One Universal Language

[shrooby]

Link to original post: [drupal=5373]One Universal Language[/drupal]



Should there be a universal language that almost everyone in the world speaks? What that language would be or how it would be formed is not the question. Nor is whether or not it would even be possible, but rather would it be beneficial? (I suppose you could also answer how that language would be developed, or how it could be achieved so that everyone knows it, but I'm more interested in whether or not it would be beneficial)
I have yet to really form an opinion, but the question kept popping into my head. I'm curious to hear(read) other opinions so I can see both sides, and hopefully form an opinion on the matter.

 

[Browny]

I've been of the belief for quite a while that eventually, english and chinese will be the only languages that matter.

So many countries teach english to students as a second language to a level WAY beyond what english-speaking countries teach any other language, its inevitable that it will become more and more prevalent. When an option exists to learn another language, it seems to me to be pretty detrimental to learn anything other than english. Maybe if people learn 2 or more, would it be ok to learn any other language primarily.

Chinese, simply because they dont need to learn english. They can remain such an important part of all the worlds manufacturing without needing to learn it. You cant have a universal language, if the most populous country in the world doesnt speak it.

So, should there be one? I think of course, it is inevitable. Cultural identities will die out eventually as multiculturalism spreads to such a level that most countries are similar to many others anyway. Gone are the days of colonisation and wars over new land (I dont count things like north v south sudan since its impact on the world is negligible), the countries that matter will simply continue to exist and be happy to do so. And in the worst and most likely case I would imagine, it would be china invading other SE Asian countries, that would only spread the prevalence of chinese like I expect would happen anyway.

So I think there should be one, but I believe the most likely outcome over the next say, 50 years, is that English and Chinese will be so dominant, the vast majority of the earth will know either one. At no stage do they have to be 'official' universal language, but the real-world result is the exact same anyway, whether people view it that way (as I will) or not.

\IMO

 

[Vermanubis]

Nah.

Too many different languages exist for too many different reasons. As silly as it may sound, things like intonation, inflection and general sound affect how a word's perceived. From a technical viewpoint, yeah, only one language is needed, <technically>. In fact, one was created for just such a purpose: Esperanto. It's a synthetic language that's 100% grammatically and phonetically consistent, with no irregular verb forms, etc. So it's essentially meant to be a medium between languages.

However, from a more human standpoint of verbal connotation, one language just won't do it. Each language just has too much to offer in terms of expression and other humanistic considerations. For example, sprightly and animated mean the same thing, but have distinctly different connotations and invoke very distinct illustrations.

So yeah, I think as far as a technical language goes, sure--after all, English is the predominant technical language. Chinese isn't a technical language, primarily because the fabrication of a new word involves an almost primitive copulation of two separate concepts like "fire" and "arrow" for "rocket."

 

[Luigitoilet]

Yes, American.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

Music is the universal language. Or is it Dance? It's one of those two.

 

[finalark]

Esperanto was an attempt as this. As far as I know it didn't work.

Lets just all learn to speak Galactic Basic.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

English serves this purpose already quite well. If you travel, you'll find most educated young people (anyone under the age of 40, really, and older in many wealthier countries) speaks English about as well as you do. This becomes less true the further east you go, but you can still find English speakers all over the world.

English is ****ing easy. It's spoken slowly, it has amazing per-syllable value compared to other languages, regular verbs are conjugated once per tense, and there are only a few cases (my/mine, for example... most germanic languages have at least 4, some have more than a dozen). Because our "respectful" form of the pronoun "you" fell out of use more than a century ago, you use the same sentence to talk to anyone, from a small child, to your girlfriend's grandfather, to the president. There's also a ludicrous amount of material on learning English, thousands of movies subtitled across dozens of languages, and endless people to speak and practice with. English speakers are so common that native English speakers have trouble practicing their second language abroad because no one sees any sense in speaking anything but English with you.

If you're looking for an international language, it's English.

 

[Sizzle]

English serves this purpose already quite well. If you travel, you'll find most educated young people (anyone under the age of 40, really, and older in many wealthier countries) speaks English about as well as you do. This becomes less true the further east you go, but you can still find English speakers all over the world.

English is ****ing easy. It's spoken slowly, it has amazing per-syllable value compared to other languages, regular verbs are conjugated once per tense, and there are only a few cases (my/mine, for example... most germanic languages have at least 4, some have more than a dozen). Because our "respectful" form of the pronoun "you" fell out of use more than a century ago, you use the same sentence to talk to anyone, from a small child, to your girlfriend's grandfather, to the president. There's also a ludicrous amount of material on learning English, thousands of movies subtitled across dozens of languages, and endless people to speak and practice with. English speakers are so common that native English speakers have trouble practicing their second language abroad because no one sees any sense in speaking anything but English with you.

