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As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-lea

As someone who makes a hobby of learning languages, I am of the highly unpopular opinion that the world would be a better place if we could pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) and get our species out of the dark ages of having thousands of mutually unintelligible languages. No-one in their right mind would create an ethical, functioning modern society with thousands of languages, some with 100% global power and some with 0%, and have children born into it at random. Maybe it's because I'm not a historian, but statements like this: > Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.” ... make me sad, not happy. This isn't exciting or fascinating, it's a testament to how pointless it is that we put so much value in languages, like we're still murmuring incantations around a fire and we just learned a new old one to murmur. Let's pick a word for "net" and "fish" and finally, as a species, be done with it. Make a program of keeping the new global language alive and equally accessible, just like we currently do with essential medicines. Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it. Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking.

huachimingo 5y ago
Godwin's Law for language discussion: Consider the language Esperanto for universal candidate. /s
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
I read your comment and compare to programming languages. It would be revolutionary to have all computers programmed in the same language, but as different languages are good at different things and evolve concurrently, it's almost inconcievable to make it happen. And you're talking about refactoring not merely an entire industry, but the very language of thought for our species! How can we even begin to approach this consciously?
- newsbinator 5y ago
  The analogy is reasonable, although it breaks down because human languages are not nearly as varied in usefulness for different things as programming languages are. Human languages are much more generalized. Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human language being preferable to another though, like when Korean Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though perhaps what if" suggestion. On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps. If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term, and probably even in the short term too.
  - hypertele-Xii 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
  - SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
    > On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps. Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I’m a native English speaker and any time English was established as a country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and suppression of other people, even in England.
    - 5y ago
muststopmyths 5y ago
I'm sure you know that there is a reason your opinion is highly unpopular. Language doesn't just communicate fish and net. Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian. Humanity would lose a lot if we all went to just one language and script. Sure, when all the rich people flee to Elysium or Mars, they will be better off with generations growing up together with a common language and script. Because the population will be small in comparison and they will be creating their own civilization. But until then, I'd like to keep the diversity right here on Earth.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian. We don't have to incinerate anything. There won't be a government commission you have to petition to be allowed to do Japanese calligraphy or read a poem in its original language.
  - ksdale 5y ago
    I mean, if you don't force people to do it, then English is The One Language you're talking about. People have basically collectively decided that if they're talking to someone halfway around the world, the words for net and fish are net and fish.
  - paganel 5y ago
    Of course not, but the language will get lost, with time.
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      This is already happening, at an ever increasing rate. It's likely that the majority of languages will be extinct by the end of the century.
jcranmer 5y ago
> Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking. That... is optimistic, to say the least. Languages evolve essentially by having successive generations pick up collectively on idiosyncratic features of the language. And of course, people who aren't talking with each other aren't going to pick up on others' idiosyncratic features, and after several generations, you end up with new, distinct languages. To keep a single language out of it, you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it, and rather literally beat the daylight of anyone who speaks the "wrong" version of the language (this is essentially how the modern "big" European languages came about.) In other words, enforcing linguistic unity tends to require enforcing cultural unity as well.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it Yes, you do have to work to make it happen. Up to now we've given languages a free cultural pass, whereas diseases and poverty we keep shoveling trillions into, and we're proud when we've made a 20% dent. It takes work to pull the species out of what is natural, because what is natural is very often terrible. Diseases naturally evolve to terrorize us. We fight them and sometimes we win. The first step is admitting that how languages have evolved naturally up to now sucks for an ethical, roughly egalitarian 21st century information-based society. The sooner we can de-link language from local culture, the better. And of course that begs the question: can language be delinked from culture? Yes: my native language isn't the one I'm writing in to you now, and my native culture is whatever I'm making up for myself as I go along, to the chagrin of my parents and many in the culture I was born into.
  - benjaminwai 5y ago
    Can language be delinked from culture? Maybe. But can a language survive without a culture to encompass it? If you strip culture from a language, wouldn't the language would become toneless and meaningless? Yes, you can call something a 'net' or a 'fish' at a basic level. However in one culture one might say, "You must cast your net to catch the fish" it's plain what it means and it is meaningful, but for someone without the cultural context, it's a head scratcher and may wonder what fish are you talking about? I'm too, my native language isn't the one I am writing here. I have lived in quite a few different places. Culture is not something I could make up for myself as I go along, I don't think anyone could do so in isolation. I took in the different bits of cultures that i have experienced through, sometimes to the dismay of those around me. I appreciate the perspective that cultures create languages, and without the cultural reference the language would cease its importance and would die.
