OT: Off shore call center workers mad at American

[douglas]

English is the primary trade language of the world because Great Britain went on a gigantic colonization spree for a century or two and managed to outdo everyone else at it, and everywhere they went they took their language with them. At its height, the British Empire included the American colonies (which became the USA), India, Australia, huge swaths of Africa, and part of Canada. France got a share of Canada, and Spain took Mexico and maybe some parts of South America, but they never even came close to matching Great Britain.

I think I've seen some statistics that Spanish is actually spoken by more people than English, but English speakers are spread out more, so it's easier for non-speakers to find a translator in more places for English than for anything else.

[Slick]

If you believe in exponential economic growth, everyone better be looking for a good crash course in one of the Chinese dialects.

[Suicide Junkie]

What we really need is an artificial language for maximum ease of learning and use.

Don't use anyone's native language, but make a list of the best features and make one.

- Certainly no gender for asexual or non-living things.
- Pronounced the way it is spelled.
- Avoid sounds that major groups of people find hard to distingush.
- Avoid words that sound the same but mean different things.
- Unambiguous grammar.
- Consistent tenses.
- etc...

Perhaps add some single-word paradoxes to cut short the inevitable AI uprisings

If you make your tenses very structured, you should even be able to handle time travel tenses without any problems:
"I'm glad that I will have thought of this idea!"

[Jack Simth]

Suicide Junkie said:
What we really need is an artificial language for maximum ease of learning and use.

Don't use anyone's native language, but make a list of the best features and make one.

- Certainly no gender for asexual or non-living things.
- Pronounced the way it is spelled.
- Avoid sounds that major groups of people find hard to distingush.
- Avoid words that sound the same but mean different things.
- Unambiguous grammar.
- Consistent tenses.
- etc...

Perhaps add some single-word paradoxes to cut short the inevitable AI uprisings

If you make your tenses very structured, you should even be able to handle time travel tenses without any problems:
"I'm glad that I will have thought of this idea!"

There sort of is: Esperanto... but the catch is getting enough people to want to learn such a thing that everyone does, and then keeping it "pure" and avoiding the language drift that leads to such things as the word "special" becoming an insult, without getting the chains on advancement that France deals with....

[Thermodyne]

I think someone took the time to write down Klingon.


We can all switch to that for this board

Or for the klingons out there:

joH'a' 'oH wIj DevwI' jIH DIchDaq Hutlh pagh

[Jack Simth]

Scouting has badges for people who pass a translator test; no specific language list is on the requirements, just that the translator be able to do the test in the appropriet language and have a scorer that is considered fluet (basically, amounts to translating a particular length of text or carrying on a meaningful conversation for a particular length of time).

I've met somone who prominently displayed a "Klingon" translator badge on his shirt.

Kinda scary, really....