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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?
One of the beauties of English is its elasticity. Without a single authority governing its rules, English is truly a democratic, utilitarian language, and it becomes what it needs to be to fit the situation. It's a kludgey, ad hoc mess, yes, and its inconsistencies are truly maddening. And yet when another language needs to borrow a word for a new use, English is ready to provide it. We loot and barter vocabulary easily, stealing words from France and trading them over to China because we don't give two shits about the cultural sanctity of language. We are the Swiss army knife of linguistics.
To take that away; to smooth out the inconsistencies and impose a logical order on it would be to rob English of its greatest use to other languages; to be the unstable alpha branch, readily accepting commits from whoever ares to contribute, and letting the best features rise to the top for adoption by other, more stable branches.
The problem with Esperanto is that it isn't easy to learn. It's easier than French and English, but for anyone who grew up in Asia for example it's actually quite difficult because of it's European bias. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Lojban would be a good place to start.
That's a common and logical-seeming wish, but reality works differently. Every language spoken by humans contains some irregularity, to the point where there is clearly an underlying reason for why perfect regularity isn't optimal for human processing. (Note that you only have difficulty with irregular verbs in foreign languages; no one forgets forms in their mother tongue, and if you're uncertain, both forms usually work equally well for speaker and listener.)
The phenomenon isn't understood completely, but it's too pervasive to be just accidental. Some aspects of it are quite well-understood. For instance, there is a reason why languages resist perfectly phonetic spelling: written text mediates between writers and readers, and while writers would prefer perfectly regular spelling, readers actually profit from a small amount of irregularity, because it allows them to use gestalt perception to recognize some words even faster than sounding them out would be. Note that the most frequent words in English tend to be those with the weirdest spelling, much like the most common verbs have the most irregular past forms.
Clearly, a huge amount of optimization has been going on to shape the language for ever-greater efficiency, at a scale that laughs at any attempt to impose a "simpler" or "better" standard in a top-down way. That doesn't prevent purists and politicians from trying, but you know how well their efforts usually turn out. I'm certain that even Esperanto would acquire a certain amount of irregularity to the extent that it was actually used prominently as a native tongue.
But that's because people are fucked up - and the language evolves to fill our needs of being weird and wonderful.
I think what's proposed here is the same ilk as that of Swatch Time. Someone thought its better if we have a dull but efficient system that reflects how computers want to work and not how people do. They forget that we're not (yet) servants of the machines and we like the craziness, the nuances allow us to express our creativity.
Now, I'm off for a pint, you can go and enjoy your 0.568261 litres of fizzy beverage while you sit in the corner with your po-faced mates and discuss base 10 maths :-)
I've been told by a lot of foreign people that they like the way English sounds, in spite of it being hard to learn.
But its difficulty might be one of its strengths. The English language is somewhat remarkable at incorporating new words or foreign words into the mainstream vocabulary rather easily.
"Perl is just horrifically bad? Then let's invent Python "
Perl was first released in the late 80's and was stable is its version 5 form mostly by 1993-1994. Python was also started in the late 80s. So the languages are from the same time; Python was not built as a reaction to Perl or an attempt to make a better Perl. People tend to think that because Perl had an unnatural popularity surge in the early days of the internet since some of the basic tools for stuff like CGI programming and database interfacing hit Perl very early and everyone just used that. Python caught on in popularity later. So people just assume it came later.
Ruby you could sorta say that. Its from the mid 1990s and intentionally looked at Perl5 and decided to take a spin on it that was supposed to be more simple. Like they dropped the sigils and make everything an object (probably was looking at a mix of Perl and Smalltalk, which was also popular at the time for a certain group).
I
Peace, or Not?
"Taking for granted that actually replacing English is highly unlikely, what characteristics would the new language need?"
1- It would need to be designed with an attitude like this. Language is a tool, a functional one. I'll say this again: if the goals of the language are like, "political unity", "avoid sexism", "reduce regional pride", "language rights", or "diversity", then it isn't a useful tool, it's ultimately newspeak.
2- Needs to offer an advantage to the speaker. Some languages seem to likely impart an advantage to most speakers based on the inclusion or absence of certain forms. A native thinker in this hypothetical language needs to actually have some tricks that help them think faster or more accurately. This is VERY distinct from political goals above- this is functional.
3- Needs to be extensible and compatible with emotion. Constructed languages seem to really lack on this, likely because the lived experience of the constructors just don't add up to anything close to the human experience. If your language can't express the opinions of your enemies, if they can't say what they want to tear you down, then you're trying to create a world where they can't express their thoughts. I can't find any good racial slurs in Esperanto or Lojban, likely because the people who use these languages aren't the sort to use them- but lacking expressivity means the language is crap. If you make a utopian language, they'll use it in utopia- so, nowhere at all.
4- Needs some study done to show that the actual things it does are helpful. For instance, there's a study going around that hints that languages with a future tense feature people who think of "future them" as different than "present them"- this is presented as a negative (save less, eat more, make some poorer short term decisions), but given the HUGE number of tenses and modes that ancestral languages had (and mostly lost), it seems likely that any of these things could be advantages or disadvantages at different times.
Summary: The language should be designed to help the INDIVIDUAL, first and foremost. It shouldn't be about some redesign society goal.
I think that such a language can't really exist- I think that, if languages are worth creating and discussing and learning, that it's obvious that they have shaped their societies at the same time as they have been shaped by them. If society A and society B both have a language that, say, has a future tense (supposing that this one is a real finding), and society A loses it, will members of society A become more fulfilled and wary of tomorrow, as the study seems to hint, while society B stays stagnant, or will society B be more likely to be aggressive about resources, more able to defend itself from society E coming in and kicking their asses? Given that in the real world we have both (and from root languages that DID have it, meaning some lost it), it's not even possible to call one "better" under all circumstances.
I think that languages meant with a specific goal will appeal to people who want that. Lojban seems like it should be appealing to people who want to think in some rational fashion, but I don't think any study shows that in any way. Esperanto is popular among people who want to bring down national borders and unify humanity. So if you make a language that makes the individual learning it more powerful and effective (versus "everyone in society would need to have this language drilled into them for the test to happen"), then you'll get a core group, and if it is successful, then the language will spread naturally for the reason all language does- beneficial for the user.
At least in English you don't have to worry about whether your silverware is male, female, or neuter (in German, spoons are masculine, forks are feminine, and knives are neuter, but in Spanish spoons are feminine and forks are masculine), since English retains only 'natural' gender -- boy, girl, etc. -- and avoids little quirks like the word for 'young lady' ('das Fräulein') being neuter, despite referring to a female individual. English lost the grammatical genders that were universal in Old English (for example, a bench was feminine, a stone was masculine and a ship was neuter -- and just to confuse matters, the natural gender of things didn’t always correspond to the grammatical gender of things; the word for woman – wfman – is actually masculine).