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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?
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.
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
<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.
> Now, look at Esperanto: Nicely designed, but does it cover
:-)
:-) That happens because Esperanto is an agglutinative language: -ino is a woman, puri- is clean, -igi is to make something -- and so on.
:-) Try.
> the whole problem space of human to human communications?
> Now, look at English: need a word or phrase for a construct?
> Make it up via concatination, acronym, or onomonopia.
I'm afraid you are missing the point: Esperanto is not a static language designed by some mindless expert. Only its *grammatical structure* has been designed to be regular and easily understandable.
The language evolves every day pretty much in the same way as any other language: new words are created, others are forgotten and so on. Otherwise, how would you explain that a 100-year old language (as Esperanto is) has an internet-word for "@" ("heliko"), for instance?
On the contrary, while many languages have "holes" in their grammatical structure, Esperanto encourages speakers to be creative in inventing their own words, and makes trivial learning the meaning of unheard ones. An example:
- in English there are cases in which you cannot obtain a noun or a verb from an adverb. You cannot just because the word just "isn't there". Unfortunately I don't have an example ready, but I'm sure you can find many yourself.
- In Esperanto I once heard someone using the word "purigistino". Although I had never heard the word before, I immediately understood the meaning: The woman whose job is that of making things clean.
The current dominance of English (likely to continue) is due neither to its intrinsic elegance nor to the fact that it's easy to learn for beginners (although later they'll discover a nightmare of exceptions), but merely to the economic power of the English speaking world (read: USA).
I can speak English, and I frankly like the language. However, as a non-native speaker, I can well notice the weird aspects of the language. Believe me: there aren't few.
Learning Esperanto is a joy for the mind. Easy and compact, completely orthogonal, creative and endless. Pretty much like programming!
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 don't buy that.
First, I don't believe in the Sapir-Whorf (sp?) hypothesis. In any case, we are talking about the lingua franca here, the language used to communicate worldwide, and that is not the same as the language we use to think in, which is most likely to be our native tongue (not strictly true: I think in English about half the time, and it is not my native tongue).
Second, I don't see any hints that human intelligence is evolving at all (I mean, on a small scale of a few thousand years); in fact, it would be very surprising to see a rapid evolution like that when natural selection is probably gone for humanity, and, even if it isn't, is much slower in action.
Third, I do not think any constructed language has any chance of being adopted in these days. And I do not see any natural evolution of the language going in the direction you suggest, even if it is desirable. You make this point yourself.
Fourth, since about a hundred years, we have a theory of formal logic. Note that to benefit from it you do not need to actually speak it (if that means anything, which I doubt), merely to learn it (and to think about it). I do not see the point of trying to.
Fifth, redundancy is good for language. Logic is bad. The way we think is redundant and illogical. Language should follow this system also.
Sixth, there isn't such a big difference in efficiency between all existing languages. Even if there is, English is pretty good in this respect.
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
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Stephen C. VanDahm