You list a bunch of claims that mostly seem over-optimistic and that show no sign that you have thought critically about whether they are actually true.
Being able to communicate with everyone means we can travel and study and work anywhere.
No, immigration law is a stronger barrier to travel and work permits than languages are.
Since education is the key for getting out of the malicious poverty cycle, this will bring fundamental change to a major portion of the world’s population.
Education is a lot about signaling. Imaging that Western education itself without the signaling value is able to change the lives in developing countries doesn’t have a good base.
When there’s a language that everyone is proficient in, contracts will be much clearer, resulting in more trust in oversea partners and confidence in foreign trading.
Do you have any evidence that language of making contracts is any barrier to business? When it comes for example to China, the way contracts are enforced seems to be much more central than the wording of the contracts when it comes to trust.
But the world’s economy will actually benefit the most from the leaps-and-bounds advances in science and technology. The IAL fosters much better collaboration between scientists from different nations, now that they can understand their colleagues’ research published in a foreign magazine.
English works for that purpose and most fields get centered in a way that makes the important communication English.
More generally, if you would introduce a new IAL, you wouldn’t start with it being spoken by everyone. To get it adopted you need to have it be useful if not everyone speaks it.
Education is a lot about signaling. Imaging that Western education itself without the signaling value is able to change the lives in developing countries doesn’t have a good base.
From what I’ve seen studied, a base level of education (eg. basic literacy and numeracy) is absolutely significant in changing lives in developing countries, but thankfully today that’s only applicable for a relatively small and decreasing number of people.
Signaling matters a lot in developing countries for access to jobs as well.
But I do grant that base literacy and numeracy are important. There are some features of Esperanto that make it easier to achieve literacy in it than most natural languages but that’s quite distinct from the arguments that were made in the OP. I don’t see why we would expect much better base numeracy resources.
You can learn mathematics from Khan Academy, there are popular mathematical channels on YouTube, etc. If enough people speak whatever language, there most likely will be a localization of Khan Academy in that language, and probably also at least subtitles for many of the popular channels.
This is not an argument for everyone speaking the same language. Having ten major languages would work almost as well. It just sucks to be a native speaker of a language spoken by few people (or by many people but all of them in developing countries), because then you need to master a foreign language before getting an access to the international wealth of educational resources, so you cannot e.g. learn math from Khan Academy when you are 6 years old.
There are many “open source” resources for all kinds of things, and yet a language barrier can deprive you of them. To make it worse, your social environment is probably also behind the same barrier.
One more point along those lines: you say these advantages will come from everyone speaking the same language. Well, we already have one language that’s approaching that. Wikipedia says “English is the most spoken language in the world (if Chinese is divided into variants)” and “As of 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English.”
From reading your post, I bet you have glowy happy thoughts about an IAL that wouldn’t apply to English. If so, to think critically, try asking yourself whether these benefits would arise if everyone in the world spoke English as a second language.
Huh? Also from Wikipedia, I read that “English has between 450m & 2B speakers”, so an unbiased figure should hover around 1B.
My imaginations consider a great IAL, one that has many advantages over English. So while they do still apply to English, the magnificence of each facet is limited. Taking the snowball effect into account, it’s like putting a handicap of −75% on Benefits. Why settle on something inferior?
Besides, there’s a reason why English can’t ever be a true IAL—which I may address in the next part of the series. To put it in your scenario, it’s likely the question: if everyone in the world spoke English as a second language, then what first tongue are the Americans, British and Australian… speaking?
It’s dubious if a language can be significantly better than English or any other natural language*, since there’s the fundamental limitation that human brains have to learn and produce it. Some parts can be made simpler like irregular conjugations, but natural languages are already pretty close to as optimal for humans as possible—when a language loses a feature (like noun classes), speakers will naturally start adding new features (like more morphemes) or speaking faster to maintain a constant rate of information transmitted. The obvious simplification gains would help people who are learning it for the first time, but they wouldn’t really help child learners so it only saves you one generation of teaching everyone English (or any other language).
