Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?
Edit:
We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives…
- English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.
That’s not how language or communication work. Humans develop language in real time and in small cohorts. You are lucky if you can understand youth slang by the time you hit 40 and you want to force an artificial lingua franca on four billion people?
Plus, who said language uniformity is a positive? Linguistic diversity is a feature, not a bug. Language is tied to culture, identity and a whole bunch of antrhopological elements. Entire ethnicities are defined by their language. It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows, why would we do the same with language? If you ask me, there’s way too much English out there as it is.
It’s bad enough that US cultural imperialism has forced half the planet to watch the same movies and TV shows
I have a comm for you
For a tiny language, I really like toki pona, but it’s meant to be a minimal artistic language, more than an IAL (international auxiliary language).
Last I checked tho, Globasa looks really interesting. The way that they add new vocabulary, and have a good representation of world languages, seems to work well.
Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.
Yeah I feel that for better or worse Esperanto hasn’t reached a large enough mass to justify accepting its quirks and indo-eurocentrism, when we know we can do better now.
For sure. A dissapointing number of IALs have nearly all their vocab from european languages, but there are a few that try earnestly to source their vocab from a wide set of language families. Any global initiative for an IAL needs to have a global vocabulary set to have any hopes of being introduced.
If you choose vocabulary that is culturally neutral, then that vocabulary is not easily recognisable.
There’s no workaround for that trade-off.
Recognizeable for whom, is the question. The majority of IALs to date have had a highly eurocentric vocabulary, so they can’t be recognizeable to even a plurality of the world.
Correct reasoning, incorrect facts.
46% of the world speak Indo-European languages as a mother tongue.
Can’t do better than that. No other option comes close.
Aren’t you Irish? You know the English colonizers did their best to wipe out the Irish language and replace it with the one you’re advocating for right???
I never said anything approaching the words your putting in my mouth.
know the English colonizers did … right???
Nooo I didn’t actually know that and needed an enlightened person such as yourself to tell me 🙄🙄
Tá mé tinn de bheith ag glacadh comhairle stráinséara. Imagine some blan started lecturing you about haitian history and how it should affect your opinions, wouldn’t you at least tell them to fuck off?
Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.
That sounds interesting. Esperanto has no noun-declinations, it’s an agglutinating language, you don’t bend words (= declination).
But what is barely resembling that what you mention is the two cases of the language, which is nominative and the so called “accusative”. Which is adding -n to words to make them an object, depending on whether the verb of the sentence needs one or not. This case also is not just for objects, but also for directions, for measurements and time. That combination normally confuses the heck out of people.
Which is why there is also an in-joke in the Esperanto community “don’t forget the accusative”, because people forget it or apply it too often.
When I was a teen I really wanted to learn Esperanto but never got around to it. Globasa seems extremely interesting though, maybe I’ll finally give one of these languages a try.
I would say there is. Body language. Just about any human you meet can understand body language.
I suppose, though very poorly in comparison to what we usually mean by language.
This sparks an interesting question though: can two human strangers communicate with each other better than any other animals can, even when those two people have no language in common? I don’t think it’s so easy a question to answer. Probably they can in many cases but not in some others, depending on what is to be communicated. Whether there’s a bear nearby? How to coordinate an attack on tasty prey?
Edit to add: Unlocking secrets of the honeybee dance language – bees learn and culturally transmit their communication skills
Astonishingly, honeybees possess one of the most complicated examples of nonhuman communication. They can tell each other where to find resources such as food, water, or nest sites with a physical “waggle dance.” This dance conveys the direction, distance and quality of a resource to the bee’s nestmates.
I would argue yes, but not by a massive degree in my opinion. Every animal has body language and several things are shared amongst many of us, especially mammals. But yeah, I think our whole species would understand things like pointing at something or laughing or offering something with an outstretched arm, or a surprised face or a scowl.
👍
But don’t try this in many parts of the Middle East.
👌
And don’t do this in Brazil.
Yeah I specifically didn’t include hand signs in my other comment because that’s getting closer to sign language and many countries have unique hand signs. Smiling is also something not universal oddly enough.
We haven’t been a global world for very long. And language takes very long to spread and become common.
To use an analogy, if a culture is the lock, a language is the key, and some keys just don’t fit certain locks.
Because the world is not utopia, and individualism combined with a unipolar hegemon (UK before, USA now) made the division of society a feature and not a problem. Also, capitalism forces us to fake productivity and not have free time for ourselves to indulge in useless things like… learning more languages and cultures to become harmonious with more people. Wars and genocides are useful, you know… to fill the pockets of some white swines.
