this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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Is the Tower of Babel still affecting us or something?

Edit:

We have 8 billion people, yet the best we could muster for the most total speakers of a language is under 2 billion, including non-natives...

  1. English (1,452 million speakers) First language: 372.9 million Total speakers: 1.4+ billion According to Ethnologue, English is the most-spoken language in the world including native and non-native speakers.

https://www.berlitz.com/blog/most-spoken-languages-world#:~:text=1.,English%20(1%2C452%20million%20speakers)&text=According%20to%20Ethnologue%2C%20English%20is,native%20and%20non%2Dnative%20speakers.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago (3 children)

For a tiny language, I really like toki pona, but it's meant to be a minimal artistic language, more than an IAL (international auxiliary language).

Last I checked tho, Globasa looks really interesting. The way that they add new vocabulary, and have a good representation of world languages, seems to work well.

Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it's quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it's a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Esperanto is also good, but when my partner tried to learn it, they were weirded out by some of it’s quirks, like noun declinations based on whether it’s a subject or object, that seems unecessary.

That sounds interesting. Esperanto has no noun-declinations, it's an agglutinating language, you don't bend words (= declination).

But what is barely resembling that what you mention is the two cases of the language, which is nominative and the so called "accusative". Which is adding -n to words to make them an object, depending on whether the verb of the sentence needs one or not. This case also is not just for objects, but also for directions, for measurements and time. That combination normally confuses the heck out of people.

Which is why there is also an in-joke in the Esperanto community "don't forget the accusative", because people forget it or apply it too often.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

When I was a teen I really wanted to learn Esperanto but never got around to it. Globasa seems extremely interesting though, maybe I’ll finally give one of these languages a try.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I feel that for better or worse Esperanto hasn’t reached a large enough mass to justify accepting its quirks and indo-eurocentrism, when we know we can do better now.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

For sure. A dissapointing number of IALs have nearly all their vocab from european languages, but there are a few that try earnestly to source their vocab from a wide set of language families. Any global initiative for an IAL needs to have a global vocabulary set to have any hopes of being introduced.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If you choose vocabulary that is culturally neutral, then that vocabulary is not easily recognisable.

There's no workaround for that trade-off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Recognizeable for whom, is the question. The majority of IALs to date have had a highly eurocentric vocabulary, so they can't be recognizeable to even a plurality of the world.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Correct reasoning, incorrect facts.

46% of the world speak Indo-European languages as a mother tongue.

Can't do better than that. No other option comes close.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Aren't you Irish? You know the English colonizers did their best to wipe out the Irish language and replace it with the one you're advocating for right???

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

know the English colonizers did .... right???

Nooo I didn't actually know that and needed an enlightened person such as yourself to tell me 🙄🙄

Tá mé tinn de bheith ag glacadh comhairle stráinséara. Imagine some blan started lecturing you about haitian history and how it should affect your opinions, wouldn't you at least tell them to fuck off?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Kind of wild that you use Haiti as an example here, considering the european genocide of the Taino people, as well as the european importation of african slaves, two groups that didn't speak european languages, and had their languages erased by the same process you're advocating for.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

So why are you advocating for the displacement of the majority of the world's language families based on european languages popularity it gained through colonial displacement?

The majority of the world don't speak european languages.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

So why are you advocating for the displacement of the majority of the world’s language families based on european languages popularity it gained through colonial displacement?

Same reason you are advocating wife-beating (i.e. I never said anything like that)

The majority of the world don’t speak european languages.

Correct. That's was our starting point: there's no language that the majority of the world do speak.

Indo-European is spoken by a 46% minority.

About 19% of the world's population speak the Indo-Iranian branch alone. It's by far the largest of the 8 branches by number of speakers. By number of languages (which includes tiny languages) it comprises about ⅔ of the family –

For example there are 884 million speakers of Hindi/Urdu + Bengali + Marathi + Gujarati + Odia + Punjabi in India, and Pakistan is almost all Indo-European (Indo-Aryan and Iranic).

Agus in theannta sin, tá Gaeilge (teanga Ind-Eorpach/Ceiltís) ag 0.0002125% den daonra domhanda!

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago

I never said anything approaching the words your putting in my mouth.