If a language doesn’t have the vocabulary you need for a given task, that could make it worse, but adding technical vocabulary to a language is a solved problem
On the contrary, I believe it’s possible to improve any existing language significantly. I’ve already have some idea to increase the rate of transmitted information, and that’s only me. When we get more brain power into this project, even better stuffs will invariably be found.
The obvious simplification gains would help people who are learning it for the first time, but they wouldn’t really help child learners so it only saves you one generation of teaching everyone English (or any other language).
Could you explain more? I don’t think I really grabbed what you said, but the great IAL will not necessarily simplify everything. On some facets, it will be more sophisticated. The goal is to have a much more efficient language, not just a simple one… And that has nothing to do with saving 1 gen of teaching everyone IAL, no?
When a child is learning their native language, they don’t have the same difficulties with irregular verb conjugations that second-language learners have. So getting rid of irregular verb conjugations would make it simpler for second-language learners. But once everyone has learned the language and is teaching it to their children as a native language, no one is better off because the language doesn’t have irregular verb conjugations.
On top of that, there’s evidence that irregular verb conjugations (and other irregularities) actually make a language easier for humans to speak, since they help with error-handling. Human hearing and speaking are lossy conversions, so redundancy helps decipher meaning. If you hear a word and think that it might be two different verbs, hearing either an irregular or regular ending can tell you which verb you actually heard. Noun class (like whether a word is “masculine” or “feminine” in Romance languages, but some languages have many more types) and grammatical cases are a couple other language attributes that can help with this.
When a child is learning their native language, they don’t have the same difficulties with irregular verb conjugations that second-language learners have.
They don’t have a difficulty understanding, but I think they keep making mistakes when talking… and the adults keep correcting them, day after day, and after a few years the kids finally get it reliably right. It just all happens at a small age and is quickly forgotten.
This is very interesting! Could you point me to some research links about irregular conjugations, noun class and other redundancy help with clarity in conversations? I’ve tried googling to no success. Anyway, if with “hear a word and think that it might be two different verb”, you were referring to homonyms, then I believe there’s at least a solution for that while not compromising the simplicity of a language.
But once everyone has learned the language and is teaching it to their children as a native language, no one is better off because the language doesn’t have irregular verb conjugations.
This is assuming that people will deliberately try to make their next gen use IAL as 1st language, which is absolutely not what an IAL is meant to be. The core idea is for a particular person to use native tongue when conversing with the family, tribe, and people in the same country in general. When they meet a foreigner, then they’ll both switch to IAL. So typically a child would learn their mother tongue exclusive for the 1st 3-4 years of life, and only starting to get IAL at age 2 at the earliest. Of course, there will be a few parents who teach their infants IAL, as the case with some Esperanto fanatics has shown. But I don’t think of this whole IAL endeavor as an individual race to be better off, i.e. “I have to learn this stuff to get ahead and step on that guy’s head” (terribly sorry if I’m misinterpreting your words here). I envision a great IAL as an excellent way to dramatically enlarge the cake, and therefore bringing bigger slices for everyone.
The relevant topic in linguistics is redundancy. This article (“The role of redundancy in language and language teaching”, Darian 1979) is a decent introduction to the topic, and it also talks about its role in language learning.
This article (“Redundancy Elimination: the Case of Artificial Languages”, Chiari 2017) seems quite relevant to your purposes (full PDF).
if with “hear a word and think that it might be two different verb”, you were referring to homonyms
I was referring more to if you hear a word that is similar to another but not identical, and then you’re trying to figure out which it was. If I say “John hit the ball”, you might hear instead “John hid the ball”.
One example in English is the redundancy in the plural ending. If I say “Alice read the three books”, there’s redundancy because the “-s” ending on “books” indicates that there are multiple books, while “three” also indicates that there are multiple books. If you mishear me and either hear “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the books”, you still know that there are multiple books. If we got rid of the plural ending in Englsih, you might hear either “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the book”, and then you don’t consistently know that there are multiple books.
