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[MetalSlimeHunt]

We'll have "universal language" once realtime machine translators take off, and no sooner.

[Owlbread]

My god how I long for that day. I will never have to speak English again.

[misko27]

My god how I fear that day. The internet will descend into, err, something worse. Bigoted Americans being able to speak with bigoted Russians, The endless middle-eastern policy war, basically all the majorities and minorities in the world will get to pick on each other.


Bitcoins, err, well they're awesome for drugs I hear. Very illicit, no records, very well-suited to the black-market. Most likely companies will stick to the dollar as they tend to be tied (by which I mean they trade money and materials, you know the economy) to bigger companies, which are tied to even bigger countries, which are tied to Financial markets, which will see the bitcoin as a much less safe bet then, say, the Euro, or the Dollar.

[Bouchart]

Forget bitcoin.  This is the currency of the future.

[Owlbread]

My god how I fear that day. The internet will descend into, err, something worse. Bigoted Americans being able to speak with bigoted Russians, The endless middle-eastern policy war, basically all the majorities and minorities in the world will get to pick on each other.


Bitcoins, err, well they're awesome for drugs I hear. Very illicit, no records, very well-suited to the black-market. Most likely companies will stick to the dollar as they tend to be tied (by which I mean they trade money and materials, you know the economy) to bigger companies, which are tied to even bigger countries, which are tied to Financial markets, which will see the bitcoin as a much less safe bet then, say, the Euro, or the Dollar.

I'd really like to see the Chinese intranet though, for curiosity's sake.

[Leafsnail]

Oh right, the Bitcoin price tracker is pretty interesting.

http://bitcointicker.co/

It can be misleading though.  Partly because it's going off of an exchange that you can't actually cash out of, and partly because there's nothing to stop the people running the exchange from making high value trades with themselves to help trigger a bubble.

e: yes the Bitcoin really did lose almost half of its value in one day

[misko27]

Oh right, the Bitcoin price tracker is pretty interesting.

http://bitcointicker.co/

It can be misleading though.  Partly because it's going off of an exchange that you can't actually cash out of, and partly because there's nothing to stop the people running the exchange from making high value trades with themselves to help trigger a bubble.

e: yes the Bitcoin really did lose almost half of its value in one day

I heard this was because the US said they were doing an investigation of the illicit aspects of it, as part of a broader review they are doing.

[Leafsnail]

Well also the fact that the Bitcoin's price is clearly inflated way beyond its actual value due to a ridiculous bubble.

[Tack]

On the topic of Esperanto - Apparently English is one of the hardest languages to learn worldwide, whilst Esperanto one of the easiest, that being one of the reasons it was designed.

But about bitcoin and Esperanto, you can definitely say that neither of them are 'organic', they haven't grown over time like so many of the other cultural languages and currencies - which means that they don't have a lot of the same flaws.

[Putnam]

English isn't that hard to learn, it's just hard to speak. Its grammar is simple as hell and can be stretched really far.

I can type a sentence like this.

This I can type a sentence like.

It is not a crime to wildly split infinitives.

Let's go over regular conjugation in Spanish using "hablar":

Tense	First Singular	First Plural	Second Singular	Second Plural	Third Singular	Third Plural
Present Indicative	Hablo	Hablamos	Hablas	Hablaís	Habla	Hablan
Preterite	Hablé	Hablasteis	Hablaste	Hablamos	Habló	Hablaron

Since this is extremely time-consuming, I'm just going to say that there are 7 more that I didn't list; the past participle is "Hablado" and the present participle is "Hablando".

Now, let's do one for English, using the standard verb "to talk":

First Singular	First Plural	Second Singular	Second Plural	Third Singular	Third Plural	Preterite	Past Participle	Present Participle
talk	talk	talk	talk	talks	talk	talked	talked	talking

Yeah, I didn't really need a table for that. The main issue with English is that there are so few regular verbs and no sense of phonics. Words like "think" with just an irregular past tense will still be understood if done wrong ("thinked"). Words with completely irregular conjugation like "to be" or "to do" or "to have" are often irregular in other European languages anyway. Esperanto won't exactly help any more than English will, since Esperanto is just as horrible euro-centric as English.

Esperanto's main advantages are no irregular verbs and standard pronunciation, which basically makes it English if English were Spanish.

EDIT: Haha, I just used the subjunctive form of "to be" there. I can't think of any other words that have subjunctive forms in English, though.

[Darvi]

And then you have verbs like "to put" which will make you soudn like a chicken.

[da_nang]

-snip-

I like to think some kind of information density/complexity is a good measure for difficulty. One thing I've struggled with when it comes to say Finnish is not only the speed at which it's sometimes talked at but also the amount of complex structures can be put into a grammatically correct sentence. Part of this I believe have to do with the way it's structured. If say a language heavily relies on suffixes and offers a rather liberal word order then it stands to reason that this increases the complexity and risk for homophones. The mental "language parser" simply has to work a lot more to properly translate the language into something understandable. This can create this lag between words spoken and words understood. I've noticed this with Finnish as I usually can handle text rather well (more time to translate) but stumble with speech (less time to translate).

Just to take a similar example, consider Latin. It too heavily relies on suffixes (and prefixes to some degree) and offers a very liberal word order. The sentence really comes down to suffixes. But that liberal word order can literally place them anywhere in a sentence. You essentially have to remember a much larger block of data to properly translate this.

Nocte in agro terram laborabamusque animalia cum cane in domum ducebamus cum lupi nos oppugnaverunt.
At night we were working the soil on the field and herding the animals into the house with the dog when the wolves attacked us.
Yöllä pellolla työskentelimme maata ja paimensimme elämiä taloon koiran kanssa kun sudet hyökkäsivät meitä. (Roughly)
Under natten brukade vi jorden på åkern och vallade djuren in i huset med hunden när vargarna attackerade oss.

Now have someone speak that quickly and someone else translate on the fly. Then move the word order around. Then try it in Finnish.

On the other hand, you have English and Swedish that restrict word order a bit and delegates say prepositions to actual words instead of suffixes (in comparison to Finnish). These languages (to me) just seem to have a rather natural word order without too many suffixes that keeps the information density/complexity relatively lower.

Also for posterity's sake (and my own amusement), Latin for talk/speak.

First Singular	First Plural	Second Singular	Second Plural	Third Singular	Third Plural	Preterite	Past Participle	Present Participle
dico	dicis	dicit	dicimus	dicitis	dicunt	dixi (...)	dictus (-a, -um)	dicens (dicentis)

[FearfulJesuit]

Different languages don't actually have different rates of information density.

[da_nang]

Different languages don't actually have different rates of information density.

Poor choice of words perhaps, but some sentences simply take slightly longer to parse in different languages.

[Strife26]

English has developed as it has, but you're hard pressed to find a language that can boast a triple and oftentimes quadruple vocabulary.