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Something like this would make for a great universal human language. In addition to this simplified grammar, it would also be great to limit vocabulary so only

Something like this would make for a great universal human language. In addition to this simplified grammar, it would also be great to limit vocabulary so only need a small dictionary, hopefully without any homonyms, homophones, or homographs.

mchaver 3y ago
The best example of this might actually be Wikipedia. There is a separate set of articles in a simpler and controlled form of English: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page , and details about the rules: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English
- zokier 3y ago
  Simple English Wikipedia is not limited to Basic English
stavros 3y ago
I doubt that English is a good basis for a universal anything, due to the extreme inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation. There are some other disadvantages, as there are in any language, but having to learn how a word is spelled and pronounced entirely independently of each other, with no correlation, is a big drain on time. I imagine something like Esperanto would be much more suitable for the role.
- arp242 3y ago
  The downside of Esperanto is that very few people speak it and is harder to learn in some ways as there's far less media in the language – you got that 1960s William Shatner film that's entirely in Esperanto, and maybe 2 or 3 more, and ... that's it. Meanwhile you can learn English from watching Star Trek, Time Team, SpongeBob, reading Harry Potter, The Hobbit, shitposting on Reddit, etc. For better or worse, English already is the de-facto universal language, or the closest we have to it. We tried the Esperanto thing back in the 20s, and it didn't really work out as there was very little interest outside of a fairly sizeable but ultimately limited group of enthusiasts. I don't see how Esperanto or any other constructed language will take off in the foreseeable future. Continued evolution of English pronunciation and spelling seems like a more realistic and better option – the language will change anyway, as all languages do, so might as well ensure it changes in a reasonable direction. Time spent advocating Esperanto is probably better spent on advocating more consistent English.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Sure, but my point still stands, it's unfortunate that English is the one that spread. Spanish would have been a better choice.
    - _yweu 3y ago
      Why is that? I'm not criticising, just curious. What makes it a better language?
      - stavros 3y ago
        It's much more phonetic, which removes a huge amount of work in learning to spell.
        TinkersW 3y ago
        Spanish is too verbose and the gender feature is a pointless waste of time. Informal/formal also pointless.
        stavros 3y ago
        Same as having to always mention the gender in English, ie "he said", whereas in Spanish it's just "said".
        programmer_dude 3y ago
        Does Spanish assign gender to inanimate objects?
        stavros 3y ago
        It assigns linguistic gender, which isn't the same as people's gender.
        3y ago
- msla 3y ago
  Esperanto is very Eurocentric, in grammar and phonolgy, not to mention being under-specified and idiosyncratic in ways that make it hard to learn. It's also sexist, completely apart from the fact it's gendered, and some of its vocabulary is ambiguous.
  - stavros 3y ago
    Out of curiosity, how is it sexist?
    - bloak 3y ago
