/lit/ - Literature

And then we should make them verbal so we can talk as well!

>>19242892
>globalism is good
The marxist education system is effective on these zoomers it seems

>>19242892
Except blind people

There has been a desire to do this since the early 19th century with constructed languages (conlangs) like Volapük and the more famous Esperanto. Esperanto people are weirdly nice.

Before the 19th century obviously Latin was still a decently universal lingua franca. But there were also philosophical attempts to found, discover, or found on the basis of discovering, a universal language of universally comprehensible human concepts or symbols, for instance once all the "particular" aspects of empirical languages are reduced to the "pure logic" of thought, as in Leibniz's characteristica universalis. This has remained as a kind of proverbial dream of logicians since then.

There are also neat esoteric things like Fabre d'Olivet thinking he had discovered the ur-language in Hebrew. Oddly enough the famous linguist Whorf (known for his linguistic relativity thesis and for his pioneering work on Native American languages) was initially a crank inspired by Fabre d'Olivet. I think he was an insurance salesman or something like that, and then just got into linguistics?

>>19242979
>Latin was still a decently universal lingua franca.
Wasn't it only used for writing scholarly texts? Did people actually use it to verbally communicate?

>>19242984
Verbally communicate, pretty rarely, but as a written lingua franca, more often than you think. Although not always in beautiful literary Latin. Swedenborg's Latin is simplified and stereotyped, written for a common as opposed to a sophisticated reader for example. And he was writing in the mid to late 18th.

In the medieval period and well into the Renaissance, education meant university education and university education meant communicating in Latin with people from 50 different countries at your university in Paris or wherever you were studying/employed. In the Renaissance, classical Latin was revived in opposition to "scholastic" Latin and it was a point of pride to write and think in beautiful Latin. The vernaculars rose in prestige only gradually, and even then, still in the 19th century it was still a common enough judgment of style to say one's vernacular prose could "be translated into Latin." I think Nietzsche says somewhere, it's an "easy and even enjoyable exercise" to translate Schopenhauer's German into Latin, in reference to some essay in the Parerga where Schopenhauer says something similar (modern stylists are sloppy shit; classical stylists were 100% deliberate in their choice of grammar and syntax, and worked hard at it).

So verbal communication, no, although if I were going to autistically force a conlang on Europe I'd probably re-enforce Latin education (Europeans used to learn it and Greek in their early/mid teens well enough even at a semi-mass education level), and then base a spoken Latin on that, although I wouldn't be ultra-autistic about reconstructing spoken classical Latin. Classical linguists are one of those professions that loves its technical tools so much that they get lost in them. They love training themselves to correctly aspirate some fucking letter when speaking halting reconstructed Greek.

The main thing would be getting a written lingua franca back. Latin isn't even ideal, it's just universally known and easy to learn. Let Latin be the easily acquired workhorse of the international intelligentsia and let Greek be the higher level lingua franca. If you made Greek the basic one, it would just be flattened down into what Latin is already.

>>19242892
If efforts to achieve these didn't involve coercion nor a new world order, sure.

>>19242892
Why a sign language instead of just a spoken language? Sure, deaf people would have trouble with a spoken language, but blind people would have trouble with a signed language, so you're just trading off one disabled group against another. Why not just use the modality that most people are used to?

>>19243135
Well, Esperanto fits the bill pretty well- it's pretty grassroots, its speakers are pretty much just ordinary people who support a better, more equitable solution for international communication.

>>19242907