Posts by BenWilson
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Would the English language get to the point where it starts splitting off like Latin did into French/Spanish/Italian/German/Yugoslav/Romanian? As if English didn't have enough irregularities already.
Seems pretty resilient so far. The English spoken in most other parts of the world is very recognizable. I think technology is mostly responsible for that though, the explosion in communication in modern times. You could say it's already happened though, that English spin-offs exist, like pidgins, and all the blend languages like Chinglish, Spanglish, etc. English speakers will struggle to understand much of those languages.
I think for English to go the way of Latin, English speaking culture would need to go a similar way. Total destruction of their dominance of the world would be required. Which could still happen, and is the reason why I don't think English is the only candidate.
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Joe, pretty awesome. When oral history is all you've got, prodigious feats of memory would be required all the time. But it's still Chinese Whispers, just slower. The size of your body of knowledge preserved in this way is bounded by what a human has time to commit to memory. The rest is lost. Any time you forget or mis-remember, information is lost. Still awesome, though.
Joe, I'm very much familiar with Esperanto, and learned a reasonable amount of it out of sheer admiration for the idea. But I'm not that optimistic about it's chances of fulfilling Zamenhof's dream. It's more of a stepping stone, a way of showing that it is at least possible to develop a simplified language that is rich. It's still a candidate for a universal language, but the number of people speaking it is the problem. There's a critical mass it needs to reach, which I don't think it is anywhere near, before people might start learning it for practical purposes rather than idealistic ones.
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Islander, the idea that language always gets more complex is simply not true. There have been massive simplifications in many languages in the world many times in history. The language used to describe measurements, for instance, was massively reduced by the invention of the metric system. The old words still exist but they are fading away like so many forgotten words that have outlived their usefulness. The invention of the dictionary massively reduced the number of spellings and pronunciations of words by virtue of people seeing a point to having a common way of doing it. The invention of writing itself served to immortalize words beyond the Chinese Whispers game that humanity had been playing for all the millenia before history.
I'm not sure what "If We Could Talk To The Animals" has to do with anything, unless by Animals you mean other people who can't speak our language. Biblical visions of a world of common language could actually be one of the few visions they have that might actually come true. Just because it was a dream then, and still is now, does not mean it always will be. Everything we have ever invented started as a dream. So these appeals are not really swaying my hope that such a thing could happen. I doubt they ever will if not enough people want them to.
Linger, the range of social signals is not really that great compared to what is possible by referential meaning. That is why animal languages are not particularly rich. It is entirely possible that humans of every make could learn to share these signals, if they wanted to. To a certain extent, via body language, we already do.
To both Linger and Islander, I reiterate: I don't know if a universal language for general communication will ever actually take off. But I do believe that it would be a good thing if it did. It would be one more level playing field to liberate humanity from the fact that we can't choose where we are born, or to whom. Currently, depending where you are born, you find yourself unable to communicate adequately with most of the world, without a great deal of effort and luck. However prosaic it may seem to preserve such a situation, I doubt many people who were given the opportunity to easily learn to speak to basically the rest of humanity, would turn it down. And it would be easy, if almost everyone could speak it. You would learn it from your parents, just like your native language.
There are probable losses if something like that actually did occur. The main one would be that people who already enjoy huge advantages from their luck in learning one that is used by the powerful, would no longer have anywhere near such an advantage. Some languages might die. These losses don't seem to outweigh the benefits, though.
In case it's not clear, I include English as a candidate for the universal language. It's not the only candidate. Nor would it have to be 'English as we know and speak it now'. If English were easier to learn, it would be a stronger candidate, IMHO.
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I figure that anything that makes a language harder to learn is a negative for the human race. But since we're not going to get Esperanto, we could at least slowly reform the worst added complications out just by showing a little tolerance to the ever widening pool of people who speak the language. It could be that more people actually speak English as a second language than as a first one day, in which case medieval-based needs of the native speakers do actually start slipping down the food chain. Of course I'm dreaming of something that's been dreamed of since language began, that everyone in the world could converse easily, but there have been a number of forces working against that since time began, too, so my dreams may be futile.
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I don't think grammar-nazis have ever been fighting a winning battle, so claims of a Grammanati are wildly conspiratorial.
And for that reason I fully agree that simplifying the language ain't gonna happen on a 'rational' basis, although I always like it when I see it happening spontaneously.
You don't want to go around simplifying a language that doesn't distinguish between you, one person, and you, several people. That's just madness.
Simple madness, even.
It always strikes me as strange when people point out that a part of the grammar can't be lost because it would lead to ambiguity. Like the dropping of apostrophes. Indeed it would lead to ambiguity, if sentences were then constructed in exactly the same way. But, sensing ambiguity, the writer/speaker always has the option of rephrasing unambiguously. The ambiguity of "you" isn't really much of a problem in English, because when it's ambiguous, people ask. Or the proofreader suggests another way. Or, very often, it actually doesn't matter.
Same would go for "its" if it were also to convey "it is" and "that which belongs to it". They all sound the same and yet we seem to be able to use them in speech perfectly well.
"yous" is actually a gift from Maori, an excellent simplification. I will use it, and the fact that it ambiguously conflicts with the word "ewes" has never been a problem to anyone expect people trying to school me (like I don't bloody know!). So I can just as easily ask:
-"Do you want another drink?" <gesturing to the group, or pointing at an individual>
-"Do yous want another drink?" <hands full of drinks, can't gesture>
-"Who wants another drink?" <find another way of saying it to get around the ambiguity that the group pedant is going to hold the drinks up for>
-"Drinks?" <the best one to teach to a foreigner>Popular usage will dictate which ones we're still doing in 100 years.
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A.u.d.i.e.n.c.e. Write for your audience.
C.o.n.t.e.n.t. Read for content.
I'm feeling you've also joined the ranks of people who are no longer disagreeing me, but still want to reserve the right to feel grumpy with me about it.
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Heh, worse is when the txtese is actually longer! Like using "eye" instead of "I". But of course a large part of the point of txt seems to be the amusement caused by the restrictive form, and the liberation from grammatical normzzzzzzz.
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English becoming progressively simpler would be a good thing for everyone.
I don't know if that is actually what is happening though. The new things which are working their way into the language seem to be just more and more piecemeal, as naturally evolving languages tend to be. English is a language in which the same thing can be said in many different ways. Which is good for the person talking, not so good for the listener. Attempts to deliberately simplify English have their issues too, usually because a huge lexicon is actually useful, and compound words don't really cut it. Too long and really, if you have to learn the compound word, is it really that much harder to just learn a shorter word?
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Paul, that's so my experience of it. But even more important to me is the time. Things can be said in 15 seconds that it can take 5 txts to get through, over 5 minutes.
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On a related topic, I've never figured out - besides greedy corporate monopolies - why texts aren't essentially free.
I don't think you need look further than the greed angle. Even when txt first started, the bandwidth used was tiny compared to voice.
I find predictive is really good, until I want to use a word it doesn't know. Then it's humorously annoying in the ways it goes completely wrong.
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