Ask Slashdot: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English? 626
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?
Easy grammar (Score:5, Informative)
no irregular verbs, we could call it, let's say ^'Esperanto.
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Re:Easy grammar (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget Esperanto. There's a new language already being developed for the masses. Newspeak.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Easy grammar (Score:4, Informative)
Please report to Room 101 for training. The correct spelling is doubleplusgood
This is why they reinvent the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This is why they reinvent the wheel (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is why they reinvent the wheel (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Often times, you can't appreciate the existing solution until after you tried to make something better. An awful lot of the people who love Perl love it even more after they spent some time working with Python, Ruby, PHP, or for that matter Java, C#, or Haskell. If a kid - or an old fogey like us - wants to try to make the next Perl? Go for it.
2. Some times, you genuinely do make something that's an evolutionary step forward. What if, 30 years ago, people thinking like you convinced Larry Wall that C + sed + awk was good enough? It's rare, but it does happen.
3. The whole process of trying to understand what came before and trying to do better is an excellent learning method. If I write my own text editor, even if it's awful I'll probably become a better developer.
Now, basing a business model on trumping what came before is like gambling only more stupid. I wouldn't try to get rich inventing the next Perl, the next Facebook, or the next Docker. But trying to make one for fun.... why not?
Re:This is why they reinvent the wheel (Score:5, Interesting)
"Perl is just horrifically bad? Then let's invent Python "
Perl was first released in the late 80's and was stable is its version 5 form mostly by 1993-1994. Python was also started in the late 80s. So the languages are from the same time; Python was not built as a reaction to Perl or an attempt to make a better Perl. People tend to think that because Perl had an unnatural popularity surge in the early days of the internet since some of the basic tools for stuff like CGI programming and database interfacing hit Perl very early and everyone just used that. Python caught on in popularity later. So people just assume it came later.
Ruby you could sorta say that. Its from the mid 1990s and intentionally looked at Perl5 and decided to take a spin on it that was supposed to be more simple. Like they dropped the sigils and make everything an object (probably was looking at a mix of Perl and Smalltalk, which was also popular at the time for a certain group).
I
Re:Easy grammar (Score:4, Insightful)
A human-spoken language designed from scratch to be simple and easy to learn? It's been done, Esperanto.
Esparanto has been around for more than a century, and has failed to catch on. Like it or not, English is the standard international language. So fixing the worst problems with English makes more sense than trying to start something from scratch. We could change the spelling of words like "through" and "tough" to "thru" and "tuff". Get rid of some of the irregular verbs and irregular plurals.
Mark Twain made a very reasonable proposal [i18nguy.com], that could be a framework for reform.
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He didn't say native speakers. He said international language.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty sure "standard international language" does not mean "most native speakers". English IS the standard international language. Ie. when two people of any two differing languages get together, what language do they speak most often ?
Also, business.
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As others have noted, the number of native speakers of a language is different than the number of people that can speak a language, and that's where English pulls ahead.
The most widely known language in the world is "broken English" - there are a lot of native English speakers, a ton more who know it very well as a second language with a good degree of proficiency, and then a huge, huge, huge number more that can get by in English passably well.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:5, Informative)
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
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Re:Easy grammar (Score:5, Interesting)
But that's because people are fucked up - and the language evolves to fill our needs of being weird and wonderful.
I think what's proposed here is the same ilk as that of Swatch Time. Someone thought its better if we have a dull but efficient system that reflects how computers want to work and not how people do. They forget that we're not (yet) servants of the machines and we like the craziness, the nuances allow us to express our creativity.
Now, I'm off for a pint, you can go and enjoy your 0.568261 litres of fizzy beverage while you sit in the corner with your po-faced mates and discuss base 10 maths :-)
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Now, I'm off for a pint, you can go and enjoy your 0.568261 litres of fizzy beverage while you sit in the corner with your po-faced mates and discuss base 10 maths :-)
I invoke the insensitive clod clause.
Here we go off for a litre -- you can go and enjoy your 2.11338 pints of fizzy beverage (and btw, was that Imperial or US pints?). Also, discuss base 10 maths if you must, but base 16 may be more interesting and useful around here.
Also, this way we get more beer.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:4, Interesting)
I've been told by a lot of foreign people that they like the way English sounds, in spite of it being hard to learn.
But its difficulty might be one of its strengths. The English language is somewhat remarkable at incorporating new words or foreign words into the mainstream vocabulary rather easily.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:5, Funny)
Right,. English combines the melody of German pronunciation and the ease of French grammar with the simplicity of Latin logic. A beautiful language, indeed.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:4, Informative)
I'm glad I'm a native speaker because learning it as a second language would surely give anyone a headache.
