should there be only one language

[idle echo]

Isn't it kind of pointless having more than one language...? More work, more problems, less misunderstandings, easier to travel, wouldn't limit the places you could move to.?

[unborn canopy]

The argument would be that diversity and culture is good , a language is a key aspect of a culture, but I agree and I believe most people agree, the question is which language should be the sole language? I can't see anyone being able to agree on that

[golden haven]

according to what though

thats of course not the way it is, but according to what would it even be changed

like how would that at all be practical

[idle echo]

Personally English
Fairly the most spoken language OR the easiest to learn

[golden haven]

easiest to learn to english speakers

its probably as hard to learn english to chinese speakers as it is for english speakers to learn mandarin

[unborn canopy]

I think a new and efficient language should be created

[golden haven]

i mean to countries closely related to english

[idle echo]

This may be bias, but English is probably the best choice as it's spoken all around the world

Easy to learn

And top 3 most spoken

Mandarin isn't spoken around the world

[golden haven]

again easy to learn, to countries closely related to english

[unborn canopy]

I don't think I'd like a world where there were only one language actually

It would be dull and boring

[golden haven]

yeah

[idle echo]

You think having many languages is fun?

[golden haven]

i think it wouldnt be practical or make sense to even impliment though, even though its whole merit is practicality

[idle echo]

Actually if we split the world into 2 languages, everyone could learn the both

[golden haven]

plus if you instantly zapped everyone into english speakers, surely non mutually intelligible dialects would develop, like arabic

and mandarin/cantonese

[idle echo]

True

[unborn canopy]

it's more beautiful, I'm going to Europe and one thing I'm looking forward to is hearing all the languages

sometimes you need to sacrifice aesthetic and culture for practicality

like, ionic columns may not be practical (use more materials than doric columns) but they're more prettier so we use em

[golden haven]

i think diversity for a lot of things are good

if worldwide standards were the default thing (in a universe that just works fundementally different where diversity was the exception)

and you just had a few things that were diverse, if we still had the same brains as here, then we would go crazy

standards are good somewhere like with USB ports, power grids, whether somewhere uses summertime or not

or with screws, etc

i dont think language is one of them

[idle echo]

Too much isn't tho

How about a language per continent

Because there are farrrr too many

[golden haven]

maybe having one language that everyone speaks as a second language like for example english

on top of all the ones we have

that would probably serve both practicality and diversity

[idle echo]

Yes, you'd have to learn your cultured language and English

Brilliant

[unborn canopy]

But most people who know a niche languaeg also know a common tongue

[golden haven]

so if everyone spoke their current language and then english second

[golden haven]

exactly

[golden haven]

so i guess the world has in a way already corrected towards this in a lot of ways

[unborn canopy]

Problem with that is that if you live in an area where everyone speaks a cultured language, people will continue to speak taht cultuted langauge so they wouldn't want to learn English and if they did, they would never practice it

aside from the occasional tourist

[golden haven]

thats not true

india is exhibit A

everyone there speaks their local language which is in the 100s, plus english

i also speak my native tongue and english

[idle echo]

Also there's no need to be fluent, just to prevent misunderstandings and make kif easier

[idle echo]

Same, on top of that I speak Italian

[unborn canopy]

I guess mainly because of the internet?

Why would they learn English?

[magic spindle]

Are you familiar with Esperanto?

This has been tried

[unborn canopy]

I am actually

there's an xkcd for this I think

[golden haven]

oh yeah this is true!

[magic spindle]

The best argument for a universal language is efficiency.

The best agrument against is that there is value in seeing the same thing from fundamentally different perspectives.

[golden haven]

so that just repeats what i said at the start that this would never actually be practical

like youd have to have something akin to a powerful world government for this to feasibly be able to exist with the current ways the world works, regardless of how good and effective it actually is

in my opinion

[idle echo]

Which is why we came up with a mix, your own language plus a new efficient language

[hard ruin]

there already is one, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

oh @magic spindle already mentioned it

[hard ruin]

this also already is a thing. Many former colonies speak a creole language

[keen marsh]

My answer : nah.

[hard gull]

There are some cultures that have more words for more phenomena, I believe the Alaskans or Inuit people have like 6 different words for snow. USA has a lot of focus on self victory (can’t think of the term rn). But we have a lot of words that start with self, self-esteem, selfish, self-aware. Cultures develop language separately having one language for how different places are is silly

[golden haven]

its actually 400 words for snow! (or a bit lower depending who you ask but wayyyyy above 6)

[hard ruin]

actually, with regards to this xkcd, Unicode (specifically UTF-8) won. Obviously there are still a million different character encoding standards, but UTF-8 is what almost everyone uses these days, except for severely memory limited applications (like some embedded use cases), but those are niche.

and that's probably the only documented example of someone developing a new standard that quite literally covers everyone's use cases (it's also the reason why we have emoji -- Japanese encodings had them, and the purpose of unicode was to cover everything), that prevailed

10 years ago when I started as a software dev, I still routinely saw a variety of different character encodings used, but now I can't even remember the last time I saw anything other than UTF-8 used.

[hollow mica]

Yet, from my personal experience, not being fluent in a language can create more misunderstandings than 2 people that do not even speak the same language trying to have a conversation.

Specifically, specific words and phrasing in the English language can be interpreted in different ways across English speaking countries as well as between regional dialects.