gwbas1c 5y ago
That would be authoritarian. I think natural evolution will gradually move most people to adopt either a single global language, or there will only be a few global languages. As English speakers, you and I can travel to most parts of the world without knowing the local language, because English is so pervasive. Will the "global language" be English? Who knows! > Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking. I always find it fascinating to see different dialects of English. The way that Americans will say "Please ..." and Indians say "Kindly ..." always makes me chuckle.
tbonesteaks 5y ago
You have a very fascinating point of view. I never thought of it that way before. But, from what I understand, the Tower of Babel isn’t a problem to be solved. It was a solution to the problem you want to introduce. Not disagreeing with your points exactly, but it is very interesting dichotomy you’ve introduced.
kartikay26 5y ago
I don’t think we need to put in extra “effort” to make it happen, it’s already happening - and English is becoming the default global language. Knowing English is an advantage in most jobs all over the world and it seems the percentage of English speakers in the world is increasing over time.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  That's true, it's going in that direction. But that's like saying there's less Malaria year over year because we're naturally building cities and towns that displace mosquito habitats. If we're going to agree that X is a problem and that we're happy the problem is naturally diminishing at some snail-like pace, then let's also agree to take direct action to solve X properly and now. We're tackling the Malaria problem, with dollars and behavior changes. Let's tackle the Tower of Babel problem with dollars and behavior changes. English is an okay global language, for example, but its writing system is far from okay.
  - thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
    Empirically, most people deal with English’a dumb spelling. Over a billion people have gone and learned English, on top of native speakers. We’re using it now. Your hypothetical new language would have to displace this incumbent which for all practical purposes already does what you want of it. Miraculously, people can do more than one language so all this happens without anyone abandoning their languages. English spelling is not okay but it’s not -far- from okay. Most people (who, again, empirically deal with it fine) are typing with autocorrect.
    - newsbinator 5y ago
      Every person who learns English writing today spends literal years learning it to the point of not being embarrassingly bad at writing it. I'm not sure if you've ever had to learn English as a non-native English speaker, but it's one of the hardest, most painful, longest things to get truly proficient at, equal to other very hard aspects in one's very hard profession. There are hundreds of millions of smart people who can't communicate their ideas to us in even simple English sentences. Whereas English grammar, as long as you avoid idioms, is pretty accessible as far as natural languages go. So to sum up: as a global language English is maybe okay, but its writing system makes it not at all okay.
yboris 5y ago
Language is a way of thought. Languages come with their own quirks, and just like [plant] monoculture is bad for an ecosystem, so would a single language. Since I was born in Russia and came to the US (thus becoming fluent in both languages), and especially after reading the book "Metaphors we live by" I see how language forces certain concepts on us. Having a variety of languages is a benefit, despite introducing problems. As of now, English has become the de-facto universal language: in many countries it's the #1 most-studied foreign language in schools. I don't see a problem with having English (or another language) be everyone's 2nd language for better global communication.
- ziotom78 5y ago
  I second this. Better having a 2nd language that is common for everybody than have just one language and only one way to express thoughts. I speak Italian (my mother tongue), English, Romanian and a bit of German, and I really enjoy when I discover subtle connections between words/sayings and the culture of the people using that language. (As an analogy, what if the world decides that only C++ should be used to write programs and libraries?!? Boooring!)
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    > just one language and only one way to express thoughts. There's no reason any reasonable person would suggest this
- rileyphone 5y ago
  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis always catches me as something we should investigate more, but unfortunately it’s mired in the broader conflict of cultural relativity, as I learned when my anthro professor tried to disprove it with a convoluted argument from an aboriginal tribes notion of direction. A diversity of languages means a diversity of thought, which maybe you could make the case for more multilingual teams from. English seems to suck as a language but it has risen to be the lingua franca of our present world system - how much of that is because British and American superpowerdom vs being a good lingua franca is up for debate.
KineticLensman 5y ago
Implementing a new global language is akin to a standardization process. From my experience in standardization (several years supporting SISO [0]), standardization is a very expensive and time consuming activity, even when the participants can see obvious benefits. Creating a new global language - and then adopting it - would have a massive opportunity cost - that could be better spent in trying to deal with higher priority problems such as global heating. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_Standards_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_St...
velcrovan 5y ago
> No-one in their right mind would create […] society Right. Because societies are emergent things that arise from masses of people, not products of an individual’s design preferences. That’s not to say that we might not eventually get to one language. But it won’t be because of illiterate* ideals expressed through technocratic meddling. (* — “Illiterate” in its original sense: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literacy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literac...)
- newsbinator 5y ago
  What's the difference between the technocratic meddling of getting everybody to stop spreading AIDS and the technocratic meddling of getting everybody to start speaking the same language? We build consensus, we devote dollars and person-hours, and we try to figure out how to get closer to a desired end state. We do it all the time. But when it's giving a generation of people plumbing that's monumental human progress and when it's giving a generation of people a lingua franca that's illiterate technocratic meddling.
  - rileyphone 5y ago
