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Domination of English has more to do with British empire bringing it to large swaths of the world (India, Africa), and the US being the principal winner of WWII and expanding its industrial, scientific, and cultural might around the world.

English language is like Chinese: while simple structurally (no cases, constructive verb forms, etc) has a terribly complicated writing and pronunciation system, where there sort of are rules, but you never know when you hit an exception. Despite that, people take it up, because the important communication happens in English. (People who study areas like ML, or who work a lot with industrial production, likely pick up some Chinese, out of the same necessity.)

I don't doubt that the Empire and America had a lot to do with English dominance. However I do feel there is something inherently fun about English that is lacking in other languages I've encountered. Maybe it's just because it's my native language but I can't help but feel this sense of playfulness is picked up on by non native speakers as well. The article below is really interesting; it's by non English stand up comedians who have started performing in English. The general feel is that they prefer writing/performing in English and can have more fun with it than their native languages.

https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/stand-up-comedy-english-lang...

I'd say each language has pockets of playfulness that aren't found in others. Sometimes you find pockets that coincide to a surprising extent. It's like stacking layers of Swiss cheese.

For instance, Gad mentions in the article the expression "Got it" that doesn't have great equivalents in French. But French also has sentences that don't have great equivalents in English, or if they do have one it's not nearly as playful.

The one thing English has that most languages don't is a massive body of work and a dominant grip on international culture, and I think that's what the comics in the article are interpreting as higher overall playfulness.

> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme

I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).

Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.

> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones.

"So stop ragging on C++, you meanies!"?

A world were everyone could speak scheme is a beautiful idea. Like if we were cyborgs. I'd hope there is still value in learning the thought patterns of Scheme 1.0.

I once fancied a girl who was doing postgrad work in linguistics, and one time she made a remark like "I love lambda calculus!" And I was like, really? That's a programming/CS thing, how does it apply in your field? Turns out LC is used as a representation to normalize semantics in linguistics.

It would be interesting to see a Scheme-like underpinning to the semantics of any language -- maybe not to be used for communication in its own right, but to achieve things like more intelligent translation, or NLP machine-learning applications that extract meaning from a text. I don't see much interest in something like this emerging, however, with the current trend in AI being "throw more statistics at the problem".

That's basically what Lojban is. The structure is somewhat lisp-ish.