this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 1 points 4 hours ago

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.

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago

Esperanto. Logical. Clear. Easy.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 9 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

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...

[–] timkenhan@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 hours ago

I feel like Indonesian is what Esperanto could've been.

[–] 7empest@beehaw.org 3 points 11 hours ago

French, we could all be a little more french when keeping our leaders on a leash

[–] Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 17 hours ago

Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.

[–] mukt@lemmy.ml 4 points 17 hours ago
[–] folaht@lemmy.ml 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Lojban for now
Certainly not Esperanto

  1. Lojban like Esperanto has been created to be a neutral lingua franca.
  2. I've heard that it's a logical language that tries to do away with ambiguity and that sounds interesting to me.
  3. Esperanto feels like a language made for the EU rather than the world and so do all Esperanto look-a-likes.
  4. 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.
[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Are we sure it's actually usable as a natural language?

[–] folaht@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, the spelling is terrible, even if the spoken language is not.

[–] folaht@lemmy.ml 1 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] spittingimage@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Esperanto. It's an artificial language designed to be easy to learn and communicate in. Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.

[–] dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Although it's worth noting that there are esperanto dialects and speakers of one don't necessarily understand speakers of another.

WHAT!? OK biggest failure of an artificial language in my book then

[–] echindod@programming.dev 2 points 9 hours ago

I think this is actually a success: this is the process of all languages. A usable language will evolve and grow, and something as geographical dispersed and isolated as Esperanto will certainly show divergence if it is being used.

So rather than a failure, I think this demonstrates it can be a real language. Though my interest in language isn't for communication. So eh. Your milage may very.

[–] arthur@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I think it is easy, but I speak only european languages. Not sure if it is really easier or I just feel that is easy because I know the languages I do.

I would love to say mandarin/chinese, but tonal languages scares me.

I made a grammar rule set (not a complete conlang yet) where verbs don't need to be conjugated, and information about time is separated from the verb; A new lingua franca, IMHO, should not have verb conjugation.

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[–] RabbitMix@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Dutch, but only because I'm tired of Dutch people telling me I really shouldn't have bothered when they find out I learned to speak Dutch.

I just like learning different languages because it lit|really provides new frameworks of understanding for me, goddamn.

[–] folaht@lemmy.ml 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

Nou ja zeg!

Dit zelfver-nederland-cultuurtje moet blijkbaar
nog altijd blijven opkijken naar de taal waar het hoofdland
op dit moment verder afglijdt naar het fascisme.

[–] bochy992@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 hours ago

Hey, can you translate this to English?

Because what Google gives me doesn't make sense:

This self- Dutchifying culture apparently still has to look up to the language, while the main country is currently sliding further towards fascism.

[–] dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 17 hours ago

I think it's worth it learning dutch if you nail the accent, especially common ones found 50 years ago (as in dubbed Pipi Longstocking).

[–] isyasad@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (7 children)

Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are totally unrelated languages. Chinese languages are sino-tibetan, Vietnamese is austro-asiatic, Japanese is japonic, and Korean is alone in its own family. Totally unrelated to each other as far as we can trace.

Despite that, they all used to use the same writing system and, shockingly, they were mutually intelligible when written down. In Japanese this method of reading Chinese (without actually knowing Chinese) was called kundoku but I think that the other languages also had ways to read & write Chinese writing with very light translation. Even today, Chinese writing unites the different dialects/languages of China.

My proposed lingua franca is the Chinese writing system. Everybody should keep their own writing systems, but they should also learn to transcribe into Chinese, the only extant written language in which this is really possible.

[–] gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

everything you said is true because chinese script is not based on pronounciation, but on (highly abstracted) images. these icons are universal because the concepts they represent are universal.

[–] ylph@lemmy.world 5 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

This is only partially true. Very early on, this was the case - Chinese characters started as pictograms representing objects and concepts. But this was fairly limiting in how much complexity you could capture without creating an unmanageably large set of unique pictograms. So the system evolved to use compound characters (characters made up of 2 or more components) incorporating phonetic (i.e. pronunciation) information into the writing system.

Most Chinese characters used in past 2000 years are made up of parts related to their meaning or category of meaning, and parts related to the pronunciation of the spoken word they represent (at least at some point in time, typically in Old Chinese) - these are called phono-semantic compound characters. The first comprehensive dictionary of Chinese characters that was created almost 2000 years ago already classified over 80% of all characters as phono-semantic compounds. This percentage also went up over time in later dictionaries as new compound characters were still being added.

As an example the character for book (ζ›Έ) - is made up of 2 parts, the semantic part is 聿 (brush - in its original form a literal picture of a hand holding a brush) on top (so the word is related to writing or painting), and θ€… on the bottom (the meaning of θ€… is not important here (it was a picture of a mouth eating sugarcane originally, but lost this meaning long time ago), but θ€… in Old Chinese was pronounced similar to the Old Chinese spoken word for book, so it serves a purely phonetic function here)

When Chinese writing was adopted in Japan, it wasn't really used to write Japanese - it was used to write Classical Chinese. Literate people would translate from Japanese to Chinese (which they would have been fluent in) and write it down in Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary, not spoken Japanese grammar. They could also read it back and translate on the fly into spoken Japanese for Japanese speaking audience. They also brought in the Chinese pronunciation of the Characters into Japanese (in fact several different versions of this over time - see Go-on, Kan-on, etc.) so the phonetic hints in the characters were still useful when learning the system.

Attempting to write spoken Japanese using Chinese characters was difficult, initially they would actually use Chinese characters stripped of their meaning to represent Japanese syllables. These were later simplified to become modern kana

Spoken Chinese itself evolved beyond the monosyllabic written Classical Chinese (which remained quite rigid), so for a long time, Chinese also wrote essentially in a different language from how they spoke. It was only fairly recently that vernacular Chinese began to be written (rather than Classical Chinese) with it's polysyllabic words (most words in modern Chinese have 2 or more syllables, and require 2 or more characters to write, further distancing modern words from the original simple pictogram meanings)

So while the idea of some kind of universal abstract concept representation divorced from phonetics sounds intriguing, in practice it is a poor way to capture the complexity and nuance of spoken languages, and all languages (including Chinese) that attempted to adopt it ended up having to build various phonetic hints and workarounds to make the system actually useful and practical for writing.

yeah :)

you're right

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[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 50 points 2 days ago (6 children)

Esperanto! Yes, there are better conlangs, yes, it's eurocentric, and yes, there are ways to improve it or even come up with something better. But it has a cool history, it's tied to socialist movements and anarchist movements, it is fairly easy to learn (especially for speakers of European languages), it's grammar is super simple, it uses a system of root words and affixes that make me think of Legos, and it has real, native speakers already, meaning it is a living language that has changed over time, and is fully capable of being used exclusively to communicate efficiently.

Plus, the fascists fucking hate it

[–] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not against Esperanto but creating a β€œuniversal language”and then making it gendered seems a little stupid.

It’s not as bad as other languages on this front, but if I remember correctly there’s still no agreed-upon gender neutral singular pronoun in Esperanto is there?

Mi forgesis, ke mi lernis Δ‰i tiun lingvon.

[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 5 points 1 day ago

There's a daughter language called Ido that's done away with gender, iirc. And I believe there's some gender neutral ways to get around it in the community, but it's been a long time since I've attempted to do anything with it

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