= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Viliam comments on Crazy Ideas Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (344)
A single world language should be designed and promoted. Previous attempts have been too Eurocentric to take advantage of all useful grammatical features that are available.
Alternative option: English is already a de facto world language, and it is well suited to borrowing foreign terms when it needs to, but humanity should be ashamed that it conducts its main scientific, commercial and diplomatic operations in a language with such a defective writing system. Spelling reform (or a completely new, purely phonetic alphabet) is urgent. I would advocate adapting Hangul for that purpose.
Is there a chance to agree on which gramatical features are useful?
For example, what colors does the language have words for? Does it distinguish gramatical singular and plural? How about dual? How many tenses? Clusivity? Honorifics? Etc.
My intuition is that in a "perfect" language all these things should exist, and all should be optional. (Not sure about the colors; perhaps we should have separate words for "green" and "blue", but also one for "green or blue", and also one for "light blue" and one for "dark blue" to make everyone happy. I hope the list would not grow too much.)