Globasa. A constructed language, but with most world language families represented, and a process that ensures new words meet a few other good criteria.
Barring that, toki pona.
Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto- Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
- I’ve heard that it’s a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
- Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
- Lojban sounds like a cross between Romansh and a lost native American language. Not good compared to my two favorite sounding languages, Japanese and French, but at least more neutral than Esperanto. Esperanto sounds Spanish and Interlingua sounds like an Italian that thought that Esperanto should sound Italian and I don’t like how either of those two languages sound.
Toki pona
Thus making everything open to interpretation
I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.
Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.
I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that “watermelon” would be “kili telo” (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that “kili telo” would not be understood as “watermelon” unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived “kili telo”.
If you’re going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.
deleted by creator
Nou ja zeg!
Dit zelfver-nederland-cultuurtje moet blijkbaar
nog altijd blijven opkijken naar de taal waar het hoofdland
op dit moment verder afglijdt naar het fascisme.Hey, can you translate this to English?
Because what Google gives me doesn’t make sense:
This self- Dutchifying culture apparently still has to look up to the language, while the main country is currently sliding further towards fascism.
Tsk tsk!
This selfhu-miliationland-culture* apparently
needs to keep looking up to the language where it’s main country
is currently sliding further and further towards fascism.
* Wordplay on the Netherlands and humilation
Türkçe not gendered (at all, everyone and everything is “o”) and one of the easiest languages to learn
Just an hour ago I changed my profile mentioning Lingua Franca because I’m downvoting non-English posts not using language tags… the last time I heard that word being used was probably like… 20 years ago maybe? It’s not a common word specially because the word itself doesn’t make much sense anymore (been several decades that French is no longer the trade language, so it just sounds funny)… and after just mentioning it in my profile I see it being used again… by any chance, did you read my profile? lol
Lingua franca has nothing to do with French.
Then it’s just a happy coincidence that it was the first world wide language used for diplomacy.
I’m pretty sure the first diplomatic language was Latin.
It wasn’t, the term lingua franca originates from the Mediterranean Lingua Franca, also known as Sabir, a pidgin language made up of bits from primarily romance languages (notably those of northern Italy) around the Mediterranean. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
It was (the first world wide language used for diplomacy). If you want to quote Wikipedia, then:
“French is sometimes regarded as the first global lingua franca, having supplanted Latin as the prestige language of politics, trade, education, diplomacy, and military in early modern Europe and later spreading around the world with the establishment of the French colonial empire. With France emerging as the leading political, economic, and cultural power of Europe in the 16th century, the language was adopted by royal courts throughout the continent, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Russia, and as the language of communication between European academics, merchants, and diplomats.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca#French
Maybe sailors communicated with locals through a broken pidgin, but diplomats and aristocrats used French.
mathematics or cartoons work great for communicating ideas to people who don’t speak the same language you do.
essentially, all languages are made up. we therefore need to focus more on universal languages that are the same everywhere. mathematics are one example, but surprisingly, so are comics. many of the emotions displayed there are widespread and close to universal.
It’s pretty hard to express general, commonsense ideas in math, or abstract/complex ideas in cartoons, though.
French, we could all be a little more french when keeping our leaders on a leash
