11–20 of 67 posts
I have a different opinion. I think people will stick to their languages, and some will die naturally. However, one new language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide. Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential people would need to have basic…
Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages, contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.
I have a different opinion. I think people will stick to their languages, and some will die naturally. However, one new language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide. Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential people would need to have basic…
I have a different opinion. I think people will stick to their languages, and some will die naturally. However, one new language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide. Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential people would need to have basic…
They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important.
In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.
As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a couple of years as well.
Why learn Chinese or Hindi if your smartphone or perhaps your glasses will seamlessly translate back and forth between your native language? The pressure to learn a second language will be lessened greatly.
I don't think the loss of a language without a literature is much of a loss, really. Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages, contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.
I think the article asks the wrong question. Surely by 2115 we will have a perfect universal translator fluent in hundreds of languages. Why learn Chinese or Hindi if your smartphone or perhaps your glasses will seamlessly translate back and forth between your native language? The pressure to learn a second language will be lessened greatly.
I really don't like how tones are presented as a confounding item like irregular verbs. Tonal languages essentially just take advantage of extra bandwidth that was ignored by most european languages. They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important. In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more toleran…
Most irregular verbs also serve to increase bandwidth though: You can say "I ate" faster than "I eated".