Slashdot Mirror
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?
no irregular verbs, we could call it, let's say ^'Esperanto.
That wud B GR8.
It's called Ebonics.
No thanks.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Don't Chinese languages already have that?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It would have to be backwards compatible with English. Then you could say that everyone who speaks English is also speaking your constructed language.
But Perl is still easier to learn and with a significantly larger user base.
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.
I think that'd have to be one of the main characteristic. If you could provide a machine translation of english wikipedia into your new language that would preserve the meaning and at the same time would be easier to understand learn and pronounce then that'd be enough reason to learn it.
One of the major faults of constructed languages in the past, such as Esperanto. has been the lack of profanity. So much of English and a good many other languages include good old fashioned ways of insulting someone else, calling their parentage or intelligence into question or simply questioning whether or not they are smart enough to actually be classed as a thinking being or even human.
Create anything you like, form and conjugate verbs as regularly as you can, limit sentence structure to extremely simple forms by limiting or eliminating conjunctions as much as you want but the language will be a complete failure if you cannot call someone names in it as easily as you would in your native language.
verification word: disrupts I like that.
so says Pootie Tang
I know it bothers some people, but I use the singular "they" for a gender neutral third person pronoun. I think once a person gets used to it they will prefer it to "he or she".
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
It's an evolutionary emergence, arising from the muck of screams, grunts and groans.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Esperanto is plenty irregular according to Justin B. Rye's "Ranto".
As Miriam Ferguson, first female governor of Texas, said, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas!"
Should it be a beautiful language to the ear to hear, but should it also take a long time to say anything worth saying (elvish, entish references)?
In all seriousness, if it was easy to learn, quick to speak what's on your mind, and also delighted the ear, it might have a good chance of catching on.
when i tried to make chatbutton.com inject viruses into users' computers, i had to write my own language to get around anti-virus products... but it's all working now.
Please use SEOChat.com and ChatButton.com so i can install viruses on your users' computers
Something to consider that would be more important than Syntax and Grammar. How would it sound make it universal and eliminate accents.
How would be accents speaking this language sound if some one from South Carolina spoke it, vs. New Jersey vs. California vs. Mexico vs. Asia vs. Germany vs. Where ever.
Lots of places try to teach English and non-English speakers claim to know it, however rarely can you understand them fluently.
I would recommend a standard rate of speaking with delays after words depending on the type of word, Name, Noun, Verb, Adjective, etc.
ADJECTIVE + 0.25 seconds
NOUN + 0.5 seconds
VERB + 0.75 seconds
NAME + 1.0 Seconds
SENTENCE + 2.0 Seconds.
Lojban would be a good place to start.
the kitchen.
We need more requirements. I'd like to submit the following as a starting point:
* Must be usable with respect to the correct chronological context. Consider how the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution have been hashed over, in the last 200+ years. We need to be able to reference the exact version of the language, as used, in any legal script. This will keep lawyers from interpreting version 1.0 laws using version 2.0 rules and definitions. Alternatively, the task is monumental: create a language that will stand as valid speech, *forever.*
* Must be amendable. Amendments to the language must not be permitted to collide with existing definitions. I would go as far as to say that synonyms and homonyms must be strictly prohibited; a side effect here is a relatively pun-free language.
* The definition of anything must be readily quantifiable, without ambiguity, right down to the planck constant if need be. Recommending the strict use of SI measurements for both space and time.
* An improved version of these requirements must be penned in version 1.0 of the language, to be followed immediately by version 2.0
SIL (http://www.sil.org/language-development) is an organization devoted to language development in remote populations with little or no education or language definition. Although they don't create languages entirely from scratch, they do clarify the boundaries of tribal languages, create alphabets for them, and teach them to read. Because of this, many of your questions are well-researched; SIL is considered something of an authority on linguistics around the world.
Even in a language without profanity per se, you can resort to Vulcan insults: "child of unwed parents" (bxstxrd), "you ought to be a slave" (nxggxr), "your intellectual disability is slowing the team down" (rxtxrd), "you deserve to be ignored for refusing offers of tutoring in the majority language" (spxc), "your sexuality puts me at risk of disease" (slxt, fxggxt), "your sexuality puts your children at risk of disease" (mxthxrfxckxr) and the like. Or something like "your logic is that of a squirrel crossing a street".
I highly recommend Anita Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages, which is interesting to a sci-fi fan because it covers not only the obvious cases like Klingon, but serious attempts to create "philosophical" languages which are alluded to in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle.
It was interesting to me as a long time database and system designer because the seriously undermines the impulse that arises once in every generation of system designers that systems can be integrated "merely" by adopting a common, standardized ontological model.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A: Widely adopted.
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has
been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European
communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British government conceded that
English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a
five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for
short).
In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c".
Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the
hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up
konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the
troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like
"fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are
possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters,
which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil
agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is
disgrasful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing
"th" by z" and "w" by " v".
During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords
kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer
kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be
no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand
ech ozer.
Den, Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
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.
In the preface to the book "What Color is Your Parachute" (2003,2009 editions) the author addresses this, cites some other grammar analysis authors, which also agree. He points out that this is again common usage in the current vernacular (just as it has been in previous periods in history).
View the page here: https://books.google.com/books...
Popular.
Ok, there are a lot of synthetic or constructed languages. Many people here have already pointed out Esperanto.
Too bad there are significantly more people that speak Klingon than Esperanto. Esperanto is a failure.
What would it take other than being popular? Making it common, useful, or even important. Require it to be taught for school children and free classes available for adults. Then make things people want or need only available in that language. Some options include government services, others might be 2/3s of a media stations programming, get creative. Preferably, do it in many countries, especially 1st world nations, at the same time.
Would people rebel against that? Oh hell yes! Just look at metrics in the US. Most people still have no freaking clue how many centimeters are in a meter (here's a hint, the metric system is based on 10s, with decimeter being between centimeter and meter) and they were teaching that thing to school kids since the 60s that I know of! Most of the world, and all of the other 1st world nations, have already officially switched to metrics, even the UK. In fact most sources are only listing 3 countries that haven't officially switched yet.