    The consequences can be disastrous, like Mao’s great leap forward. In any case, English is naturally taking the place of the world language.
63 5y ago
Language is an integral part of every culture. It's not just an arbitrary system that everyone chose differently, but a way of communicating and reinforcing ideas that's unique to different groups. Consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There's a reason language was associated with nationalism in the 20th century. Keeping the diversity of breadth of the human experience alive (much of which we've already lost with increasing globalism) means keeping diverse languages and cultures, and I think that's important.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  This is the standard refrain any time somebody calls for a unified language: "it's an integral part of our culture". I addressed this: > Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it. Will this mean losing the diversity of cultures due to increased globalism? Yes. Now here comes my most unpopular opinion on HN: Good, let's lose some cultures. My culture isn't special. Human cultures aren't a scare resource and we make up new ones all the time. If the next generation, which enjoys the gift of a single unified baseline language, isn't interested in my culture anymore, that's fine. It might even be good news. When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months. Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less varied than the ones that involved worshipping tree spirits and eating each other's hearts for strength. Let dying cultures die.
  - mrtranscendence 5y ago
    > Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less varied It's astonishing to what degree that comparison misses the mark. No, "complex" cultures don't pop into and out of existence on the internet every day -- "gaming" culture or "sports" culture or "woke twitter" culture are not cultures in the same sense that people living an an area and speaking a common language develop a culture over time. They're not the same thing, and though you might compare them via metaphor they're so different as to make that metaphor misleading. Amusingly, I've seen this attitude in Esperanto circles. No, there's no "Esperanto" culture in the same sense that I'm culturally North American (for example). > When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months. Culture is not nearly as ephemeral as you're making it out. You can't just develop a culture out of nothing. My "culture" includes not just a common vocabulary but a shared history going back hundreds of years; it includes visual arts, literature, intertwined family histories, the dust bowl, jazz and rock and roll. You can't just find those popping into and out of existence on Discord or Facebook.
kragen 5y ago
Schleyer's project of an international auxiliary language (and then later Zamenhof's, with Esperanto, and Hogben's with Interlingua) is indeed very worthwhile. It seems to have run into some political resistance, though.
tgv 5y ago
What would that solve? Do large societies with a common language do so much better than those with multiple languages? > South Korean Hangul The Roman alphabet is just as simple, and much wider spread. English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language with great expressive power. So shall we settle on English as the New World Language? Thought so.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  That's like comparing learning to drive a car with learning to drive a 747. No, English isn't a perfectly simple, easy to learn writing system. It's among the hardest writing systems to learn. Which is why we have a ridiculous game called "Spelling Bees", which can't exist in a language that's easy to write in. In Korea nobody's impressed when an 8-year-old can spell a complex-sounding word they've never heard before and don't know the meaning of: they should be able to spell it. http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/ http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/ > Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. > I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer. > Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
  - tgv 5y ago
    You said writing system, nothing about phonetic correspondence. But then I'll simply replace English by Spanish. There's of course the silent h which throws a spanner in the works sometimes, and there's the v/b overlap, but extremely easy to pronounce straight from the text, even without understanding. And with 27 letters that don't combine with others into groups, a lot easier to learn than Hangul. Or Inglish with a speling riform? Det shood bi sooparizi too lurn es wel. End yoo get ol da books end moovis for fri. Anyway, you haven't replied why you think it's advantageous. All that trouble just to avoid translating here or there, or learning multiple languages? What makes you believe that speaking the same language makes a better place?
  - CapitalistCartr 5y ago
Wowfunhappy 5y ago
Is this an unpopular opinion? I think that languages are beautiful and culture should be studied and respected—but yes, of course the world would be more efficient if we had a single universal language. (And preferably not English, since English is horrible.) There’s a reason the Tower of Babel story depicts languages as a punishment from God. The problem is that it’s ultimately a purely academic debate, for somewhat similar reasons to why QWERTY vs DVORAK discussions never lead anywhere. I have spent my entire life practicing reading and writing in english. I have zero interest in all that away to switch to an entirely new language, much less one that none of the people around me speak. You’re just never going to develop a movement around this in a free society, so there’s no point.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > English is horrible. English isn't substantially worse than any other natural language, except insofar that it is attached to a very inconsistent system of spelling. That's somewhat orthogonal to English as a language, though, and indeed it could be written with any imagined writing system (e.g. quickscript).
  - Wowfunhappy 5y ago
    I'm not well-versed in any foreign languages, but the little I know of Spanish grammar seems to be a lot more consistent than english. (There are footguns, there just seem to be fewer.) And since we're talking about ideals, I don't see any reason to limit ourselves to natural languages! I am quite certain you could design a language which is much easier to learn and no less expressive.
yosito 5y ago
