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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
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.
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
The other problem is that not everyone in the world will join the internet at the same time - the more developed nations (such as those in Europe, the US, and so on) will have a larger and earlier influence on the evolution of the language as compared to the other, less developed nations. Global internet access for all is still a pipedream I'm afraid...
ManicHawk - Just because you're manic doesn't mean the walls aren't bouncy
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
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.
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?
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"
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.
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!
English is widely taught as part of required public schooling worldwide as a 2nd language if it's not already the local primary language. World documents like passports and such are printed ALWAYS in English, French, and then the local language if its not one of the two former, and the need for French is falling off.
The ASCII character set, promulgated by the internet tends to favor English usage by not supporting diacritical marks used in other roman-alphabet based languages (French, German [extra characters now officially deprecated by German gov't], Spanish, etc.) Non-roman writing based languages are very much hindered by 7-bit ASCII (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, The Cyrillic based languages, also Georgian, Hindi, the list is long).
And with global communications, languages have ceased diverging and evolving each in their own directions. Without global comm and fast worldwide travel, American English would have diverged from British English to become as different as Spanish and Portugese are today. These processes have halted and in fact have reversed and will eventually result in a nearly uniform version of English.
It's not really the internet that's causing this, but instantaneous global communications in general. Language has always been an evolutionary phenomenon; here we just get to watch it evolve faster. The idea of a new language popping up and being universally accepted is about as likely as everyone switching over to IPv6 on the same day.
Totally incorrect. The evolution has already slowed and reversed as I described above. A new language? Unlikely. One being adopted until nearly all understand it (like English) it'll happen. Not instantaneously but over time. English is already understood in more places on Earth today than just 75 years ago. Why? Satellite TV boradcasts, people traveling 10,000 miles regularly many times per year. Global business partnerships. If there's any evolving going it, it's everything evolving to merge together.
The odd man out? Space travel.
The difficulty of space travel and slow light speed communications will mean that the first settlements beyong the Earth will be isolated for long periods of time with only sparse contact with the Earth and cartainly no interactive contact (light time is neearly 1 hour just to get to Jupiter, and you though satellite delays were annoying!). This isolation may result is some new diverging and evolution of language again.
Until then look for one language growing at the expense of others and many languages to even die out. For good or bad, a common language has advantages and is necessary. It will happen.
I start hearing the Eagles go though my head:
/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
The good news is that it will be a "perverted" of English with plenty of foreign words.
Not will be, ARE foreign words. A large number of the words for food in the English language are already of French origin due to the Norman conquest. Beouf, etc. There are many other examples of non-English words in common use as well.
English has a HUGE vocabulary, more than any other language. Part of the reason for this is the long history it has of subsuming words from other languages.
English has some real positive attributes to recommend it over other languages as a lingua franca - the rich vocabulary, the great body of literature (rivaled only by Greek and Sanskrit), the fact that there is no central body that tries to control the vocabulary (like the notorious and highly xenophobic Academie Francaise) and keep out foriegn cultural influences.
...and that's why english is and will be the language of the internet.
English will change of course, with new words meaning new things.
For many years to come, the people building the net will be technicians of some kind. They will be working with programming languages, markup languages, and hardware. I have yet to see a real-world ``computer-language'' (programming or mark-up) that isn't based on english.
I'm not native english myself, but I tend to write source code comments and program output in english anyway. So anyone using or digging into programs I've written, will be using english too. I see everyone else doing the same thing.
Sure, the technicians are not the ones necessarily deciding the language of the program input/output in an application, but I bet that as soon as you look under the hood of 90% of the non-english programs out there, you'll see comments in english still. As long as more than a few people have to work with code like that, english will be the common language of the many.
Even if you decide to not use english, you still will:
open(OUTF, "min_fil") or die "Kunne ikke åbne min_fil";
Sure, some company tried to translate the macro language of their international products into using words from the languages of each of the translations. I have yet to meet someone who found that anything but catastrophic. Macro packages for the english version wouldn't run on the german version and vice versa. Even worse, you couldn't share experiences across borders, or read foreign language books about the macro language.
Anything that constrains the benefit of communication between people to within national borders, is doomed. Be it a macro language, or a nationalized internet.
Unlike French, there is no common group of social "overlords" who determine what will go and what will stay. Words come and go in the english language like fads. Slang terms slowly replace more traditional terms, and more traditional terms sometimes make comebacks...and the evolutionary process of the english language continues (Webster knew his kids would always have a job).
