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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?
But Perl is still easier to learn and with a significantly larger user base.
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!"
Forget Esperanto. There's a new language already being developed for the masses. Newspeak.
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.
I hear it is double plus good!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
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.
For fun. Why not humor the submitter?
To the submitter: Okay, I'd start with saying, "don't reinvent the wheel more than necessary". So for example, consider IPA as the writing system. Or if you want to invent a writing system to be optimized by a given set of rules, at least consider using the IPA forms as your basis.
Consider who your target learners are. Is it the whole world? Any particular weighting that you want to apply with certain native tongues? Check and see what phonemes and linguistic rules are common in the languages by whatever weighting you want to apply.
When doing your weighting to decide what phonemes to use, don't only consider "whether the language has it", but also "how easy is ot for people to learn who don't know how to do it. For example, among the sounds in Icelandic that aren't in English there's the "ll" lateral plosive and the alveolar trill "r". The "ll" is nothing like anything found in English, yet given a simple description most English speakers can pronounce it perfectly. On the other hand, some people struggle for years and never manage to learn a trilled "r".
That is, all to say, an ideal language takes research not just on what phonemes people use, but what phonemes are easy to learn.
Then there's one of the biggest issues, which is intelligibility. You want the most diverse array of phonemes possible without being likely for the listener to confuse two similar ones together. Again, research would pay off big here.
The exact same rule applies to vocabulary / grammar, and this is unfortunately one thing that constructed languages usually suffer from relative to evolved ones. If English had the word "dog" like it is now, but the word for cat was "dawg" with only a slightly different pronunciation, these two common everyday words would lead to a lot of confusion. This normally gets steadily selected out either with pronunciation shifts or the adoption of alternative words.
If you really want to get into it, you could write an evolutionary algorithm to optimize your vocabulary and/or grammar to maximize the auditory difference between different common words and word phrases. The goal is to keep that signal to noise ratio up to maximize understandability. :)
One I'd recommend is something that Icelandic does: having a simple, universal stress rule. That is, the first syllable of every word, and the first part of every compound with at least one syllable between them, is stressed. And when I say stressed I mean literally double the length of the others. What this does is make it so that even a beginner can tell exactly where one word or part of word ends and the next begins.
A couple things that English speakers often attack about other languages you should think about instead of just readily dismissing them:
1. Genders. It seems archaic, right? But there are practical reasons. For example, consider the sentence:
"I used a backhoe to drag a box but it was ruined in the process"
Which is ruined, the backhoe or the box? In Icelandic it's obvious because a backhoe is feminine but a box is masculine. Sorting words into differing groups adds some clarity to sentences. It comes at the cost of increasing the amount of knowledge needed for each word (this is usually done by breaking words into patterns, such as "if it ends with these letters, it's in this group"). You could, for example, have such a grouping (calling it something other than gender), but have the rules for determining whether a thing is in a particular group be really obvious. Taking a direct from English example, if we wanted many groups, one for each last phoneme in the word, the above could become:
"I used a backhoe to drag a box but itoe was ruined in the process."
Now it's obvious to a "native" speaker of our constructed language that the particular word for "it" refers to the backhoe.
The other thing English speakers often complain about is declensions. But once again, they're another example of giving additional info
Trump's plan to get rid of Mueller appears to be 'be so guilty of so many things that Mueller works himself to death.'
Right,. English combines the melody of German pronunciation and the ease of French grammar with the simplicity of Latin logic. A beautiful language, indeed.