What will the official language be for CS?

Lojban? Esperanto? English?

English.

Just because it's clean slate, doesn't mean we have to replace everything. We've had people claiming we should replace the time system (see CS Time), despite the fact that it would be pointless.

Natural selection seems to point to English.

Bob

Given we're probably only five years away from real time similtaneous translation on your iphone or equivalent, is individual language even that important anymore? If everyone can talk to everyone else regardless of their learnt language, does it matter what that language is?

"Given we're probably only five years away from real time similtaneous translation on your iphone"

That's a rather big "given."

Bob

"The future has already happened, it's just unequally distributed."

You can already buy this sort of technology in Japan and S Korea. Primitive versions of it are run on iphones in Irag to aid US soldiers to communicate with the locals. There's nothing magical or fantastical about it, it's just moore's law. Speech dictation is already pretty good, translation is ok and getting better every day, speech synthesizing is common place. The thing only stopping them in real time is processing speed, and in five years your pda will be as fast as a modern desktop. I really don't think it's that much of a leap.

I go away for a week and there's already new members, fantastic! Welcome to the forums Bob!

Real-time iPod based speech translation, can't wait for it. Now we lazy Americans will never have to learn any other language!

American's always copy all their best traits from the english.

lkm wrote:

American's always copy all their best traits from the english.

So what does that say about the Royal Family and the House of Lords?
LOL

Quote :

American's always copy all their best traits from the english.

And the English got all of their good traits from the Scottish

Locksley wrote:

Quote :

American's always copy all their best traits from the english.

And the English got all of their good traits from the Scottish

Oh come now! Not all English are alcoholic golfers! LOL

What about Wales? And the Irish?

I was simply giving a compliment to lkm

If you want to be honest with it though, we'd have to say we all got it from the Normans.

What about the Saxons? And the Angles? And don't forget the Spainish Inquisition.

What about those horny Romans? There was a lot of DNA exchanges back then too!

This thread is going places!

Such as off topic!

I strongly support the idea of a common language for all of humanity, but it really shouldn't be English. English is a mess.

There is a growing body of evidence that humans have a built-in capacity for symbolic processing. One example is polyglots. A polyglot is what happens when two or more languages are combined (usually in an informal way, such as "pidgeon english"). Every polyglot language in the world has the same overall syntax.

As we learn about how the the brain processes language, it should be possible to design a language that matches that processing system. Such a language would be easy to learn and use.

Lojban?

I support the notion of a universal second language. That way everyone can communicate with each other, without the draconian measures needed to enforce it on the entire population. However, if the language is as easy to learn and speak as you suggest it might be, I think a voluntary switch would occur in 25-50 years.

As long as it remains Second, and isn't forced on people.

But it would, technically, be Coercion, if people couldn't survive without it.

If it is taught in schools, I suppose you could call it 'coercion'- although it would be no more forced than math or science. And if it comes to be the standard, then that will be because it is useful. Is writing government documents forcing people to learn to read? If so, is this a bad thing? I say not.

But writing the government documents in a language that most people in the country don't know (i.e. writing US documents in Spanish, despite it being practically the second language) would be bad.

I'd say the same second language for all, that has a structure designed around common architecture in all languages. A base language, if you will. You can have whatever first language you want, but if everyone knows the second language then they can speak to each other and we won't have a forced cultural barrier.

That is exactly what I would advocate.

Perhaps make the most important copies of government documents available in this language, but have available copies in any language?