I don't think it's that simple. Here in Russia despite attempts at revitalization many national minority languages are sorta dying. Once everyone around you speaks a "universal language" (Russian), which due to its "universality" becomes a language the wast majority of the culture is produced in, other languages naturally start getting phased out, despite attempts to preserve them.
Like I knew Buryatians who couldn't speak Buryatian despite studying it at school. There's no motivation to learn. Everyone speaks Russian.
the non-imperialist version of lingua francais is simply an alternative sent for when communities interact. its not imagined as a replacement for normal language, just a neutral ground to decomplicate internationalism. its much preferred to have a constructed for-purpose tounge than a holdover from or realisation of an empire's hegemony. no nation owns esperanto, the yankees and brits 'own' and imposed english on everyone else
im not saying it should be esperanto, which is also very old and nobody speaks it. if someone designed a better one there'd be no reason not to use that instead. i defend the concept of a constructed 'universal' language for international communication
Even if you did somehow get all of humanity to agree on and learn a common language it'd start diverging immediately along all sorts of faultlines. region, culture, subculture, professional field, gender, whatever.
I don't get the point of a universal language with things like Google translate. It's far more likely that we'll eventually develop a computer translator that's sophisticated enough to have near perfect translation between major languages and many minor ones as well. The alternative, trying to impose a lingua franca on the world, is fraught with political and cultural obstacles. And there's the ever present question of which language is going to be the lingua franca.
Here's the number of speakers. The first step would be developing near perfect translation between branches of the same family (eg Spanish-to-French, Mandarin-to-Cantonese, Hindi-to-Bengali) and work from there.
If we have to pick a lingua franca, I vote for Singlish. It draws from multiple language families (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Dravidian), is actually spoken in real life, and isn't some cringe Eurocentric fake language like Esperanto.
I don’t get the point of a universal language with things like Google translate. It’s far more likely that we’ll eventually develop a computer translator that’s sophisticated enough to have near perfect translation between major languages and many minor ones as well.
Just a random thing, a woman came into work recently who only spoke Portuguese, but she used Google translate and just spoke into it and we could communicate though it really well. We get a lot of people with no English whatsoever in work, so a tool like that is really useful
I think these sort of creoles and pidgins that develop further with a lot of different languages is how you ‘create’ a good universal language. People will naturally use whatever pieces that are the shortest or feel best to convey something and the language will develop to be easy to use.
I think English gets pieces of simplification in places where it’s used but it’s a shame those don’t always work back into the source.
Universal translators will be possible and simple as fuck if AI development keeps up for a few more decades. Shit, we’re most of the way there for being able to do so with at least the major languages, language barriers won’t exist, only the benefits from different perspectives and ways of thinking would remain
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I don't think it's that simple. Here in Russia despite attempts at revitalization many national minority languages are sorta dying. Once everyone around you speaks a "universal language" (Russian), which due to its "universality" becomes a language the wast majority of the culture is produced in, other languages naturally start getting phased out, despite attempts to preserve them.
Like I knew Buryatians who couldn't speak Buryatian despite studying it at school. There's no motivation to learn. Everyone speaks Russian.
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Nah, being able to talk with everyone iscool enough to justify it
the non-imperialist version of lingua francais is simply an alternative sent for when communities interact. its not imagined as a replacement for normal language, just a neutral ground to decomplicate internationalism. its much preferred to have a constructed for-purpose tounge than a holdover from or realisation of an empire's hegemony. no nation owns esperanto, the yankees and brits 'own' and imposed english on everyone else
I've heard that Esperanto is mostly based on European languages making it much easier to learn for speakers of those languages than for anybody else.
im not saying it should be esperanto, which is also very old and nobody speaks it. if someone designed a better one there'd be no reason not to use that instead. i defend the concept of a constructed 'universal' language for international communication
Toki Pona seems nice.
im not a linguistics nerd so im happy to burn that bridge when we get to it at the 6th internationale (and cause the 2nd sino-soviet split over it)
Even if you did somehow get all of humanity to agree on and learn a common language it'd start diverging immediately along all sorts of faultlines. region, culture, subculture, professional field, gender, whatever.
Soviet Union kept it's Russian universal though by chosing one standard Russian language for most official cultural products: newspapers, radio, tv.
Due to modern globalization I'm guessing everyone who knows English understands (and to extent can reproduce) the dialect used in Hollywood movies.
I don't get the point of a universal language with things like Google translate. It's far more likely that we'll eventually develop a computer translator that's sophisticated enough to have near perfect translation between major languages and many minor ones as well. The alternative, trying to impose a lingua franca on the world, is fraught with political and cultural obstacles. And there's the ever present question of which language is going to be the lingua franca.
Here's the number of speakers. The first step would be developing near perfect translation between branches of the same family (eg Spanish-to-French, Mandarin-to-Cantonese, Hindi-to-Bengali) and work from there.
If we have to pick a lingua franca, I vote for Singlish. It draws from multiple language families (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Dravidian), is actually spoken in real life, and isn't some cringe Eurocentric fake language like Esperanto.
Just a random thing, a woman came into work recently who only spoke Portuguese, but she used Google translate and just spoke into it and we could communicate though it really well. We get a lot of people with no English whatsoever in work, so a tool like that is really useful
It gets worse when neither of those languages are English, because it uses English as an intermediary.
I think these sort of creoles and pidgins that develop further with a lot of different languages is how you ‘create’ a good universal language. People will naturally use whatever pieces that are the shortest or feel best to convey something and the language will develop to be easy to use.
I think English gets pieces of simplification in places where it’s used but it’s a shame those don’t always work back into the source.
Universal translators will be possible and simple as fuck if AI development keeps up for a few more decades. Shit, we’re most of the way there for being able to do so with at least the major languages, language barriers won’t exist, only the benefits from different perspectives and ways of thinking would remain
Idunno I been reading a lot of sci-fi lately lol