Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

Tom Wier wrote:

> Robert J. Petry wrote:
>
> [kut]I realized what you were talking about.  Note several things:
>
> (1) By being the present day de facto world standard, English is
> already an international auxiliary language (you will please note that
> they need not be artificial languages).
>
> (2)  Thus, I was referring to just such a language as you described.  You
> described several things:
>
Similar, yes, but not quite as potentially extensive right out of the box, although, as everyone
knows, English at present is a very active language.

>
> you wrote:
> > Certainly if a certain language could communicate across, let's say, a half dozen or
> > more language barriers with virtually no previous study by the participants, versus
> > a language that required lots of study and could only cross one language barrier
> > at a time and only to someone who had studied that AIL in particular, then do we
> > not have here a criteria for "better"?
>
> (a) considering the extent to which English lexical items are being borrowed
> wholesale by a great many languages in the world today, much of the newly
> developed international culture has more or less similar vocabulary, based to
> a large extent on English.  Thus, when a Japanese person and a German
> want to talk about popculture, they will find that whether they use either language,
> many of terms they use will be the same, or similar, and so we already have a
> language which spans across multiple linguistic barriers.
Again, although I agree with your statement about borrowings, I am talking about being able to do
this without the "borrowings" so to speak. It's interesting, as an adjunct, to listen to Hispanic
speakers here in the southwest. They have a great mixture of English within their speech, and it
is interesting to listen to. Especially when hearing them discuss "baisball", "strike one",
"first base" etc. And, even ".....good luck., see you later." And, much much more, all intermixed
within the "Spanish" language.

> (Interestingly, as a side note, I read recently that the modern influx of English
> words and phrases into Japanese, in a little more than a hundred years of being
> open to the West, has already begun to rival the influx of Chinese during a
> period of several hundred years longer during the first millennium.)
Agreed, but this is not exactly the same as a "complete" language at once being recognized by
multiple millions who have never studied the language nor deliberately "borrowed" from it.
However, some of these concepts tend to blurr at the edges depending on how one wants to present
orr case.

you wrote:

> > One, let's say, that could right now reach upwards of a billion people with
> > written and spoken messages, would be better in that category over one that
> > could reach maybe 10-50,000 people who are students only of that AIL.
>
> (b) current estimates for the number of speakers of English (of whatever
> variety) range normally somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion
> people (though some go even higher).  These speakers are on average
> literate (though varying in ability).
In that case, I am talking about a language that will reach upwards of two billion folks,
certainly way beyond English alone.

> I was responding, then, to your comment that such a language was being
> ignored.  I would certainly agree with you that any _artificial_ language is
> being more or less ignored, but certainly World English is not.  There was a
> comment on Auxlang recently about World English :
[kut]

I like what Burgess says in his book Language Made Plain about English as a world language. I've
been quoting some of it on the occidental list today. Anyway, see what you think about his
thought:

"What tends to happen to English, however, when spoken in foreign territories, is that it is
absorbed too thoroughly, ceases to be an outward-looking auxiliary and becomes a mere dialect of
the mother tongue. This is certainly true of some of the communities of India, especially where
the mother-tongue does not belong to the Indo-European family: Tamils, who speak a Dravidian
language, are adept at turning English into a Tamil dialect -- the phonemes, idioms, pace being
so thoroughly Tamilised, that it is not possible for a non-Tamil English-speaker to understand
very well. Writing and reading are, of course, a different matter. I could make no sense out of
bu lokkar until it was written down for me as "bullock cart".

We have to reconcile ourselves to hard linguistic facts. Languages will always change, whatever
we try to do about it, and out of local changes come local languages. English is already changing
into new languages in various parts of the world, mutually unintelligible, unintelligible to the
English-born. English -- full of unstable diphthongs and vowels, carrying a stress-system not
always properly understood -- [my first experience in England, as mentioned before, was an
inability to even recognize what was being said to me as English, much less understanding the
Englishman who was saying it to me.] lends itself far more to change than does a language like
Italian, whose simple vowels have hardly altered in 2,000 years. But, if there is a confusion of
English-speaking tongues, the written word remains constant enough, unifying as the ideograms of
Chinese unify. And English is big enough to enclose any number of aberrations."

If, as a "befuddled dream" we can communicate with two billions with one language, that only
leaves four billion to go. Chinese should easily cover one billion, That only leaves three
billion to go. So, the languages that could be used to cover at least half the world to start
would/or could be:

English
Occidental
Chinese.
Any suggestions for the other three billion?

Although not likely, in a "befuddled dream" we could cut the world's confusion down to five to
ten languages as a first goal. Then, some way distant future, cut those ten down to half, and
then half again, etc. until we end up with ony Speedwords as the world language.;--)))

Seriously, though, it could be done technically I think, but the political, national, religious,
etc. obstacles are the problem, and those maybe can never be overcome, at least as the world
stands now.

Al l sue,
Bob, x+