Going further abroad, you can see an example with noun classes in German. You can compare “Er sah den Bär” (“He saw the bear”) versus “Er sah das Bier” (“He saw the beer”). In English, the only difference between the sentences is the vowel in the final word, so if you misheard that vowel then you’ll get a completely wrong idea. In German on the other hand, the articles are marked with the noun class (“Bär” is masculine while “Bier” is neutral), so you have two pieces of evidence to tell you what noun you heard.
If you start adding in adjectives which agree with the nouns, there’s even more evidence in German but still only the one bit of evidence in English. Compare “Er sah den schwarzen Bär” (“He saw the black bear”) versus “Er sah das schwarze Bier” (“He saw the black beer”).
Another feature of redundancy displayed in German is noun case. In German, you can say “Der Mann sah den Bär” or “Den Bär sah der Mann” to mean “The man saw the bear”. In English though, if you say “The bear saw the man” then you mean something different. This works in German because in both of those sentences “Mann” is marked as a subject while “Bär” is marked as an object.
German can have the object before or after the verb, letting you emphasize either the subject or the object by putting it in the first place. English always has to have the subject before the verb and the object after the verb though, since otherwise it’s unclear which noun is supposed to be the subject. English in turn lets you emphasize a noun by putting extra stress on it.
English has redundancy built into the word order while German has the redundancy built into the noun cases. If you look at the history of Germanic languages, you can actually see quite clearly that word order became stricter in English at the same time that it lost noun classes and case. The speakers of Middle English stopped using noun classes or case but needed some extra source of redundancy, so they started to say their sentences only in a certain order. (source: “Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic”, George Walkden 2014)
It’s even more obvious looking at Romance languages. Latin had a free word order, few prepositions, and six cases while the modern Romance languages have a relatively strict word order, many prepositions, and no cases. (Note that they’re all the same because they all evolved from Vulgar Latin which happened to have changed that way; there’s no fundamental rule that free word order always evolves in that way).
Thank you! The links you provided are valuable. I can’t access the full Darian article, but with Chiari there seem to be some issues with her approach. She tried to defend redundancy, but by only citing previous (very old) works and providing some comparison examples between languages. IMHO, if one is to prove something, she’d have to set up experiments. Like, recording people having conversations using a conlang with little to no redundancy, compared to using a natural redundant tongue. Then asking them to rate the level of clarity after the talks, and combining it with analysis of the recorded videos, etc. Then repeating the experiment with different pairs of language… In other words, her article is not convincing at all. Granted, maybe the presence of numerous grammatical errors in that supposedly professional linguistic paper contributes quite a bit to undermine her message.
Nevertheless, as her article suggested, the lack of any constructed language with absolutely zero redundancy may point to it being necessary for speaking. I have nothing against redundancy and try to hold a stance of ‘blank slate’ when it comes to IAL ideas and opinions. The goal is to build an IAL as easy to learn and effective as possible, and if some redundancy can help, then I can see no reason not.
The problem is that, not many linguists are also “LWer”s. They can be quite biased toward their own studied tongue and can’t see some brilliant ways which other languages employ to solve their own one’s problems. Case in point, your Germanic examples help me open my eyes to a lot of interesting stuffs. Yet at the same time, I can already formulate some ideas to eliminate a few of those issues, inspired by my native tongue. It’s just that my linguistics knowledge is too limited right now to correctly express them. Well, that’s why getting serious education on the topic is the 1st step of my plan :)
Your last sentence perfectly describes the main obstacle a supposed IAL will face in the process of emerging into global usage. It must prove way more effective than the next candidate in order to persuade.
immigration law is a stronger barrier to travel and work permits than languages are.
That’s true. However, I’d say that if the total difficulty is 100%, then immigration law contributes around 55% and language barrier 45%. If you can eliminate the latter, then you effectively make it twice as easier to do it. Moreover, IMO immigration law is kinda ephemeral. Trump was elected and put up some barriers. Biden then went razed them down. Meanwhile, something as basic as language is much more rooted—the US hasn’t changed its official language since its birth.
Western education itself without the signaling value is able to change the lives in developing countries doesn’t have a good base.
I didn’t emphasize Western education anywhere in my post. Chances are you’re biased against Eastern education? Whether education is about signaling or not, isn’t it just better to have more education? I think we can agree on this point.