The thing is, languages are a whole lot more than systems for speaking and writing. They're cultural memes and make up a large portion of many people's identity. I speak two widely spoken languages and one that's a bit less common. Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club, and was even a key to getting citizenship. But I had to learn more than just words for things. I had to learn about culture and history just to be able to socialize in the language. I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them. And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years. It can't simply be replaced with a standardized system. Currently, the closest thing the world has to a global standardized language is English. English isn't the most logical or simple system, but it works because so many people already know it due to the global shared history it has. Languages can't be divorced from history and culture, even English.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club This is the problem: every language is an exclusive cultural club. I want to have one that isn't an exclusive cultural club. > I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them What would be an example of this? For example in Korean there's the concept of 정, which is a Korean-specific feeling of love/loyalty/bond with another person. You could write paragraphs about how it's subtly different from Japanese Jyo or English love/loyalty/bond, but at the end of the day either you need the concept and create a word for it in the global language, even "Jeong" or whatever, or you don't need the concept and don't create a word for it. You don't build all of FORTRAN into CSS just because you want to borrow the concept of variables. You borrow what you need and make sure it fits nicely with what's already there. > And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years. You're saying that if over a generation they were to switch from one language to another their children and grandchildren would be without a history? The children in our family don't speak the same language as their grandparents did. They don't know any of the culture-specific words. This doesn't seem to matter in any way that I've noticed, and certainly they themselves haven't.
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danjac 5y ago
The world decided on English. It wouldn't be my first choice - even as a native speaker - but history and inertia has decided on this obscure Norman French/Anglo-Saxon island pidgin and we're kind of stuck with it until the Chinese century runs its course and we're dealing with pictograms and tonal differences.
- kaesar14 5y ago
  Until Chinese romanizes it will never be a lingua franca. Simply far too hard to learn the written word, Simplified or not.
  - danjac 5y ago
    It doesn't matter how difficult a language is to master to gain the status of a lingua franca. Have you tried learning Russian? Or Latin? Or ancient Greek? I mean English has such a bizarro spelling system it may as well use pictograms. You might as well say "English will never be a lingua franca unless the English speakers overhaul their spelling". English is where it is because of the double historical whammy of the British Empire followed by American hegemony. Couple battles won or lost here and there and we'd still be using French. Just as the saying is that a dialect is a "language with an army and a navy", a lingua franca is a language with the biggest army and navy (or trade/cultural influence). It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the simplicity of the language, although simplified pidgins/creoles might develop as more non-natives have to learn it (hence how Latin evolved into French, Spanish etc). But pidgins/creoles tend to be localised adaptations and don't have the universal currency of a lingua franca - unless of course they develop into fully-fledged "imperial" languages themselves, as with English.
    - kaesar14 5y ago
      It definitely does matter how difficult a language is to gain the status of a lingua franca. The written word of Chinese is beyond exceptionally difficult to learn. Saying English has such a bizzaro spelling system it might as well be pictograms just indicates to me you’ve never seriously given learning written Chinese a fair shake. What does a learner of English need to be able to learn to write a word? 26 * 2 symbols, and a fair understanding of the most basic spelling rules to give any word a basic attempt at spelling. If you didn’t know the spelling of president, you could very reasonably guess your way through it (begins with a ‘p’, ‘z’s are pretty rare and I’d know if it had one, etc.) Contrast this with the modern state of China where actual teenagers have difficulties writing Chinese without the use of a computer because the written word is THAT vast. I don’t see what your other examples have to do with anything…those are all languages that use an alphabet?
yorwba 5y ago
> pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) That's an interesting combination. The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics. Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another language with a writing system few people are familiar with. Whereas Hangul as used for writing Korean has plenty of cases where the same symbol represents different sounds in different context and vice versa different symbols representing the same sound in the same context. There's an internal logic to it that makes sense for Korean, because it results in words deriving from the same root being spelled similarly, but if you apply it to Malay, it's just another random set of symbols that can be assigned sounds by convention.
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics Malay/Indonesian is ridiculously easy and fun to learn. The simple/logical grammar is a joy compared to English, French, Arabic, etc. And it doesn't really have tones like Chinese. Anyway Malay + Hangul may not be your first choice, that's totally fine. Whatever is your first choice, let's go with it and establish it as the global baseline language that all children learn in school from kindergarten and in cartoons long before that.
SuoDuanDao 5y ago
That is very much the sentiment behind the Esperanto movement. Though that was proposed as a standardized second language, to be learned alongside whatever local languages were already being learned by the local population. The Esperanto crowd is a cool community, but uptake has been much slower than would be necessary for it to have the desired effectiveness.
BuckRogers 5y ago
The problem with the idea as I see it, is that it'll just tribalize again. You'd need to ensure that requirements are in place for learning and maintaining the chosen language, and prevent substantial evolution within it by any group of people. It's better for something like this to be a 2nd language, which is already in place for the world in English. The easy to learn and write part is mostly there, but getting someone out of the dark ages relies on them learning English. The real problem with maintaining language interop is that you have to practice it. It's infeasible to foist a new language onto the entire world, or choose one, rather than work with what we have. Money and knowledge are the only real motivators and English has it. Just as French did before, and Latin before that. Spanish, Chinese and Hindi probably also have a secure existence and always will. The rest are at risk of dwindling numbers and then extinction. So your wish has been coming true over time.

