French, we could all be a little more french when keeping our leaders on a leash
I’ve heard good things about Indonesian/Malay. It probably helps it was a regional lingua franca for a long time.
English was legit the best choice in Europe - analytic, with vocabulary drawn from a couple major families, and (almost) no grammatical gender. If only we could unfuck the orthography…
Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.
Sanskrit.
Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto- Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
- I’ve heard that it’s a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
- Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
- Lojban sounds like a cross between Romansh and a lost native American language. Not good compared to my two favorite sounding languages, Japanese and French, but at least more neutral than Esperanto. Esperanto sounds Spanish and Interlingua sounds like an Italian that thought that Esperanto should sound Italian and I don’t like how either of those two languages sound.
Are we sure it’s actually usable as a natural language?
I have no clue, but it’ll be better than a language that thinks it’s acceptable for words like “read”
to not just have two different meaning, but two different pronunciations,
while also having words like “sense”, “scents” and “cents” be pronounced exactly the same.And while writing this, I just learned that pronunciation should be spelled with “u” instead of “ou”.
That makes no sense.Yes, the spelling is terrible, even if the spoken language is not.
Esperanto. It’s an artificial language designed to be easy to learn and communicate in. Although it’s worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don’t necessarily understand speakers of another.
Although it’s worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don’t necessarily understand speakers of another.
WHAT!? OK biggest failure of an artificial language in my book then
I think this is actually a success: this is the process of all languages. A usable language will evolve and grow, and something as geographical dispersed and isolated as Esperanto will certainly show divergence if it is being used.
So rather than a failure, I think this demonstrates it can be a real language. Though my interest in language isn’t for communication. So eh. Your milage may very.
I think it is easy, but I speak only european languages. Not sure if it is really easier or I just feel that is easy because I know the languages I do.
I would love to say mandarin/chinese, but tonal languages scares me.
I made a grammar rule set (not a complete conlang yet) where verbs don’t need to be conjugated, and information about time is separated from the verb; A new lingua franca, IMHO, should not have verb conjugation.
Why not lojban?
Haven’t heard of it.
Dutch, but only because I’m tired of Dutch people telling me I really shouldn’t have bothered when they find out I learned to speak Dutch.
I just like learning different languages because it lit|really provides new frameworks of understanding for me, goddamn.
Nou ja zeg!
Dit zelfver-nederland-cultuurtje moet blijkbaar
nog altijd blijven opkijken naar de taal waar het hoofdland
op dit moment verder afglijdt naar het fascisme.Hey, can you translate this to English?
Because what Google gives me doesn’t make sense:
This self- Dutchifying culture apparently still has to look up to the language, while the main country is currently sliding further towards fascism.
I think it’s worth it learning dutch if you nail the accent, especially common ones found 50 years ago (as in dubbed Pipi Longstocking).
Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.
Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.
My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.
everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.
This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.
Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.
As an example the character for book (書) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is 聿 (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and 者 on the bottom (the meaning of 者 is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but 者 in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)
When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn’t really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.
Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana
Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it’s polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)
So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.
Yes, learning a few letters that form syllables and through that you can read words even though you don’t know what they mean is not practical, it’s better to learn a some thousand symbols and, if you don’t know a symbol at all, you can’t even say it out loud because you can’t read it.
Ideograms are the imperial units of language.China has an extremely high literacy rate, so the difficulty in learning the system is, at least, provably surmountable.
The strength of being able to unite communication historically across East Asia and potentially around the world is a pretty big plus. Offering such a strength impossible in other systems, ideograms are hardly equivalent to imperial units.
Oh yeah, if you start learning it when you are like 4yo and have high mental plasticity and see it everywhere around you everyday sure it isn’t a problem, but it doesn’t make the ideogram/logogram system any less convoluted, unpractical and arbitrary… one has to learn from 3000 to 4000 symbols just to be able to read most publications. You are right, it’s hardly equivalent, imperial units aren’t that bad
Just like using Arabic numerals were a huge improvement from Roman’s, the alphabet was a huge improvement from pictograms, ideograms and logogramsI disagree. I doubt you read any alphabet letter by letter. You read words or you don’t read fluently. So the reality is: alphabets aren’t inherently better, and I think the continued existence of Chinese as a viable writing system shows this to be the case.
The one advantage alphabets have is they have a more gentle ramp up, but I don’t think they are inherently better. In fact your example of Roman vs Arabic numerals is a preference for logogram over atomistic writing system.
If your language isn’t messy you actually read syllables.
