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by katsura 1623 days ago
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).

2 comments

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.

Isn't that what Esperanto was supposed to be?
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.