huachimingo 5y ago

Godwin's Law for language discussion: Consider the language Esperanto for universal candidate. /s

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

I read your comment and compare to programming languages. It would be revolutionary to have all computers programmed in the same language, but as different languages are good at different things and evolve concurrently, it's almost inconcievable to make it happen. And you're talking about refactoring not merely an entire industry, but the very language of thought for our species! How can we even begin to approach this consciously?

newsbinator 5y ago
The analogy is reasonable, although it breaks down because human languages are not nearly as varied in usefulness for different things as programming languages are. Human languages are much more generalized. Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human language being preferable to another though, like when Korean Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though perhaps what if" suggestion. On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps. If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term, and probably even in the short term too.
- hypertele-Xii 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y ago
  > On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps. Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I’m a native English speaker and any time English was established as a country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and suppression of other people, even in England.
  - 5y ago

muststopmyths 5y ago

I'm sure you know that there is a reason your opinion is highly unpopular. Language doesn't just communicate fish and net. Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian. Humanity would lose a lot if we all went to just one language and script. Sure, when all the rich people flee to Elysium or Mars, they will be better off with generations growing up together with a common language and script. Because the population will be small in comparison and they will be creating their own civilization. But until then, I'd like to keep the diversity right here on Earth.

newsbinator 5y ago
> Poetry, songs and literature just do not seamlessly translate between languages very well. Nor should we lose the calligraphy of Japanese/Chinese/Arabic/Persian. We don't have to incinerate anything. There won't be a government commission you have to petition to be allowed to do Japanese calligraphy or read a poem in its original language.
- ksdale 5y ago
  I mean, if you don't force people to do it, then English is The One Language you're talking about. People have basically collectively decided that if they're talking to someone halfway around the world, the words for net and fish are net and fish.
- paganel 5y ago
  Of course not, but the language will get lost, with time.
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    This is already happening, at an ever increasing rate. It's likely that the majority of languages will be extinct by the end of the century.

jcranmer 5y ago

> Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking. That... is optimistic, to say the least. Languages evolve essentially by having successive generations pick up collectively on idiosyncratic features of the language. And of course, people who aren't talking with each other aren't going to pick up on others' idiosyncratic features, and after several generations, you end up with new, distinct languages. To keep a single language out of it, you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it, and rather literally beat the daylight of anyone who speaks the "wrong" version of the language (this is essentially how the modern "big" European languages came about.) In other words, enforcing linguistic unity tends to require enforcing cultural unity as well.

newsbinator 5y ago
> you have to work hard to promote only a single version of it Yes, you do have to work to make it happen. Up to now we've given languages a free cultural pass, whereas diseases and poverty we keep shoveling trillions into, and we're proud when we've made a 20% dent. It takes work to pull the species out of what is natural, because what is natural is very often terrible. Diseases naturally evolve to terrorize us. We fight them and sometimes we win. The first step is admitting that how languages have evolved naturally up to now sucks for an ethical, roughly egalitarian 21st century information-based society. The sooner we can de-link language from local culture, the better. And of course that begs the question: can language be delinked from culture? Yes: my native language isn't the one I'm writing in to you now, and my native culture is whatever I'm making up for myself as I go along, to the chagrin of my parents and many in the culture I was born into.
- benjaminwai 5y ago
  Can language be delinked from culture? Maybe. But can a language survive without a culture to encompass it? If you strip culture from a language, wouldn't the language would become toneless and meaningless? Yes, you can call something a 'net' or a 'fish' at a basic level. However in one culture one might say, "You must cast your net to catch the fish" it's plain what it means and it is meaningful, but for someone without the cultural context, it's a head scratcher and may wonder what fish are you talking about? I'm too, my native language isn't the one I am writing here. I have lived in quite a few different places. Culture is not something I could make up for myself as I go along, I don't think anyone could do so in isolation. I took in the different bits of cultures that i have experienced through, sometimes to the dismay of those around me. I appreciate the perspective that cultures create languages, and without the cultural reference the language would cease its importance and would die.

gwbas1c 5y ago

That would be authoritarian. I think natural evolution will gradually move most people to adopt either a single global language, or there will only be a few global languages. As English speakers, you and I can travel to most parts of the world without knowing the local language, because English is so pervasive. Will the "global language" be English? Who knows! > Sure, languages evolve and you can't fight that, but with a global internet and a concerted effort to finally solve the Tower of Babel problem, languages can evolve everywhere at once into a single global language that every child gets brought up speaking. I always find it fascinating to see different dialects of English. The way that Americans will say "Please ..." and Indians say "Kindly ..." always makes me chuckle.

tbonesteaks 5y ago

You have a very fascinating point of view. I never thought of it that way before. But, from what I understand, the Tower of Babel isn’t a problem to be solved. It was a solution to the problem you want to introduce. Not disagreeing with your points exactly, but it is very interesting dichotomy you’ve introduced.

kartikay26 5y ago

I don’t think we need to put in extra “effort” to make it happen, it’s already happening - and English is becoming the default global language. Knowing English is an advantage in most jobs all over the world and it seems the percentage of English speakers in the world is increasing over time.