There is this guy called Paulo Freire that developed a literacy method for adults that is really impressive and it was tested in several parts of the world. It has a whole part about making it relatable to the person learning and using its environment and social reality, but the reading/writing part is based on phonetics, so in two months his method can get adults from poor regions that have never went to school reading and writing - but as it’s based on phonetics, and language is messy, at start they mix syllables that have same sound, like stuff with c and k, or ch and x, or ks and x, regardless of grammatical mistakes, what they write is understandable and “right” when it comes to phonetics, so even though it’s “wrong” you can still read and understand it, and that’s possible because the written language is based on syllables… now imagine having to teach 3000 to 4000 different symbols and if you make one stroke to the wrong side or miss one stroke it’s a completely different word?The continued existence of written Chinese means as much as the continue existence of Christianity and how it spread through other continents, it has nothing to do with how good it is, but with historical power relations - and if Chinese becomes the next Lingua Franca, as it will probably be, it will because China won at capitalism and conquered the world’s markets, and not because its language is good - I actually can’t say if the language is good or not, but the writing system, it’s beyond bad.
For who? As in I have to stop using English and start using the language or as in the world will all now just speak this language, no qualifications? If it’s the former, probably something like Esperanto. If it’s the latter, Lojban.
Swedish, very pretty language
Also note that script is historically mostly used for communication over large distances and times.
Historical scriptures (such as the bible) got transported across half the globe and copied and passed down for more than a thousand years. The scripture transcends both space and time.
If you only want to communicate with your neighbour, you don’t need a lingua franca. Lingua franca is exclusively for writing down, and communicating over very large distances (such as the internet). In that case, no pronounciation is needed. So it is possible to have an abstract sign language that doesn’t even have a standardized pronounciation.
This might sound absurd at first, if you never thought about it, until you realize that is how a lot of our information is already transported. There are a lot of sketches and visualizations of important data that are graphics, plots, charts, drawings, and such, that don’t have a standardized pronounciation. The information is transported visually.
I wouldn’t, because everyone would just have to learn another new language if they learned English because it’s the current one.
Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it’s eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it’s tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it’s grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.
Plus, the fascists fucking hate it
Not against Esperanto but creating a “universal language”and then making it gendered seems a little stupid.
It’s not as bad as other languages on this front, but if I remember correctly there’s still no agreed-upon gender neutral singular pronoun in Esperanto is there?
Mi forgesis, ke mi lernis ĉi tiun lingvon.
There’s a daughter language called Ido that’s done away with gender, iirc. And I believe there’s some gender neutral ways to get around it in the community, but it’s been a long time since I’ve attempted to do anything with it
Actually wondering, why would fascists hate it? Idk much history behind language, just know that language exists.
The whole idea behind it was radical unity, internationalism, and bringing disparate people together on equal footing. Instead of me speaking a language I’ve known since birth, and you speaking a language you are just capable of understanding, and both of us trying to plead our case to the government, the idea is that we would all have an auxiliary language to compliment (not replace) our mother tongues, and we would both be capable of making yourself understood equally.
Those ideals don’t really jive with hard nationalism and pseudoscientific ideas around superior races
Yeah make sense, thanks
Plus, the fascists fucking hate it
Lol was waiting for this kick-back
Might as well choose English at that point.
Congrats, you managed to turn this conversation into a socialism vs fascism conversation. It wasn’t easy but you spotted an opportunity and you took it. Now we can all talk about your favourite topic!
Congratulations, you managed to get offended by a historical tidbit about a constructed language!
Oh, and pissing off fascists is always good. Period. Full stop. If you don’t think that’s true, perhaps it’s time for some introspection!
Toki pona
Thus making everything open to interpretation
I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.
Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.
I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that “watermelon” would be “kili telo” (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that “kili telo” would not be understood as “watermelon” unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived “kili telo”.
If you’re going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.
Isn’t toki pona supposed to be an art language?
Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?
Is Esperanto similar to what you’re talking about?
No, I think a true universal language is going to need minimal friction, and be as simple and vocab-limited as possible, to encourage mass adaptation.
For all its intent on being easier than other mainstream languages, Esparanto is still more complex than what I’m talking about.
Gaeilge just to fuck with the brits. We all have to write it in ogham too, I don’t care how inconvenient it might be.
That or serbo-croatian because we are all serbs anyway
Tabhairfaidh mé mo vóta duit.
Such a pretty language. I should learn it someday!
Mé fresin.
I would have picked gaeilge too, since it’s the only other language I know (kinda, I’m terrible at it). Ogham sucks though.
Yeah Ogham would be fucking awful for modern communication but I thought it’d be really funny. In a more serious sense I actually think it’d be super interesting to see how humans adapted to it and adapted it to their needs.
Anyway I also picked Gaeilge because it makes for great lyricism