When it comes for example to China, the way contracts are enforced seems to be much more central than the wording of the contracts when it comes to trust.
Agree! I hadn’t thought about it thoroughly enough, now that you mentioned it. How about a different point? Companies always have to spend resources on the translation process when dealing with foreign partners—in your example, China. But now they don’t have to do it anymore, and thus have more capital to spend on other projects.
English works for that purpose and most fields get centered in a way that makes the important communication English.
English can do the job at an ‘huh, OK’ level. It was patchily built throughout many centuries with not-for-scientific-research mindset. Not to mention when scientist actually go to their colleague’s foreign lab for collaboration, they will face even more difficulties, because in every-day purposes, English is also far from great.
You list a bunch of claims that mostly seem over-optimistic and that show no sign that you have thought critically about whether they are actually true.
No, immigration law is a stronger barrier to travel and work permits than languages are.
Education is a lot about signaling. Imaging that Western education itself without the signaling value is able to change the lives in developing countries doesn’t have a good base.
Do you have any evidence that language of making contracts is any barrier to business? When it comes for example to China, the way contracts are enforced seems to be much more central than the wording of the contracts when it comes to trust.
English works for that purpose and most fields get centered in a way that makes the important communication English.
More generally, if you would introduce a new IAL, you wouldn’t start with it being spoken by everyone. To get it adopted you need to have it be useful if not everyone speaks it.
From what I’ve seen studied, a base level of education (eg. basic literacy and numeracy) is absolutely significant in changing lives in developing countries, but thankfully today that’s only applicable for a relatively small and decreasing number of people.
Signaling matters a lot in developing countries for access to jobs as well.
But I do grant that base literacy and numeracy are important. There are some features of Esperanto that make it easier to achieve literacy in it than most natural languages but that’s quite distinct from the arguments that were made in the OP. I don’t see why we would expect much better base numeracy resources.
You can learn mathematics from Khan Academy, there are popular mathematical channels on YouTube, etc. If enough people speak whatever language, there most likely will be a localization of Khan Academy in that language, and probably also at least subtitles for many of the popular channels.
This is not an argument for everyone speaking the same language. Having ten major languages would work almost as well. It just sucks to be a native speaker of a language spoken by few people (or by many people but all of them in developing countries), because then you need to master a foreign language before getting an access to the international wealth of educational resources, so you cannot e.g. learn math from Khan Academy when you are 6 years old.
There are many “open source” resources for all kinds of things, and yet a language barrier can deprive you of them. To make it worse, your social environment is probably also behind the same barrier.
One more point along those lines: you say these advantages will come from everyone speaking the same language. Well, we already have one language that’s approaching that. Wikipedia says “English is the most spoken language in the world (if Chinese is divided into variants)” and “As of 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English.”
From reading your post, I bet you have glowy happy thoughts about an IAL that wouldn’t apply to English. If so, to think critically, try asking yourself whether these benefits would arise if everyone in the world spoke English as a second language.
Huh? Also from Wikipedia, I read that “English has between 450m & 2B speakers”, so an unbiased figure should hover around 1B.
My imaginations consider a great IAL, one that has many advantages over English. So while they do still apply to English, the magnificence of each facet is limited. Taking the snowball effect into account, it’s like putting a handicap of −75% on Benefits. Why settle on something inferior?
Besides, there’s a reason why English can’t ever be a true IAL—which I may address in the next part of the series. To put it in your scenario, it’s likely the question: if everyone in the world spoke English as a second language, then what first tongue are the Americans, British and Australian… speaking?
It’s dubious if a language can be significantly better than English or any other natural language*, since there’s the fundamental limitation that human brains have to learn and produce it. Some parts can be made simpler like irregular conjugations, but natural languages are already pretty close to as optimal for humans as possible—when a language loses a feature (like noun classes), speakers will naturally start adding new features (like more morphemes) or speaking faster to maintain a constant rate of information transmitted. The obvious simplification gains would help people who are learning it for the first time, but they wouldn’t really help child learners so it only saves you one generation of teaching everyone English (or any other language).
