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Forum URL: http://www.eyrie-productions.com/Forum/dcboard.cgi
Forum Name: Undocumented Features General
Topic ID: 92
Message ID: 11
#11, RE: Standard language?
Posted by Pasha on Sep-01-01 at 01:33 PM
In response to message #4
>>On the other hand, English is a highly expressive language that
>>conveys ideas well.
>
>...Not really. There's some things that it's very good at, mostly
>wordplay and puns thanks to an immense vocabulary and lots of
>homophones. It's also just about the most musical Germanic language
>I'm familiar with. But there are languages that are far easier to
>learn, languages that are far less ambiguous in day-to-day matters,
>and languages that are more expressive in prose. Benjamin Sapir-Whorf
>(as in the Whorf hypothesis) found Hopi a language extremely
>well-suited to describing the world that physics and math and other
>hard sciences describe, far moreso than English. (He said something
>along the lines of Hopi being a rapier and English being a bludgeon.)
>
>In other words, English is ambiguous, difficult to learn (particularly
>written English), and a poor choice for an International language.
>It's gained its prominence in the world stage mostly because of the
>economic power of the States and the extent of the British Empire,
>sort of like how French became the international language before that.
> (At least French is relatively easy to learn.) Japanese is judged to
>be about as difficult to learn as English, for much the same reasons,
>and many linguists consider Basque to be the most difficult language
>in the world to learn.

Ok, I'm not sure if this is true or not, but I was having a conversation with a linguist, who explained that one of the reasons that english is used so frequently is the redundancy, and the fact that, for most uses, it uses the least sylabels(Ok, I mangled the spelling on that. If an admin wants to stalinize it, go for it.) of any language.


>At the other end of the scale, there's Esperanto, which, though an
>artificial language, is stupidly, ridiculously easy to learn, and
>amazingly expressive (although it does have a tendency to generate
>rather immense words due to the tendency to make words by compounding
>them; it's not as bad an offender as German, but malsanule^jo --
>hospital -- ain't elegant). I'm enough of an Esperantist to want it
>to become the true international language and everyone's second
>language (and the language thought of as "Terran" if we make contact
>with an alien species -- it's certainly far better suited to that than
>English), but enough of a realist to know that it's unlikely to
>happen.

I could also point to lojban, which is the only language that I know that can express time travel, from the third person after the fact, without breaking down into tears. And it's just fun to speak a language that looks like code when written out. Hey! There's an idea! we'll all use some bastardized version of Perl to communicate in the future! Yeah!

--
-Pasha
Umm, right....I'll be with you in just a sec now...