[hypertele-Xii]

I read your comment and compare to programming languages. It would be revolutionary to have all computers programmed in the same language, but as different languages are good at different things and evolve concurrently, it's almost inconcievable to make it happen.

And you're talking about refactoring not merely an entire industry, but the very language of thought for our species!

How can we even begin to approach this consciously?

[katsura]

Every computer is programmed with the same language, namely 1s and 0s. The other programming languages add certain abstractions to make different things "easier".

But there doesn't exist a human language that you can use to communicate with everyone on Earth. OP seems to propose a 0-1 language (to stay with the computer analogy) everyone could use to communicate with anybody else, while the local languages would be kept the same way as different programming languages are used now (basically to express certain patterns differently).

[newsbinator]

That's a good summary, thanks! With the only departure being that programming in 1s and 0s is very hard for humans and so we develop abstractions on top of it to make it easier.

Whereas the baseline language I'm proposing we use would be very easy for humans, and in fact would be much easier than the local languages that would be kept the same to express whatever they're good at expressing.

[Izkata]

Isn't that what Esperanto was supposed to be?

[katsura]

Don't get me wrong, I have a huge appreciation for Esperanto, but using it as a global language would mean forcing western ideas, about how a language should work, on the eastern population. So as Zamenhof didn't consider Asian languages when he made Esperanto (not to mention the use of diacritics), I wouldn't use it as a global language.

I have been following some auxlangs for some time now, and if I had to vote, I'd go with an a priori language as a global second language, instead of choosing an existing one with specific culture attached to it.

[newsbinator]

The analogy is reasonable, although it breaks down because human languages are not nearly as varied in usefulness for different things as programming languages are.

Human languages are much more generalized.

Sure, you can find domain-specific examples of one human language being preferable to another though, like when Korean Air forced all its pilots to communicate in English, even Korean->Korean pilots, because in English you can tell explicitly a person who is older/more senior than you that they're about to kill everybody on the plane, without defaulting to making that a polite "it seems as though perhaps what if" suggestion.

On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

If we can roll out vaccines to the globe over a couple years and a few trillion dollars, then surely rolling out a global language over a generation or two would only be 1 or 2 orders of magnitude more challenging, but it would likely result in far more benefit to the human race in the medium/long term, and probably even in the short term too.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

> On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

Which country is this? Genuinely curious. I’m a native English speaker and any time English was established as a country wide lingua franca it involved colonization and suppression of other people, even in England.

[newsbinator]

There are several examples. Here's one that involved fining people for not speaking the lingua franca in public:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizen,_speak_Turkish!

I'm not sure exactly how I feel about this. I hope we can get everyone to a global language without so much as a $1 fine, but if it did require a generation of fines and public shaming, it could fall into "the ends justify the means" territory.

In my modern/developed country we fine citizens heavily for entering without presenting a valid PCR test against covid. That's because we believe the public good of having everyone free of covid outweighs the public evil of fining people for simply existing as they are.

Would the public good of switching the globe to a unified language be worth fines and social pressure?

I don't know the answer to that, which maybe correlates with my score on the "Darkness Measure" we've recently seen posted here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734100

[hypertele-Xii]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[newsbinator]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

[jcranmer]

> On a country-level, we've successfully normalized a given language across large populations and large geographies. Often without involving genocide or prison camps.

Well, what do you call beating school children for not speaking the "proper" language? Because that's basically the minimum you need to do (see: US, Canada, France for specific examples).

[newsbinator]

We don't need to beat school children to get them to do all sorts of things they'd rather not do. Currently we get most school children trained to be effective factory workers and low-grade administrative assistants by age 14~16 without beating any of them.

People used to beat school children all the time. They used to beat minorities and torture people who have developmental problems.

We don't do that anymore, and we still find ways of achieving our aims.