Internet Language-FarOut Idea of Mine

Ok. As I sat pondering inventive ideas, I came up with this general idea for information technology.
English is the dominant language of the internet, but there are other languages out there that English speaking people are not willing to learn but would like to interact with people who speak that language. And also vice versa, there are people who have the internet in "third-world" countries that don't know the English language. So, my idea is that we should have a universal expression of ideas, feelings, intelligent thinking, etc such as we do in a language but in a writing form that everyone can be taught. Ofcourse it would take cross-cultural comparisons of languages, but have a way in which the whole world can communicate based on this one dominant written language solely for the internet.
I can see many pro's and con's to this idea, but what does everyone think?

Or perhaps I should try hashish in a group setting instead of alone......

Websperanto, perhaps?

Maybe you could create a modern version of hyroglyphics using modern icons and symbols for words. Of course you would have to invent one hell of a set of characters to achieve this, but maybe create a translator program that takes words from any languages and converts them into symbols for things.

Well there is an effort already underway to develop a common language between humans and computers its called lojban which means the logical language.

Originally posted by TheBigD
Or perhaps I should try hashish in a group setting instead of alone......

You'll get way more crazy ideas from "brainstorming" in a group that sitting alone.

Yeah don't camp on it pal.. pass it over here.

I think that it is a good idea, like you said it would allow for communication between all people....In order for this to work though the UNIVERSAL language would have to be based on something that is common to nearly every language.....Or every culture, from this an idea can be built.

Originally posted by racos
I think that it is a good idea, like you said it would allow for communication between all people....In order for this to work though the UNIVERSAL language would have to be based on something that is common to nearly every language.....Or every culture, from this an idea can be built.

Check out lojban, its an artificial language that is Cuturally Neutral(ie is just as hard for an English Speaking American to learn it as it's for an Chinese person speaking whatever chinese dialect they speak)

English is the language of business.

English is the world's most popular second language: the language of the Internet and international commerce.

www.thelearningweb.net...

English has a total of 550,000 words � more than any other language.

Learn only that fact, and English might seem far too complex. But
2000 to 2500 words make up 90 percent of most speech. In fact, the same applies to most European languages. Learn to use those 2000 words fluently and you're well on the way to being fluent in your new language. Small children generally learn 2000 words by age four.

Amazingly, 400 to 450 words make up 65 per cent of most writing, even in adult books. Most of those key words are "small inking words", such as the, a, an, about, over, under, to, until.

Of the 70 sounds that make up all the world's main languages, English uses a maximum of 44.

Those 44 sounds can be spelled using only 70 different combinations.
About half of those combinations are phonetic (pronounced roughly as they sound, such as hat, mat, cat and bat) and half are not (including difficult spellings such as though, tough, cough, where, tight, weigh and bridge.)

This language you speak of is apparently English:

The English language is a West Germanic language, originating from England. It is the third most common "first" language (native speakers), with around 402 million people in 2002. English has lingua franca status in many parts of the world, due to the military, economic, scientific, political and cultural influence of the United Kingdom and later the United States.

Where possible, virtually all students worldwide are required to learn some English, and knowledge of English is virtually a prerequisite for working in many fields and occupations. Most higher academic institutions, for example, require a working command of English.

en.wikipedia.org...

Zip

Originally posted by sardion2000
Check out lojban, its an artificial language that is Cuturally Neutral(ie is just as hard for an English Speaking American to learn it as it's for an Chinese person speaking whatever chinese dialect they speak)

Now that's an achievment. Make it incredibly hard for everyone! Very democratic.

I say screw artificial languages. We must preserve the wealth of culture as it is. I'd rather learn a little Chinese and read the rest in translation, and read Tolstoy and Shakespear in their original language (already can do that) waste my time on some sort of lojban.

Besides, with the inevitable advent of efficient computer translation, the point is so moot.

The US soldiers already use handheld translators from English to Arabic, and that's just the beginning. In 20 years it'll be built into every cell phone.

The biggest trouble with languages such as Esperanto, Lobjan, and other "created" languages is that, to date, there has been no compelling reason for people to adopt them.

English, and before that French, have been adopted as a "common" tongue because they're the language of business and diplomacy. Immigrants learn the language of their new home because they (or their children) have little choice if they want to succeed. Slaves learned the languages of their owners because they, too, had a need to communicate with others, especially in the case of the African diaspora where slaves were often from many different parts of Africa and would not, necessarily, speak the same tribal languages.