      There are languages like Finnish and Hungarian in which gender is almost entirely absent, and there are languages like French in which a binary masculine-feminine distinction permeates everything. Gender in Esperanto is similar to gender in English, but slightly more problematic: 1. There are different pronouns ("li" and "ŝi") for male and female persons, just like in English. There is a also a non-traditional gender-neutral pronoun ("ri") that a large proportion of Esperanto speakers have probably heard of by now but is not yet used very much. 2. There are about 20 word pairs where the female form is derived from the male form with the suffix -in, for example, "patro" father, "patrino" mother, so the sexes are treated asymmetrically. There are multiple proposals to fix this but, as you can imagine, it takes a while to reach a consensus on which proposal to adopt, if any. Both of the above make it difficult to talk about someone in traditional Esperanto without knowing or revealing their sex, and also make it difficult to talk about non-binary people. But in principle the problem is not hard to fix and so it probably will get fixed once enough people feel strongly enough about it.
- ginsider_oaks 3y ago
  Lojban[1] is a constructed language which is (or tries to be) syntactically unambiguous. Of course even fewer people speak Lojban than Esperanto, but there's still a sizable community. [1]: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban
pif 3y ago
The proper use of the Latin alphabet, or any other alphabet, should be top priority. Phonetic spelling: if you see it, you can pronounce it; if you hear it, you can write it. Spelling bees have no sense in a rational language.
- nine_k 3y ago
  Languages drift. What was straight spelling 10-20 centuries ago is now mismatch, because people now say these words differently. (Case in point: Italian vs classical Latin.) To keep spelling in sync with pronunciation the spelling must be centrally controlled, like German, or Russian, or Spanish (the latter has the least-surprising spelling of all Latin-based modern languages I'm aware of, unless you're in Argentina). Centralized control over English spelling is impossible due to a bunch of obvious reasons.
  - lil_cain 3y ago
    It's actually worse than this; you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. Otherwise, would a speaker of local Dublin english spell tree and three the same? And should a speaker of South Eastern Hiberno-English spell three and tree differently, even though the difference in their t and th is indistinguishable to most speakers of British English? The lack of exact correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is a feature, not a bug.
    - pif 3y ago
      > you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. No, not at all. Several Italian words have regional variants, and they are simply spelled differently. When you are used to a phonetic alphabet, you never wonder how to write what you say.
      - lil_cain 3y ago
        The differences in regional accents between say local Dublin English and the Supra regional Dublin accent (i.e. without even leaving the city) are reasonably large. I dunno what italian dialectal differences is, but Englishes are often very large city. I'm not saying it's impossible; Trainspotting, for example, is mostly written in phonetic Scottish english. Many english speakers find it difficult to read though, for precisely that reason…
euroderf 3y ago
English has conflicting tendencies. The spelling is effective in distinguishing written forms of homophones, a feature that is papered over in many sound-based spelling reforms. But OTOH the spelling is often disturbingly awful - and obnoxiously misleading. A controlled English should (IMO) strike a balance between these two tendencies while opening the door to spelling reforms, which could be easily managed in a controlled language environment.
modderation 3y ago
I'm curious if a limited English dictionary would eventually start picking up loan words for new concepts, gradually bloating back into the modern (or future) English vocabulary. Out of interest, I'd point at XKCD #1133, "US Space Team's Up-Goer Five" [1] and Thing Explainer [2][3] for examples of what gets lost when vocabulary is cut down. [1] https://m.xkcd.com/1133/ https://m.xkcd.com/1133/ [2] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer

