More proof the world should only speak one language

[bankside]

It IS one language. It was called Serbo-Croatian back in the day. They just do really stupid things like when Bosnian was created they put a bunch of Turkish shit in the dictionary to make it more Muslim-y.

I think you mean "Croato-Serbian."

 

[ThreeCrows]

No, Shatner was in that.

Yea, I know - I was correcting myself because I said "the first and only" but it was actually the second movie made in Esperanto.

Incubus was the second feature film primarily using Esperanto ever made; the first, Angoroj (Esperanto for "Agonies") appeared in 1964, one year earlier. Esperanto speakers are generally disappointed by the pronunciation of the language by the cast of Incubus.

I should have included the relevant quote along, not just my source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incubus_(1965_film)
Sorry about that.

 

[DJ1990]

My favourite is what became of the Washing Machine after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Croatians now use a "Stroj za pranje rublja" whilst Serbians have to use a Веш машина. Formerly, this was the same appliance.

Dirty bastards.

 

[DJ1990]

Even so, wouldn't Serbo-Croatian be understood still by your parent's generation?

Hopefully at least the younger generations speaks some English.

We all understand it...it's the same language it's just like a bunch of different accents.

 

[Telstra]

i support one world, one language.
It makes that much easier.

Other languages should swallow their pride and put them in the museum of languages.

 

[bankside]

Dirty bastards.

Not at all! Doing the laundry in the correct machine is now a patriotic duty! The whole region is cleaner than ever. And those damned Dalmatians and their Oxy-Clean....everybody's jealous of them....they'd better watch their backs.

 

[DJ1990]

I think you mean "Croato-Serbian."

They should just call it satanic.

 

[CGHJ]

Where in Bosnia? I was stationed in Doboj, but I've been around...that was 10 years ago I hope it's in better shape now than when I saw it, that is to say, I hope much progress has been made rebuilding it.

 

[DJ1990]

Not at all! Doing the laundry in the correct machine is now a patriotic duty! The whole region is cleaner than ever. And those damned Dalmatians and their Oxy-Clean....everybody's jealous of them....they'd better watch their backs.

Oh that reminds me Dalmatia has a lot of italian crap. I don't understand 10% of the words they say.

 

[Críostóir]

Not in the least.

In brief, morphophonemic tagging should trump phonemic spelling. Always and forever.

The obvious solution is to spell it "sekretri" and then have sound mirror spelling.

Well, spell it that way in Ukland if you wanna. We fought a war not to have to do what the Brits tell us, remember!

As for English being the "universal" language, it isn't. It's my language, and the rest of the world can fuck off and get their own universal language.

Well, geez, y'all shoulda thought a' that before creating the biggest Empire the world has ever known, ya know? Too late now. It's your karma to hear "your" language mangled by everyone else in the world!

As far as English goes...England is a tiny backwater in the English-speaking world. Since English is not French, there's no one with official authority over what is and is not English; the majority of English speakers speak it as a second or third language, and most of them are in Asia.

Get used to it, dude. You're out of luck.

BTW, I think the world's future involves a pluralistic linguistic environment, not a monopoly.

That would be nice, actually. Do you have any reason other than wishing (and I do sympathize) for believing that? Did you know that there are native speakers of Chinese today, speakers of say, Mandarin and Cantonese, who can communicate fine in writing (because Chinese is not written phonemically!), but who speak English to each other because it's easier than speaking either Chinese language?

The serbian makes more sense.

To be fair, it may just be that the Google Translate team that worked on Serbian did a better job. I just took them at their word, having none of my own in either language!

 

[DJ1990]

Where in Bosnia? I was stationed in Doboj, but I've been around...that was 10 years ago I hope it's in better shape now than when I saw it, that is to say, I hope much progress has been made rebuilding it.

ooo that's nice.....how long were you there? Well my two main towns are Travnik and Sarajevo.

 

[DJ1990]

^ I don't think English is hard at all...........a lot of my cousins in Bosnia speak it....even better than me.....I have to admit...plus it's easier to learn since basically everything people find cool is in English and people all over the world are obsessed with America.

 

[Telstra]

My proposal: bring back Latin.

nope,
let natural selection of languages do its job without the interference from governments, cultures or religions .. etc.

 

[Críostóir]

Much easier for someone who is speaking his native language --which uses the subjunctive-- than for someone who is coming to the language from a mother tongue in which there is no subjunctive.

What language are you talking about? Every language I've studied has a subjunctive. I'm sure there are ones that don't.

People who speak Chinese or Japanese have trouble with grammatical number (singular and plural), too. Are you going to leave it out because it might be hard for them?

No.

See above.

No, it's not a problem when you standardize pronunciation.

And by what kind of brutal worldwide dictatorship will you accomplish that? No one has ever done that, not even in France, which is the most linguistically-controlled place on the planet. In the broadly-spoken linguas franca we know of, pronunciation is a local matter; no one tries to speak Swahili with a native accent (the small number of native speakers do it without trying; the rest don't bother).

Just because they failed in the past doesn't mean they would fail in the future.

Unless you do something very different than the previous ones did, it kinda does.

Which is available to a much smaller percentage of humanity than an alternative language might be because it (English) is so hard to learn.

English is more widely spoken on this planet than any other language, even if you lump everything called "Chinese" together (which is kind of like lumping everything called "European" together). No artificial language has come close to those numbers. They're marginal at best.

What method will you use to devise a language that's easier (for everyone!) to learn than English? I think you underestimate both a) the difficulty of the task of creating a language, even if not absolutely from scratch, and b) the difficulty of weighing all the different approaches to language to maximize ease of learning.

Esperanto was only trying to combine and simplify European Romance languages. The only one that really tried to make its vocabulary and grammar universal (with population weightings for greatest-good-for-greatest-number) was Loglan, which is universally (well, except for a few crackpots) held to be a complete disaster: not one person has EVER learned to speak it.

Do you have some method in mind? People with lots of linguistic training and years of experience learning many languages have tried, and failed. What makes your effort different?

I rest my case.

I think you missed my point. You don't attain global market hegemony by being virtuous. You attain it by being adopted most widely despite lacking virtue.

Yet English has virtues not shared by other languages. It has the largest vocabulary of any modern language (and historically only Ancient Greek has it beaten); this makes subtleties of meaning available which require many more words to express in other tongues. What's Spanish for "I'm alone, but not lonely"?

And in general English is quite compact. Chains of nouns modifying each other are one good example; try translating "There's been a malfunction of the White House press briefing room podium sound equipment" into any Romance language, and you'll see one reason English is so widely used.

 

[Críostóir]

So? People get it amusingly wrong. Your point?

 

[Paws]

Ebonhicks

 

[ThreeCrows]

I've got the solution, and I hope I'm going to earn some nerd points here:

Star Trek's "universal translator," which also ties into William Shatner!

 

[teadrinker]

One language, eh? Well, as a test case, let's start with Canada. Which shall we outlaw: French or English?

-T.

 

[NineOfClubs]

nope,
let natural selection of languages do its job without the interference from governments, cultures or religions .. etc.

Oh. That settles it then. English it is!

 

[DJ1990]

One language, eh? Well, as a test case, let's start with Canada. Which shall we outlaw: French or English?

-T.

French. Kill it.