's not why I study it.
~mark
Various things like this have been tried. You might try looking at Lojban. 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; 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.
?X?|uÂit was Xerox who started developing "Machine Compatible English", which was basically a simplified Engligh minus all the ambiguity and messy stuff.
it is still very inteligible to any native speaker, but has the advangate of being 'computer compatible' which allowed automatic translation into any number of languages.
Xerox used it for photocopier intstruction manuals...
It always struck me that slightly midified native langiages are the best bet -- the changes are minor on the written language and the benfits of high quality babbelfishing are double plus good.
I think the adaptation could go over pretty easy, i would love to see it happen. (I am sure that it wouldn't be any stranger than Swiss-German, which is a pretty different language from 'real' German, but has no written language! Swiss-German kids go to school and write in a different language than they speak...)
adrien cater
boring.ch
Point and Grunt
Actually, me German too. And me too doing everything computery in English, since it somehow feels so natural (no wonder, most software _is_ English to start with).
But I believe the problem of expressions is a problem with English in general. I don't know who said this, but it certainly sounds true:
To learn English takes 30 days, to master it 30 years.
Other languages have interesting parts, too - swearing in Italian is just so much more colorful, and some languages have words I miss in others. Danish eg has two different words for day, one being used for day as the opposite of night, and the other one to describe a 24-hour period.
Even within German there are times when to use Hochdeutsch and when to use the local dialect... what I want to say is that some languages are more up to a task than others, and most languages have their own beauty. Another problem for a non-native speaker is that usually, complex nuances are prepared in the native tongue and then translated - until one gets stuck due to a lack of words for the concept. However, this doesn't mean that the other language does not have the capability to express the concept. Often, a completely different approach is used, so that you build your sentence rather differently. These things are also hard to look up in a dictionary, since the other language uses different metaphors.
Rambled enough? Cheers for bearing with me.
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
Aren't you confusing that with Italian or Spanish?
Anyway, there are intricacies en masse with yes or no answers on negative questions. Most every language I've seen so far had it different. And occasionally, different dialects will turn the tables again...
In Japanese eg, yes ("hai") is just a way to express "I'm still listening", and only the second answer is actually answering the question.
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
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.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
German was a world language not only in chemistry, also in physics in the 1930ies. Think of people like Heisenberg, Einstein, Hahn, etc, they all were writing German. And anyone really into physics had to learn German at that time. It was mainly history that decided otherwise...
Hurricane Application Group, Dept of Meteorology Control, Ministry of Proactive Defense
How About Latin as a common Language...??
I was born in U.S. and still live there, and I can say there is no shame in speaking English just because it is the de facto standard for communication. Why does the U.S. have so much self-hatred?
I've always said that we (U.S.) should convert to metric system (the English measurement system is really, really stupid) and the rest of the world should bend to English language, despite whims of silly countries like France.
Now, I know, I know. It sounds ethnocentric. It's not really. It just makes sense. There is all this effort at translation and that adds up to misunderstandings among countries, it adds up to lots of money as well. Culture != language. Think about it: do Canada and America and U.K. and Australia and India all have the same culture? I think not.
Chinese is *not* #1 by the number of speakers, although it is #1 by the number of native speakers.
When you count second and third languages, english is #1 by head count
>So-called "dialects" of English are unintelligible to other English speakers.s
.
.
Boy, that's a tough standard . .
My weak spanish (and the fragments of ecclesiastical latin that a Catholic picks up) are enough that I can usaually follow at least the general gist of Italian and Portugese. This would mean that Italian and Spanish aren't separate dialects . . . or am I not reading this right? And I'm not going to touch whether Portugese and Castillian (the primary [but not exclusive; there's also Catalan and maybe more] Spanish in Spain) are dialects of the same language or separate languages . .
hawk
> Hm, I'm a French Canadian . . .
Uh, oh. Now you're in trouble. You posted this in only one language.
THe language police are coming to get you.
\sing_song_voice{You're going to language jail; you're going to language jail}
:)
don't worry; we'll start the legal defense fund right awy . . .
Wait a minute. It's not because of Britain's imperialism.
It's because
a) The navy (and army) backing british imperialsim was better than its competitors
b) Britain left the Common Law all over the place in its wake, and the Common Law is more suited to the emergence of commerce than the alternatives.
hawk, esq.
How many hundreds of languages are still spoken there? Yet they have a single language that isn't native to the area, english, which binds it all together. ANd why? Trade.
.
:) following changes here.
Yes, trade. It was trade that led to the *private* acquisition of of most of India by the tea company. They didn't *want* an empire, but they kept having to put down local skirmishes that were geting in the way of commerce. Bit by bit they ended up reluctantly governing most of the subcontinent, and spent a hundred years trying before they managed to pawn it off on the Crown . .
Just imagine trying to choose any one of those languages to replace India. Everyone else will object.