mchaver 3y ago

The best example of this might actually be Wikipedia. There is a separate set of articles in a simpler and controlled form of English: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page , and details about the rules: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English

zokier 3y ago
Simple English Wikipedia is not limited to Basic English

stavros 3y ago

I doubt that English is a good basis for a universal anything, due to the extreme inconsistency of spelling and pronunciation. There are some other disadvantages, as there are in any language, but having to learn how a word is spelled and pronounced entirely independently of each other, with no correlation, is a big drain on time. I imagine something like Esperanto would be much more suitable for the role.

arp242 3y ago
The downside of Esperanto is that very few people speak it and is harder to learn in some ways as there's far less media in the language – you got that 1960s William Shatner film that's entirely in Esperanto, and maybe 2 or 3 more, and ... that's it. Meanwhile you can learn English from watching Star Trek, Time Team, SpongeBob, reading Harry Potter, The Hobbit, shitposting on Reddit, etc. For better or worse, English already is the de-facto universal language, or the closest we have to it. We tried the Esperanto thing back in the 20s, and it didn't really work out as there was very little interest outside of a fairly sizeable but ultimately limited group of enthusiasts. I don't see how Esperanto or any other constructed language will take off in the foreseeable future. Continued evolution of English pronunciation and spelling seems like a more realistic and better option – the language will change anyway, as all languages do, so might as well ensure it changes in a reasonable direction. Time spent advocating Esperanto is probably better spent on advocating more consistent English.
- stavros 3y ago
  Sure, but my point still stands, it's unfortunate that English is the one that spread. Spanish would have been a better choice.
  - _yweu 3y ago
    Why is that? I'm not criticising, just curious. What makes it a better language?
    - stavros 3y ago
      It's much more phonetic, which removes a huge amount of work in learning to spell.
      - TinkersW 3y ago
        Spanish is too verbose and the gender feature is a pointless waste of time. Informal/formal also pointless.
        stavros 3y ago
        Same as having to always mention the gender in English, ie "he said", whereas in Spanish it's just "said".
        programmer_dude 3y ago
        Does Spanish assign gender to inanimate objects?
        stavros 3y ago
        It assigns linguistic gender, which isn't the same as people's gender.
        3y ago
msla 3y ago
Esperanto is very Eurocentric, in grammar and phonolgy, not to mention being under-specified and idiosyncratic in ways that make it hard to learn. It's also sexist, completely apart from the fact it's gendered, and some of its vocabulary is ambiguous.
- stavros 3y ago
  Out of curiosity, how is it sexist?
  - bloak 3y ago
    There are languages like Finnish and Hungarian in which gender is almost entirely absent, and there are languages like French in which a binary masculine-feminine distinction permeates everything. Gender in Esperanto is similar to gender in English, but slightly more problematic: 1. There are different pronouns ("li" and "ŝi") for male and female persons, just like in English. There is a also a non-traditional gender-neutral pronoun ("ri") that a large proportion of Esperanto speakers have probably heard of by now but is not yet used very much. 2. There are about 20 word pairs where the female form is derived from the male form with the suffix -in, for example, "patro" father, "patrino" mother, so the sexes are treated asymmetrically. There are multiple proposals to fix this but, as you can imagine, it takes a while to reach a consensus on which proposal to adopt, if any. Both of the above make it difficult to talk about someone in traditional Esperanto without knowing or revealing their sex, and also make it difficult to talk about non-binary people. But in principle the problem is not hard to fix and so it probably will get fixed once enough people feel strongly enough about it.
ginsider_oaks 3y ago
Lojban[1] is a constructed language which is (or tries to be) syntactically unambiguous. Of course even fewer people speak Lojban than Esperanto, but there's still a sizable community. [1]: https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban

pif 3y ago

The proper use of the Latin alphabet, or any other alphabet, should be top priority. Phonetic spelling: if you see it, you can pronounce it; if you hear it, you can write it. Spelling bees have no sense in a rational language.

nine_k 3y ago
Languages drift. What was straight spelling 10-20 centuries ago is now mismatch, because people now say these words differently. (Case in point: Italian vs classical Latin.) To keep spelling in sync with pronunciation the spelling must be centrally controlled, like German, or Russian, or Spanish (the latter has the least-surprising spelling of all Latin-based modern languages I'm aware of, unless you're in Argentina). Centralized control over English spelling is impossible due to a bunch of obvious reasons.
- lil_cain 3y ago
  It's actually worse than this; you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. Otherwise, would a speaker of local Dublin english spell tree and three the same? And should a speaker of South Eastern Hiberno-English spell three and tree differently, even though the difference in their t and th is indistinguishable to most speakers of British English? The lack of exact correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is a feature, not a bug.
  - pif 3y ago
    > you'd need centralised control over pronunciation as well. No, not at all. Several Italian words have regional variants, and they are simply spelled differently. When you are used to a phonetic alphabet, you never wonder how to write what you say.
    - lil_cain 3y ago
      The differences in regional accents between say local Dublin English and the Supra regional Dublin accent (i.e. without even leaving the city) are reasonably large. I dunno what italian dialectal differences is, but Englishes are often very large city. I'm not saying it's impossible; Trainspotting, for example, is mostly written in phonetic Scottish english. Many english speakers find it difficult to read though, for precisely that reason…

euroderf 3y ago

English has conflicting tendencies. The spelling is effective in distinguishing written forms of homophones, a feature that is papered over in many sound-based spelling reforms. But OTOH the spelling is often disturbingly awful - and obnoxiously misleading. A controlled English should (IMO) strike a balance between these two tendencies while opening the door to spelling reforms, which could be easily managed in a controlled language environment.

modderation 3y ago

I'm curious if a limited English dictionary would eventually start picking up loan words for new concepts, gradually bloating back into the modern (or future) English vocabulary. Out of interest, I'd point at XKCD #1133, "US Space Team's Up-Goer Five" [1] and Thing Explainer [2][3] for examples of what gets lost when vocabulary is cut down. [1] https://m.xkcd.com/1133/ https://m.xkcd.com/1133/ [2] https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ https://xkcd.com/thing-explainer/ [3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer