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Ask Slashdot: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English?
Loren Chorley writes: The idea of constructing a language capable of replacing English has fascinated me for a long time. I'd like to start a project with some of my own ideas and anyone who's interested, but I'd really like to hear what the Slashdot community thinks on the topic first. Taking for granted that actually replacing English is highly unlikely, what characteristics would the new language need? More specifically: How could the language be made as easy as possible to learn coming from any linguistic background? How could interest in the language be fostered in as many people as possible? What sort of grammar would you choose and why? How would you build words and how would you select meanings for them, and why? What sounds and letters (and script(s)) would you choose? How important is simplicity and brevity? How important are aesthetics (and what makes a language aesthetic)? What other factors could be important to consider, and what other things would you like to see in such a language?
Forget Esperanto. There's a new language already being developed for the masses. Newspeak.
Irregular verbs exist for a reason... they're the verbs that get used the most, and the irregularities are how people either eliminate redundancy or add additional shades of meaning that most normal verbs can live without.
Ditto, for "silent letters" in English. They're how we disambiguate homonyms (ex: to/too/two).
If English had official "tones" like Mandarin, we could distinguish between meanings of "fuck" used as a verb in writing, to visually indicate things like sarcasm. Actually, in a way, English *does* have an informal "system" of indicating the equivalent of _tones_ -- quotation marks, underlines, italics, boldface, and wikitext markup.
Any conlang that *really* gets used by **real** people as their "real" language will quickly mutate and become as irregular as English or Spanish.
My thoughts exactly. A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto. And, since my mother learned it in the '50s, it's been around for a while. How long have UN documents been available in Eperanto? Been there, done that... Why reinvent the wheel?
I can't say this without sounding like an old man, so you kids stay off my lawn. There.
One of the problems I see with younger IT people, like presumably the poster who asked about this, is that there are always the following assumptions.
1) Everybody older than me is an idiot.
2) I've had some kind of genius insight that nobody before has had, because, well, see #1.
Perl is just horrifically bad? Then let's invent Python which is just so much better in every way possible. Oh wait. Python sucks bad, so let's invent Ruby. There's probably something out there now that will replace Ruby because Ruby just sucks too. The people like the original poster never ask these kinds of questions:
1) Has this been tried before and failed for a really good reason? Really good reasons might include it being really difficult to do this, being able to do it but not well, being able to do it well but nobody wants to use it, etc.
2) If there's been no big push in the past to get this done, is there really some kind of true demand for this?
I don't go around insulting people who start topics here, but this does seem rather pointless.
http://xkcd.com/927/
A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto.
Esparanto has been around for more than a century, and has failed to catch on. Like it or not, English is the standard international language. So fixing the worst problems with English makes more sense than trying to start something from scratch. We could change the spelling of words like "through" and "tough" to "thru" and "tuff". Get rid of some of the irregular verbs and irregular plurals.
Mark Twain made a very reasonable proposal, that could be a framework for reform.
TL;DR: Attempting to artificially create a human language is a complete waste of time. It's almost as wasteful as learning a natural human language you will never actually use practically.
The ops question stems from a deep misunderstanding of what human language is. Humans use language to communicate meaning. The important part here is the meaning, not the language. Language itself is practically arbitrary. Sure, there are similarities across human languages. Like, the English R sound is pretty uncommon and comes late in language acquisition. This doesn't mean that English is "hard". English isn't hard. Neither is Chinese, nor is French, nor vietnemese, nor any other natural human languages.
Different languages do not take different lengths of time to learn. Native language acquisition occurs at approximately the same rate overall across languages. Different people acquire language at different rates, but there are clear statistical trends, and there tend to be only a few commonly used learning strategies for any given problem in language space (like making the English R sound). You might think certain languages are harder to learn because they are harder for YOU to learn, but this isn't the case. Secondary language acquistion occurs as a bootstraping on an existing scaffold (your native language). That means the base language significantly affects the ease at which a secondary language will be acquired.
