A few times I’ve come upon the power of a common language in the last few days.

I’ve seen a video about a meeting of Amazonian pajés (shamans) and herbalists sharing and maintaining traditional plant use, facilitated through the common language Portuguese, I’ve read about the success of the Zapatistas where native people are helped in their efforts by the common language Spanish. And just now a post in Anarchism & Social Ecology mixing Spanish and English just as comfortably as my family juggles three languages at home.

Do you know of other examples?

I thought one of the non-evil possible uses of a LLM could be to create a new language like Esperanto, and ideally it would simply be a mix of English and Spanish, to connect a maximum number of people? Or are artificial languages always doomed to fail?

Edit: title, because there is not one language of solarpunk

  • keepthepace@slrpnk.net
    3·
    1 year ago

    One of the thing I had not realized and that was explained to me by a linguist, was that the biggest difference between “natural” and artificial languages, is that the former have an inherent useless complexity and that artificial languages are almost always much, much easier to learn and use.

    I guess vocabulary is always a sticking point and will tend to be easier in some languages and others, but I think a universal grammar could already be agreed on.