newsbinator 5y ago
That's true, it's going in that direction. But that's like saying there's less Malaria year over year because we're naturally building cities and towns that displace mosquito habitats. If we're going to agree that X is a problem and that we're happy the problem is naturally diminishing at some snail-like pace, then let's also agree to take direct action to solve X properly and now. We're tackling the Malaria problem, with dollars and behavior changes. Let's tackle the Tower of Babel problem with dollars and behavior changes. English is an okay global language, for example, but its writing system is far from okay.
- thatjoeoverthr 5y ago
  Empirically, most people deal with English’a dumb spelling. Over a billion people have gone and learned English, on top of native speakers. We’re using it now. Your hypothetical new language would have to displace this incumbent which for all practical purposes already does what you want of it. Miraculously, people can do more than one language so all this happens without anyone abandoning their languages. English spelling is not okay but it’s not -far- from okay. Most people (who, again, empirically deal with it fine) are typing with autocorrect.
  - newsbinator 5y ago
    Every person who learns English writing today spends literal years learning it to the point of not being embarrassingly bad at writing it. I'm not sure if you've ever had to learn English as a non-native English speaker, but it's one of the hardest, most painful, longest things to get truly proficient at, equal to other very hard aspects in one's very hard profession. There are hundreds of millions of smart people who can't communicate their ideas to us in even simple English sentences. Whereas English grammar, as long as you avoid idioms, is pretty accessible as far as natural languages go. So to sum up: as a global language English is maybe okay, but its writing system makes it not at all okay.

yboris 5y ago

Language is a way of thought. Languages come with their own quirks, and just like [plant] monoculture is bad for an ecosystem, so would a single language. Since I was born in Russia and came to the US (thus becoming fluent in both languages), and especially after reading the book "Metaphors we live by" I see how language forces certain concepts on us. Having a variety of languages is a benefit, despite introducing problems. As of now, English has become the de-facto universal language: in many countries it's the #1 most-studied foreign language in schools. I don't see a problem with having English (or another language) be everyone's 2nd language for better global communication.

ziotom78 5y ago
I second this. Better having a 2nd language that is common for everybody than have just one language and only one way to express thoughts. I speak Italian (my mother tongue), English, Romanian and a bit of German, and I really enjoy when I discover subtle connections between words/sayings and the culture of the people using that language. (As an analogy, what if the world decides that only C++ should be used to write programs and libraries?!? Boooring!)
- newsbinator 5y ago
  > just one language and only one way to express thoughts. There's no reason any reasonable person would suggest this
rileyphone 5y ago
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis always catches me as something we should investigate more, but unfortunately it’s mired in the broader conflict of cultural relativity, as I learned when my anthro professor tried to disprove it with a convoluted argument from an aboriginal tribes notion of direction. A diversity of languages means a diversity of thought, which maybe you could make the case for more multilingual teams from. English seems to suck as a language but it has risen to be the lingua franca of our present world system - how much of that is because British and American superpowerdom vs being a good lingua franca is up for debate.

KineticLensman 5y ago

Implementing a new global language is akin to a standardization process. From my experience in standardization (several years supporting SISO [0]), standardization is a very expensive and time consuming activity, even when the participants can see obvious benefits. Creating a new global language - and then adopting it - would have a massive opportunity cost - that could be better spent in trying to deal with higher priority problems such as global heating. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_Standards_Organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_Interoperability_St...

velcrovan 5y ago

> No-one in their right mind would create […] society Right. Because societies are emergent things that arise from masses of people, not products of an individual’s design preferences. That’s not to say that we might not eventually get to one language. But it won’t be because of illiterate* ideals expressed through technocratic meddling. (* — “Illiterate” in its original sense: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literacy/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/03/rediscovering-)literac...)

newsbinator 5y ago
What's the difference between the technocratic meddling of getting everybody to stop spreading AIDS and the technocratic meddling of getting everybody to start speaking the same language? We build consensus, we devote dollars and person-hours, and we try to figure out how to get closer to a desired end state. We do it all the time. But when it's giving a generation of people plumbing that's monumental human progress and when it's giving a generation of people a lingua franca that's illiterate technocratic meddling.
- rileyphone 5y ago
  The consequences can be disastrous, like Mao’s great leap forward. In any case, English is naturally taking the place of the world language.

63 5y ago

Language is an integral part of every culture. It's not just an arbitrary system that everyone chose differently, but a way of communicating and reinforcing ideas that's unique to different groups. Consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There's a reason language was associated with nationalism in the 20th century. Keeping the diversity of breadth of the human experience alive (much of which we've already lost with increasing globalism) means keeping diverse languages and cultures, and I think that's important.