If you look at the English language now...it is in fact a far cry from the days of Shakespeare and such. A new dialect certainly.
The point is that language is a process of evolutionary communication. As the internet grows, and the world becomes closer and closer...English will most likely become a standard amongst the vast majority of the world population...but most certainly it will not become a standard in the next 50-100 years. We're talking about a signifigant lingual/cultural change. Terms like "carte blanche" and "caveat emptor" which have become a part of the english language help us identify more than just what we're talking about. They're also an indication of where the language has been (btw - the reason english is so "bastardized" and irregular, so to speak, is because it's an agregate of many languages...but that's another lecture for another time.)
English most likely will become the standard for the world...at which point it would logically become the standard for the internet, not the other way around...although the internet may facilitate its growth. But by the time this occurs...once again our decendents won't be able to read our current literature without being told to by their 10th grade teacher...and it probably won't really be English they're speaking anymore...it'll just be called that by default!
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
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
Nearly correct, it will be the dumbed down version of english also known as US english or even american. I'm not trying to insult people here but I'm just trying to make clear that the US population consists of immigrants from all over the world. Most of them adopted the local language (brittish english), with varying results. After 200 years of language evolution the result is a dumbed down version of brittish english (simpler spelling, smaller vocabulary). As a non native english speaker (I'm dutch) I have no problems understanding american english (spoken & written). However, brittish english is much more difficult.
So american english is perfect for the internet since it already is a language for immigrants. As such it is rather easy to learn for non native speakers (much easier than brittish english or even french with its rigid grammar).
However, I don't really believe in global cultures and other crap like that so i think an increasing portion of the content will in other languages than english.
Jilles
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.
<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.
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
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 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.
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.
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!
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!
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
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 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/
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
However, I don't think people realize how little of "English" is really still around. English is a mongrel language, combinations of French, Norse, Latin, Spanish. It would be hard to find a language in the world that didn't have some influence on English in some way (where do you think words like "shampoo" came from? :)
:)
There was a wonderful commentarty by Joe Slesinger on CBC regarding the recent flap in France about air traffic controllers using English over radio waves, causing a big flap (mostly in Quebec, where if it isn't French, it's possibly illegal). He peppered his commentary with at least 20-30 Frech words, and then pointed out that every one of them was in the English dictionary.
So in short, English will prevail, but "English" circa 2100 won't probably sound a think like the archaic "English 2000" we speak today.
(but will there be a W3C document defining language?
Any universal language has to have the flexibility of English. Most romantic languages are too hard core about syntax and purity. English is the bastard of bastards and allows you to put nouns and verbs from many other languages into it (hence the ability to use foreign maxims in the middle of speech and still be grammarically correct). I'm biased because I've been speaking English my whole life but I've come to understand its versatility.
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)
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
Not that I have anything against Chinese... I'm fluent in Mandarin :)
> 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
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
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
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
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.
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")
----
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
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
Take Shakespeare away
Why should I take away the greatest playwright? Surely his work is significant component of what I am talking about.
If you want more, there is a large body of drama from the Restoration, and you might want to investigate the York plays. The problem with English drama is that Shakespeare is taught amost to the exclusivity of everything else when in fact there is a lot more worthy of consideration.
Take Poetry. OK.
Yeah, there's Keats and Browning and perhaps a few others,
You mean like Chaucer, Blake, Yeats, Shelley, Dunne, Burns? Or the Gawain poet? The Morte Arthure? The list of great English poets is a lot longer than you give credit for.
Greek..while there are great works of art
That's the point, isn't it? Volume isn't the criterea by which art is judged, otherwise the bodice rippers would be a great body of literature. Greek literature is unparalleled in it's quality and influence.
Greek cannot compare to the literaric volume of any living language.
I assume you mean classical Greek. Greek is by no means a dead language, as those living in Greece will surely attest.
Various things like this have been tried. You might try looking at Lojban. 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.
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
Very true. However, there are still two problems with this approach:
Esperanto actually has a rather wide speaker base, despite the relatively small number of speakers. English still holds the title of most widely-spoken; it doesn't have the sheer number of speakers that Mandarin does but chances are you can find someone who speaks English almost anywhere you go. Spanish is also rising in terms of breadth of speaker base; in a few years it might knock English from that slot.
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
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.
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