What Will the World Speak in 2115?
wsj.com
wsj.com
So, yes, what will the world speak only a century from now, as the article asks? Plenty of other languages, for sure, and I for one am glad I devoted years to learning Chinese and German and other languages, but there will be more and more people speaking English in more and more places as the years go by.
It hasn't become a dominant inter language (yet), but it also hasn't failed, and nothing has come along to change that Esperanto is dramatically less effort to learn to usable levels than any evolved language.
That is a frequent claim in the Esperantist literature, one I encountered when I studied Esperanto, but it is dramatically untrue. There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.[1]
By the way, how would you write your whole comment in Esperanto?
I would struggle, because I'm not a fluent Esperantist; it would come out be omething like:
Alian ideon. la Esperanton estas la sola konstruitan lingvon kio havas multaj da parolistoj en multaj loĝoj. Ĝi ekzistas, dum ĉiu semajno aliajn malgrandajn lingvojn mortas, kaj ĝi havas pli vivo ol tiojn denaskajn lingvojn kio vivas de amatoristoj kun tro influo - ekzemple kimra lingvo.
La Esperanton neestas la plej uzata mondlingvon (nuntempe), sed ĝi ne mortas. Nenio ŝanĝis la fakto ke vi povas lerni ĝin, ĝis vi bonparolas, en malpli tempo ol iu denaska lingvo.
--
[I dropped English idioms "on the other hand" - which hand?, "have got anywhere" - languages don't go anywhere, some of the metaphoric stuff about a language being alive and "on life support". If I've written it reasonably well it should carry the same general meaning. Transliterating this comment back to English:
Another idea. Esperanto is the only constructed language which has many speakers in many places. It exists while every week other small languages die, and it has more life than those native languages which live by amateurs with too much influence - for example Welsh.
Esperanto is not the most used world-language (currently), but it is not dead. Nothing changed the fact that you can learn it, until you speak well, in less time than any native language. ]
That's not a great comparison since Dutch is about as close as a foreign language gets to English. And when you learn it you can only use it in the Netherlands and some former colonies. More speakers yes, but ... More places?
(Albeit not Easy because how easy can it ever be to learn to say everything in another way?)
Other countries at other times would have had sufficient interest in investigating an easy-to-learn interlanguage
If they really had "sufficient" interest, they would have funded some linguists and had an interlanguage designed from scratch, then mandated that it be taught in their schools and solved the problem[1]. Language work requires minimal technology, minimal physical resources, and minimal space, so funding from a government scale budget would be a non-issue ... so why haven't they?
All of the central European governments with multiple neighbour countries speaking different languages, international organizations like the EU, the UN, WTO, ISO, any of these people - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intergovernmental_organ... - which of them had sufficient interest to actually try and solve the problem - in whatever way, picking any of the myriads of constructed languages or having their own designed and agreed upon?
Your suggestion is that they investigated Esperanto and found it too difficult, right? But why haven't they done anything, except be happy that English or French is good enough for them and ha ha sod the entire rest of the world who find English and French difficult to learn to fluency.
[1] I conclude, either the problem of agreeing on a more-simple shared language is unsolvable, or they didn't have "sufficient interest" in solving it.
I have read large parts of this rant, and I started off thinking "wow, he's really ripping into Esperanto, there will be nothing useful left afterwards!". Then I started thinking about it; on the high level his arguments are weak. E.g. the overall theme of his rant seems to boil down to "If Esperanto has flaws, it can't be good", and on the low level, his arguments are weak, he gets right down to "A flaw in Esperanto is that the 1905 published book on it contained a typo". That's someone with a real axe to grind.
I'm not linguist enough to follow very closely, but pages and pages of this are essentially. "Here's what Esperanto did. It's bad because it's not what I'd have done". Look:
The actual forms of these inflections (‐os? ‐inta?) are unconvincing. Worst of all is ‐u, the imperative. Most languages, for obvious reasons, arrange it so that commands can be given via the most basic verbal “stem” available, not a special, uniquely inflected form!
Well I disagree, I like that basic stems and imperatives are clearly different. Now what?
B3: I wouldn't have chosen those sounds.
F1: It uses words people knew!!!!!
F2: I wouldn't have chosen those words!
F3: It's plausible that a hypothetical language could do better.
G2: He wasn't even a real linguist!
G5: I don't like how this looks, therefore it's bad.
