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.
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.