“I think the worlds leading linguists should design a language built on logic/most common similarities/natural speech/mathematics/etc, and the world should adopt it as their second language. Schools and business’s could make it compulsory. Having one global language would actually protect other languages, as everybody on the planet would only have to learn two languages, and everybody on the earth could talk to one another – then we really would be one race, the human race. All films and literature could also be released in this language”
thetaoofyun 7:51 pm on July 21, 2011 Permalink |
That was more or less the idea behind Esperanto which fizzled and no-one could understand why. For communication, you need context. Each culture has a perceived construction of context and language assigned to each context relative to the speaker. without culture, language doesn’t live. hence if your proposal was implimented, each culture would just translate directly from their mother tongue and expect people to understand (imagine spanish speakers translating and omitting subjects/ English speakers putting in too many? maybe too nerdy a response for this but the point is that there is no direct one to one correlation from one language to another)
Besides, learning a language means pushing your brain to understand something so complex and there are so many variations out there that you are spoiled for choice. As for the doom of languages (a.k.a. the endangered language issue) once the world has successfully installed a common language and declared it global property (something happening right now) then people will feel less pressured to ‘denounce’ their mother tongue.
Short answer: no matter how hard we try, its already happening