English is extremely easy to learn for Germans, Dutch, Danish (and other Skandinavians, except Fins) and even french ... why? Because it is a conglomerate of those languages. For plenty of "english" words you even have a germanic root AND a second latin variation, most of the time they can be used interchangeable.
A simple list, left german, right english, and at many rows you could add danish or dutch (I don't speak both but can read them)
Wind - wind
Wasser - water
Stein - stone
Fisch - fish
Rabe - Raven
Kraehe - Crow
Grass - grass
Haus - house
Stock - Stick
Von - From
unter - under
Wolf - wolf
Fuchs - fox
Strom(as in river) - stream
die See (not der See, that is a lake) - sea
Auge - eye
Ohr - ear
Arm - arm
Herz - heart
Damm - dam
If you know about the v to b and t to z "soundshifts" you can recognize plenty of words by context. If you know a bit of latin/french AND another germanic language you can learn english in a month ... unfortunately the school systems insist on teaching "grammar" and "spelling" first instead of reading and speaking.
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I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't niche.
A good friend of mine attended a lot of Esparanto conventions. He met lots of Japanese people in the process.... but it's just one anecdote.
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The problem with Esperanto is that it isn't easy to learn. It's easier than French and English, but for anyone who grew up in Asia for example it's actually quite difficult because of it's European bias. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
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The problem with Esperanto is that it isn't easy to learn. It's easier than French and English, but for anyone who grew up in Asia for example it's actually quite difficult because of it's European bias. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... [wikipedia.org]
Lojban tries to solve this problem. I don't know how well they succeed.
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Is it possible to not be biased toward a region's patterns and style? For example, it could be made tone-based to be more compact, like many Asian languages, but Europeans would be more likely to be tripped up by tones.
Ranto (Score:2)
Esperanto is plenty irregular according to Justin B. Rye's "Ranto" [demon.co.uk].
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That rant is a pretty fair (if harsh) criticism of Esperanto, but it doesn't really point out any irregularities in Esperanto itself. Many of the flaws it points out are actually cases where the language is too regular, where it mandates something everywhere instead of making it optional where possible.
The only grammatical irregularity in Esperanto I can think of is how -A affix can be used for female names, instead of the -O used for all other nouns. Other than that, everything is regular and self-consiste
Re: Easy grammar (Score:4, Insightful)
Irregular verbs exist for a reason... they're the verbs that get used the most, and the irregularities are how people either eliminate redundancy or add additional shades of meaning that most normal verbs can live without.
Ditto, for "silent letters" in English. They're how we disambiguate homonyms (ex: to/too/two).
If English had official "tones" like Mandarin, we could distinguish between meanings of "fuck" used as a verb in writing, to visually indicate things like sarcasm. Actually, in a way, English *does* have an informal "system" of indicating the equivalent of _tones_ -- quotation marks, underlines, italics, boldface, and wikitext markup.
Any conlang that *really* gets used by **real** people as their "real" language will quickly mutate and become as irregular as English or Spanish.
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The thing about English, that most people don't quite realize, is that English is a constructed language, based on a whole bunch of other languages. Gaelic, German, Latin, Scandinavian .... and a smidgeon of others as well.
It is why you can say things like "away put your weapon" (Irregular grammer) but still be understood perfectly.
Yes, it is decidedly European in nature, and there is a bias (if you call it that). But bias is not a bad thing. It is difficult to learn and even more so to master.
Re: Easy grammar (Score:4, Insightful)
English is NOT a "constructed" language, because that implies intent.
English is more of a trash heap of things we borrowed from all those other languages that over time people have grafted rules onto to try to decode and standardize. :-P
But (and I say this in the nicest possible way because it's my native language), English is a dog's breakfast of bits and pieces string together with loose rules and exceptions which require you to know from which language we stole the various bits and pieces.
The more I know about the English language, and the longer I know people whose native language isn't English ... it's harder to justify some of the "rules" as being anything other than arbitrary, and I've discovered that the ways that non-native speakers "mangle" English actually often leads to a better expression for the context, but which is grammatically incorrect.
Because it's hard to rely on knowing this came from French, and this came from German to know how you treat the words.
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Easy spelling!
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but 44 phonemes. I'd start there. Expand the alphabet to 44 letters; one letter per sound and double le(tt)ers are not necessary. Thus no ambiguity on how to spell a word; you spell it like it sounds. It would be like a metric system for speaking/spelling...in that it makes sense. So "two" becomes "tu" or maybe just "2" (wi yuz tu karakters wen won wil du?), "too" becomes "also", and "to" becomes anything...maybe "tob".