To put some perspective on that, the metric system is reported to have been created in 1799... That's around TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN YEARS! And that's only a measuring system, not something even vaguely as significant and large as a language.
So yes, the only way to get a new language adopted is either find some way to make it so totally popular everyone wants to know it so bad they'd skip their own birthdays and sex to take even one class. Or to force everyone to learn and use it while giving it some modicum of popularity and usefulness.
So anyhow, good bloody luck with that.
I definitely prefer it. Shorter and easier. No need to mention what might be in someones pants when you're trying to talk about something serious.
http://xkcd.com/927/
Yes but esperanto is certainly easier to read.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That wasn't so much a new language, as a dialect based on massive simplification of a language.
With no accents, tildes, or whatever over the letters.
The fucked-up-ness of English makes easy to absorb other languages and overcome them. Sort of like US foreign policy.
I was going to make a joke about a CPAN module for Esperanto, but lo and behold:
http://search.cpan.org/~patch/...
So, I've known a few people who were learning Esperanto on this premise ... but, seriously, who the hell do you think is interested in replacing the English language? Do you think Esperanto has stormed the world yet?
Humans don't have a whole lot of interest in swapping out their language with some constructed thing because someone on the internet thinks it's a cool idea.
Like it or not, languages evolve over time, and aren't something you just whip up and design and expect people to use them.
Honestly, if you like the idea of this, have fun with it. But you might as well try to teach Klingon to yak herders for all the actual results you'll get out of it.
On behalf of native speakers of English, we don't want a replacement.
With all of its warts, borrowed syntax, and aggregation from half a dozen other languages which creates even more exceptions and borrowed syntax which can't be explained to non-native speakers -- English is a workable, expressive, and useful language.
What you're proposing is a kinda neat thing in an abstract, nerdy, and not very useful sense of the words. But outside of you and your BFF talking in secret code at the local pub and looking like smug wankers ... nobody else will give a damn.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I mean, for centuries there has been a movement to reform the spelling of English itself, to make it sort of consistent and thus easier to learn. Even though the movement was backed by important people and it was certainly not nearly a "departure" as a whole new language would be, it never gained any traction.
So, even forgetting about the unfeasibility and just starting to tackle your questions we do come to some moot points. E.g. "what characteristics would a new language need?" The main one is usefulness - what you will gain by learning it. So, a brand new language is the least useful. Then, other questions like "How could the language be made as easy as possible to learn coming from any linguistic background?" have no real answer, unless you optimize at least for some linguistic background. Do you want to make it a bit easier to East Asians, or you'd rather aim westerners better?
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
As Miriam Ferguson, first female governor of Texas, said, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas!"
Apparently that is an urban myth. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/M...
Besides making people mad, you lose information with "it"... I don't know whether you're talking about a salt shaker or a human without more context.
This space intentionally left blank
This is why we now encourage our governers to run for president of the US. It gets them out of the state for a while.
But spelled phonetically (funetikle?) and restricted to a basic vocabulary of 1000 or 2000 of the most frequently used words. Probably more than enough. More complex thoughts could be constructed out of those components.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
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)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The reason English is is widely spoken around the world is not just that England had a long period of aggressive expansionism. It's also because English is an extremely flexible and expressive language, with a rich literature - literally millions of texts, many tens of thousands of which are fine works of art. Of course, this is true of many other well-established natural languages, from Farsi to Mandarin. But it isn't, and cannot be, true of any new artificial language.
I'd guess it would take any artificial language at least a thousand years of hard use by millions of people before it could become a contender to supplant a natural language, and by that time it would have mutated into a natural language.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
The single simplest answer I can come up with is "no exceptions". English is dumb like that: "i before e, except after 'c'...or when you run a feisty heist on a weird, caffeinated, foreign, beige, Atheist neighbor". We make a word plural by adding an 's' at the end...except for womans, childs, mans, oxs, mouses, mooses, gooses, and about 1,001 other 'exceptions'. Verb conjugation is a mess, typically using "helping verbs" to establish tense, except when you don't. Then, there are vowels. Spanish has this right "a" (ah), "e" (eh), "i" (ee), "o" (oh), "u" (oo), no exceptions. English has a "short" and "long" sound for each, and then there's the "schwa" sound, because apparently simply using a "short u" when you need one is too complicated for English. And then, there's this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annane....
Trying to find a common denominator between Mandarin, Hungarian, Creole, and English is highly unlikely to happen. So, from my experience with languages, which is "English, with a high school understanding of Spanish and a handful of core phrases in other European languages (i.e. I can ask for a bathroom throughout Europe), my core answer would be consistency. This letter makes this sound, no exceptions. This word ending means that the word is in this tense, no exceptions.
Finally, minimize the "through context" words-with-multiple-meanings situation; "love" being a great example. If you love your mother, your super-fast computer, bacon, and your spouse the same way, then the language is the least of your problems....
I know it bothers some people, but I use the singular "they" for a gender neutral third person pronoun. I think once a person gets used to it they will prefer it to "he or she".
No because 'they' is plural those leading to more ambiguity. If you want a neuter third person use 'It' as it is the neuter second person in English.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
One thing you would have to do (and it would be impossible to enforce!), in order to make it easier as a second language, is abolish idioms. Idioms - figures of speech that mean something other than what the words do - is the part of learning a second language that's the hardest. And you would never be able to abolish them outside of a "1984"-style dictatorship.
Then go for Finnish!
That link doesn't seem to work for me.
Mignon Fogarty ("Grammar Girl") is in favor of moving to singular "they", and it is perfectly acceptable in British English.
Zamenhof's reasons for making Esperanto strike a chord with me. A quote of a quote, from wikipedia:
Esperanto was created in the late 1870s and early 1880s by L. L. Zamenhof, a Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist from Biaystok, then part of the Russian Empire. According to Zamenhof, he created the language to foster harmony between people from different countries. His feelings and the situation in Biaystok may be gleaned from an extract from his letter to Nikolai Borovko:[16]
"The place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Biaystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an 'anguish for the world' in a child. Since at that time I thought that 'grown-ups' were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil."
