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I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common

I’ve long thought about how wonderful it would be to create a contemporary new hybrid language whose objective was to unify communication along the very common linguistic origins at least some language clusters have. The core challenge of course is that it would be contrived in a time when top down imposition does not work as effectively. It’s a dream I have nonetheless. It would be a gargantuan effort just alone to devise a language that would unify historic language origins roots in a contemporary time. The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects that are all under varying states and types of endangerment or extinction risk, but also prevent an ignoble, unstable, and inadequate language like contemporary English from dominating the whole world.

detourdog 5mo ago
I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
- lproven 5mo ago
  I preferred Interlingua... But these days, Slovio would help me more. I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise. https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.slovio.com/ https://www.slovio.com/
  - amdsn 5mo ago
    I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange. Straight from the Slovio website: >Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla. >Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
    - lproven 5mo ago
      Very interesting. Thanks. Those are good points...
- detourdog 5mo ago
  You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.
tsimionescu 5mo ago
> The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?
dahart 5mo ago
Yes I’ve been having similar thoughts - how amazing would it be to have a common global tongue. Last time I looked, Chinese and the Spanish were the two most spoken languages, at least counting native speakers - there are other legit ways to measure this! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...) What I’m personally curious about is the goal to prevent extinction of languages. Isn’t that fully at odds with the goal to unify languages? In a single language, we can’t possibly keep enough of even just the Germanic languages for anyone to feel like their language was preserved, and we’re talking about something that also has to work for all the wildly different language families is Asian, African, Slavic, Indian, and South American countries, just to name a few. I’m not sure it’s possible to borrow from languages in any way that preserves them. The thought I keep having is that maybe the goal to preserve languages is working against us. Yes it’s sad to lose some languages, but I think it was sad for the languages to split in the first place, and it would be amazing if there was a common language. What about the idea of archiving all the languages we have, so the history is there, and then after that dropping the objective to preserve any of them? Still a gargantuan effort, but maybe being able to focus on unification and ignore preservation would help us get there? This is a hypothetical, of course, pie in the sky dreaming… but I share at least part of your dream. Language will continue to evolve as it always has, and maybe geopolitics will drive us toward one or a few languages being super common.
- schoen 5mo ago
  The official position of modern IAL advocates like Esperantists is that everyone should be bilingual in a local or family language as well as in the world language. There is someone on HN who has pointed out (I forgot exactly when) that this is actually not the historical tradition in Esperanto, but it's extremely strong nowadays. I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages. I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders! My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).

detourdog 5mo ago

I’m sure you are aware of Esperanto. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

lproven 5mo ago
I preferred Interlingua... But these days, Slovio would help me more. I've tried Slovio on Slavs of about 10 nationalities. None had ever heard of it. All of then, no exceptions, could just understand it perfectly well, to their great surprise. https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.interlingua.com/interlingua-en/ https://www.slovio.com/ https://www.slovio.com/
- amdsn 5mo ago
  I find slovio to be jarring. It's like someone took vaguely slavic words and slammed Esperanto-inspired grammar onto them. Something like Interslavic at least has noun/verb morphology that is much more familiar to all Slavic language speakers. I could imagine myself actually speaking Interslavic, but not the case for Slovio. It's simply too strange. Straight from the Slovio website: >Slovio es novju mezxunarodju jazika ktor razumijut cxtirsto milion ludis na celoju zemla. >Slovio is a new international language that 400 million people on the planet understand I am a Russian speaker so the copula "es" being written is strange but obviously I speak other languages that use their copula in the present tense so that's not so bad, but to 100% of slavic speakers "jazik" (tongue/language) is masculine, yet the adjectives here are reminiscent of ones for a feminine noun in the accusative case which is doubly weird as that case would also make no sense here. The second half of the sentence isn't so bad aside from "ludis" (-s plural is alien to the entire family) and "na celoju zemla" (more confusion where my brain expects a different case form). It's just odd that it completely drops noun cases on the floor when almost all the Slavic languages still have healthy productive inflection systems.
  - lproven 5mo ago
    Very interesting. Thanks. Those are good points...
detourdog 5mo ago
You are both more involved than I am. I only brought up Esperanto because it seemed as if there was no awareness of effort in this type of language development.

tsimionescu 5mo ago

> The objective would be to stop the death and eradication of languages, e.g., Welsh, German, or any of the numerous other smaller languages and dialects How is German, a langauge natively spoken in two nation states and quite a few neighboring regions, being eradicated?

dahart 5mo ago

Yes I’ve been having similar thoughts - how amazing would it be to have a common global tongue. Last time I looked, Chinese and the Spanish were the two most spoken languages, at least counting native speakers - there are other legit ways to measure this! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of...) What I’m personally curious about is the goal to prevent extinction of languages. Isn’t that fully at odds with the goal to unify languages? In a single language, we can’t possibly keep enough of even just the Germanic languages for anyone to feel like their language was preserved, and we’re talking about something that also has to work for all the wildly different language families is Asian, African, Slavic, Indian, and South American countries, just to name a few. I’m not sure it’s possible to borrow from languages in any way that preserves them. The thought I keep having is that maybe the goal to preserve languages is working against us. Yes it’s sad to lose some languages, but I think it was sad for the languages to split in the first place, and it would be amazing if there was a common language. What about the idea of archiving all the languages we have, so the history is there, and then after that dropping the objective to preserve any of them? Still a gargantuan effort, but maybe being able to focus on unification and ignore preservation would help us get there? This is a hypothetical, of course, pie in the sky dreaming… but I share at least part of your dream. Language will continue to evolve as it always has, and maybe geopolitics will drive us toward one or a few languages being super common.

schoen 5mo ago
The official position of modern IAL advocates like Esperantists is that everyone should be bilingual in a local or family language as well as in the world language. There is someone on HN who has pointed out (I forgot exactly when) that this is actually not the historical tradition in Esperanto, but it's extremely strong nowadays. I guess one thing that leads to divergent attitudes about multilingualism and language planning is people's different intuitions about whether bilingualism is easy or hard. Some people feel bilingualism is literally automatic (just have children regularly spend time in different language environments), while some people feel it's expensive or prone to failure modes where some children favor one language or another, suffer cross-linguistic interference (which might not harm their intelligibility at all in their own immediate environments, but might be at odds with language planning goals), or become less than fully fluent or less than fully literate in one or more languages. I was taught the "bilingualism is automatic" view and I know there's a lot of scientific consensus behind it, but it also seems like the fine details are complicated: not all children and not all adults will be enthusiastic about achieving and maintaining equal fluency in languages they use in different contexts, or necessarily about following a national or international standard to maximize understanding with outsiders! My father's family (in New York) stopped speaking German in his generation, so I'm not a native German speaker, as my grandfather was. I've been sad about this, especially with the intuition that I could "easily" have been a fluent native German bilingual speaker "for free" with no adverse consequences to my English proficiency. But maybe that's not literally true (maybe my English would have been more idiosyncratic and less standard, maybe I would have lost interest in German as a child and become bad at it, maybe I would have divided my reading time between languages and ended up with a slightly smaller English vocabulary?).