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If English had official "tones" like Mandarin, we could distinguish between meanings of "fuck" used as a verb in writing, to visually indicate things like sarcasm. Actually, in a way, English *does* have an informal "system" of indicating the equivalent of _tones_ -- quotation marks, underlines, italics, boldface, and wikitext markup.
This is not what tones are like in Mandarin. Different tones change the meaning of individual words completely.
ma1 (high, level tone): mother
ma2 (rising tone): hemp
ma3 (falling then rising tone): horse
ma4 (falling tone): to curse
ma5 (no tone): makes a sentence into a question, a bit like adding "right?" (rising tone?) to a sentence in English.
Sarcasm in English applies to the whole sentence, and the tone is applied to the whole sentence, not the individual words.
(Also, a homonym is a word like "minute" (ti
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no irregular verbs, we could call it, let's say ^'Esperanto.
Or a ton of irregular verbs, we would call it French.
Re:Easy grammar (Score:4, Interesting)
That's a common and logical-seeming wish, but reality works differently. Every language spoken by humans contains some irregularity, to the point where there is clearly an underlying reason for why perfect regularity isn't optimal for human processing. (Note that you only have difficulty with irregular verbs in foreign languages; no one forgets forms in their mother tongue, and if you're uncertain, both forms usually work equally well for speaker and listener.)
The phenomenon isn't understood completely, but it's too pervasive to be just accidental. Some aspects of it are quite well-understood. For instance, there is a reason why languages resist perfectly phonetic spelling: written text mediates between writers and readers, and while writers would prefer perfectly regular spelling, readers actually profit from a small amount of irregularity, because it allows them to use gestalt perception to recognize some words even faster than sounding them out would be. Note that the most frequent words in English tend to be those with the weirdest spelling, much like the most common verbs have the most irregular past forms.
Clearly, a huge amount of optimization has been going on to shape the language for ever-greater efficiency, at a scale that laughs at any attempt to impose a "simpler" or "better" standard in a top-down way. That doesn't prevent purists and politicians from trying, but you know how well their efforts usually turn out. I'm certain that even Esperanto would acquire a certain amount of irregularity to the extent that it was actually used prominently as a native tongue.
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Esperanto is too Euro-centric. It's based on how European languages, derived from Latin, work. It is thus totally unsuitable as a replacement for east Asian languages like Japanese, Chinese and Korean. It's probably unsuitable for many other cultures I'm not so familiar with.
That's the real problem. To get people to use such a language you would have to get them to change the fundamental way they think. Would you accept switching to Chinese?
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no irregular verbs, we could call it, let's say ^'Esperanto.
I would vote for Klingon for boys. Thanks to Star Trek and mainstream television, Klingon already beat Esperanto by a wide margin. Then if we want to capture the teenage girls demographics, we would need to invent a special language for vampires (the good looking vampires and the gay vampires especially).
These two languages don't even need to intersect, it's not like those two demographics will ever talk to each other.
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Use phonetic spelling (Score:2)
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I would argue that the fact that we have homophones in the first place is a bad thing. Ideally: One sound, one spelling, one meaning (except possibly allowing for metaphorical meanings derived from that).
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Homophones are bad if you're trying to get to the right room (was it five two or five too), but good if you're a smartass, poking fun at linguistic problems and someone else getting lost.
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I would argue that the fact that we have homophones in the first place is a bad thing. Ideally: One sound, one spelling, one meaning (except possibly allowing for metaphorical meanings derived from that).
You do realize that by doing so you would kill the pun, thus depriving many people of the only humor they understand.
See Esperanto (Score:2)
No thanks.
Backwards compatibility (Score:2, Funny)
It would have to be backwards compatible with English. Then you could say that everyone who speaks English is also speaking your constructed language.
Re: (Score:3)
Then that's technically the existing corpus of law in any English speaking country, today.
Over time, the legal system has accrued terminology, jargon, and definition as each case has helped clarify or reinforce the written law. So we have things like "malice aforethought" or "work for hire" that have relatively exact meanings when compared with the use of those phrases in passing.
Yet we know that it's not exact *enough*. It fails as a specification over, and over again.
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It's true that compatibility would be a big issue. The only options I see are to either use the English term or make a translation. If you use the English term is a concession that the language isn't adequate. If you make a translation, you have to make sure that the language is at least as comprehensive as the original language. But maybe it's a good opportunity to try to make a language more powerful in it's ability to express things like that.
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Atsthay away oodgay ideaway. Itway eemssay ikelay away implesay ingthay otay oday.
Bad idea (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm not sure. It might help prevent a few wars if more people could understand each other. OTOH, it would also probably cause a few wars.
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... to be the unstable alpha branch, readily accepting commits from whoever ares to contribute, and letting the best features rise to the top for adoption by other, more stable branches.