The created, logical languages have not yet had any sort of impetus for such widespread adoption. They're not mandated by any government, they do not facilitate business or diplomacy, they're not even spoken by any significant communities.

I think that in the future, a common language will be necessary for global technology to advance.
Maybe a language based on mathmatics, and simply expressed verbally.
A mathmatical translator could also be created as a stop gap for current languages.
I don't think any of the current spoken languages have sufficient definition to be adopted as a global language.

Originally posted by Whiskey Jack
The biggest trouble with languages such as Esperanto, Lobjan, and other "created" languages is that, to date, there has been no compelling reason for people to adopt them.

As i said above, its being developed as a common language between computers and humans, obviously the first people to learn it would be programmers. I think artificial languages will come of age eventually either that or the real-time translator.

go wiki.

i myself am on a mission to learn lojban. its pretty easy, and simple (since its designed that way). ive got a lot of work, so thats getting in the way a lot (read: all the way) but i hope to learn it by the end of this year, or at least start.

i think lojban has a future. maybe not in my lifetime, but we will eventually hit a problem where computers need to be able to interface with humans, and it wont be feasible to have different languages. roughly the same time, different languages just interfere with trade. follow the money, so they learn a common language.

it may not be lojban that becomes that language, but i think its the best candidate so far, and has a very, very good future.

Well... If you want to know language which differs much from most western languages try Finnish.
en.wikipedia.org...

For example instead of using prepositions we just "bend" word itself.
en.wikipedia.org...

But there's also one big good thing in Finnish language, especially when considering machine translation/speech recognisation: there is only one way for pronouncing each letter.

Aldo da Rosa, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford, surprised me for praising the logical spelling of Finnish, giving a strange reason. He says: "When my children were babies, they spoke Finnish (in addition to Portuguese and English) although I did not. Nevertheless, every night I read them Finnish stories without understanding what I was saying. They understood and enjoyed them. This was possible because of the rigid spelling rules of the language and the extremely simple rule for stressing syllables in a word

wais.stanford.edu...

So when developing common language for use between humans and computers that might be good feature tfor it to have.

Originally posted by sardion2000

Originally posted by Whiskey Jack
The biggest trouble with languages such as Esperanto, Lobjan, and other "created" languages is that, to date, there has been no compelling reason for people to adopt them.

As i said above, its being developed as a common language between computers and humans, obviously the first people to learn it would be programmers. I think artificial languages will come of age eventually either that or the real-time translator.

How close to allowing such interfacing is Lobjan currently? Is it possible (or will it be in the near futuer) to write a program that a computer can interpret using Lobjan? If not, is the hold up with the language itself or simply with building an interpreter for the computer?

It would be very nice if it were possible to program computers using something close to spoken languages' syntax and structure.

I do not know unfortunetly. It was disigned with computer logic in mind, so it stands to reason that if a language is more similiar to that of a computer language, it would be alot easier to make speech interfaces. Of course computer languages are ever evolving so any common language has to keep pace(its not that hard to do, you just gotta have enough people who speak and understand)
One of the main pros of Lojban as an common language between humans and computers(and other humans as well) is that all of its rules are absolute. No exceptions, and that makes it a helluva lot easier for speech reconnition software to figure out.
One of the big drawbacks is as you said not that many people speak it outside of those who are curently working and developing it, so maybe its day is not today or the next but maybe just maybe it will spawn a true universal language. Either that or we will invent a universal translater first(which isn't as far into the future as most people think, USMC is using somthing called a Phraselater, that translates phrases at the touch of the button only one way the one I saw being used)

ok first of all

cons
not everyone in third world countrys have computers

a human-computer hybrid langauge would be very hard to learn for all of the logic needed

i think the best idea is to create a hyroglyphic based langauge that the computer can understand by the place ment of pixels but it would be harder for the computer rather than just compiling the code

pros
easyer way to comumitcate maybe

as is said above, lojban follows all rules, all the time, so, really, the only problems lie in actual recognition by the computer, and processing of whatever it 'hears.' i think its great, however, that many people dont no it yet. we arent using it, and id rather keep all the different languages alive for as long as possible.

klian, heiroglyphics probably wouldnt work. to convey words through a series of images would be awkward and burdensome. its almost completely useless for written work (in a practical sense), whereas lojban is perfectly simple to write. it is also impossible to speak the language, without giving sounds to pictures which could then just be transformed into text. its much harder for a person to read an image. and, just practically, an image takes much longer to load, and takes up much more space than a piece of text would.