

Thought Experiment: World language - kwamenum86

If everyone in the world spoke every single language all of a sudden, do you think we would converge on a single mostly used language?
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RiderOfGiraffes
An interesting thought experiment. Ignoring for the fact that it won't/can't
happen ...

I've been in groups where most people spoke several languages sufficiently
fluently not to care (and in some cases not to know!) which they were
speaking. Every time this has happened the language in use changed according
to the topic being discussed, sometimes in mid-word. Sometimes one language
just makes it easier to talk about something than another.

In one book I have read it says something along the lines of:

    
    
        One speaks of love and such trivia in French, of food
        in Italian, of tragedy in Russian, does business in
        German, and addresses the servants in English.
    

Although the book itself is a parody, the passage rings true (although perhaps
not in specifics).

Similarly, I regularly program in AWK, Python, C, C++, and ARM assembler, and
I dabble in Lisp, Lua, OCaml and Haskell. In each case I reach for my most
comfortable tool for what I'm working on, and it's not always the same one.

So I think if everyone were equally fluent in every language, there would be a
pidgin arise, a language that is a mixture of the others, possibly with sub-
languages for specific subjects.

~~~
kwamenum86
Very interesting response. Thanks for taking he time to reply. This was such
an unusual submission that I thought it might be flagged or ignored. I really
like that quote as well.

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peterhi
In all probability a new language would emerge. But just think of the
cognitive load in knowing every single language. Ignoring the many and varied
grammatical rules that languages have for a moment and just consider
vocabulary.

Lets say you need around 3,000 words for a normal day to day conversation
(though I suspect that it might be higher). That 3,000 words in Chinese, 3,000
words in German, 3,000 in Farsi. You get the idea. There has got to be more
than 2,000 living languages in the world - admittedly some of them have only a
handful of speakers - so you will need to remember 6,000,000 vocabulary items.

That alone is a nightmare but remember that not all words have direct
translations from one language to another, English does not distinguish gender
the same way that Arabic does. Japanese has different number words for
different types of objects. So where some languages use only one vocabulary
item others will require several.

English has, as I understand it, the largest vocabulary with more than 300,000
items (we didn't just steal people countries when we built the empire we stole
their words too). Take it from me, no one knows them all.

6,000,000 - you don't stand a chance.

~~~
kwamenum86
True. I did not consider the cognitive load. It was just a random silly
question that popped into my head. Setting aside the fact that it is
impossible what do you think would happen to languages? And what impact do you
think this change would have on other things (economic? international
relations? education?)

