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Creating new languages

Orphia Nay said:
Wouldn't it be better to start using a language that is in danger of dying out?

(Not sure I hold this belief. Just posing the question while I muse on it.)
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Nope. The thing about lanuages with a small number of speakers is that they are a great way to control people. One of the things that the ANC did back in the day was teach people english because within the english corpus there are some interesting ideas. Thus if you wish to improve the human condition you should actively seek to destroy any language with less than say 100 million speakers.
 
aggle-rithm said:
Klingon is basically English with Klingon vocabulary substituted. Or so I've heard.
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Nope, completely different. For example, Klingon grammar uses the OVS sentence structure, which is rarely encountered in natural languages (the purpose of choosing this was to make it sound as alien as possible). English uses the SVO sentence structure.

Also, Klingon is an agglutinative language while English is closer to being an isolating language.

(No, I don't speak Klingon. I was interested in the subject of conlangs a while ago, and remembered reading that it had the opposite sentence structure to English. I had to check Wikipedia for the rest of the info.)

ETA:

An example of a SVO sentence structure in English would be "Jane makes dinner".
But if you were using an OVS structure, you'd say "Dinner makes Jane".
 
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geni said:
Nope. The thing about lanuages with a small number of speakers is that they are a great way to control people. One of the things that the ANC did back in the day was teach people english because within the english corpus there are some interesting ideas. Thus if you wish to improve the human condition you should actively seek to destroy any language with less than say 100 million speakers.
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So you'd only keep eleven languages?

Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi-Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Punjabi, and German?

Goodbye Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and all the rest?
 
Why do we need new languages?

C or C++ seems to be the best language. (More modern languages seem to use the same syntax). I also like FORTH. You can create any words you like and make them do anything you want them to do. You can even redefine existing words. And you have complete control over the stacks.
 
geni said:
As living languages certianly.
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Well, from that perspective Latin is already gone. It's a zombie language now, dead but still shambling around.

I don't think that trying to actively destroy the lesser spoken languages (and replace them with more widespread languages) would improve the human condition as much as ensuring that speakers of these languages also understand a major language.
 
Brian-M said:
I don't think that trying to actively destroy the lesser spoken languages (and replace them with more widespread languages) would improve the human condition as much as ensuring that speakers of these languages also understand a major language.
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History suggests that the two are effectively equivilent. Long term bilingalism just isn't stable.
 
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