M1: Unsurprisingly, Esperanto's phrase structure rules and so on turn out to be hardly distinguishable from the ones Zamenhof grew up with – they're pretty good simple ones, but it's sheer blind luck… - Really? You can't even give him the benefit of the doubt? He spent ten years working on this and the only way he did something you like was blind luck?
On and on, sour grapes and "hypothetically it could be done differently and more to my taste" by the author.
Yes there are some valid criticisms in there, the way "Three twelfths, 32nds and Thirty halves" are written the same, numerically.
But then we come back to... what's the point of the article? "If there are problems it must be completely useless?" or "If I can find no problems then everyone would speak it?" or "it's possible to design a language that nobody would find any flaws with?".
Anyway, let me not whinge forever, since I'm not a fluent Esperantist or a linguist. See instead Claude Piron's response to that deconstruction: http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/why.htm (He being a UN translator working on translating English, Russian, Chinese and Spanish into French, and was fluent in Esperanto).
There are very few people who have taken up Esperanto who can communicate well with it even after much effort. That's especially true for people of the majority of the world's native language backgrounds.
and his http://claudepiron.free.fr/articlesenanglais/comments.htm which contains
Languages such as Esperanto are no easier for non-Europeans to learn than French or English.
When I observed communication in Esperanto in Eastern Asia, especially among Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Koreans, I made it a point to ask people how much time they had devoted to acquiring the language. [..] Most of these Asians with a rather crippled English had devoted some 2000 hours to learning it; those who used Esperanto had studied it for less than 200 hours. Yet, their level was much superior whatever the criterion (fluency, lack of misunderstandings, spontaneity, nuances, humor, etc.). Obviously, your conclusion is based on erroneous data. (See my research report "Esperanto: l'image et la realite'", Cours et Études de Linguistique contrastive et appliquée No 66, Paris: Institut de Linguistique appliquée et de didactique des langues, University of Paris-8, 1987, and my book Le defi des langues, Paris: L'Harmattan, 1994, e.g. pp. 243-254; a review of this book can be found in Language in Society, 26 (1), 143-147, 1997).
Also, ref. Bjarne Stroustrup's quote 'There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses'.
Why learn Chinese or Hindi if your smartphone or perhaps your glasses will seamlessly translate back and forth between your native language? The pressure to learn a second language will be lessened greatly.
Especially since this is something where it's not possible for machines to truly just eclipse humans -- if you're fluent, you're fluent. Of course machine translation easily surpasses human speakers on vocab, but you're more or less bounded by what the recipient/listener can understand, anyway.
But demand for translation services will likely dwindle.
That said, one of the best reasons to learn languages is simply the mental exercise, and unless we change the way humans learn and maintain mental performance, that will remain true.
For example, the German 'ich mag sie' could mean 'I like her' or 'I like them' or 'I like you' in formal settings, while the English 'at least' could be translated to German as 'zumindest', or 'mindestens', or 'wenigstens', with different emotional significance.
I'm not sure you could really do adhoc translation at the language level with any real fluidity: you would probably need your phone to monitor your brain before you spoke to get at the pre-language meaning of what you are saying, if that is even possible.
No doubt it's possible to construct examples that support your agument in just about any language, though. I'd recommend East Asian ones, since they're less heavy on the pronouns than Indo-European languages, and you can generally often omit subject or object if it's clear from context, or are even expected to for good style. Korean poetry even relies on intentional ambiguity a lot of the time, forcing the reader to consider the options, for their enjoyment or to challenge them.
Machine translation is of course aware of this problem, and doing the (rough) equivalent of "whole program analysis" is an active concern. I.e. you can try to source info elsewhere in a longer input to decide between multiple possible translations for another bit. The problem is really these short inputs where no context is easily available to the program - it's an input problem in some sense; it's just much easier for a human translator to guess from cues the program simply has no input channels for. One of those cues is who exactly they've been hired by, though, and that can be replicated with user profiles, too.
In 2115 we might be able to technically do a very good approximation of it, but it might not have much use except for very casual contexts.
I think it really comes down to controlling one's communication. For instance, right now businessmen learning Mandarin are not cheaping on translator services, they want a better understanding of someone's culture, the concepts they think in, and want to speak in their own words.
Communication is and always will be extremely important, and as soon as there will be enough stakes, the time we 'lose' in learning will always be worth the gain in control.