The internet is in the same position. English is already the trade language. More people speak english than any other language, *including* mandarin. Not nearly as many speak it as a first language, but as a second or third, it leads.
Until there's a reason for it to change, english will remain the language of both commerce and the internet. WIll it stay the same as american english? I have no idea. If it does, I think it's more likely that it will be because of americans accomodating the drift if internet/trade english in their own speech than by internet/trade english (ITE ?
Swinging wildly to the side topically, there's a group in Britain trying to get schools teaching english as a foreign language to teach british english rather than american english. THey're doomed. American english isn't taught because it's the language we speak here, but rather becasue it is the trade language.
Anyway, I don't see other languages going away. Mixing with english (in both directions), yes. Gone, no. Eventually, almost everyone will speak ITE english as a second language--including some who speak another english dialect/language as their first.
Well, I didn't make it up, that's what the Almanac says....
I don't think that languages like Esperanto have much of a chance of becoming a univeral internet language (not enough native speakers). But why English? it's only the dominant language of the Internet because the majority of Internet users are English speakers at the moment - in 20 years time, who's to say that will still be true? Remember that languages like Spanish, Mandarin and Urdu are spoken by many more people across the globe, but most of them don't have access (yet).
So who's to say what will happen in the future??
I am not trying to flame everyone else that doesn't speak english, but lets face it. For websites, I can acomplish about 99.5% of my needs by viewing only english sites or sites that I can translate with babelfish. It is that simple.
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Sig Return: 204 No Content
Am i wrong? Is there not a french academy for language? I know of several specific instances where words that were commonly used in french were not honored by the Academy because there was "no room" for them - if you'd like to see an example, go to any McDonalds in France. I'm not knocking french - quite the contrary. I suppose what i'm trying to get at here is that you're post obviously subjects you to scrutiny as, what some like to call, a fucking stupid bitch!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
I would like to expand on what you said about Interlingua since I believe this is underrepresented here.
Interlingua is a neutral, constructed, but naturalistic language that most anyone could understand, at least passively, without having to learn it first. A grassroots, clean alternative to the sluggish and bloated monopolist English, not controlled by any government, company or other entity, upon which anyone can freely extend and build, as long as you keep to a certain set of openly published, scientifically established guidelines -- a kind of Linux of the human languages?
Interlingua has been in use for decades (for real, not as a hobby). And it's not just because of it's name that it is the ideal auxiliary language for the Internet age; its major advantage is its instant usability even outside the Interlingua community.
For 27 years (from 1924 to 1951), a team of linguists worked on the cool concept that an interlational language already exists, hidden in all the world's national languages: the language of scientific and technical international words, mostly of Latin and Greek origin. They extracted this language methodologically out of seven major source languages sharing most of this international vocabulary. Then they made a minimalist grammatical framework around it (no gender, no verb inflections, almost no irregularities, etc), et voila: a constructed, but natural language, easy to learn, that's immediately usable almost all over the world (even on computers: its character set is plain ASCII).
The team, called IALA (International Auxiliary Language Association) decided that the source languages for Interlingua would be English, French, Spanish/Portuguese (taken as one), Italian, German, and Russian. Roughly said, if a given word appears in some form in at least three of these languages, it is automatically an Interlingua word, whether it appears in any dictionary or not - all that needs to be determined is its 'prototype', an average version of the word without the peculiarities of the national languages. This linguistic methodology makes any governing body obsolete.
Interlingua is the ultimate human open source language. If you discover a new word that appears in at least three of the source languages, then all you have to do is determine the prototype and you have a new Interlingua word. This way, many English words, especially Internet-related terms, have made its way into Interlingua since it was published in 1951. In addition, there is also its innate ability to build new words out of existing ones.
- Martijn, Netherlands (© 2000)
Damn! Beat me to it! :)
A neat world population 'clock' (and a US population 'clock') is available here
Important info:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
http://dieoff.org/synopsis.htm
http://www.peakoil.net
The punctuation for numbers is not really odd..
Official dutch punctuation for numbers is the same, although I use dutch, english *and* international standard, depending on what I like that particular second..
(NL/FR/?) 1.000,00
(english) 1,000.00
(int.) 1 000.00 (iirc)
Esperanto is a powerful language with an "object-oriented" feel. There are many instances that I come across a simple concept in Eo that cannot be translated simply into English. An example: for the adverb form of "friend" (amike), the closest English translation I can make is "in a friendly manner." Plus, Eo was designed from the start with rules for adding new words to the language, and it has no lack of computer terminology.
Esperantist Sylvan Zaft has a great novel about Esperanto published on the web which (IMO) addresses Esperanto intelligently and fairly, addressing both positives and negatives. It's definately worth a read: Esperanto: Language for the Global Village
I don't propose everyone to learn Esperanto, and I don't propose it to replace anyone's language. OTOH, translating your pages into Esperanto is good karma, and all that jazz...
