Poll: One world language... that isn't yours.

[RooftopAssassin]

German. Always found it a lot easier than French and the words aren't structured in a stupid way ("the car blue").

Le voiture blu. Perfect example. Or when you have to say "French class"- Classe de francais= "Class of French". I like how you can clump words together in German like: Hoechsgeschwindigkeitsbegrenzung = maximum speed limit


I like the way Russian sounds, so I picked that. I was forced to learn Cyrillic in my world history class so it's be easier than most for me.

 

[Michjo]

I say Japanese. I like the way the language sounds. Sure, the sentence structure is highly unorthodox (often going subject -> object -> verb as opposed to subject -> verb -> object like most other languages), but it's really not that hard to learn.

And I second Esperanto. Sure, it may seem like the poor man's Latin, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Esperanto is no good, too small a vocab, its not meant as a primary language but just as a common secondary language.

Esperanto's vocabulary is not only not too small, it is as least as large as that of the other languages suggested here. The number of ROOTS (or stems, if you like) is relatively small - about 10,000 official + 10,000 unofficial - but you can combine them with almost total freedom to create new words, giving an effective vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words, most of which you don't have to learn, but can create on the fly.

Esperanto not being a primary language is irrelevant. What matters is this: does Esperanto keep its promise? Namely, can you express yourself as clearly and as richly as in your native language, but at a much lower cost than learning another ethnic language, and does that hold true regardless of your native language? The answer, based on my and other people's experience as Esperanto speakers, is a most definite yes.

 

[Michjo]

Oh man, I can't decide, most of them are good.
However, I want to object to the notion of Esperanto. That language is an abominiation, an awkward-sounding frankenstein sloppily cobbled together from European languages.

By "abomination, an awkward-sounding Frankenstein sloppily cobbled together from European languages", I suspect very strongly that Mr. Squishy really meant was that he IMAGINES Esperanto to be such. I speak Esperanto, and never have I felt it to be an abomination, or a Frankenstein, or awkward, or sloppy - it feels to me just as natural and seamless as the other languages I speak (French, Arabic, some German and Hebrew).

An excellent example of an ethnic language that, by Mr. Squishy's criteria, would be an "abomination, an awkward-sounding Frankenstein" because it is "sloppily cobbled together from European languages" is English. Yet, it doesn't feel that way. Why? Because everything imported into English has been thoroughly Anglicized, and no one stops to consider the source of they words they use - they just use them. When I use English words like "law", "angst", "giraffe", "John", "shampoo" or "ketchup", it never jumps out at me that they were taken from other languages (French, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Malay); I just use them as the English words they now are. You can make any English word SOUND artificial by just saying it over and over again; do that with enough words, and you have the impression the whole language is an artificial mess.

The same holds for Esperanto: everything imported into Esperanto has been thoroughly Esperantized, and when I use Esperanto words, I don't stumble over the fact that they came from this or that language, I just use them as the Esperanto words they are. The result is a seamless whole, just as much so as any other language.

 

[Michjo]

Spanish because:
...

3. Unlike Esperanto a lot of people already speak Spanish (at least in the Western Hemisphere) so finding people to teach Spanish would be easy.
...

The solution to that problem for Esperanto is actually quite simple: have existing teachers of other languages learn Esperanto. It's easy enough that if all language teachers were to start now, we'd have a corps of fully qualified of Esperanto teachers in a year, without anyone having to spend any time abroad.

 

[Arsen]

German. It can sound romantic, articulate, intelligent, fearsome, and powerful all at the same time.

 

[DanDeFool]

Lojban.

It's an engineered language, designed to be completely logical and unambiguous. It should be comparatively (or at least equivalently) easy for everyone to learn, and doesn't have any bizarre linguistic bullcrap that some languages are absolutely fraught with.

(English, I'm looking at you.)

I think that if we want to make everybody learn one universal language, we might as well pick a language that won't have half the world whining about racism and how white people are all yearning for the day when they can put all the darker-skinned races back on the plantation again.

(Again, English, looking DIRECTLY at you.)

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban

 

[Sabrestar]

Welsh. Because I'm perverse like that.



And it's very lyrical and musical to my ears.

 

[zombiesinc]

I simply voted for my favourite language, Japanese.

May not be the easiest, but I dun care.

 

[General BrEeZy]

c'mon people, russians totally punk-ass!
german and japanese are too minus the japanese

 

[Unmannedperson]

Esperanto because anyone who speaks a European language could learn it in 6 months.

 

[Jark212]

Latin easily, in has roots in many languages so it would be easier for a larger population to learn...

 

[iblis666]

German since i hear it has a sentence structure much like that of English and still basically uses the English alphabet which is very versatile though all in all id much rather create a new language that doesn't have so much adopted words

 

[crepesack]

本当に？Why are people voting japanese? I speak english and chinese fluently. I'm starting to learn japanese and by far is it one of the HARDEST languages to learn out there. Characters have many many readings, the phonetic system is pretty byzantine, there are multiple ways of speaking based on gender and there are an innumerable number of grammatical exceptions.

English is my native language so I shall pick the grammatically and structurally closest thing: German.

I honestly think anyone who chose Japanese either has never attempted to learn the language or seems to forget the logistics involved in training the entire world in an already difficult language. There would be a global reduction in literacy. A horrible lingua franca Japanese makes.

That is my two cents. 　

真是的，外国人假装懂我们东方人的语言的难度！
no, I'm not from China, born in the good 'ol USA and no, I'm not a communist bastard. And yes, I am Taiwanese and no I don't care that it's in simplified chinese.

Edit: My second pick is spanish because it uses a familiar alphabet, and aside from the odd conjugation rules it's pretty easy to pick up. Also, I sort of know a good bit of conversational spanish. (yay for living down south).

I personally would never pick any language based on modular pictographs...

 

[joshthor]

I've always thought german sounds really cool to learn so I voted for that.

if its german hitler wins.

 

[Squilookle]

Italian should be on this poll.

Japanese is only voted so highly because of all the Anime fans

I agree. Poll fixed

Also sorry for not including Latin, it seems quite popular, though the main reason people argue for it applies to Esperanto as well, so just vote for that instead.

 

[Ravek]

Why the hell can't I vote for English?

Because you ARE English!

No I'm not.

 

[MikailCaboose]

I picked German 'cause I'm a major Rammstein and Oomph! fan.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Lets all speak Chinese. If we're all going to be speaking the same language, we may as well speak a language that doesn't exist.

Agreed, lets make it up as we go along!

 

[Sun Flash]

Seeong as I'm lazy and can't choose my native language, I'll go German, since I'm halfway competent at it.

 

[Vern]

As an English speaker, I chose German. Part of it is because the majority of English is derived from German, with Latin influences, but also because German is very specific. They use compound words much like English, and they may end up with 16 character words, but at least you know what they're talking about, much like English. It's generally very straightforward, businesslike, to the point, and efficient. The fact that I have a decent amount of German ancestry, love the language, and cant stand Latin based languages may have helped my decision.