If you're looking for an international language, it's English.

I completely disagree with your second paragraph, even though you kind of mention it in your first. English is incredibly difficult to learn as a second language if you come from a non latin root language speaking sphere. I've spent considerable time in Japan, a lot of it teaching English. English speakers are not common there, and there is little to no chance for Japanese to practice speaking English with a native speaker. English grammar rules are illogical, the alphabet may be easy, but the amount of differing sounds are high, and pronunciation is a complete nightmare because of it. The sentence structure is different, and there are also unnatural sounds for them. I could go on, but try reading this and tell me English is easy.

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/

 

[Browny]

Quite... I've heard that English is one of the harder languages to learn (Behind the likes of Icelandic of course).

Especially with the sheer amount of homographs, homonyms and homophones to confuse the hell out of people, and words that can be verbs, nouns and adjectives all at once.

How about Strike... You can strike from work, strike someone (physically), strike to remove something, strike out in baseball, look 'striking'. I just thought of that then, how many more stupid words like that exist to confuse people.

Obviously the grammar rules are significant too, but many times my international friends were lost when I spoke and used words they thought only had 1 meaning, when it could have anywhere past 4.

 

[Ussi]

other languages also have words that have more than one meaning.....

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

English grammar rules are illogical,

Other languages, too

the alphabet may be easy, but the amount of differing sounds are high, and pronunciation is a complete nightmare because of it.

What

English has incredibly easy pronunciation. It obviously depends on who you're teaching it to (people of some native languages like French have trouble with our "th" sound). If you're talking about speaking it to a point that you wouldn't have an accent that differs from native speakers, then it's true that English is harder than other languages, but just like, learning to speak well enough that people can understand you? Not a chance.

The sentence structure is different, and there are also unnatural sounds for them. I could go on, but try reading this and tell me English is easy.

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2011/12/23/english-pronunciation/

This is more an issue of English spelling than English pronunciation ("why is this word spelled this way" and not "why is this word pronounced like this when it's spelled this way") but yes English spelling is stupid. That doesn't make the language any harder to actually speak nor does it make English's incredibly simple grammar any harder to apply in real life.

Like, look at Portuguese. In Portuguse, each verb has multiple conjugations per tense like in every language. Almost every verb also has at least one irregular adjustment, so there are very few regular verbs. Portuguese students learning English are amused and relieved when they find out they don't have to learn new conjugations for each verb because English doesn't have any (well, except for third person singular). You might argue they have to learn some irregular spellings instead, though.

English has one tick: it becomes harder the more you know about it, unlike more languages which seem to become easier as you amass information. With that said, we're talking about learning English within the context of it being an international language for conversational use between nations. Learning English conversationally is pretty easy.

EDIT: I jsut realized your post was about people who speak asian languages as their first language. Obviously it will be harder for them. :\

Do you think like, Esperanto would be easy for them? I doubt it.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Quite... I've heard that English is one of the harder languages to learn (Behind the likes of Icelandic of course).

Yeah my English teachers all through life told me this, but they're just wrong.

English has more quirks than any other language, that is certainly true... like: tons of irregular verbs that are used every day (but even then, most languages have tons of irregular verbs and you have to conjugate them 20+ times and know them buy heart), bizarre use of some tenses in casual speech, spelling rules that break themselves constantly.

Other languages have homographs, homonyms and homophones. Other languages have nonsensical expressions, and many times they are even worse, and any times there are more of them.

 

[Ussi]

"gh" has more than one pronunciation

 

[Ramen King]

There used to be one universal language, but god divided people up and gave them each different languages because people were becoming too advanced.

 

[Ussi]

I thought the story was they tried to build a tower to the heavens?

Kinda wondering what advanced would mean back then too...

 

[#HBC | J]

English is one of the hardest languages to learn because we have so many different/obscure/nonsensical rules that just don't make sense and we even end up breaking some of the rules in order to make new words. It really is a weird/wonky language as supposed to Spanish/French/German/Japanese.

Having one universal language would be kind of a good thing but eh, I don't know it's just fine the way it is today personally.

 

[cannedbread]

foreign languages are so beautiful.

 

[Ramen King]

I thought the story was they tried to build a tower to the heavens?

Kinda wondering what advanced would mean back then too...

Yeah the tower of babel, similar to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJ4Qp2xeRds&feature=plcp&t=7m08s

 

[#HBC | Joker]

Why are you people discussing english and verb conjugation and esperanto?

Music and Dance are the universal languages.