newsbinator 5y ago
This is the standard refrain any time somebody calls for a unified language: "it's an integral part of our culture". I addressed this: > Everybody has their own local medicines, even traditional witch-doctor medicines, but at the same time everybody gets the exact same doxycycline and training on when to use it. Likewise whatever word we end up choosing for "fish" and "net": use whatever word you want in your village, but when you want the one that works in the rest of the world, we made sure you're already armed with it. Will this mean losing the diversity of cultures due to increased globalism? Yes. Now here comes my most unpopular opinion on HN: Good, let's lose some cultures. My culture isn't special. Human cultures aren't a scare resource and we make up new ones all the time. If the next generation, which enjoys the gift of a single unified baseline language, isn't interested in my culture anymore, that's fine. It might even be good news. When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months. Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less varied than the ones that involved worshipping tree spirits and eating each other's hearts for strength. Let dying cultures die.
- mrtranscendence 5y ago
  > Complex cultures pop into and out of existence on the internet every day, and they're no less complex and no less varied It's astonishing to what degree that comparison misses the mark. No, "complex" cultures don't pop into and out of existence on the internet every day -- "gaming" culture or "sports" culture or "woke twitter" culture are not cultures in the same sense that people living an an area and speaking a common language develop a culture over time. They're not the same thing, and though you might compare them via metaphor they're so different as to make that metaphor misleading. Amusingly, I've seen this attitude in Esperanto circles. No, there's no "Esperanto" culture in the same sense that I'm culturally North American (for example). > When they need a culture like my culture again, they'll develop one, probably within years or months. Culture is not nearly as ephemeral as you're making it out. You can't just develop a culture out of nothing. My "culture" includes not just a common vocabulary but a shared history going back hundreds of years; it includes visual arts, literature, intertwined family histories, the dust bowl, jazz and rock and roll. You can't just find those popping into and out of existence on Discord or Facebook.

kragen 5y ago

Schleyer's project of an international auxiliary language (and then later Zamenhof's, with Esperanto, and Hogben's with Interlingua) is indeed very worthwhile. It seems to have run into some political resistance, though.

tgv 5y ago

What would that solve? Do large societies with a common language do so much better than those with multiple languages? > South Korean Hangul The Roman alphabet is just as simple, and much wider spread. English is a perfectly simple, easy to learn language with great expressive power. So shall we settle on English as the New World Language? Thought so.

newsbinator 5y ago
That's like comparing learning to drive a car with learning to drive a 747. No, English isn't a perfectly simple, easy to learn writing system. It's among the hardest writing systems to learn. Which is why we have a ridiculous game called "Spelling Bees", which can't exist in a language that's easy to write in. In Korea nobody's impressed when an 8-year-old can spell a complex-sounding word they've never heard before and don't know the meaning of: they should be able to spell it. http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/ http://chateauview.com/pronunciation/ > Dearest creature in creation Studying English pronunciation, I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. > I will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy; Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear; Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer. > Pray, console your loving poet, Make my coat look new, dear, sew it! Just compare heart, hear and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word.
- tgv 5y ago
  You said writing system, nothing about phonetic correspondence. But then I'll simply replace English by Spanish. There's of course the silent h which throws a spanner in the works sometimes, and there's the v/b overlap, but extremely easy to pronounce straight from the text, even without understanding. And with 27 letters that don't combine with others into groups, a lot easier to learn than Hangul. Or Inglish with a speling riform? Det shood bi sooparizi too lurn es wel. End yoo get ol da books end moovis for fri. Anyway, you haven't replied why you think it's advantageous. All that trouble just to avoid translating here or there, or learning multiple languages? What makes you believe that speaking the same language makes a better place?
- CapitalistCartr 5y ago

Wowfunhappy 5y ago

Is this an unpopular opinion? I think that languages are beautiful and culture should be studied and respected—but yes, of course the world would be more efficient if we had a single universal language. (And preferably not English, since English is horrible.) There’s a reason the Tower of Babel story depicts languages as a punishment from God. The problem is that it’s ultimately a purely academic debate, for somewhat similar reasons to why QWERTY vs DVORAK discussions never lead anywhere. I have spent my entire life practicing reading and writing in english. I have zero interest in all that away to switch to an entirely new language, much less one that none of the people around me speak. You’re just never going to develop a movement around this in a free society, so there’s no point.

mrtranscendence 5y ago
> English is horrible. English isn't substantially worse than any other natural language, except insofar that it is attached to a very inconsistent system of spelling. That's somewhat orthogonal to English as a language, though, and indeed it could be written with any imagined writing system (e.g. quickscript).
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  I'm not well-versed in any foreign languages, but the little I know of Spanish grammar seems to be a lot more consistent than english. (There are footguns, there just seem to be fewer.) And since we're talking about ideals, I don't see any reason to limit ourselves to natural languages! I am quite certain you could design a language which is much easier to learn and no less expressive.

yosito 5y ago

The thing is, languages are a whole lot more than systems for speaking and writing. They're cultural memes and make up a large portion of many people's identity. I speak two widely spoken languages and one that's a bit less common. Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club, and was even a key to getting citizenship. But I had to learn more than just words for things. I had to learn about culture and history just to be able to socialize in the language. I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them. And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years. It can't simply be replaced with a standardized system. Currently, the closest thing the world has to a global standardized language is English. English isn't the most logical or simple system, but it works because so many people already know it due to the global shared history it has. Languages can't be divorced from history and culture, even English.