—L. L. Zamenhof, in a letter to Nikolai Borovko, ca. 1895
Nope. The characters start with male or female radical, depending on, you know, gender.
The Chinese third person "ta", is gender neutral when spoken. When written, it can be written in feminine form, but doesn't have to be, even when referring to a female. Chinese names also don't make gender clear. In English, there are a few given names, like "Chris" or "Pat" that are gender neutral, but in Chinese most names are, especially if you only hear them spoken and aren't sure about the characters. When speaking Mandarin, a conversation about a third person can progress for quite a while, until someone asks "Is this person we are talking about a man or a woman?"
If somebody answers with "NodeJS", I'll personally install Windows on your Linux server.
Table-ized A.I.
At one time a number of constructed languages were created and got some speakers (including Esperanto). But relatively few people learn a language just for fun (yes, I know about Klingon and Elvish, but they will not be replacing English). Most people will only learn a language if they have a strong need to USE that language to communicate with some large group of people. Esperanto is actually much easier to learn than English; it's a reasonable constructed language. I spent a little time learning some of it, and I appreciate its clever approaches to making it easier to learn (e.g., the "mal-" prefix). The problem is that you can only speak with other Esperanto speakers in it. English is a mess of complications, like all natural languages. In some ways English is easier; in others it is harder. But when you learn English, you can talk to the other 1 billion people who can speak English as a first or second language. For most people, THAT is what makes English worth learning. Again, you normally learn a language specifically so you can communicate with others. Chinese actually has more speakers than English, but they are concentrated in China; worldwide, it's easier to find an English speaker than any other specific language. If you want an easier-to-learn language than standard English, you might consider an English-based controlled language like "Basic English" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... or the "Special English" used by Voice of America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ; these are more complicated than Esperanto, but you can talk with many more speakers. I can imagine "mostly compatible with existing English" could be a necessary criteria for "new" constructed language, if you need to create one at all.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Have you never heard of NewSpeak?
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.
No because 'they' is plural those leading to more ambiguity. If you want a neuter third person use 'It' as it is the neuter second person in English.
Is "you" singular or plural?
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I have taught myself limited Esperanto, and can tell you: It actually DOES have a lot of unnecessary exceptions.
So I would take the basic ideas of :
Keep:
* the correlatives -- in fact, make it COMPLETE (i tiam for "now", rather than "nun")
* the agglutination system -- in fact, use it MORE, and think through, carefully, the ontology of each word region -- make it as plane and ordinary as possible: this may take several decades from a team of collaborating resesarchers, but might result in a dramatically easier learning curve
* NO irregular verbs
Toss:
* the future tense (-os)
* the conditional tense (-us)
* basically, anything that comes from Latin
* EXCEPTIONS
* , or anything else that doesn't appear on a querty keyboard
* irregular nouns
* the Esperanto dictionary -- some overlap would be fine, but don't just import it (because we want a clean model of agglutinated nouns)
Add:
* limited vowel sounds -- constrain vowel sounds to Japanese's "a", "i", "u", "e", and "o" -- and NO syllable emphasis
Irrelevant:
* European vs. Asian basis -- I really don't think this is the obstacle people think it is.
If you're looking for something as an auxiliary language that allows people everywhere to communicate, and want to leverage what's already out there (English as a widely known lingua franca,) then it's already been tried http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English/ and there's even a version of the wikipedia in it. http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
The same sort of thing has been tried with Latin, Latino Sine Flexione (Latin without inflexions, since the main PITA with Latin was learning all the inflexions of 5 Declensions of nouns with 5 cases, 3 genders, singular and plural, 4 conjugations of verbs, not counting deponent and semi-deponent, then there's all the pronouns....) Latin is what they call an inflected language. Whatever you do, DON'T create one of those.
If you want something different from the Indo-European style of languages, I was stationed in Japan for a couple of years and, while I never got good at it, and at first it seemed really weird, I eventually came to feel that Japanese grammatical structure is rather neat, so you might take a look at that. I've read about ergative languages. Modern English has picked some ergative features. I think employee from the verb employ is supposed to be an example. If I were designing a language, I think I'd want to have that.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Of course, it is a funny quote, but it almost certainly never happened.
Her history is actually kind of interesting. Her husband was previously governor of Texas but was convicted of a number of charges. Despite this, she able to overcome this and win the governorship defeating the Republican opponent in a landslide in the 1924 election.
Policywise, perhaps the most interesting thing was that she issued thousands of pardons to reduce prison overcrowding. Mostly those convicted for violation of prohibition laws.
Who cares? Embrace your inner redneck and use y'all and all y'all
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Take out the ambiguities of linguistics and you need to remove the ability for it to evolve. The perfect language you seek is math. The issue is the limit of what it can honestly convey.
Look at Esperanto and the wide adoption it has amassed over the last 50 years. Follow their successfukl formula and you should have something less universal than pig latin. With universal translators, the need of a universal language is falling out of necessity more rapidly than adopting a new one for the world will be able to outpace.
Q: What would a language need to have to be able to replace English?
A: English. It would have to have English.
Winged Power Photography
Create an alphabet that mimics each phoneme that is also simple to reproduce using seven segment displays (as a guideline).
Create a structure for nomenclature based on two things:
1. Analysis of commonality of common usage (example: words for mother/father vs duodenum)
2. Analysis of nomenclature structure: If it's a noun, how does it relate to other nouns and what it describes? Is there logic to the method of description?
Build a model of the language and test it using voice recognition. The higher the level of understanding/comprehensibility the better.
Put it out there and watch as the public completely ignores it.
*** Don't be dull.***
Replace English you will. Confused you then will become.
Have gnu, will travel.
Want your language to become the next lingua franca? The first thing you need is a time machine. You have to go back in time and find some culture that is going to become extremely influential and somehow get them to adopt your language.
Features of grammar, spelling, etc. are irrelevant. There can be no better proof than the current widespread dominance of English.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
On the bright side, English is a GREAT language for puns due to having a large number of homophones!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Widely Employed by a brutal Imperialist power as it cuts a swathe across the world.