/end thread

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

English is one of the hardest languages to learn because we have so many different/obscure/nonsensical rules that just don't make sense and we even end up breaking some of the rules in order to make new words. It really is a weird/wonky language as supposed to Spanish/French/German/Japanese.

Having one universal language would be kind of a good thing but eh, I don't know it's just fine the way it is today personally.

Do you speak a second language?

English's grammar rules are actually really straightforward compared to a lot of languages.

English's weirdness is all in the spelling and pronunciation. Well, there are actually some things with tenses. Good, strong conversational English requires mastery of most of its tenses. English also has a ton of phrasal verbs ("take a walk," "eat out," as in at a restaurant, "kill time," ran into," "make up," and so on), and a special quirk no other language has called "verbing" which allows us to freely use some nouns as verbs... for example, "exit" is a noun, but "to exit" has become a pretty acceptable verb. "Access" is also a noun that became a verb, for example. Other languages just don't have this function. This can make English tricky to keep up with if you aren't speaking it every day.

If you're talking about being 100% fluent I would say English is a challenge, if you're talking about going to America or England and being conversational I'd say it's one of the easiest languages out there.

 

[infiniteV115]

How do you know exit and access didn't start off as nouns and verbs at the same time?

Cause I don't agree with the idea of a word changing its definition (or gaining a new one) just because everyone starts using it incorrectly. Still gonna protest the use of 'suicide' as a verb.

Also I only took 1 spanish course in high school but it seemed like a very easy language.

 

[Supermodel From Paris]

Verbing is a well-known linguistic phenomenon in English.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_(linguistics)#Verb_conversion_in_English

And no offense meant by this, but talking about linguistics after taking a single spanish class in high school is a little like saying Snake loses to Ganondorf because you beat your cousin all the time with Ganon.

I'm amazed at how many Americans who don't know a second language think other languages are somehow less robust or complicated. lol

Describing English as easy isn't even an insult, it's a compliment. English is insanely efficient and still manages to be amazingly descriptive. You can fit the same amount of information in 2 syllables in English that it takes 3-4 to fit in another language.

In Portuguese, for example, "my friend" is "o meu amigo" or "a minha amiga" if they're a female. It takes 5-6 syllables to say the same thing in Portuguese. In Portuguese, you gain the added information of their gender because Portuguese and other latin languages have gender built into most nouns, however we still gain gender information based on other parts of the sentence that the Portuguese guy would say anyway. For example, "My friend said that he likes yellow" is 8 syllables in English and still includes the gender description, while in Portuguese the same sentence is "O meu amigo disse que ele gosta de amarelo." is 15 syllables for the same information.

Information-per-syllable is a huge part of learning a language, and as a bonus, English is spoken pretty slowly in most regions of the US.

 

[_Keno_]

English if pretty easy except for a few words and phrases of exception, which if you mess up on people will still understand you anyways.

Also I really hate that "read" is both the active and past-tense of itself. It just annoys me because sometimes i pronounce the wrong version in my head when reading.

Do you read? I read.

Did you read? I read.

 

[Ussi]

Why are you people discussing english and verb conjugation and esperanto?

Music and Dance are the universal languages.

/end thread

I don't listen to music. Some Muslims think music is bad, I decided to follow suit in that.

/threadreopen

 

[Chronodiver Lokii]

Okay, I know a few people who are not native English speakers
Best example are my Korean coworkers
We would think Korean/Japanese/etc would be difficult to learn, but I'm attempting to learn both Korean and Japanese and i am having a much easier time understanding grammar rules. Same with when I took Spanish.

The English language has a lot of unnecessary rules that make it one of the most difficult languages to understand completely. There is an exception to every rule, multiple pronunciations to everything, multiple versions of each word and variations in sound or spelling, etc

The grammar rules in other languages im attempting to learn are simple and straight forward:
Here is the sentence structure. Here are exceptions. Here is the alphabet. Pronunciations. Now you just need to learn vocabulary, speaking fluently, and writing. Have fun. (it's not simple, but it's a lot easier than having a non native speaker come and try to learn the basics of English, even from grade school level books)

My Korean coworkers struggle with the language. My boss has been here for over 8 years, and it is still difficult. Her sister tool ESL classes and is struggling to take her other classes. The chef has lived with his son in America for a while.....and we can barely understand each other (I had to help fill out his papers for his citizenship). I've talked to them about learning languages, and English has been a struggle. They all know other languages besides korean (my boss's sister speaks fluent Japanese as well), and they still find English more difficult. And Japanese is NOT an easy language. But, it has more straight forward rules, while English is all over the board.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

I don't listen to music. Some Muslims think music is bad, I decided to follow suit in that.