If a language doesn’t have the vocabulary you need for a given task, that could make it worse, but adding technical vocabulary to a language is a solved problem
On the contrary, I believe it’s possible to improve any existing language significantly. I’ve already have some idea to increase the rate of transmitted information, and that’s only me. When we get more brain power into this project, even better stuffs will invariably be found.
Could you explain more? I don’t think I really grabbed what you said, but the great IAL will not necessarily simplify everything. On some facets, it will be more sophisticated. The goal is to have a much more efficient language, not just a simple one… And that has nothing to do with saving 1 gen of teaching everyone IAL, no?
When a child is learning their native language, they don’t have the same difficulties with irregular verb conjugations that second-language learners have. So getting rid of irregular verb conjugations would make it simpler for second-language learners. But once everyone has learned the language and is teaching it to their children as a native language, no one is better off because the language doesn’t have irregular verb conjugations.
On top of that, there’s evidence that irregular verb conjugations (and other irregularities) actually make a language easier for humans to speak, since they help with error-handling. Human hearing and speaking are lossy conversions, so redundancy helps decipher meaning. If you hear a word and think that it might be two different verbs, hearing either an irregular or regular ending can tell you which verb you actually heard. Noun class (like whether a word is “masculine” or “feminine” in Romance languages, but some languages have many more types) and grammatical cases are a couple other language attributes that can help with this.
They don’t have a difficulty understanding, but I think they keep making mistakes when talking… and the adults keep correcting them, day after day, and after a few years the kids finally get it reliably right. It just all happens at a small age and is quickly forgotten.
This is very interesting! Could you point me to some research links about irregular conjugations, noun class and other redundancy help with clarity in conversations? I’ve tried googling to no success. Anyway, if with “hear a word and think that it might be two different verb”, you were referring to homonyms, then I believe there’s at least a solution for that while not compromising the simplicity of a language.
This is assuming that people will deliberately try to make their next gen use IAL as 1st language, which is absolutely not what an IAL is meant to be. The core idea is for a particular person to use native tongue when conversing with the family, tribe, and people in the same country in general. When they meet a foreigner, then they’ll both switch to IAL. So typically a child would learn their mother tongue exclusive for the 1st 3-4 years of life, and only starting to get IAL at age 2 at the earliest.
Of course, there will be a few parents who teach their infants IAL, as the case with some Esperanto fanatics has shown. But I don’t think of this whole IAL endeavor as an individual race to be better off, i.e. “I have to learn this stuff to get ahead and step on that guy’s head” (terribly sorry if I’m misinterpreting your words here). I envision a great IAL as an excellent way to dramatically enlarge the cake, and therefore bringing bigger slices for everyone.
The relevant topic in linguistics is redundancy. This article (“The role of redundancy in language and language teaching”, Darian 1979) is a decent introduction to the topic, and it also talks about its role in language learning.
This article (“Redundancy Elimination: the Case of Artificial Languages”, Chiari 2017) seems quite relevant to your purposes (full PDF).
I was referring more to if you hear a word that is similar to another but not identical, and then you’re trying to figure out which it was. If I say “John hit the ball”, you might hear instead “John hid the ball”.
One example in English is the redundancy in the plural ending. If I say “Alice read the three books”, there’s redundancy because the “-s” ending on “books” indicates that there are multiple books, while “three” also indicates that there are multiple books. If you mishear me and either hear “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the books”, you still know that there are multiple books. If we got rid of the plural ending in Englsih, you might hear either “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the book”, and then you don’t consistently know that there are multiple books.
Going further abroad, you can see an example with noun classes in German. You can compare “Er sah den Bär” (“He saw the bear”) versus “Er sah das Bier” (“He saw the beer”). In English, the only difference between the sentences is the vowel in the final word, so if you misheard that vowel then you’ll get a completely wrong idea. In German on the other hand, the articles are marked with the noun class (“Bär” is masculine while “Bier” is neutral), so you have two pieces of evidence to tell you what noun you heard.
If you start adding in adjectives which agree with the nouns, there’s even more evidence in German but still only the one bit of evidence in English. Compare “Er sah den schwarzen Bär” (“He saw the black bear”) versus “Er sah das schwarze Bier” (“He saw the black beer”).
