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

  • cerement@slrpnk.net
    12·
    7 months ago
    • 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)
    • schmorp@slrpnk.netOPEnglish
      7·
      7 months ago

      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!