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English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.
Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.
Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).
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English is King but Technology May Trump All
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Monday January 28 2019, @11:14PM
That doesn't sound right so I did some searching. Unfortunately I can't find the book, I may not have a copy here. From the web it seems likely I am thinking of "Gulf." He may well have used Loglan elsewhere.
At any rate the AL he described went to extremes to maximise phonemic inventory and use it all, so as to cram the largest vocabulary possible into the shortest utterences. So the phonemes approximated IPA, the language wouldn't just have a T, or a T and a D, but also aspirated AND glottal AND fricative AND affricative version of each, and so on. There's not just a click but every sort of click found in any natural language, or deducible from those, a glottal click and a dental click and a palatal click and so forth. It's hard to say just how many phonemes you would wind up with this method - the IPA claims 107 "letters" but it also has 56 additional characters that are used in combination, so the total number is vast.
By comparison Japanese has about 5 vowels and 14 consonants for a total of 29; English has about 15 vowels and 24 consonants for a total 39; in comparison to well over 100. With 5 vowels and 14 consonants, assuming all syllables are CV, you have 70 simple syllables to work with. With English phonemes, but still assuming that simple syllable structure, you'd get 15*24=360 syllables to use. But with, what, somewhere around 80 consonants and 40 vowels (a conservative guess) you'd wind up with 80*40=3200 syllables instead!
You could talk very fast if you learned a language like that, the big problem would be could you *listen* fast enough to understand it though. It's very easy to mistake each of these sounds for some of their close relatives. In most languages, the subconscious can narrow the possibilities down very quickly because only a few (or only one!) is actually possible. You thought you heard an aspirated 't' instead of the other one? Doesn't matter, they both mean the same here. You thought you heard a dental sibilant? Might be a speech defect, there aren't any words with an 's' there but if we put in a 't' it makes sense. You mind does this very quickly in the background so you rarely have to think of it. But if EVERY sound is used and EVERY possible syllable is used there's just no room for that sort of correction anymore. Oh, and if you misspeak - same thing. You can fumble over most of the sounds in a natural language and people can still easily understand you, because the sounds you're making aren't actual words, but they're close to something that is. With the phonemic inventory maxed out like this, that's no longer true - every time you misspoke the change would produce a valid word - just one with a different meaning from what you intended.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?