27 points

Why would you want an official language?

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17 points

Guttural grunting and crude arm gestures

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15 points
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Chinese has the most native speakers. Spanish has the most countries and English is the most common second language. So between the three of them you have a huge chunk of the world population covered.

Not saying there really should be an “official” language but there will need to be a lingua franca because putting two dozen languages on a street sign doesn’t help anyone.

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8 points
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When I was a kid I learned to speak enough Chinese I could get around the city but I never could get the hang of reading it. In two years I doubt I learned more then 100 or so characters. So yeah I feel ya.

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2 points

2000 characters gives you a ton of coverage unless you’re working with obscure topics (which you’ll pick up from context anyway). I would also say that speaking is significantly more important that reading, writing, or listening, and if you focus on that as a first objective (but not the only objective of course), everything else will come pretty naturally.

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1 point
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Lol every one speaks Firefly.

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E S P E R A N T O

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7 points

a new version of esperanto where they dont use those wonky letters and is fully compatible with current keyboards without having to use extra buttons or alt codes tho pls

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no

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3 points

:07:

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11 points

Do Ithkuil. Not only does it look like a cool sci-fi language, but it is also extremely (impractically) information dense. “Tram-mļöi hhâsmařpţuktôx” translates to “On the contrary, I think it may turn out that this rugged mountain range trails off at some point”, and is 5 characters of written script.

But on a more serious note, we would have to do everything we can to ensure that all languages survive, for historical and cultural reasons. You can do things in a lot of languages that you can’t do in other languages, some expressions just don’t work in other languages.

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There’s literally no reason to have one global language. If I went to the other side of the world and everyone sounded the same as me I would freak out. Like maybe 5-10 regional languages but preserve all languages and even revive dead ones.

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1 point

I know, the Ithkuil thing is a bit, it is REALLY not practical for actual use.

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