So there I was, scribbling down some notes off the PC screen by hand, when I reached for the keyboard and Ctrl-S'd.
No because 'they' is plural those leading to more ambiguity. If you want a neuter third person use 'It' as it is the neuter second person in English.
Is "you" singular or plural?
Modern usage 'you' is both singular and plural, but historically 'you' was plural second person and 'thou' was singular second person pronoun.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
No because 'they' is plural those leading to more ambiguity. If you want a neuter third person use 'It' as it is the neuter second person in English.
Seems to me that using "it" is going to cause more ambiguity and confusion because people won't be expecting you to use it to refer to a person. And it sounds rude.
"This/that/the person" seems to work nicely enough, doesn't?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
1) No irregular verb conjugations. Period. None.
2) No irregular pronunciations. All words should be pronounceable by rules dependent solely on spelling.
3) Severely limited number of phonemes. You just don't need a huge number of them. Certainly less than English has, and much less than the worst offenders have.
4) No accented characters. They are completely unnecessary.
5) No meaning dependent on intonation.
5) Complete absence of phonemes that require lingual or other extremely difficult to master gymnastics. Nothing like the horror of the trilled R in many/most languages, or the ch sound in German.
What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English?
English
To misquote Tony Hoare: I don't know what the language of the future will look like, but I know it will be called English.
This sign language developed by orphans in Nicaragua my be relevant.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's going to need words that mean multiple things and multiple words to say the same thing or we won't be able to tell such great jokes and poetry.
We are unable to convince citizens in the USA to convert from imperial to metric measurements, despite the numerous benefits including easier conversion, scalability, etc. If you cannot convince a populace that it's easier to divide by 10 than 12, then there is little hope you can convince them to switch languages so they can avoid using irregular verbs.
As Miriam Ferguson, first female governor of Texas, said, "If the King's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for the children of Texas!"
You're joking, of course, but the King James Bible can be read with pleasure after 400 years.
If you have ever tried to slog your way through one of Project Guttenberg's impenetrable nineteeth century translations of classical works, you how extraordinary an achievement that is.
I've seen Europeans pick it up in less, although they were extremely bright people and were "helped" by having English speakers constantly correct them. In general, if forced to use a specific language for conversation, you should be able to pick it up in about 2 years and be fluent enough in conversational use to be understood. It helps if you already know a language that comes from common roots (e.g. Latin). The biggest problem is moving to a language that contains phonemes your ear isn't trained to hear and you mouth isn't trained to generate.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
That's very true. Thanks for the input
More like 14 years - most things that are targeted for general adult audiences (other than things written in legalese) is written for an 8th-grade (age 14 or so) reading level.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Right,. English combines the melody of German pronunciation and the ease of French grammar with the simplicity of Latin logic. A beautiful language, indeed.
Exactly so.
English can be a beautiful language when used by a master or a wise fool. It can equally be a terrible language when used by a proclaimed master or a person who thinks himself wise.
English will be replaced like Latin was. It will just take a while. The elite just stopped learning Latin, for the most part, a few decades ago. They existed side-by-side for a long time.
FYI: My native language is English, and I have studied Spanish, French, and am currently studying Japanese.
As already mentioned, no irregular verbs
No verb conjugation
Japanese has the concept of particles, which is brilliant, and can solve a great many problems that are present in most natural languages
The problems with Japanese (being a natural language, it has problems like any other) could be solved by more extensive use of particles. Verb conjugation particles could be added; counters could be replaced by a counter particle, etc. Verb particles could also let you put the verb anywhere in the sentence you want, making for a very flexible language. Particles for various levels of politeness could make that very easy for those societies where that is a thing.
re: sounds
I would evaluate the major languages of the world and see if there is a sizable enough set of sounds they have in common that would be sufficient for the new language. One of the problems learners of second languages have is their new language often has sounds that simply do not exist in their native language. If you don't start learning your new language before puberty, the chances of you being able to make native-level sounds in your target language (when those sounds don't exist in your native language) become very unlikely. Some people are able to, but most are not, especially if they don't have the opportunity to immerse themselves in that language every day, which will never happen in a new constructed language.
re: writing
I'm learning Japanese, and the no spaces between words is VERY difficult to adapt to. I would recommend against no spaces. :)
Logographs like Chinese characters (which are also used in Japanese) are VERY efficient for a native language (and I can read those far faster than the Japanese words which do not use them), but learning them is a total pain in the ass, and takes far longer than I would think a good idea for a secondary, universal language. For this reason, I would use an alphabet system that is already in widespread use, and well-understood by more people than any other - the Latin character set used by English and the Romanesque/Romance languages. I would avoid the use of diacritical marks, if possible, due to being harder to type.
There are a lot of proponents that will tell you that you should learn the Dvorak keyboard. Why don't people learn it? Doing so is a big investment, without assurance of a big payoff. In fact, it's been shown that Dvorak is only marginally better than Qwerty. The theory is (and it's questionable) that Dvorak leads to faster typing because it's carefully optimized to speed typing. Qwerty isn't much worse than optimal because it's random, and random asymptotically approaches optimal in many cases. Consider random vs. LRU cache replacement policies. Also, the main reason people believe Dvorak is better is not because it's been shown to be the case objectively but because people have believed the marketing materials that came from the inventors of the Dvorak keyboard layout.
Ok, so going back to this investment idea, you have a choice between English, which sucks to learn but half the world knows, and some new language you just invented that nobody knows but which MAY (but you don't have proof) be easier to learn. Where are you going to spend your energy? Marginally higher learning effort with a clearly huge payoff or a marginally lower learning effort but a huge risk that you'll never find another speaker of the language?
I'm a conlang enthusiast. I've invented a few myself. But I did it as a means to tinker with ideas, explore, and learn about language. I never had any expectation that people would use them with any regularity. Actually, two of them I named "Ferengi" and "Cardassian," so you can see that it was driven in part by my interest in science fiction, which is FICTION.
