I agree but i think we also need to accept that the majority of humans live in asia and should have their own influence on the language, rather than trying to keep it from changing by associating it to specific countries where it’s native.
If “international english” turns into a creole of basically every major language, and everyone makes an effort to learn or at least become familiar with languages unrelated to their native one; then it becomes vastly more fair and useful as a lingua franca.
I’m blowing smoke on this topic based on dnd terms. Common tongue is English because more people speak that already. Whatever people do to it after, they do to it after, but English as a starting point removes the need for more people to learn Esperanto or whatever other language wants to be “common.”
In the fantasy I’ve created in my head/my hot take: it would be easier if people shifted to English as common, and had “secondary” languages based on their location.
(In the real world, even sign language isn’t universal. Certain languages like German apparently also do better for certain things like written law. I realize it’s silly to expect our species to choose a common language based on numbers alone. I think more people speak English specifically because English speaking countries hold more sway on international economics/warfare (for now), and other countries have responded in kind.)
Only if you accept that English is a garbage language and reform it so the rest of the world has to learn a sensible language instead of the clusterfuck that is english.
If you want a language to be used universally, it must not be a clusterfuck.
If it is a clusterfuck, it’s easier to make excuses to not adopt the language. So it will fail in becoming a universal language.
“Why would I learn English to communicate with you? You should learn Spanish to communicate with me! Since English has X and Y issues that Spanish doesn’t have”.
I’m not sure if the language is good or bad. If it’s the most spoken currently, it seems like it’s a shoe in for our DnD common language, though. No favoritism, just using stats to decide.
My thought is: Everyone can speak English, but spelling is just terrible. Make it phonetically consistent. Easiest transition, but of course you are still stuck with… English (words, grammar, quirks).
The good thing about Spanish is that if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce a word when you see it written. However, if you hear it, it is ambiguous as to how it is written. So my proposal for spanish makes each letter have 1 sound and 1 sound only. And each sound is represented by a single letter.
A similar thing to that would already massively improve English. And that’s just changing how the words are written, without changing the grammar at all.
Notice how that changes the easiest part of the language to change. You don’t need to change grammar, or words used, or pronunciation.
Just having the sounds and the text be consistent with each other makes the language massively easier to learn. In addition, you wouldn’t have one different way to pronounce each word per town in England. So even if you learned English from a texan, you would still be able to communicate perfectly with a Liverpool Englishman.
Even if local accents form, everyone would know how to fall back to the “correct” pronunciation if they see they’re talking to a foreigner and are having trouble communicating.
Of course, all other aspects of English are a clusterfuck too, but you gotta start somewhere. And I think it’s best to start with the high impact low hanging fruit.
also hot take: US schools should teach 100–300 most common kanji (their meanings and pronunciations in Mandarin) if nothing else to dispel the myth that logograms are “too hard to learn” for English speakers
knowing gen Z they’d probably invent a 300+ language pidgin comprised almost entirely of memes which would be impossible for the rest of us to learn. it’d be glorious
Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it’s currently the lingua franca ;)
Plus, because it’s a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it’s already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.
At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it’s place as the default does.
That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It’s kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it’s dead. Esperanto isn’t dead, but it’s similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin
forkDestroyer@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Hot take: Everyone should accept that English is the common language, and only speaking one language is a setback.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I agree but i think we also need to accept that the majority of humans live in asia and should have their own influence on the language, rather than trying to keep it from changing by associating it to specific countries where it’s native.
If “international english” turns into a creole of basically every major language, and everyone makes an effort to learn or at least become familiar with languages unrelated to their native one; then it becomes vastly more fair and useful as a lingua franca.
forkDestroyer@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
Pardon my wall of text:
I’m blowing smoke on this topic based on dnd terms. Common tongue is English because more people speak that already. Whatever people do to it after, they do to it after, but English as a starting point removes the need for more people to learn Esperanto or whatever other language wants to be “common.”
In the fantasy I’ve created in my head/my hot take: it would be easier if people shifted to English as common, and had “secondary” languages based on their location.
(In the real world, even sign language isn’t universal. Certain languages like German apparently also do better for certain things like written law. I realize it’s silly to expect our species to choose a common language based on numbers alone. I think more people speak English specifically because English speaking countries hold more sway on international economics/warfare (for now), and other countries have responded in kind.)
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Only if you accept that English is a garbage language and reform it so the rest of the world has to learn a sensible language instead of the clusterfuck that is english.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
all languages are clusterfucks, have you seen japanese?
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Doesn’t make it an excuse.
If you want a language to be used universally, it must not be a clusterfuck.
If it is a clusterfuck, it’s easier to make excuses to not adopt the language. So it will fail in becoming a universal language.
“Why would I learn English to communicate with you? You should learn Spanish to communicate with me! Since English has X and Y issues that Spanish doesn’t have”.
forkDestroyer@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
I’m not sure if the language is good or bad. If it’s the most spoken currently, it seems like it’s a shoe in for our DnD common language, though. No favoritism, just using stats to decide.
petersr@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What’s your proposal?
My thought is: Everyone can speak English, but spelling is just terrible. Make it phonetically consistent. Easiest transition, but of course you are still stuck with… English (words, grammar, quirks).
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I actually have a proposal for my own language (spanish). It’s written in a jokingly manner, but here it is: https://github.com/Calcoph/espa-ol-dos
The good thing about Spanish is that if you know the rules, you know how to pronounce a word when you see it written. However, if you hear it, it is ambiguous as to how it is written. So my proposal for spanish makes each letter have 1 sound and 1 sound only. And each sound is represented by a single letter.
A similar thing to that would already massively improve English. And that’s just changing how the words are written, without changing the grammar at all.
Notice how that changes the easiest part of the language to change. You don’t need to change grammar, or words used, or pronunciation.
Just having the sounds and the text be consistent with each other makes the language massively easier to learn. In addition, you wouldn’t have one different way to pronounce each word per town in England. So even if you learned English from a texan, you would still be able to communicate perfectly with a Liverpool Englishman.
Even if local accents form, everyone would know how to fall back to the “correct” pronunciation if they see they’re talking to a foreigner and are having trouble communicating.
Of course, all other aspects of English are a clusterfuck too, but you gotta start somewhere. And I think it’s best to start with the high impact low hanging fruit.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Yeah, English is the most spoken language in the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers
also hot take: US schools should teach 100–300 most common kanji (their meanings and pronunciations in Mandarin) if nothing else to dispel the myth that logograms are “too hard to learn” for English speakers
NikkiDimes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
If it’s Mandarin, you mean hanzi then, kanji is specifically Japanese 😝
In 3 months, you could learn 300 at 5 per school day. That’s not even too crazy.
TIL what kanji are called in Mandarin (I’m a weeb and have only studied Japanese haha)
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 weeks ago
I’d love to split off a timeline where we just teach the basics of as many languages and scripts to kids as possible, it’d be a great experiment
knowing gen Z they’d probably invent a 300+ language pidgin comprised almost entirely of memes which would be impossible for the rest of us to learn. it’d be glorious
Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it’s currently the lingua franca ;)
Plus, because it’s a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it’s already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.
At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it’s place as the default does.
That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It’s kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it’s dead. Esperanto isn’t dead, but it’s similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin
gnutrino@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Only because it was never alive to begin with
Lmmfao! Yeah, it never even had a chance, unfortunately