this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 52 points 3 months ago (9 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

[–] 0_0j@lemmy.world 18 points 3 months ago

Plus, the fascists fucking hate it

Lol was waiting for this kick-back

[–] AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not against Esperanto but creating a “universal 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 ĉi tiun lingvon.

[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 7 points 3 months 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

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 6 points 3 months ago

Might as well choose English at that point.

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[–] PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S 33 points 3 months ago (2 children)
[–] zyberlex@lemmygrad.ml 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

So something as ambiguous, complex and misused as English. Nice.

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[–] Cowbee@lemmy.ml 31 points 3 months ago

Something with a consistent phonetic alphabet, like Korean with hangol.

[–] funbreaker@piefed.social 26 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Esperanto. it's not the statisically-average best lingua franca but it's the best known that's not tied to a single nation. Plus Hitler and Stalin both hated it.

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[–] jrubal1462@mander.xyz 21 points 3 months ago

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.

[–] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)

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

[–] Infrapink@thebrainbin.org 7 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Tabhairfaidh mé mo vóta duit.

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[–] CloutAtlas@hexbear.net 16 points 3 months ago

Mongolian, just for preparation for when the Mongols rise again. It's just a matter of time.

[–] spittingimage@lemmy.world 13 points 3 months 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 15 points 3 months 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

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[–] arthur@lemmy.zip 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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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[–] anoriginalthought@lemmy.ml 13 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 0_0j@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.

True, I will ask this: Why does it have 2 variants? Traditional? Modern?

[–] sylver_dragon@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago

Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can "fix" the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

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[–] isyasad@lemmy.world 12 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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 9 points 3 months ago (2 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.

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[–] CanadaPlus 11 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months 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...

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[–] BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Toki pona

Thus making everything open to interpretation

[–] morgan_423@lemmy.world 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

I'd honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.

Don't think it's going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.

[–] isyasad@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago

I stopped believing in toki pona when I heard somebody say that "watermelon" would be "kili telo" (fruit [of] water). It goes without saying that "kili telo" would not be understood as "watermelon" unless they had heard it in English before, or heard someone use the English-derived "kili telo".
If you're going to use English-language ideas to form words, then English is a prerequisite language for speaking toki pona, and toki pona becomes useless.

I think if toki pona is developed as you describe, it could be much more useful than it is today.

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[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 11 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Screeching 9600 baud modems. Now with more emotion!

[–] _deleted_@aussie.zone 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Latin, or even better, Klingon

[–] Apeman42@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

All I know is "petaQ" and "Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam", but I suppose that should be enough to get by.

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[–] mathemachristian@lemmy.ml 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Türkçe not gendered (at all, everyone and everything is "o") and one of the easiest languages to learn

[–] Moidialectica@hexbear.net 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

can you write an example, say, this message being translated to Turkish?

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[–] manxu@piefed.social 8 points 3 months ago (2 children)

One of the South American variants of Spanish, probably Argentinian. And I say that despite not speaking any Spanish.

The language itself is a contact language and heavily influenced by centuries of cohabitation with speakers of Arabic. That simplified a lot of the Indo-European complexities away.

The phonology - the sounds - of the language are clear and predictable and sufficiently different that a non-native speaker and their accent are not too troublesome in comprehension.

The language itself is already a world language, ranking 4th in number of native speakers.

I like the suggestion of Esperanto, which I do personally speak and which has all the advantages above, except already being a world language.

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[–] robot_dog_with_gun@hexbear.net 8 points 3 months ago

Klingon, so we can finally appreciate Shakespeare properly

[–] 0_0j@lemmy.world 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Swahili speaker (native) here, fluent in English.

Language is a medium of communication between two or more parties. So long as they understand each other, all is good. whether they used klingon or Martian, it don't matter.

What i do know is that, if, hypothetically, internet throws a poll for people all over the world to choose language they will use for communication, every one, myself included, will hold their conner, defending how real and original the language that they are familiar with (and most definitely biased towards) is.

if you put it on a vote on the other hand, something different happens. In fact, it's been happening all along, silently and quietly at the back of our heads. From the first day surfing through the internet to buying your first own smartphone/laptop and choosing the default language for these devices, I know on my part I was driven by convenience. As the majority of media outlets use English. From the shows i watched to the role‐models i looked up on while growing up, they all circled around this fascinating slang that made them even more interesting. The internet's influence towards english made it easy (at least for me) to catch up real quick.

I will say this tho, hearing hakuna matata on the lion king was awesooome

[–] queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

One of the things that really excites me about the internet is its impact on the development of language. We're still at the very beginning of its impact, considering the timescale on which language has traditionally evolved, but I suspect that in time the advent of the internet will be considered a major inflection point in the history of language, maybe the single greatest inflection point in the history of language itself. All of a sudden, billions of people who otherwise would never have had the means to converse directly, are now able to converse directly with billions of other people all over the globe, in near real-time. I can't really imagine how that doesn't have a seismic impact on how human language evolves. I would love to jump forward in time a few centuries just to see how the things that are happening right now shake out in the long term.

[–] Unpigged@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 3 months ago

Lojban, or Toki Pona for shits and giggles.

[–] PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 months ago

Klingon or Quenya, both sounds like music (just of different genres)

[–] Horse@lemmygrad.ml 6 points 3 months ago

toki pona
it would be funny

[–] FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website 6 points 3 months ago

I would argue no one could choose one. A lingua franca is silently agreed upon over long periods of time. No committee sat down to make old Frankish the language of trade, modern French the language of diplomacy, and nowadays English the language of internet arguments.

If I had a magic wand though my vote is Klingon as well. Qa'plah.

[–] Xaphanos@lemmy.world 6 points 3 months ago
[–] Tenderizer78@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (9 children)
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[–] zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)
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[–] birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Lojban, it's culturally neutral, and that makes it all the more nice. Plus it's got an interesting punctuation style.

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