Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?
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
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.
You alluded to the US imperialism of the past 200 years, but not the British who have undoubtedly done more to spread the language
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.
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.
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?
To use an analogy, if a culture is the lock, a language is the key, and some keys just don’t fit certain locks.
We haven’t been a global world for very long. And language takes very long to spread and become common.
I’d argue that by your own criteria, English is that language.
There’s like 1.2 billion English speakers, including non-native speakers, tho? the OP asks for like 3.5 billion or somethin’… since population globally is 8 billion…
Less then a quarter of people speak English, so not even close.
Well fuck me sideways I thought it was more than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world
Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion.
So you’re right: one quarter of people at most. Nonetheless that’s remarkable. Too bad it’s due more to subjugation than cooperation.
Nowadays it’s probably also because of the dominance of American culture, especially online.
Awfully generous of the UK to go out of its way to respect Mongolia. I guess you gotta honor that Klingon code.
Because for most of modern history, we were very isolated from the “outside world”.
Other than the last 200 years, the best “internet” was a dude on a horse. Since groups of humans developed quite independently of each other, they developed their own languages. However in the modern age this is changing rapidly, with many languages and dialects coalescing into one, consistent, language. Additionally many countries have tons of English speakers which is a defacto “universal language”. Most big cities will have english translation for many signs and important documents.
Kial ne esperanto?
I just now googled it so it might be wrong but… two million isn’t close to half the world population.
two million isn’t close to half the world population.
Simple solution: just kill 8106 million and it will be
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
Erm erm, one sec.
~Love is the Universal language~
Ok you can crucify me now xD
👉👌
Even the Tower of Babel cannot take this from us.
😏? 😉? 👍 🫦🍆✊👅💦💦🤤😪
Who needs a language
We have NTT DoCoMo to thank for that.
Wasn’t there a language created called Esperanto that was supposed to be the world language.
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”.
I would imagine that there would have to be a really good reason to happen, and the default is millions of different (albeit slightly) languages amongst an equal number of small communities. It takes empires and states to force a unified linguistic project, which is not necessarily pursued in all cases. If you’ve ever had a group of friends sort of develop their own cant, imagine how quickly it could change if it was 150 people who only contacted outside traders five times a year.
Language and politics is a huge part of linguistics (e.g. “a language is a dialect with an army and navy”). Certainly, since nationalism began there has been concerted efforts to unify languages around the powerful members of a nation (France explicitly does this with a legal structure, English has elitism in social structures). The borders of languages are forced categories of fuzzy culturally evolved systems. Who decides the line between German and Frisian?
The short answer is “Why would there be such a broad language?”. The default case is diversification, being able to talk to someone across the world might be convenient every now and again compared to being able to talk to your local community every day.
Is that the default situation is it??
You dreamed up a scenario and now are asking why it is not the case.
It is a somewhat naïvely-framed question, but also you could have just clicked downvote and moved on with your day.
Tell me, where is this global language where it has 3.5 billion speakers, if not half? You’ve indicated it’s not the case…?
Do you think I ask in bad faith, or do you ask in bad faith?
geography is a bitch
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?
