Trevor @ Thursday June 10th 2004 18:03

Interlingua is a highly user-friendly language with a pedigree that is a bagful of doughnuts better than bitter, twisted Esperanto. Try this:

That’s so damn easy that I could learn it with a Dutch accent and impress the cat by telling her it’s Romanian. But making everything so piddly-diddly is actually a huge waste of time, because (a) linguistic complexity isn’t a big faze factor for language translation and checking machines; and (b) humans reading a language so distressingly regular will fall asleep after a couple of paras.

Not knowing (or caring) very much about Marxism, I sometimes suspect that English is so popular (and so strongly associated with ideologies of freedom) not because of its status as the world’s primary language of intercommunal transaction but simply because it is such a delightful chaos. For this reason I am happy that it shows every sign of resisting the linguistic hygiene and spelling reform brigades and becoming ever more diverse and confusing.

Just as Marx never really figured out whether capitalism was going to die on its own or whether it needed stomping on, I’m not sure whether we need to help boring languages on their way, or whether they will simply flicker and fade, forgotten. The latter may be the case with Interlingua, but I think that concerted action may be necessary to seek out and destroy Klingon. Who will join me on this mission?

Categories: Languages, Splog

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