So, invent your new language. Talk to people on the internet about it who are also interested in conlangs. It's a fun hobby. But be realistic about it. Most people don't give a crap about learning ANY second language (especially in the US, while elsewhere people get multiple languages because people are forced by circumstances or live in multilingual communities), and they're certainly not interested in languages for their own sake. This is why "free and open source software" is hard for politicians to grasp as being of any value (at least on an ethical level) because most people don't get it and really just don't care.
BTW, some others here have made some good points about irregularity and redundancy. Redundancy is vital to a language. We need it to maintain a high signal to noise ratio. If you eliminate the irregularities (which have been positively selected for because of their redundancy value), then you'll make the language perhaps easier to learn but harder to understand. Esperanto's regularity is not an asset, and native speakers have naturally introduced new irregularities to compensate for the drawbacks. So your ideal universal language would in fact be intentionally harder to learn so that as to minimize ambiguity in communication.
Just like the metric system, this would be simpler than what we use now. And it will never happen.
Afrikaans is the youngest official language in the world, granted, it shares a lot of similarity to dutch, it has evolved quite a bit and still is. It does have a few nice things, if you spell a word in Afrikaans you'll get it right most of the times by just spelling it as you say it. No silent sounds, no weird rules. It does have some eccentricities, double negatives ie. "Hy kan nie swem nie." "He can not swim not". I must admit than I am a first language Afrikaans speaker so I might be biased. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
There are candidate languages already like Esperanto as has been pointed out. I think what you're looking for is a path to get from here to there. Artificially, I think you'd want education, books, newscasters etc. to start deliberately moving what we see as "proper" language towards the new language. Start introducing borrow-words that are easy to infer meaning of from usage. Begin tweaking word order in subtle ways towards the target. Let people pick it up over generations. Over the course of 100, 200 years with concerted effort the entire planet could be speaking one language. Maybe shorter. But the coordination it would take would be unprecedented.
In constructing a language easily learnable by the most people, you'd want to leverage as much existing knowledge as possible. Rather than starting from scratch, it would be more efficient to revise and regularize a popular existing language so that its speakers could adapt and new users could learn easily. The two obvious candidate languages are English and Spanish. Chinese and Arabic are ruled out by the difficulty of learning. The argument for English is that it is the largest language for first and second use and is a popular foreign language for students. The argument for Spanish is that it has more regular spelling and grammar and is easier to learn. If you chose English, you would want to regularize its grammar and spelling while attempting to retain as much vocabulary as possible and bring in useful new words from other languages. Fortunately these changes are already happening through evolution. It’s possible to imagine an official regularization authorized by English-speaking governments and performed by scholars, but the required political steps are unlikely. We’re probably stuck with evolution, which is not all bad.
I strongly recommend Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. It will shed a lot of light on the nature of language and help you understand that it cannot be constructed by fiat.
To summarize Pinker's thesis succinctly, language is created by each individual by instinct and at a young age . There are a couple of fascinating examples from recent history that demonstrate the process. One is in a deaf community in Nicaragua: after the Sandinista war when a semblence of calm returned to the country, the authorities were able to create schools for the deaf. Initially, the students were teenagers collected from various villages. They had lived in isolation with their families and no education in sign language. "Instinctively", each had created their own sign language. When they were brought together, the students merged their separate sign languages into a pidgin. The interesting bit is what happened when younger children subsequently joined the school: since their language instinct was still creating language, they were able to adapt the nascent pidgin into a more more coherent sign language complete with grammatical rules; the result was much more expressive and coherent - and completely independent of other established sign languages. Today, it is a recognized sign language.
It is constructive to think of language as something created by each individual; everybody has their own language and they evolve separately and over time, driven by social imperatives.
On the topic of redundancy: it is a necessary part of all languages. It would be a huge mistake to try to design a more efficientlanguage. This is in part because languages must be able to evolve. They are never static.
Regarding rules: one of the reasons that English has been so successful is its forgiving nature and its willingness to absorb shamelessly from other languages.
In short, I think you will find it more enjoyable and fruitful to channel your interest into other aspects of language. Over the past decade there have been huge advances in language recognition and translation; you might like to start with those fields since they are current, topical, and valuable.
You might also wish to check out another one of my favourite books: The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson. Both of these books are targeted at the layman and are very enjoyable reads.
We should get rid of him, his, and she, and just go with he, her, hers.
Why ?
English just works.
There's no such thing as an Universal Language. That language would not be able to capture the people's culture and beliefs. English, however, has been able to, and despite all variants, be understood worldwide. Same does not happen with Spanish, Portuguese, Slavic languages, and Chinese.
If it ain't broken, why fix it (or replace it) ?
"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.
"The French don't have a word for Entrepreneur." -- Village Idiot
A very wonderful characteristic of ancient languages such as Aramaic is their words intuitively sound like their meaning. This is something we have pretty much lost in the English language. This is known as Onomatopoeia.
For example, the word "Odin" to me seems to have good Onomatopoeia, it sounds like the name of someone important. However, his wife's name "Frigg" does not have good Onomatopoeia - in my opinion it doesn't sound queenly or goddess-like.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
Don't re-invent the wheel instead Refactor mercilessly
I would think as a philosopher you would understand the need for the human mind to create (which seems to be most of your argument, actually, that people create changes to languages very naturally).
So, if this person wants a hobby of messing around with language and seeing where that takes him, why not? Why not follow his passions, even if not for the rest of his life, just for a year or so to learn more about languages and history of them? I'm very disappointed to see so much negativity amounting to an academic subject; why not encouragement? It's one thing to say "don't expect to create the world's main language in the year 2050", but why such negativity about it?
After all, what use is anything we all do? Sports, mathematics, science, philosophy, arts. Culture changes on a whim, sometimes culture never accepts your work, and in a few billion years when the sun explodes perhaps all evidence of human kind will be extinguished anyway.
So why the hell can't a man dream? Why can't we encourage him? Even if his language never gets used by anyone ever, the process of creating will forever alter the submitter's brain in a way that lets him see the world (or at least, subset of the world) differently than before, and that's something I encourage.
I guess my tl;dr is : if he enjoys it, how is it a problem to want to tinker?