Language is organic. People creatively use language in order to communicate meaning, as we said above. There isn't actually a thing called "English". There is a group of people who understand each other. They play a language game, but they don't all do it the same way. You've heard of something called "dialects"? It turns out that people who can understand each other don't necessarily always play by the same rules. Rules vary, and that varience tends to corrolate with geographic distance. Now, even though they vary, people tend to still understand one another pretty well across dialects. You get to the point eventually where people no longer understand one another, even though the languages are still recently historically related (Spanish and French). At this point, we say they speak different languages. The point of this "language is organic" line is that language CHANGES. Sometimes it changes slowly, sometimes it changes rapidly. It is an absolutely critical feature of language that it can change.
Humans adapt language to serve their needs. It evolves over time, morphing into mutually unintelligible versions of itself across speakers. Now, language change does work acording to some rules. There are syntax and grammar features which human brains appear reluctant to violate, and there are common strategies which are usually followed (though there are exceptions to pretty much anything). What does language change mean? It means that if you go designing a language(an artificial language), your carefully designed language will change into something else over time (a natural human language), People will change the rules you have prescribed to suit their needs. They will invent new words. They will stop using old words and use different ones, sometimes for reasons as trivial as that they like the way the new ones sound. They will alter syntax creatively in order to express themselves, but insodoing they will make those changes acceptable over time. What, then, is the point of designing an artifical language if it is desitined to quickly change into something essentially identical than what you started out with?
The only artificial languages which persist are computer languages. They persist only because a computer is very unlike a human in that it will not attempt to parse your expression for layers of meaning. Computers demand all expressions have only one possible interpretation. This is vastly different than human language processing. If you would like an example of the utter failure of humans attempting to create artificial languages then go look up Esperanto.
IAAL and IAAPoL (I am a linguist and a philosopher of language)
English is NOT a "constructed" language, because that implies intent.
English is more of a trash heap of things we borrowed from all those other languages that over time people have grafted rules onto to try to decode and standardize. :-P
But (and I say this in the nicest possible way because it's my native language), English is a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces string together with loose rules and exceptions which require you to know from which language we stole the various bits and pieces.
The more I know about the English language, and the longer I know people whose native language isn't English ... it's harder to justify some of the "rules" as being anything other than arbitrary, and I've discovered that the ways that non-native speakers "mangle" English actually often leads to a better expression for the context, but which is grammatically incorrect.
Because it's hard to rely on knowing this came from French, and this came from German to know how you treat the words.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
One thing that any language needs is a reason for people to want to learn and use it. Some people are willing to learn a new language for commercial or professional reasons, but having an actual culture built around the language is very important. People still learn dead languages like Latin, Classical Greek, and Biblical Hebrew because they want to read the important works of literature written in them. People learn Italian because they want to understand opera and Japanese so they can watch Anime. And they learn English at least in part so they can read Shakespeare and watch Hollywood movies in their original language. If your constructed language lacks that kind of culture, it's going to be at an inevitable disadvantage.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
How could the language be made as easy as possible to learn coming from any linguistic background? How could interest in the language be fostered in as many people as possible?
Part of the problem is, these two things are working at cross purposes. Contrary to your instinct, making a language easy to learn will also probably harm the cause of fostering interest.
The problem is, from a sort of detached, scientific, logical point of view, it sounds like a great idea to have a language that is simple, easy to learn, containing definite rules, with no irregularity, and leaving little room for ambiguity. The problem is, people don't want language to work that way. It's not specifically that they want it to be hard to learn, but they want a language with nuance and ambiguity. We like puns and plays on words. People often enjoy and appreciate slang, or unusual word choice. And beyond that, people don't particularly like being told how to use language. It's something we learn culturally, and it's difficult to lose those habits. Picking up a language that no one actually speaks is difficult, since it has no purpose.
So if you really want to develop a clean, simple, clear, concise language, you should probably plan to abduct a lot of babies and raise them yourself in order to force them to learn it. And then, prepare yourself, because they'll start developing slang, and using the language in ways that you didn't expect and might not approve of.