newsbinator 5y ago
> Learning the less common language was like gaining membership in an exclusive cultural club This is the problem: every language is an exclusive cultural club. I want to have one that isn't an exclusive cultural club. > I learned things that simply can't be translated into other languages without long paragraphs of explanation that would actually require the reader to accept some knowledge of the language to understand them What would be an example of this? For example in Korean there's the concept of 정, which is a Korean-specific feeling of love/loyalty/bond with another person. You could write paragraphs about how it's subtly different from Japanese Jyo or English love/loyalty/bond, but at the end of the day either you need the concept and create a word for it in the global language, even "Jeong" or whatever, or you don't need the concept and don't create a word for it. You don't build all of FORTRAN into CSS just because you want to borrow the concept of variables. You borrow what you need and make sure it fits nicely with what's already there. > And people who grew up speaking this language have their entire life experience wrapped up in it, and their entire family history wrapped up in it for thousands of years. You're saying that if over a generation they were to switch from one language to another their children and grandchildren would be without a history? The children in our family don't speak the same language as their grandparents did. They don't know any of the culture-specific words. This doesn't seem to matter in any way that I've noticed, and certainly they themselves haven't.

deleted 5y ago

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danjac 5y ago

The world decided on English. It wouldn't be my first choice - even as a native speaker - but history and inertia has decided on this obscure Norman French/Anglo-Saxon island pidgin and we're kind of stuck with it until the Chinese century runs its course and we're dealing with pictograms and tonal differences.

kaesar14 5y ago
Until Chinese romanizes it will never be a lingua franca. Simply far too hard to learn the written word, Simplified or not.
- danjac 5y ago
  It doesn't matter how difficult a language is to master to gain the status of a lingua franca. Have you tried learning Russian? Or Latin? Or ancient Greek? I mean English has such a bizarro spelling system it may as well use pictograms. You might as well say "English will never be a lingua franca unless the English speakers overhaul their spelling". English is where it is because of the double historical whammy of the British Empire followed by American hegemony. Couple battles won or lost here and there and we'd still be using French. Just as the saying is that a dialect is a "language with an army and a navy", a lingua franca is a language with the biggest army and navy (or trade/cultural influence). It has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the simplicity of the language, although simplified pidgins/creoles might develop as more non-natives have to learn it (hence how Latin evolved into French, Spanish etc). But pidgins/creoles tend to be localised adaptations and don't have the universal currency of a lingua franca - unless of course they develop into fully-fledged "imperial" languages themselves, as with English.
  - kaesar14 5y ago
    It definitely does matter how difficult a language is to gain the status of a lingua franca. The written word of Chinese is beyond exceptionally difficult to learn. Saying English has such a bizzaro spelling system it might as well be pictograms just indicates to me you’ve never seriously given learning written Chinese a fair shake. What does a learner of English need to be able to learn to write a word? 26 * 2 symbols, and a fair understanding of the most basic spelling rules to give any word a basic attempt at spelling. If you didn’t know the spelling of president, you could very reasonably guess your way through it (begins with a ‘p’, ‘z’s are pretty rare and I’d know if it had one, etc.) Contrast this with the modern state of China where actual teenagers have difficulties writing Chinese without the use of a computer because the written word is THAT vast. I don’t see what your other examples have to do with anything…those are all languages that use an alphabet?

yorwba 5y ago

> pick one easy-to-learn language (e.g. Malay) and one super-simple writing system (e.g. South Korean Hangul) That's an interesting combination. The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics. Writing it in Hangul instead would make it just another language with a writing system few people are familiar with. Whereas Hangul as used for writing Korean has plenty of cases where the same symbol represents different sounds in different context and vice versa different symbols representing the same sound in the same context. There's an internal logic to it that makes sense for Korean, because it results in words deriving from the same root being spelled similarly, but if you apply it to Malay, it's just another random set of symbols that can be assigned sounds by convention.

newsbinator 5y ago
> The main reason why English speakers often consider Malay to be easier than other South-East Asian languages is that it's usually written using the Latin script without diacritics Malay/Indonesian is ridiculously easy and fun to learn. The simple/logical grammar is a joy compared to English, French, Arabic, etc. And it doesn't really have tones like Chinese. Anyway Malay + Hangul may not be your first choice, that's totally fine. Whatever is your first choice, let's go with it and establish it as the global baseline language that all children learn in school from kindergarten and in cartoons long before that.

SuoDuanDao 5y ago

That is very much the sentiment behind the Esperanto movement. Though that was proposed as a standardized second language, to be learned alongside whatever local languages were already being learned by the local population. The Esperanto crowd is a cool community, but uptake has been much slower than would be necessary for it to have the desired effectiveness.

BuckRogers 5y ago

The problem with the idea as I see it, is that it'll just tribalize again. You'd need to ensure that requirements are in place for learning and maintaining the chosen language, and prevent substantial evolution within it by any group of people. It's better for something like this to be a 2nd language, which is already in place for the world in English. The easy to learn and write part is mostly there, but getting someone out of the dark ages relies on them learning English. The real problem with maintaining language interop is that you have to practice it. It's infeasible to foist a new language onto the entire world, or choose one, rather than work with what we have. Money and knowledge are the only real motivators and English has it. Just as French did before, and Latin before that. Spanish, Chinese and Hindi probably also have a secure existence and always will. The rest are at risk of dwindling numbers and then extinction. So your wish has been coming true over time.