If you would like an example of the utter failure of humans attempting to create artificial languages then go look up Esperanto.
I looked into Esperanto and find it a very fun language. As you state, at least as far as I understand your argument, language needs to be adaptable. Esperanto is quite adaptable, as it only has a few essential rules. Subject-verb-object order can be strewn about without loss of understanding, adjectives and nouns can be built up using interesting prefixes and suffixes to get across a point (being only a beginner, I had already noticed there were several concepts I could express in a couple of words that take a sentence or two in English -- I imagine with better vocabulary and maturity one could communicate some very interesting concepts succinctly that perhaps cannot be done at all in English). Really it is a fantastic language, one that has indeed grown since it was first developed over 100 years ago, but the developments have kept in line with that minimalist set of rules.
If nothing else, just the consistent sounds of letters makes me happy. It drives me nuts trying to spell in English. If we had the consistency of Esperanto, it would be much easier to communicate in written word without confusion (or at least, easier to become proficient at writing).
I would encourage the original submitter to look into Esperanto and the design decisions of the language. It really did well in the early 1900s. I do not offhand have the link, but I believe I have read before that it likely would have become a more world-wide trading language (it was growing very fast) if it had not been the world wars that catapulted the U.S. into world power status and therefore English as a major language (prior to then, French had been the dominant international language -- in fact, I believe it said the U.S. supported the switch from French to Esperanto until it looked likely that English would take over). Pretty decent for a constructed language, and would probably be fascinating research for a person interested in languages. I admit my own interest but never the time to fully verify (isn't that everyone's problem though?)
Slashdot has finally decended into Kafka land, the comment section having been there for some time. English wasn't made. No comparable entity has ever been made. Man was created a speaker of language which facilitated expression of his soul. And Man made a tower which resulted in several languages which evolved into many, many more, or all languages just evolved along with the speakers from nothingness over a looooong amount of time. Depending on your religion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
well-known, widely recognized, drawn from basically every other language so everybody has something to like. and I already know it, so there!
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'd urge you to read that peace by Arika Okrent. Apart from reading stories about miscelenious freaks, geniuses and villains you will understanding why you will most likely fail. According to Okrent there are 2 main reasons why folks invent language .. well I'll not spoil it :)
1- remove ambiguity and find universal tool for describing everything (Lojban being last interesting attempt)
2- easy-to learn communications tool (Esperanto, Ido and similar)
3- pure fun (creations by Tolkien and authors of Star Wars (sorry do not remember language names anymore)
And you will fail in any of those categories because
A good ale should be consumed at room temperature. That is, 10-14C : typical room temperature in the early evening in a medieval roadside inn.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Solresol has some fun features.
Also dump verb conjugation.
Alfred Korzybski made some important observations I think.
And finally, to replace English your language will need to become the official language of a World-spanning empire like those of Britain and America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Among others the US military took an interest in new or efficient languages back in the 1960 era. Colleges sometimes were used to try out various language experiments without the transparency the English majors should have had as they thought it was simply an educational project. For example try to create a working language with 50 words leaps to mind. If you could get a language with fifty words up and running and the encrypt the language it would offer a very secure language with a built in resistance to being cracked. Keep in mind that you could also create the fifty words yourself. Others might be asked to create languages with 100 or 200 new words. Keep in mind that there are people among us who have a fifty word vocabulary and they somehow get through life. One of the easy things to observe is the slow and difficult flow of formal languages such as mathematics, chemistry or physics. Imagine if Einstein had delivered the E = MC squared equation without telling anyone what E, M or C represented. How many years would have passed before someone understood that equation at all? As far as the beauty and utility of English is concerned it may very well be the best language ever conceived. Some would argue that French would be better and many realize that German is highly suited for science and engineering. The one negative for English is for new learners coming from non English speaking nations. Yet English continues to spread around the world as more and more nations find it essential to do business.
No we don't. What we need is to abolish identity politics and tell the crybabies who bitch over pronoun use to get lives.
English has that. "They". "Where did they go last night?" is ambiguous between plural and singular, both gender neutral.
Technically "he" is gender neutral, as it is the proper singular form when talking about an unknown-gender person. "What gender is he?" is the proper pronoun for asking the sex of a baby. Though it's not used as much because the gender-neutral pronoun is also the male-gender pronoun. Much like "bark" can mean tree covering or dog sound. But "he" is refused as the proper gender-neutral pronoun because people object to the "unrelated" second definition as non-gender neutral.
Learn to love Alaska
The English language has so much character and personality, largely because of its "flaws". I wouldn't want it any other way. Most every language that people have used has character as a result of being used by humans and evolving over many, many years.
"It drove it's car to the store last night, and bought some oranges which it ate on the way home."
No information is lost with "it" but "they" sounds much better, which is the definition of language, not whether it has the most information.
Learn to love Alaska
it is not neuter. It is impersonal. It is used to refer to things that have no gender, not for when there is a gender, but it is unknown. "They" is much more accurate. It confers the personal state, and doesn't lose anything.
Learn to love Alaska
Money talks. Counting the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, fully 30% of the world's GDP is produced in English. Mandarin (70% of Chinese, China produces 13% of the world's GDP) is a distant second at about 9%. We live in an interconnected world, and it speaks English.
I tried learning esperanto, several years ago, from the argument of efficiency.
- esperanto is supposed to be 4x easier to learn than most other languages
- therefore, if I want to communicate with any single person who doesn't already speak english, it would be only 1/2 the effort, for BOTH of us to learn esperanto, than for either of us, to learn the other's native language.
---
Mi komencis lerni esperanton, antaux multaj jaroj, de la motivo de facileco.
Esperanto estas kvar-obla pli facile konigi, ol multaj alia lingvoj.
Do, se mi volas korespondi kun tiu kiu ne kompreneblas anglo, estus nur du-ona laboro, por ni ambauxe lernus esperanton, ol oni de ni lernus la alia pralingvon.
---
But in practice, everyone I've ever met, either has english 10x better than my esperanto, or knows absolutely zero esperanto whatsoever, and "ne habla espanol" is the only phrase I've needed.
