A few times I’ve come upon the power of a common language in the last few days.
I’ve seen a video about a meeting of Amazonian pajés (shamans) and herbalists sharing and maintaining traditional plant use, facilitated through the common language Portuguese, I’ve read about the success of the Zapatistas where native people are helped in their efforts by the common language Spanish. And just now a post in Anarchism & Social Ecology mixing Spanish and English just as comfortably as my family juggles three languages at home.
Do you know of other examples?
I thought one of the non-evil possible uses of a LLM could be to create a new language like Esperanto, and ideally it would simply be a mix of English and Spanish, to connect a maximum number of people? Or are artificial languages always doomed to fail?
Edit: title, because there is not one language of solarpunk
this is just my 2 cents as a silly cat on the interwebs:
artificial languages designed to be international ones always feel a little authoritarian to me, as people usually arent going to want to learn something that isnt useful or fun to them, so youre at a disadvantage going that route, as you fail to pick up the population required for a common language. to make if work, you need to lower barriers to learning languages, while also providing a motivation to learn it, and for a new conlang, that initial growth is the hardest part, from what ive seen.
as for using an LLM to create a mix of eng+esp, that really doesnt scale much past the americas imo in terms of speaking population, what about Hindi or Mandarin as an example? not to mention the issues with LLMs in general on the environment. as far as i know there really isnt a way to make a conlang that fits in all compatible aspects for all the world’s languages, and honestly, i dont think that’s a bad thing. languages are fun and beautiful when they are unique, though it does stifle communication between people.
i think youre headed down the wrong path here, there is no (single) language of solarpunk, and i think there shouldn’t be. to me, solarpunk has always been about the people, and people speak different languages, have different dialects or accents, or maybe cant speak at all. to me, what you described was the language of solarpunk, overcoming challenges in communication for the benefit of all. in my solarpunk vision, there are many languages in a community, and most people can speak a few, and sign at least partially if they can,while translators and language education is publicly funded (whether though coops or a government). solarpunk needs translators, not dictators telling them how to speak (side eyeing the french govt here). imho international languages font work within the moral framework of solarpunk, you need either colonialism or globalism to spread a language far enough to become a common language, im not sure how youd acheive it otherwise.
anywho, i only dabble in a little bit of conlangs myself, so i may have missed something xx meow
many languages in a community, and most people can speak a few
I guess that’s the world we are approaching already.
artificial languages designed to be international ones always feel a little authoritarian to me
Not sure, the efforts to create international languages never seemed to come from the authoriarian corner historically, or do they?
- roughly, three broad sources for “the next international language”
- lingua franca – a third language that acts as a bridge between two other languages – English has pretty well wedged itself into this position currently
- interlang – constructed languages designed for interlinguistic and international communication – Esperanto is in this category (with Esperanto’s main shortcoming being its Euro-centrism)
- creoles – languages that arise from the mixing of other languages – creoles exist all over the world, but just don’t have the visibility – Naijá is probably the strongest with over 121 million speakers
- I got distracted by this a while back, and I figured a solarpunk interlang would probably arise out of the creoles or conlangs (and people just getting tired of English’s dominance and a willingness to start giving indigenous voices a chance)
- my personal choice would be toki pona – most likely not the best choice, but I like it for its simplicity (and it still has far less baggage other options)
Oh see you have been down the language rabbit hole, very neat!
people just getting tired of English’s dominance and a willingness to start giving indigenous voices a chance
I would really hope that, but I’m afraid the dominance of English is here to stay for a while. Just like Latin after the Roman empire collapsed - a quarter of Europe practically still speaks some dialect of Latin. I guess that’s also why interlang languages don’t really seem to take off ever. Language is a tool one has to use every day - no time to handle the learning curve of a whole new tool, no matter how fancy and world-changing it is.
toki pona
wtf :D Guess I’m back into the rabbit hole. Language is a never ending source of fascination!
- roughly, three broad sources for “the next international language”
Why create this new language and start from zero when Esperanto already has speakers and resources?
Esperanto has a lot of good features, but it is binary gendered and default male by design. That hasn’t aged well.
Due in part to persecution on both sides during the Cold War, it has skipped a generation in terms of adoption. There are a lot of old speakers, a growing set of new speakers, but not a lot of middle aged speakers. But the dated politics and class interests of the large population of the surviving advanced aged speakers with leisure time to participate in the culture can make them as much a burden as they are a resource, in north America at least.
That’s interesting and kind of disappointing to hear - I mostly know of Esperanto thanks to Harry Harrison who loved it enough to write it into his books and add ads about it to the last pages.
Lojban.
It’s kinda sad to me that the common languages of the Americas are all European.