-- Scott S.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Funny that this topic came up the same time as the Big Ball Of Mud development model. Spoken languages typify the BBOM.
Non-native English speakers often complain about homonyms, the lack of properly descriptive pronouns, and the somewhat arbitrary spellings. EI? IE? What the hell difference does it make if it starts with "C" or sounds like "neighbor or way"?
I tried to learn French once, and was annoyed to find that pretty much every letter in the alphabet could be silent. And it all sounds like "Fweh! Fweh!" anyway.
Japanese is pretty cool in that the pronunciation is rigidly consistent, and even the contractions make sense. But the only consonant you can end a word with is 'n', and writing it is horrific - you got something like 9000 Kanji pictographs, a set of Hiragana for words not expressed by Kanji, and a set of Katakana for borrowed foreign words.
So, here are my specs for a universal language:
No silent letters. Ever.
One pronunciation per letter. If we need more vowels, create a new symbol.
All characters will be composed of straight lines or circles. No hooks, squiggleys, doodles or umlauts. Refer to #2.
All characters must represent an sound that can be easily generated by mouth. None of that adenoidal French "un" stuff, and no goddam clicks!
A standard library of swear/slang words should be developed which have no similarity to any other existing words. gay, ass, pussy... these are all perfectly good words that have been ruined by negative connotations.
No formal recognition of euphemisms. Choose a word that specifically means something and then *keep* it, even if what it represents is undesirable. People who are now "Mobility impaired" don't walk any better than they did when they were "handicapped".
And for RMS, we need two separate and distinct words for free (as in beer) and free (as in speech)
Well my language is better than yours! So there!
Isn't it amazing how we've been avoiding the real topic?
Nice to see Lojban get a mention. I think in the long-term it has prospects as a kind of international "geek-speak" for the following reasons: - It is about as unambiguous as you can get, making it suitable for machine translation and AI work (there is already a working parser-glosser, and it has YACC and BNF machine grammars). - It's very easy to create new terms from a limited number of root words, e.g. "samske" (computer science); "samru'e" (currently executing program). - It's about as culturally neutral as you can get. In particular, it doesn't rely on culturally specific metaphors (try explaining to a non-native English speaker why you run up a debt but run out of milk!). - Basing the grammar on predicate logic makes it convenient for human-machine interaction (you can think of it as a kind of spoken Prolog). However, I think it will be a long way before it makes any impact on English as an international language.
Because americans will use monopolistic and preditory practices to suck the life out of all compeeting languages?
No, not at all. English has and will continue to succeed on its merits. Although it is far from perfect, and has a number of acquired inconsistencies which are (obviously) not present in a designed language or some natural languages, it works.
In fact, it works very, very well. English succeeds because of both its breadth and depth. The English language is the original open source project, adopting and adapting ideas, features, vocabulary, grammars, and structures from other languages with little or no prejudice. I'm not picking on the French, but contrast this with French, which insists on inventing "French" words rather than adopting prevailing and perfectly good words from other languages, especially English. (e.g.: "Informatique" instead of "computing" or "data processing", IIRC.)
You may not like the English language for whatever reason, but there are many historians who believe that the power, flexibility, and adapabilty of the English language has been one of the keys to the prominence of English-speaking peoples over the past several centuries. (I highly recommend Winston Churchill's excellent four-volume series "The History of the English Speaking Peoples" for more insight into the culture behind the language.)
The simple fact is that English has survived and thrived because it permits and even encourages a broader range of expression and a finer ganularity of meaning then is possible in nearly any other major language. The fact that it also (although not uniquely among western languages) lends itself to easy mechanical representaiton is just icing on the cake.
Those of you bashing English out of anti-American sentiments (whether American yourselves or not) are missing the point: The English language has earned its place in the world, and will continue to thrive into the future simply because it works so well.
English. It just Works!
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
What you describe as for japanese is a phonetic distorsion of borrowed words. In {at least}, there's also a sense distorsion, and these words become more precise. For Example, in french, Deal means "Drug Deal", whereas you'd use marché for any other kind of deal. Therefore, borrowing languages become more and more nuanced, whereas english keeps as poor. That's why, if a natural language becomes universal, it will necessarly become the poorest language. Yet, If it's an artificial language, the ability to make new words as needed will let him be as rich as possible, but it will keep very prosaic, and could only be used for translation, and not for conversation. If there's a good solution, it's 1st language native, 2nd Esperanto, as easier to learn than english.
Maybe not in qc, but in france we stillsay "si", and if someone uses "oui" instead, he just won't be understood (too ambiguous, & one would repeat the question.) And as for the Académie & conservatism, it just isn't true, yes they decide, but who cares. French has, I believe the richest and fastest evolving slang.
The Universal Networking Language is such a project to provide this feature. Each website would be translated into a 'universal' language by describing mathematical relations between objects. See the website for more details (http://www.unl.ias.unu.edu/).
20 mil and I will! Learn Esperanto with 20M others.