---
Sed en vero, cxiu kiu ke mi rekontis, havas anglo dek-obla bona ol mia esperanto, aux konas nulo esperanto, kaj "ne habla espanol" estas la nur vortoj mia bezonis.
Dunno what's wrong with the link.
The relevant part is:
...I often use the apparently plural pronouns "they," "them," and "their" after singular antecedents--such as, "You must approach someone for a job and tell them what you can do." This sounds strange and even wrong to those who know English well. To be sure, we all know there is another pronoun--"you"--that may be either singular or plural, but few of us realize that the pronouns "they," "them," and "their" were also once treated as both plural and singular in the English language. This changed, at a time in English history when agreement in number became more important than agreement as to sexual gender. Today, however, our priorities have shifted once again. Now, the distinguishing of sexual gender is considered by many to be more important than agreement in number.
The common artifices used for this new priority, such as "s/he," or "he and she," are--to my mind--tortured and inelegant. Casey Miller and Kate Swift, in their classic, "The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing," agree, and argue that it is time to bring back the earlier usage of "they," "them," and "their" as both singular and plural--just as "you" is/are. They further argue that this return to the earlier historical usage has already become quite common out on the street--witness a typical sign by the ocean that reads, "Anyone using this beach after 5 p.m. does so at their own risk....
Actually it is plural.
The singular form is no longer used and is "thou".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Thanks! I hope this usage comes back in American English.
If, for some reason, you don't like Esperanto, you can check Lingwa de planeta. The designing committee has already made the main decisions, but you can find something to contribute or to avoid.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Speak for thyself, thou insensitive clod!
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Not being Jewish, but coming from a religion with very strange rules, I like this idea. Picking a name before the baby was born was a sure-fire way to piss off god and get a dead baby; insults come from there. And then there is always the southern "Bless your heart."
Sorry, I just don't see a constructed language taking over, unless you count a universal translator. The only way I see English going out is if the US or an English-speaking country goes Nazi and English gets shunned (similar to what happened to German) for whatever the big good-guy country speaks.
Wait 'til "Canadian Ted" Cruz becomes your president, overthrows the Castro regime and sends a twentieth of the island's population to the mainland as language teachers.
2017: USA officially bilingual in English and Spanish - thence a compulsory subject! :)
Consider how the language has changed from Shakespearean times to now. It's taken about 400 years for the language to evolve to the point where it's practically a different language altogether. The change happened slowly in every aspect including constructs and vocabulary. I'd imagine instead of creating a language from scratch, adjusting English by slowly introducing artificial constructs and vocabulary would be the way to go. Not sure if it will remain anything more than a niche dialect of English but it's worth a try.
$x = ($x * 10) % 10 >= 5 ? 1 + int $x : int $x
To respond seriously (heck, why not?), what a constructed language really needs is not particular grammatical or word-building features, but a ready-made collection of material, such as science books, engineering and medical textbooks, plays, novels, biographies, histories, etc. Plus have one of the larger versions of Wikipedia.
One thing that Zamenhof did right with Esperanto was to use it for translation thereby allowing him to trouble-shoot the language and confirm that it actually worked, and to create a body of language examples which is a necessity if people are going to learn it.
The weakness of English is the 500+ year divorce between the spoken and written languages. Though it does help that there are (essentially) only two versions of English spelling (correct spellings, and US spellings) even though English in Britain, South Africa, India, Australia, Barbados, Canada, etc. sound different enough to make a mess of any attempt at strictly phonetic spelling.
Who cares? Embrace your inner redneck and use y'all and all y'all
or where I live (native English region) we say 'yous' :)
That's just a stemmer.
Try this: http://search.cpan.org/~dconwa...
This seems to be pretty common in spoken English and even informal written English.
No, 'they' used to be plural but now it's indeterminate. Or plural. Or sometimes singular.
The point is that singular and plural aren't the only options.
Eliminate homophones and heteronyms. Strip back the synonyms. Make antonyms consistent. Remove homophenes that cause confusion for lipreaders.
Re-establish phonetic spelling. Nation and national, ration and rational should NOT have a different sound for their first syllable.
In short, undertake behaviour like Edward Scissorhands on this pile of faeces.
As many years as he’s walked on his feet, let him walk on his hands, and for the rest of the time he should crawl along on his ass.
The problem with curses like this is that they would fall flat to people who actually do walk like that, such as Jeanie Tomaini or Spencer West or Jennifer Bricker or Rose Siggins. See also videos about housekeeping and Red Riding Hood and Wrecking Ball Boy. And compare Mark 9:45 in the Christian Bible, where Jesus gives a tip to BIID sufferers: "If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off. It's better to enter everlasting life crippled than to have your two feet drag you to Gehenna."
He should be transformed into a chandelier, to hang by day and to burn by night.
Says the Beauty and the Beast fetishist: "I'm so turned on."
More at 120 Paths and Goals.
This is basically the famous "make the buildings first, then add the paths later" meme, as told by the architect Christopher Alexander.
A human language must comfortably accommodate the natural cognitive arcs of the human thought process. Ideally, it should fit habits of thought as comfortably as a hand fits a well oiled leather baseball glove, one that your forefather gave to his son (or your foremother gave to her daughter), stretching in an unbroken chain all the way back to human prehistory.
What we need, then, is a good proto conlang that we can throw into a cultural stew pot to steep for a thousand years, accommodating to the human mind however it will. If by then it still seems rough, throw it back into the pot for another thousand years.
The figure of merit, therefore, for a proto conlang is that it accommodates its future evolution gracefully, blooming like a rose quite unexpectedly, making everyone blush (2000 years from now) over how we ever got along without it.
Instead, what most people busy themselves inventing is a proto conlang bowling shoe, a neat (but sweaty) communal object which fits anyone who happens to drop by to drop some pins, with no possibly confusion about which foot goes into which shoe, or how the lacing pattern goes if one the laces should happen to break—pouring over in their righteous zeal the following menu (among others) to divine the one true ineluctable escape from all things arbitrary:
43 Different Ways To Lace Shoes
What English already does: Riding Boot Lacing
English knows from feet on the ground where the pressure goes.
