I’ve heard good things about Indonesian/Malay. It probably helps it was a regional lingua franca for a long time.
English was legit the best choice in Europe - analytic, with vocabulary drawn from a couple major families, and (almost) no grammatical gender. If only we could unfuck the orthography…
Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.
Something with a consistent phonetic alphabet, like Korean with hangol.
Globasa. A constructed language, but with most world language families represented, and a process that ensures new words meet a few other good criteria.
Barring that, toki pona.
Python
So something as ambiguous, complex and misused as English. Nice.
I was thinking of saying Rust but I thought Python would be a little easier 😆
Gaeilge just to fuck with the brits. We all have to write it in ogham too, I don’t care how inconvenient it might be.
That or serbo-croatian because we are all serbs anyway
I would have picked gaeilge too, since it’s the only other language I know (kinda, I’m terrible at it). Ogham sucks though.
Yeah Ogham would be fucking awful for modern communication but I thought it’d be really funny. In a more serious sense I actually think it’d be super interesting to see how humans adapted to it and adapted it to their needs.
Anyway I also picked Gaeilge because it makes for great lyricism
Mongolian, just for preparation for when the Mongols rise again. It’s just a matter of time.
Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto- Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
- I’ve heard that it’s a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
- Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
- Lojban sounds like a cross between Romansh and a lost native American language. Not good compared to my two favorite sounding languages, Japanese and French, but at least more neutral than Esperanto. Esperanto sounds Spanish and Interlingua sounds like an Italian that thought that Esperanto should sound Italian and I don’t like how either of those two languages sound.
Are we sure it’s actually usable as a natural language?
I have no clue, but it’ll be better than a language that thinks it’s acceptable for words like “read”
to not just have two different meaning, but two different pronunciations,
while also having words like “sense”, “scents” and “cents” be pronounced exactly the same.And while writing this, I just learned that pronunciation should be spelled with “u” instead of “ou”.
That makes no sense.Yes, the spelling is terrible, even if the spoken language is not.
The sounds English makes is pretty good,
but I don’t know if it’s the culture or the language itself,
but it has a giant tendency to want to use a
euphanisms and dysphemisms to emphasize superiority
over other languages and cultures
and also has a giant tendency to use weasel words,
to weasel in authoritarianisms.
I feel like Indonesian is a decent start. There are already a lot of people speaking it, and it’s REALLY easy to learn.
There’s no conjugation and no cases/agreement. I’m a native English speaker and picked up a functional amount of Indonesian in a matter of months, just from reading a couple books before we went.
I’ve been enjoying studying Mandarin. The tones are a bit weird but the grammar seems surprisingly simple, everything can be written pretty universally in pinyin, and Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.
Sanskrit.
Türkçe not gendered (at all, everyone and everything is “o”) and one of the easiest languages to learn
can you write an example, say, this message being translated to Turkish?
Bir örnek, mesela bu mesajın türkçe çevirisini, yazabilir misin?
I don’t think it’s as easy to see, but grammar wise it’s really simple. No articles (not even a “the”), there is no concept of “definite” and “indefinite” grammar wise. Things either are defined (my house, that house) or not (any house, one house, two houses) or it doesn’t matter (I’m going to house) grammar wise, no difference.
And really anything is made with suffixes, the only thing that I would consider problematic is remembering the correct order of suffixes. For example above:
çevir-i-si-ni
çevir(-mek): to turn around, exchange, translate
çevir-i: the thing that got turned around, exchanged, translated
çeviri-(s)i: the messages’s (turkish) translation, a genitive construct where message has the genitive ending (-in) and the corresponding possessive suffix (-(s)i) binds them together.
çevirisi-(n)i: accusative case, relating it to “writing”, i. e. write the messages turkish translation.There are quite a few rules governing vowels and consonants in suffixes but they are highly regular. There are very few exceptions that need to be learned seperately. (and even a lot those can be turned into rules, though I suppose at some point the difference hardly matters)
Most creoles and other such contact languages tend to be analytic, though. Synthetic languages certainly suck for learners, but I’m not sure about why agglutinative doesn’t catch on more easily.
I don’t miss the articles in Russian, and genders seem like a random thing to embed, so that’s all great.
Klingon or Quenya, both sounds like music (just of different genres)
Toki pona
Thus making everything open to interpretation
Klingon, so we can finally appreciate Shakespeare properly
