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What would you like to see in a language?
Shanadeus
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I'm no linguist but I just encountered a situation that kinda made me think that there really should be a word or rule for this.
Essentially, the following happened:
Person A: "I don't want kids"
Person B: "Me neither"
Me: "Me... neither"
Maybe this is just because of the fact that English is just a second language for me but the end of that exchange felt wrong.
Instead, I would have liked this to have happened:
Person A: "I don't want kids"
Person B: "Me neither"
Me: "Me neithird"
Person C: "Me neithour"
Person
"Me neithive"
And unlike some of the other problems I have with the English language, such as the lack of proper pronouns of people that are neither male nor female (which is really just a result of people reinforcing the idea of there only being males/females), I could see this being useful in conversations if only to avoid redundant "Me too!"s (Is it grammatically correct to say "Me third" and so on? Because it totally should be)
Anyhow, have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wish that the language you were speaking at the time could properly cover what you were trying to convey?
Essentially, the following happened:
Person A: "I don't want kids"
Person B: "Me neither"
Me: "Me... neither"
Maybe this is just because of the fact that English is just a second language for me but the end of that exchange felt wrong.
Instead, I would have liked this to have happened:
Person A: "I don't want kids"
Person B: "Me neither"
Me: "Me neithird"
Person C: "Me neithour"
Person
"Me neithive"And unlike some of the other problems I have with the English language, such as the lack of proper pronouns of people that are neither male nor female (which is really just a result of people reinforcing the idea of there only being males/females), I could see this being useful in conversations if only to avoid redundant "Me too!"s (Is it grammatically correct to say "Me third" and so on? Because it totally should be)
Anyhow, have you ever found yourself in a situation where you wish that the language you were speaking at the time could properly cover what you were trying to convey?
Shanadeus on
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I have heard "Me too." "Me three!" before, but not since elementary school.
I'd like to see phonetic spelling. Spanish, Latin and Italian are pretty good at this.
French and English can go fuck themselves.
You're right, I just found it making sense to follow up neither with variations containing a suffix meaning three or higher.
Both it and the "Me [number]" could be very handy when a newcomer listens in to a conversation and can instantly hear how many are agreeing with something down to an exact number.
As my example for show and tell, I present you with the french word for 90 (ninety): quatre-vingt-dix
Four syllables, and literally translates as "four twenties and ten". I mean really?
I'm proud of my French heritage, but I do rankle at how rigid French language "authorities" are when it comes to adapting the language to a modern audience. Almost every new word that has come into French, especially in regards to new technological developments, have been loanwords from english.
Fun fact, French-Canadian filmakers often must redub their movies in "France" French so that their movies will sell in Europe, otherwise they're accused of being unintelligeble.
edit: just to be clear, strong typing is effectively saying that you have to declare how you're using a particular word when you do, so that the phrase bear market is clearly noted as referring to a place that sells bears or a commodity/whatnot that is losing value.
Wow, just like the Gettysburg Address.
Yes, for the love of God, Yes! A language that is spelled how it sounds! Silent letters should be shot on sight!
Six people repeating that sounds a bit odd and repetitive imho.
I think it would be "Nor I"
What you're looking for is a true alphabet: One sound for each letter, and one letter for each sound. I believe Korean has this. And Esperanto.
Japanese is like this.
I like the relative compactness of the Korean alphabet.
Like those dickbirds from Ugly Americans
They could append their weapon of choice to mix things up.
Except many of the strongest typed languages take advantage of that super strong typing and allow you to forgot the initial declaration of type and infer it through use, much like how we can usually infer the difference between a place that sells bears and type of stock exchange where growth is slow.
Better than the alternative, trust me.
I want a language with:
a. No significant regional variations on pronunciation. Arabic is particularly bad with this, with everyone thinking they need to say 'Q' differently.
b. completely regular. Not a single irregular verb or plural. In fact, I'm not entirely sold on plurals, but if there are plurals, definitely only 1 / 2+ distinction, instead of, again, 1/2/3+
c. Speaking of numbers, numbers are written and said either from left to right or vice versa, and from largest to smallest, without exception. English does numbers quite well, actually, in that 152 is "one hundred and fifty-two," rather than being "one hundred, two, and fifty."
d. Phonetic spelling.
Except they won't, because nobody actually uses constructed languages for important interpersonal communication.
Still, learning Esperanto would let you hang out with Esperanto speakers. It's just another hobby, and if this stuff matters to you, well, then it's a pretty obvious choice. Despite them coming across like a cult, they're harmless, they are just bad at PR.
Isn't sign language a constructed language?
Not really
I'm sure some developed naturally, others based on these and then the completely constructed ones.
Why isn't it?
Hell, the UK and the States have their own sign languages.
with vastly different derivations.
Neither are particularly related to English, and both are unrelated to each other.
Like the majority of sign languages, both are natural languages.
There are constructed sign languages but they are about as common as constructed spoken languages
Edit: Actually, I'm not sure that ISL is really a complete language either.
Weeeeirrrrdd. I just read up on sign languages and they are natural. I had always assumed that they were constructed by someone to make communication to the deaf easier. I stand corrected.
Esperanto has everything I want in a language besides a user base. When we start signing treaties with other major countries to teach a constructed language in our schools, I will definitely be back in juco in a heartbeat to learn it.
Internal consistency makes a language far more easily learnt, but seems to be a major hurdle for adaptivity. Modern English has been decried for its difficulty to new learners, but it works so well due to how adaptive and flexible its rules are, and persists in large part due to its proclivity for changing when it needs to and allowing for the rules of external languages to remain intact when those words are incorporated into common vernacular. Words like "croissant" and "spaghetti" aren't at all English or even Germanic in origin, but we use them just as easily as if they were today.
Really the only thing I would change about English is the lack of a proper third-person plural pronoun. Or we just all agree that "y'all" is just as legitimate as a contraction as others like "don't" or "can't" or "they're."
2) No plural nouns - a couple of plural-indicators that are spoken before or after the noun to indicate plurality and/or count
3) Non-verbs are constant regardless of case or tense
4) Genderless (no masculine and feminine words with different particles)
5) Formality/politeness determined by regular, universal indicator-words rather than different words/word-endings
6) VOS word order since that's generally the reverse of the order in which words are understood from context, so if the subject or the subject and object are understood they can be dropped without otherwise changing the structure of the sentence
7) Four pronouns - he, she, it, and <sex-unspecified/unknown person>
8) Left-to-right spoken numbering with order of magnitude-based truncated large numbers (so if 2 is 'two' then 256 is 'two five six', and if you have a large number with few significant digits, like 2000, it would be something like 'two-ten-three' where 'ten' is a word indicating something like "times ten to the power of")
9) Phonetic spelling without accent markers or shared characters
10) Uniform word endings based on part of speech. All verbs in one one of a small set of endings, all nouns in a different set, all adjectives in a third, etc. Even if you don't know a specific word, you will know exactly what kind of word it is.
But that's realy just a list of the things I've disliked about every language I've learned.
"Whair's da caw?" "Eye pawked it in da yawd."
"How meny tin cups do yo want?" "Eye'd leyek tin tin cups, pleez."
"Warsh your hands."
Also, remember that everyone has their own idiolect so you are either changing the spelling of words to suit your needs, but to someone else the spelling change is arbitrary, or you're doing away with the standardization of spelling.