/threadreopen

Wait... are you serious? Some muslims teach the idea that all music, as a general rule, is bad? I can't even imagine what life would be like without music, it is by far the greatest art form. That is so sad...

 

[-Jumpman-]

@supermodelfparis

No, English is harder than a lot of other languages. My frame of reference is limited to Europe, but it's easier to learn pretty much any other european language, than it is to learn english. I heard Japanese and Chinese are quite logical as well, but I assume Chinese requires a ****load of experience to understand.

 

[global-wolf]

PrivateJoker-Brown, visual art and photography is a vastly better method of information communication than music. Music is good for communicating emotions but only if you're accustomed to the music of that particular culture. Additionally many people do not like particular kinds of music, I personally hated rock music when I was young and thought it sounded like loud crap, whereas someone else might interpret it as angry or happy or something.

There was an article somewhere (Reader's Digest or National Geographic maybe?) that ranked the difficulties of some major world languages for English speakers. Chinese was the hardest on that list. Now Chinese was actually my first language so I can't really say how difficult it is to learn to speak and understand it, but I think the Chinese writing system alone would make it a more difficult language than English, even with all of English's inconsistency. English is still pretty hard though.

 

[#HBC | Joker]

Art is 110% subjective. Personally, I prefer music to photographs/painting/drawing/sculpture. I think all forms of art are definitely cool, but none of them speak to me the way music does. That's my personal opinion, and I wouldn't expect everyone to agree. Rock music in particular happens to be my favorite genre, so we obviously just have differing tastes.

 

[Falconv1.0]

Supermodel from Paris would be the one mother****er to say English is easy.

The one and only in a situation where you absolutely don't want to be the only mother****er backing that position up.

And to think the only reason I even got to see that post and laugh at it was because someone quoted you. Odd ****in' world.

But seriously **** English, we speak it because we're *******s who like to make things hard on ourselves.

 

[Ussi]

@supermodelfparis

No, English is harder than a lot of other languages. My frame of reference is limited to Europe, but it's easier to learn pretty much any other european language, than it is to learn english. I heard Japanese and Chinese are quite logical as well, but I assume Chinese requires a ****load of experience to understand.

I think Chinese and Japanese are hard to learn how to read and write. Its the symbols to learn...

 

[Big-Cat]

Even if we were to have one universal language, it would only then break up into multiple languages again. Cultural differences would come in and come up with various dialects which would eventually evolve into separate languages.

And English makes no sense, and I'm a native speaker. I've learned Spanish, and it's a lot more straightforward, even if I'm not completely used to some of the intricacies.

 

[Ussi]

Even if we were to have one universal language, it would only then break up into multiple languages again. Cultural differences would come in and come up with various dialects which would eventually evolve into separate languages.

Arabic is a prime example of this. No one speaks modern standard Arabic, but a dialect that had derived from it. Essentially cultural slang has changed the language in different areas.

 

[Pachinkosam]

You know english is a universal language right?

Every language is english but i just wanted to say that statement

 

[¯\_S.(ツ).L.I.D._/¯]

As far as I'm concerned if you're not speaking English you aren't worthwhile, so we have a universal language already.

 

[Browny]

Lol... 'smash debater', comes up with that response.

classy

 

[Jonas]

@supermodelfparis

No, English is harder than a lot of other languages. My frame of reference is limited to Europe, but it's easier to learn pretty much any other european language, than it is to learn english. I heard Japanese and Chinese are quite logical as well, but I assume Chinese requires a ****load of experience to understand.

Funny, I thought it was pretty easy to learn English. Then again I've been exposed to English through TV and school from a very young age, so Idk.

 

[Ussi]

speaking proper English is hard to learn. Cause of all the grammar exceptions. I can understand people when English is not their first language, but they aren't always speaking correctly.

 

[#HBC | Dark Horse]

I think Chinese and Japanese are hard to learn how to read and write. Its the symbols to learn...

From my limited experience, Chinese makes Japanese look easy. Japanese at least has alphabets (and almost all katakana words are taken from english) and uses around 6,000 kanji. Chinese uses 20,000, and has no alphabet like hiragana and katakana

 

[Ussi]

From my limited experience, Chinese makes Japanese look easy. Japanese at least has alphabets (and almost all katakana words are taken from english) and uses around 6,000 kanji. Chinese uses 20,000, and has no alphabet like hiragana and katakana

katakana is supposed to represent foreign words so that it doesn't confuse people when foreign words sounds the same as native words. So its not surprising when katakana is majority words in english.

Chinese using 20,000 letters? Oh gosh and i thought Japan are a ridiculous amount of kanji to learn