The alpha branch should not be a widely used branch. English is. Something wrong with this picture?
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Indeed, if it was rigidly defined you couldn't have it evolve the way it has ... the cromulency of new words is not defined in advance, but by how much people feel embiggened by them.
You would not have vernacular, you would have a boring, lifeless, rigid language ... Latin already did that.
I agree that some of the greatest weaknesses of English (lack of rigid structure and syntax) are also some of its greatest strengths. Because it's a fluid, evolving language which has plenty of room to be played with.
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Re:Bad idea (Score:4, Interesting)
If you want to be exact, use a dead language. There is a reason why many dead languages are dead, they failed to evolve over time, which makes them suitable for being exacting.
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that, and the fact that the people using it got a kicking from some other group. We don't speak much Latin anymore, we speak a bastardised Germanic-y language called English even if we have kept a few words for specialists.
And I'd say we only speak English nowadays, not because how the sun never once set on a salmon-pink part of the map, but because the Americans chose to speak it. If the USA had chosen German as their national language years ago, perl would probably be quite different!!
Now that happened, a
Be machine translatable from english (Score:2)
Other considerations? (Score:2)
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.
Lojban (Score:5, Interesting)
Requirements (Score:3)
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
Much of this is already being done (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Recommended reading (Score:3)
I highly recommend Anita Okrent's In the Land of Invented Languages [amazon.com], 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.
Ze drem vil finali kum tru (Score:5, Funny)
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.
One Word (Score:2)
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
Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
What? (Score:2)
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 thin
Good luck with that (Score:2)
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
Replace English with English! (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Sounds doubleplusgood to me.
Stop Now (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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"The ops question stems from a deep misunderstanding of what human language is."
Perhaps.
Personally, what I read in the OP was a very slashdottian, 'utilitarian' approach to the use of language, thinking that it was simply a tool somehow chosen for use based on need/function, like a computer language. He/she didn't seem to recognize it as an organic, dynamic thing by which our brains (involuntarily and uncontrollably, in most cases) understand the world and communicate this understanding to others.
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Flexibility, rich literature, deep culture (Score:2)
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 artificia
Consistency (Score:3)
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... [buzzfeed.com].
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....
First you need a reason (Score:3)
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
Please don't (Score:5, Funny)
If somebody answers with "NodeJS", I'll personally install Windows on your Linux server.
Have a billion speakers (Score:2)
Culture (Score:5, Insightful)
Complexity is a feature, not a bug (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
I am an American English speaker who has taken the first step to learning Japanese. One of the first things that confuses westerners about Japanese is the four alphabets, two phonetic (hiragana and katakana), one symbols borrowed from Chinese (kanji), as well as the English alphabet. Why not standardize the whole thing on English, and get rid of the rest? Well, then I discovered Kanji puns. There are different pronunciations and meanings for each Kanji, and they can be used in various ways to create dou
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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?
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.
There's also an argument made by some rhetoricians that ambiguity in language (and other places) allows people to break prisoner's dilemma-type games, and we do so constantly as lubrication for our interactions. A simple example: you get a speeding ticket. You can pay the ticket, you can attempt to bribe the officer to not give you a ticket, at tremendous risk if it fails, or you can make an ambiguous statement like "is there some way I can just pay the fine right now and get on my way?" that an honest co
Jokes and Poetry (Score:3)
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.
Whoa, really nice topic (Score:5, Interesting)
"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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Who cares? Embrace your inner redneck and use y'all and all y'all
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That link doesn't seem to work for me.
Mignon Fogarty ("Grammar Girl") is in favor [quickanddirtytips.com] of moving to singular "they", and it is perfectly acceptable in British English.
Re:Esperanto (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Esperanto (Score:4, Funny)
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I was going to make a joke about a CPAN module for Esperanto, but lo and behold:
http://search.cpan.org/~patch/... [cpan.org]
Re:'Murica, FUCK YEAH! (Score:5, Funny)
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!"
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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.
Vulcan insults (Score:2)
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 crossi
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Yiddish has some great curses without resorting to profanity: http://yiddishradioproject.org/exhibits/stutchkoff/curses.php3
Some of my favorites:
A young child should be named after him. (Which makes sense if you know that, in Judaism, you don't name after the living.)
God should bless him with three people: one should grab him, the second should stab him and the third should hide him.
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 alo
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The first 15 minutes of that movie were solid Gold (I loved the belt).
I don't think the concept was flexible or deep enough for anything over short skits, certainly not a full length movie (A Night at the Roxbury is also in this category).
I thought Zoolander would also fall into this category and avoided it for a couple of years. But once I saw it and realized the comic genius that it is, it became one of my favorite movies.
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