Comrade as to your point of unipolar hegemonie, wouldn’t the opposite be true? That because of imperialism more people speak the same language. Example would be how former English colonies speak the same language, like India and Pakistan have their own languages but they also speak English due to colonialism and neo colonialism.
While colonialism created conditions that made it favourable to benefit from the coloniser’s language, the capitalist structure ensured a proxy form of colonialism never seen before in human history, where all forms of media and pop culture were hijacked. It is unique, and it is a perspective that only I have held and seen nobody talk about it, but Britain has utilised cricket as a tool of colonialism on Hindustan (post partition, India and Pakistan). It is part of reason why even after independence we continued to be silent, unlike China, who faced half as worse the fate as India, bounced back through Mao’s revolution.
Now, back to this proxy colonialism that never left most countries even after Britain left them, post WW2 the baton seemed to have been passed onto USA. The iron grip of capitalism and a unique cocktail (western pop culture infused with the invention of modern advertisement by Edward Bernays that abused psychoanalysis theories) and the vacuum of money and opportunities created by western imperialism ensured no matter how hard colonised countries were crippled, they would have only few choices left - starve and shrivel (DPRK post 1980s USA bombing), become proxy subservient to west (IMF/WEF initiative) or become subservient to west in the form of brain drain and human resource drain. This is purely my theory and how I think about things without ever having read a word of socialist literature.
The adoption of their language was just one step among many steps they probably worked long ago, or worked as time went on. I do think it was thought of long ago, similar to what Zionist Project is.
I am not sure, I may be just rambling here, but whatever I guess.
How did unipolar prevent a majority language?
How did wars and genocides prevent a majority language?
How is learning the majority language useless to your career?
You as a 8.1 billion population have to come together and decide as a group and the enact it. If we couldn’t even stop Covid which is still around you think we can do something like this?
In a weird way, the development of advanced communications and coordination technology has only made it harder for anything to change in a significant way .
Waiting on my Universal Translator
You need a reason for a large group to choose to maintain a single language over over smaller groups creating their own.
Look at Latin, it stayed mainly cohesive due to the Roman Empire and splintered off as the empire collapsed and the necessity for commoners to maintain communication across thousands of miles dwindled.
English is the current lingua francia because the dominant nation has been speaking English for the past two hundred years and created a pop culture market that is both large and rich, creating a positive feedback loop making the market larger and richer.
English is the current lingua francia because the dominant nation has been speaking English for the past two hundred years and created a pop culture market
Cute that you think it’s the U.S. and it’s little movies that are responsible for English being widely spoken, and not the bloody history of British imperialism being forced on half the planet
I mentioned the bloody imperialism in the first half of the sentence.
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I didn’t know the USA was a dominant nation two centuries ago.
Kial ne esperanto?
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Esperanto definitely isn’t a contender, but it’s design was to be a language that’s easy for everyone to learn and be the “universal” language. People have to speak it though, otherwise it’s not of much use to know it.
Estas pli da ni ol oni eble pensus
Redakto: TIU ĈI FADENO ESTAS NUN LA POSEDAĴO DE LA UNIVERSALA ESPERANTO-ASOCIO
two million isn’t close to half the world population.
Simple solution: just kill 8106 million and it will be
Wasn’t there a language created called Esperanto that was supposed to be the world language.
People can learn more than one language. If you speak English you can learn Mandarin and increase the people you can communicate with by billions. There is no “one language” because people can know more than one language at a time
geography is a bitch
I really like esperanto as a project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
It had a lot of support with early 20th century anarchists who saw it as a way to make people less nationalistic and prone to their domestic propaganda.
Maybe it’s Interlingua. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua Most people who speak a latin based language already understand interlingua. That would be the best chance of getting a majority of the world on the same language. It would include a big part of Europe, all of South and Central America and half of North America
Interlingua: Da nos hodie nostre pan quotidian,
Esperanto: Nian panon ĉiutagan donu al ni hodiaŭ
English: Give us this day our daily bread;
We have our choice between Spanish Latin, Romanian Latin, or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.
or super complicated Latin that contradicts itself and absorbed things from everywhere at random.
English borrowed a shit tonne from Latin & Romance languages, but it is at its core a Germanic language.
To make a joke that still sticks with the facts, maybe something like “wannabe Latin”, or “that shitty Romeaboo language”.
