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What Will the World Speak in 2115?

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Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#41

Post by tikwidd »

_red wrote: post #34
qianyilong wrote: post #16

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…

English does use tones: "Going to the store" (rising = question) "Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)

Tone is not phonemic in English. What you are describing is properly called intonation, which is the application of pitch (as well as stress, loudness, tempo and other markers) to distinguish more subtle conversational functions.

Stress in English is phonemic however, viz. this minimal pair:

"rekord (record, n.) vs r@"kord (record, v.)

This is a regular phonological process in many English dialects to derive verbs from certain nouns (or is it the other way around?). Future English could turn this into a tonal distinction - I think that has a precedent in Swedish.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#42

Post by rokhayakebe »

uberstuber wrote: post #22
rokhayakebe wrote: post #2

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…

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English Basic English is 850 words

It won't work because Pride. This language will have to be one that is not tied to any culture.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#43

Post by rokhayakebe »

jodrellblank wrote: post #28
rokhayakebe wrote: post #2

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…

Your hundred year prediction is already more than a hundred years out of date. Welcome to 1880's Bialystok in not-yet-Poland, and the birth of Esperanto. Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming. The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.

Yes, but back then they did not have the Internet, apps and such.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#44

Post by rokhayakebe »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #15
rokhayakebe wrote: post #2

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…

It's not at all obvious that that would be a new language, rather than a 500-1000 word subset of an existing language.

I believe it will be because people have pride, so no-one will ask why English and not Farsi, Mandarin, Arabic, Swaheli, etc...

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#45

Post by sho_hn »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #42
uberstuber wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English Basic English is 850 words

It won't work because Pride. This language will have to be one that is not tied to any culture.

What culture is English tied to anymore, though? India, South Africa, even Asia to some degree have significant unique English vocabularies, having recombined or reapplied existing morphemes to fit local cultural contexts. Consider the Korean "officetel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officetel). You're not wrong to point to basic xenophobia as shaping what people do, but I think the "ownership" of English is diffuse enough now that it would take much less effort to dilute it further than coin a new language (which doesn't really happen anyway).

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#46

Post by hrktb »

rmason wrote: post #17

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.

Sometimes automatic translation seems to be the flying cars of computer engineering.

In 2115 we might be able to technically do a very good approximation of it, but it might not have much use except for very casual contexts.

I think it really comes down to controlling one's communication. For instance, right now businessmen learning Mandarin are not cheaping on translator services, they want a better understanding of someone's culture, the concepts they think in, and want to speak in their own words.

Communication is and always will be extremely important, and as soon as there will be enough stakes, the time we 'lose' in learning will always be worth the gain in control.

Of course a universal translator would help for tourism and casual matters. But I think for translating a menu, street signs or simple instructions we are already having pretty decent applications and won't need to wait for another century.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#47

Post by rokhayakebe »

sho_hn wrote: post #45
rokhayakebe wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It won't work because Pride. This language will have to be one that is not tied to any culture.

What culture is English tied to anymore, though? India, South Africa, even Asia to some degree have significant unique English vocabularies, having recombined or reapplied existing morphemes to fit local cultural contexts. Consider the Korean "officetel" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Officetel ). You're not wrong to point to basic xenophobia as shaping what people do, but I think the "ownership" of English is diffus…

English is a Western language. It belongs to the Western culture. At least that is how the rest of the world sees it.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#48

Post by jodrellblank »

rokhayakebe wrote: post #43
jodrellblank wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your hundred year prediction is already more than a hundred years out of date. Welcome to 1880's Bialystok in not-yet-Poland, and the birth of Esperanto. Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming. The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.

Yes, but back then they did not have the Internet, apps and such.

What difference will that make? You don't speak Esperanto now, and we have those things now.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#49

Post by rspeer »

hrktb wrote: post #46
rmason wrote: post #17

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.

Sometimes automatic translation seems to be the flying cars of computer engineering. In 2115 we might be able to technically do a very good approximation of it, but it might not have much use except for very casual contexts. I think it really comes down to controlling one's communication. For instance, right now businessmen learning Mandarin are not cheaping on translator services, they want a better understanding of…

As an example of how overly optimistic people have been about translation, here's a page on Foresight Exchange (a long-running play-money prediction market) where people have been betting on the probability of high-quality machine translation by 2015, since 1995:

http://www.foresightexchange.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Tran

Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! Of course the people who were more actively following AI knew that it wouldn't. I probably doubled my fake money on FX, if only I could remember my login.

Re: What Will the World Speak in 2115?

#50

Post by jodrellblank »

tokenadult wrote: post #37

From the article: "By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English." Yep. Esperanto is toast as a world interlanguage compared to English. The number of new speakers added to English each year just by natural increase of households in which English is spoken as a home language is, matched for levels of proficiency, comfortably greater than the total…

On the other hand, Esperanto is the only constructed language to have got anywhere at all, and is outlasting those smaller languages that are going extinct every few weeks and those natural languages on life support kept around by hobbyists with too much power, like Welsh.

It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language.

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