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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?
no irregular verbs, we could call it, let's say ^'Esperanto.
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.
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!"
Lojban would be a good place to start.
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.
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.
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)
If somebody answers with "NodeJS", I'll personally install Windows on your Linux server.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
"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.