Another feature of redundancy displayed in German is noun case. In German, you can say “Der Mann sah den Bär” or “Den Bär sah der Mann” to mean “The man saw the bear”. In English though, if you say “The bear saw the man” then you mean something different. This works in German because in both of those sentences “Mann” is marked as a subject while “Bär” is marked as an object.
German can have the object before or after the verb, letting you emphasize either the subject or the object by putting it in the first place. English always has to have the subject before the verb and the object after the verb though, since otherwise it’s unclear which noun is supposed to be the subject. English in turn lets you emphasize a noun by putting extra stress on it.
English has redundancy built into the word order while German has the redundancy built into the noun cases. If you look at the history of Germanic languages, you can actually see quite clearly that word order became stricter in English at the same time that it lost noun classes and case. The speakers of Middle English stopped using noun classes or case but needed some extra source of redundancy, so they started to say their sentences only in a certain order. (source: “Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic”, George Walkden 2014)
It’s even more obvious looking at Romance languages. Latin had a free word order, few prepositions, and six cases while the modern Romance languages have a relatively strict word order, many prepositions, and no cases. (Note that they’re all the same because they all evolved from Vulgar Latin which happened to have changed that way; there’s no fundamental rule that free word order always evolves in that way).
Thank you! The links you provided are valuable. I can’t access the full Darian article, but with Chiari there seem to be some issues with her approach. She tried to defend redundancy, but by only citing previous (very old) works and providing some comparison examples between languages. IMHO, if one is to prove something, she’d have to set up experiments. Like, recording people having conversations using a conlang with little to no redundancy, compared to using a natural redundant tongue. Then asking them to rate the level of clarity after the talks, and combining it with analysis of the recorded videos, etc. Then repeating the experiment with different pairs of language… In other words, her article is not convincing at all. Granted, maybe the presence of numerous grammatical errors in that supposedly professional linguistic paper contributes quite a bit to undermine her message.
Nevertheless, as her article suggested, the lack of any constructed language with absolutely zero redundancy may point to it being necessary for speaking. I have nothing against redundancy and try to hold a stance of ‘blank slate’ when it comes to IAL ideas and opinions. The goal is to build an IAL as easy to learn and effective as possible, and if some redundancy can help, then I can see no reason not.
The problem is that, not many linguists are also “LWer”s. They can be quite biased toward their own studied tongue and can’t see some brilliant ways which other languages employ to solve their own one’s problems. Case in point, your Germanic examples help me open my eyes to a lot of interesting stuffs. Yet at the same time, I can already formulate some ideas to eliminate a few of those issues, inspired by my native tongue. It’s just that my linguistics knowledge is too limited right now to correctly express them. Well, that’s why getting serious education on the topic is the 1st step of my plan :)
Your last sentence perfectly describes the main obstacle a supposed IAL will face in the process of emerging into global usage. It must prove way more effective than the next candidate in order to persuade.
That’s true. However, I’d say that if the total difficulty is 100%, then immigration law contributes around 55% and language barrier 45%. If you can eliminate the latter, then you effectively make it twice as easier to do it.
Moreover, IMO immigration law is kinda ephemeral. Trump was elected and put up some barriers. Biden then went razed them down. Meanwhile, something as basic as language is much more rooted—the US hasn’t changed its official language since its birth.
I didn’t emphasize Western education anywhere in my post. Chances are you’re biased against Eastern education?
Whether education is about signaling or not, isn’t it just better to have more education? I think we can agree on this point.
Agree! I hadn’t thought about it thoroughly enough, now that you mentioned it. How about a different point? Companies always have to spend resources on the translation process when dealing with foreign partners—in your example, China. But now they don’t have to do it anymore, and thus have more capital to spend on other projects.
English can do the job at an ‘huh, OK’ level. It was patchily built throughout many centuries with not-for-scientific-research mindset. Not to mention when scientist actually go to their colleague’s foreign lab for collaboration, they will face even more difficulties, because in every-day purposes, English is also far from great.