What weedy conlingers tend to moot: Hidden Knot Lacing
Conglingers know from eyes in the face that irregular knots and loose ends of human cognition are better spoked than spoken.
For a little while I started designing a language tentatively called Lengwish, the idea of which was to be an interlanguage for the Americas, that would use English and Spanish, and French and Portuguese to a lesser extent, as vocabulary sources, with other languages used in cases when the available vocabulary from these languages doesn't work well enough to due ambiguity or other issues. (Why "for the Americas"? Simple, it's just that I've studied Spanish for five years and would like to learn French.) I planned four purposes for it to serve:
Lengwish is designed to be very software-friendly, so that automated tools can help you learn it, through underlining of errors, instant translations, and "syntax highlighting".
-not my original work-
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German (which was the other possibility). As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English."
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be> replaced with "f." This will make words like fotograf 20 per cent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, alwil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the fourth yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no> mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
46137
My ex is from Singapore, where they speak 'Singlish': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... The rhythm is different and the grammar is something like bits of Mandarin, loan words from Hokkien the most famous being kiasu: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K.... For example 'eat already?', 'don't want', it tends to sound a little harsh because it's very abbreviated.
I think this is probably the future of English, that is it will win and lose at the same time. However, for a while, most of these variations should be roughly comprehensible. It's also a reason to try and keep some kind of 'standard core' as a fallback. In Singapore, once they hear my Brit accent, they slow down and use fewer local words.
BTW Perl does suck, but the useful vacuum created is 'awesome', to quote the kids.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Says the white guy.
What I like about Romanian (my mother tongue), and I find really elegant, is that it has nearly the same writing as the pronunciation. We have 5 additional characters ,, and â,î which are the same sound but are different in writing. î is used at the beginning of the word and â inside.
Other than that you basically write the word as you hear it.
If you really want to though, don't bother including features from non-Indo-European families. China and parts of SE Asia speak tonal-analytic languages that are so fundamentally different from the rest of the world that you can't mix features. Afro-Asiatic languages (including Arabic and Hebrew) contain sounds not present in any others, whereas Polynesian languages have very, very few (12 letter alphabets).
Edsger Dijkstra - 1966
James Cameron director of Avatar, Aliens, Terminator, Titanic et al is a (perhaps mad) genius. He created an artificial language for Avatar. There is an interesting article of a discussion he had on this subject. He knows a lot about artificial languages and languages in general. The discussion covered what makes a language "live"; a pool of active users interacting in real life, ambiguity... (I think) he considers Klingon an active language but not Esperanto. See if you can find the article. It's worth while given your interest.
Pidgin is a language form that arise when many diverse workers are thrown together. Cajun is the form that arises amongst the children. Each has its own grammar that arises no matter what the mix of languages. Read about those before you try to invent your own. Computer languages are not the same as human languages although I attended a meeting of sysadmins on regular expressions and the discussion of examples sounded like s Gilbert and Sullivan song! :-)
Finally, an old language joke: there was an international meeting of academics where they all spoke a common language, Yiddish! :-)
100 000 to 2 000 000 speakers would disagree with you. Some/many schools use it (e.g. in China, Australia, the UK) as their 1st second language instruction because it's by far the easiest language to learn, which accelerates future language learning. If more schools/regions can be convinced of its scientifically-measured benefits to language learning, it could take off as purely a learning language. Google Translate even has it as one of its languages (and no, Klingon is not in that list).
True, it's not currently the international auxiliary language of choice, but it's definitely *an* international auxiliary language of choice:
- 32nd on the list of Wikipedias by article count (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias)
- stay for free in 90 countries with 1000+ hosts if you speak Esperanto (http://pasportaservo.org/)
- yearly world congress with thousands of attendees, and yearly youth world congress with hundreds of attendees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Congress_of_Esperanto)
I'm still hopeful...
Easy to invent a language, hard to invent a real and useful language. Language is tied to the structure of the brain and its speech, visual and motive centers. Learning a useful language involves touching, experiencing and moving. Unless the parties to a verbal exchange share these fundamental experiences, communication is ambiguous. That's why languages evolve slowly over time along with populations, and they stagnate in isolated communities.
There may be a hardwired language-based operating system in the human brain, something like "Snowcrash". Esperanto follows most of those rules. Klingon does not.
As an interesting tidbit, new words and expressions tend to be invented and spread primarily by young teen females. Youwzah!
I have been looking into an idea like this but I was thinking about reducing language to three letter words. Most languages use about 3,000 words to make usable language. My thought was take the shortest words from every language and reduce the language to the least words needed. French is an interesting language to look at as it uses less than a 1,000 words to be usable. Maybe a basic language with 600 words could be made workable.
Read David Braine's Language and Human Understanding: The Roots of Creativity in Speech and Thought[1]. Unless you think programming languages have anything to do with creativity and especially, in breaking wholes into parts (fun quotations of Bertrand Russell and Aristotle in the first two pages of de Koninck's "The Unity and Diversity of Natural Science"[2]), you need a whole different kind of language. The difference is between a structurally closed language which is 'dead' (Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look[3], 12; Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics[4], 79), and a structurally open language, which has that critical informality that allows one to explore new territory that the language was not 'designed' to address. Finally, from Jacques Ellul's The Humiliation of the Word[5]:
Anyone who tries to circumvent the above (eliminating all ambiguity everywhere) is doing violence to creativity and humanity.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Language...
[2] http://www.u.arizona.edu/~aver...
[3] http://www.amazon.com/Interpre...
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Interpre...
[5] http://www.amazon.com/The-Humi...
Only %1% can replace %1%.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
English being a de facto international language, as has been thoroughly pointed out, might be something to start with. Simplified Technical English, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S..., is used by various government agencies to remove some of the ambiguity of English. While it and similar efforts may or may not be sufficient as an everyday language, it is an idea to consider.
You should also include these sites as a source of ideas and to see some of what has already been done, http://conlang.org/, http://omniglot.com/
"Says the white guy" is not actually a valid counter-argument. You do realize that, correct?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein