Poll: Language
- Thread starter Merkavar
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English should be the main language, of course. It practically already is. But everyone should at least learn a second language for better communication purposes and to improve linguistic skills. Just because we may have a universal language doesn't mean we can't be a little cultured.
English is a shitty language. It's my most comfortable language, and there's no doubt that it's widely spoken, but it still sucks. It's so full of logical inconsistencies, unreasonable impediments and idiot traditions that it's looked down upon to speak it correctly and well.
If it were up to me, I'd say the interstellar language should be Lojban [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban], but we can't even get our country to adopt the fucking metric system, nonetheless a logic-based second language.
If it were up to me, I'd say the interstellar language should be Lojban [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban], but we can't even get our country to adopt the fucking metric system, nonetheless a logic-based second language.
Really? I'm the only one to pick Mandarin? Sure I would have to learn it but it would make things a lot easier for the rest of the world.
Hardly anyone is going to learn a language that they don't need to, and nobody is going to learn it well if there isn't a good amount of media in that language. Esperanto may be easy, even understandable to someone who already speaks a romance language, but people don't tend to work that way.kane.malakos said:
I noticed this too; I don't understand peninsular Spanish very well myself. Still, at least it's not like the difference between English and Scots, or even dialects of Chinese. Lo que.Tsaba said:
Edit: Relevant link is relevant. [http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html] These aren't new observations, but it's stated quite well here.
English for all the reasons already said, along with the fact that it is so adaptable, words from other languages just become part of English as they are needed which might have something to do with the fact that American's aren't as.....prudish....not the perfect world but it will do. We don't have the sheer history behind our usage of the language that the European countries do as as a result we don't care as much when changes are made.
Having a near universal language, which is learned as a second language by most, has plenty of advantages. However I think such a language would need to be easy to learn and fairly straight forward.
Chinese, and to a lesser extent Japanese, both have logographic systems that are extremely difficult to learn. I do realize there are methods to get around this but I'm still skeptical.
English is extremely flexible, which makes it easy to expand - a must for any "universal" language. However it is also rife with exceptions, variants, and irregularities and this makes it quite difficult to master.
If you'll forgive a momentary aside, from my understanding every state in India needs to include Hindi or English in their official languages - and many chose English because it is neutral (Hindi empowers its native speakers). It seems to me if we want a universal language we should follow this and find something viewed as relatively neutral. This would likely be a language which isn't too widely spoken to specifically take out the power houses.
Off hand I think a language from a prominently Neutral nation would be good. Switzerland isn't going to work, it's primary languages are French and German. Swedish seems like a good bet. Finnish is even more niche but it's an agglutinative language and while I personally find them very cool I'm not sure how easy they are for others to learn.
If Swedish is riddled with irregularities like English then it may be a poor choice, otherwise I think it could work well.
Chinese, and to a lesser extent Japanese, both have logographic systems that are extremely difficult to learn. I do realize there are methods to get around this but I'm still skeptical.
English is extremely flexible, which makes it easy to expand - a must for any "universal" language. However it is also rife with exceptions, variants, and irregularities and this makes it quite difficult to master.
If you'll forgive a momentary aside, from my understanding every state in India needs to include Hindi or English in their official languages - and many chose English because it is neutral (Hindi empowers its native speakers). It seems to me if we want a universal language we should follow this and find something viewed as relatively neutral. This would likely be a language which isn't too widely spoken to specifically take out the power houses.
Off hand I think a language from a prominently Neutral nation would be good. Switzerland isn't going to work, it's primary languages are French and German. Swedish seems like a good bet. Finnish is even more niche but it's an agglutinative language and while I personally find them very cool I'm not sure how easy they are for others to learn.
If Swedish is riddled with irregularities like English then it may be a poor choice, otherwise I think it could work well.
I voted mandarin because it makes sense, I've been taking it a year, I'm the top student in my class, and I plan on making my career about it, I'm taking it for these reasons:
1 My girlfriends mother speaks it, and I want to make sure she approves of me dating that angel of a girl
2 It's a HUGELY common language, billions of people speak it.
3 I plan on doing buisness/ genetically engineering rice in china, I need to know it
4 It's something that makes me unique, and I want that
well?
1 My girlfriends mother speaks it, and I want to make sure she approves of me dating that angel of a girl
2 It's a HUGELY common language, billions of people speak it.
3 I plan on doing buisness/ genetically engineering rice in china, I need to know it
4 It's something that makes me unique, and I want that
well?
The Heik said:
If the entirety of humanity were asexuals... I'd see it as an improvement but we'd die out. Preservation of the species: Its for the children.
OT: I voted russian because I'm almost fluent and it is a simpler language in terms of rules and exceptions than english, but I am aware that english would probably win.
Simple, Sindarin.
On a more likely scale, I'd probably go with English due to it being my native language and I can't stand how in some languages (I know Spanish does it, but not sure about others) have this weird set up for adjectives. "The dog red is running" just sounds like a stupid way to put it to me.
On a more likely scale, I'd probably go with English due to it being my native language and I can't stand how in some languages (I know Spanish does it, but not sure about others) have this weird set up for adjectives. "The dog red is running" just sounds like a stupid way to put it to me.
Lol, of course ^_^health-bar said:
As for the translator Babelfish: たび、バベルフィシわしっぱいをしますよ。たんごがわかります、でも、ながくてふくざつなぶんわだめです。みらいにも。 If any translator gets that right, I definitely want to know about it.
Klingon
Every other choice would be biased based upon what language you are most fluent in. With Klingon everyone (with the exception of a couple of people) would have to learn it and there would be no bias. Too many people would just choose the language of their own country and it could lead to other countries that have biases against certain countries protesting over it.
If we were to choose Klingon then there would be much less resistance of any country against the decision to have that as our international/inter galactic language. The real problem would be that the Klingons' may have a serious issue with humans using their language and this could lead to an all out inter galactic war. However, if we were to avoid Klingon space then they would never learn of our existence and if we were to encounter a Klingon ship then we would simply speak random gibberish so that they believed we used another language.
Binary is another acceptable contender however our computers may become jealous that they aren't the only ones that use Binary as their language anymore and this could lead to an A.I. uprising.
Unfortunately, unlike Klingons, it would be much harder for the human race to avoid computers.
In conclusion, Klingon is the best candidate for the human races' international/inter galactic language as it would be the easiest to get away with and because Klingon is an alien language, we would encounter minimal resistance from countries that are too proud of their own language to allow a language of another country to be chosen.
I sincerely hope that the people in charge of choosing the language take the above points into serious consideration.
Every other choice would be biased based upon what language you are most fluent in. With Klingon everyone (with the exception of a couple of people) would have to learn it and there would be no bias. Too many people would just choose the language of their own country and it could lead to other countries that have biases against certain countries protesting over it.
If we were to choose Klingon then there would be much less resistance of any country against the decision to have that as our international/inter galactic language. The real problem would be that the Klingons' may have a serious issue with humans using their language and this could lead to an all out inter galactic war. However, if we were to avoid Klingon space then they would never learn of our existence and if we were to encounter a Klingon ship then we would simply speak random gibberish so that they believed we used another language.
Binary is another acceptable contender however our computers may become jealous that they aren't the only ones that use Binary as their language anymore and this could lead to an A.I. uprising.
Unfortunately, unlike Klingons, it would be much harder for the human race to avoid computers.
In conclusion, Klingon is the best candidate for the human races' international/inter galactic language as it would be the easiest to get away with and because Klingon is an alien language, we would encounter minimal resistance from countries that are too proud of their own language to allow a language of another country to be chosen.
I sincerely hope that the people in charge of choosing the language take the above points into serious consideration.
I gotta go with English. It's grammatically very regular, but the spelling needs to be really regularized. Spanish and Russian are fine candidates, but both being synthetic languages, I kinda no likey for a universal tongue. I tend towards preferring less inflection when possible, but it's not a big deal for me. Klingon is a terrible idea for a language--the nicest thing you can say is something like "fuck you, what do you want?" instead of "hello". I don't know enough about Japanese grammar to speak on that, but the writing system thing would be disadvantageous unless it were either normalized to just the hiragana, katakana, or romaji systems (or any of the above).
I grant that being a native English speaker I'm kind of biased towards it, though. Russian and Spanish are probably no harder to learn, spelling aside.
I grant that being a native English speaker I'm kind of biased towards it, though. Russian and Spanish are probably no harder to learn, spelling aside.