Of course a universal translator would help for tourism and casual matters. But I think for translating a menu, street signs or simple instructions we are already having pretty decent applications and won't need to wait for another century.
http://www.foresightexchange.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=Tran
Even up through 2008, most people thought it was going to happen by 2015! Of course the people who were more actively following AI knew that it wouldn't. I probably doubled my fake money on FX, if only I could remember my login.
That isn't to say I agree with the sentiment that efficient and accurate translation will make English obsolete. Pretty much every major programming language, along with things like URLs and markup, requires using ISO Latin characters found on a QWERTY keyboard, which greatly limits the power of a major class of contenders. English just happened to be the lingua franca at the time that cultural globalization allowed for a language to keep that status long past the nation that made it such stopped being a super power (which, of course, may or may not happen to the US in the next 100 years).
For any mildly complex concept, heuristics, context analysis, pattern matching and word databases won't be enough to match two exact sentences in different languages. Even a sentence like 'I felt sick watching him treating his partner this way' will need an extreme lot of intelligence to correctly parse and convey in a different language.
If in 100 years AI really reaches the holy grail and we have actual artifical intelligence, translation will be a solved problem. Now, will we be able to reach that goal in 100 years ? I hope, but that's not a given I think.
And here it is in 2014:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/12/skype-...
And the comments include "Google has been doing this for ages".
Siri, Cortana, Google Now, all have speech recognition. Google and Microsoft have translation engines. Microsoft and WordLens (and Google?) have live image OCR and translation.
It's no Star Trek Universal Translator, but it's a thing and it exists.
Those are some lofty claims about Skype Translate, but it's not putting human translators out of business.
Drops to my knees, camera zooms up and out. Roll credits.
They are hard for western learners but only because we are unused to treating tonal information as important.
In fact because of tones and limited pronunciations available I have found that I feel Chinese is more tolerant of bad or variant pronunciations than english(Assuming you can get tones right but there are really only 5 tones to learn). Tones just make a few more bits available for error correction.
As background I have studied chinese for 8+ years and lived in asia for a couple of years as well.
Most irregular verbs also serve to increase bandwidth though: You can say "I ate" faster than "I eated".
"Going to the store" (rising = question)
"Going to the store" (flat or descending = statement)
For tonal languages, the use of tone as a distinguishing characteristic is similar to any other phonemic characteristic you would typically have to distinguish words in any other non-tonal language. For instance, in English, voicing is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "pat" and "bat". Similarly in Mandarin Chinese, tone is a distinguishing characteristic that differentiates the words "mā" (mother) and "mǎ" (horse).
Stress in English is phonemic however, viz. this minimal pair:
"rekord (record, n.) vs r@"kord (record, v.)
This is a regular phonological process in many English dialects to derive verbs from certain nouns (or is it the other way around?). Future English could turn this into a tonal distinction - I think that has a precedent in Swedish.
Also Navajo, though grammatically odd to speakers of Indo-European languages, contrary to the article does not seem to only have irregular verbs.
However, one new language will emerge. It will be a set of 500 to 1000 words that anyone can learn and use to communicate world wide.
Similarly to a programming language, this one will be limited in words and easy to pick up. This language will act as a framework, giving the essential people would need to have basic communication. 500 to 1000 words.
Basic English is 850 words
Here we are in 2015 and the one hundredth annual Esperanto Congress is coming.
The reasons approximately nobody speaks Esperanto now, are the same reasons nobody will speak your universal language in 2115.
None of these alternatives: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_constructed_languages have spread even as far as Esperanto. Whatever Esperanto did, it did something right.
(And the way you say "learn from its failure" - it's still around and widespread on the internet and available in Apps; you can learn it from http://www.kurso.com.br/ and http://www.lernu.net and talk about it at http://www.reddit.com/r/esperanto and write in it at http://www.reddit.com/r/esperante and chat in it on IRC on Freenode, or verbally with Mumble http://retbabilejo.net/ , there are decks on Memrise for it, it's in development on Duolingo http://incubator.duolingo.com/courses/eo/en/status and there are Facebook and Skype groups, Anki flashcard decks https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/esperanto and heaps of Youtube videos in / about it https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=esperanto ) and yet it still isn't very popular (despite the Internet), and you still had not heard of it. That's a failure of it.
I think it's more likely that most people don't want to invest thousands of hours of effort into learning another language, and those who do, do so because they like a particular country/language/culture, than any big mistake it made.