Walter Bright wrote:
> Bruno Medeiros wrote:
>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>> One reason English is successful is its shamelessness in adopting useful words and phrases from other languages. Sort of like what D does <g>.
>> 
>> Huh? I'm under the impression that that also happens a lot in other languages.
> 
> Yes, it does. But some actively work to try and prevent this.
> 
>> In fact it likely happens much more often in other languages, who borrow a lot of *english* words in these modern times. ;)
> 
> Sure, and I suspect that a language that refuses to do so is one that will fade away into irrelevance.

The languages that I'm aware of that do this, also create replacement words.  If not, people will just use the foreign words, they often do anyway.  One example would be Icelandic.  I don't see how a living language would become 'irrelevant' because of the lack of words.  People create, alternatively 'borrow' the words they need.  But I'm sure there are counter-examples anyway.

A language generally dies when parents teach their children another language in place of their own mother tongue, because they consider their own language to be of little use to them.  After a couple of generations there is noone left that can speak the original language. This also probably happens when all the users of the language are spread to areas where other languages dominate, so the concentration of users is too low to keep the language alive, maybe there is little of use the language in writing, etc.

Stewart Gordon wrote:
> Walter Bright Wrote:
> 
>> torhu wrote:
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
> <snip>
>>>> One reason English is successful is its shamelessness in adopting useful words and phrases from other languages.  Sort of like what D does <g>.
>>> This isn't quite true.  English is 'successful' because of the dominating position of the US, and earlier the UK.
> <snip>
>> I did say one reason - there are many.  Some languages look inward, not wanting to accept foreign words.  English, as you say, is mostly foreign words.  Like the blob, English tends to absorb whatever it comes in contact with <g>.
> 
> Interesting.  But where does that put Esperanto, with its basic vocabulary
> being a mixture of languages but having compound words (and translations of
> Latin abbreviations) all its own?
> 
> Stewart.

A few steps behind Klingon, I would expect.

But (slightly more) seriously, Esperanto seems like a cautionary tale for those who would design computer (and other synthetic) languages,
in that it tried to solve a compatibility problem without actually
motivating anyone to adopt it in any material way.  It has aesthetics
but no special 'killer features'.

Now, if esperanto had array slicing...

Kevin

Kevin Bealer Wrote:
> A few steps behind Klingon, I would expect.
> 
> But (slightly more) seriously, Esperanto seems like a cautionary tale for those who would design computer (and other synthetic) languages, in that it tried to solve a compatibility problem without actually motivating anyone to adopt it in any material way.  It has aesthetics but no special 'killer features'.
> 
> Now, if esperanto had array slicing...

Hehe.  yeah, I took Linguistics in the first part of university and got rather involved in language theory.  I thought it was an excellent exercise creating an isolating morphology, VSO, CV, with semantic/phonetic enhancements..

Ultimately though, spoken language will be irrelevant with the implementation of the DNI - so inventing a spoken language that won't be spoken is folly.

DNI has killer features.  Like array slicing.  : )