• @electrodynamica
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    12 years ago

    I feel like English, French, and Mandarin are already international standards. I doubt there will ever be one singular. Isn’t that the reason they invented Esperanto anyway?

    • @CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml
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      12 years ago

      Well yeah there are international standards already (thanks colonialism). But I guess I’m imagining a distant future where in a communist world, you could travel anywhere and talk to anyone under the international tongue (International is probably meaningless, at that point nations have probably disolved). Not familiar with Esperanto, but is that all latin languages combined? Will look into it. You know what you could also in a communist society teach people fluency in big languages, but isn’t with our brains you’ll always favor one?

      • @electrodynamica
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        2 years ago

        Yeah, imperial languages reign. It’s interesting that older empires such as Spain and Arabia have had their languages splinter into 100s of dialects, some almost unintelligible to a native speaker of the original dialect.

        I think what might happen in a unified world is something similar to India, where each ethnicity has their own language, regions have their own language, and then the whole country has the common language of Hindi.

        but isn’t with our brains you’ll always favor one?

        I think it’s context dependant like in India. It’s really just more practical. Language being about communicating ideas, it makes sense that the same ideas would be expressed differently in different contexts. Sometimes even friend groups have their own language, or even a set of twin siblings.

        To use one language for everything would be very cumbersome. Imagine writing a low level hardware driver in Visual Basic 😉

        Edit: it might even make sense to go in the other direction. Like for example law should have it’s own language, with it’s own words and sentence structure. Trying to cram it into English for example has clearly been a failure. And a few jargon words stolen from latin aren’t nearly enough. Biology is a little better with their custom grammar and pseudo Greek word construction, but even that would be helped by a whole cloth new language.

        • @CITRUS@lemmygrad.ml
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          12 years ago

          You know you are probably right with whole, independent languages, there’s only so many combinations of words your alphabet has set out, and it can get confusing.

          Wait law has its own jargon? Okay I know it has stuff like prosecutor and stuff like that, but is that complicated it should have its own language? Wow.

          Now I think about my brain does explode whenever the debate kids in my school talk so there’s that.