A few times I’ve come upon the power of a common language in the last few days.

I’ve seen a video about a meeting of Amazonian pajés (shamans) and herbalists sharing and maintaining traditional plant use, facilitated through the common language Portuguese, I’ve read about the success of the Zapatistas where native people are helped in their efforts by the common language Spanish. And just now a post in Anarchism & Social Ecology mixing Spanish and English just as comfortably as my family juggles three languages at home.

Do you know of other examples?

I thought one of the non-evil possible uses of a LLM could be to create a new language like Esperanto, and ideally it would simply be a mix of English and Spanish, to connect a maximum number of people? Or are artificial languages always doomed to fail?

Edit: title, because there is not one language of solarpunk

  • Ben Matthews@sopuli.xyz
    1·
    11 months ago

    There are still enthusiasts of alt/inter-langs, more modern than Esperanto, which only has european roots - I prefer those that also blend in words from Chinese, Hindi, Arabic etc.

    See also this community .

    However modern technology - such as instant translation built into phones (very useful for Ukrainian-French here last year) - changes the situation, maybe diminishes the motivation to learn such languages, although potentially facilitating their use.

    • senloke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      11 months ago

      which only has european roots

      Oh I love it how people shit on Esperanto for it’s euroncentrism. Argumentation by perfectionism, that’s this. No one says that Esperanto could not evolve into a more egalitarian language, but feeling morally superior because its inventor chose to take from one cohesive language family (latin, romance languages) because the roman empire conquered the world a long time ago … is silly and wrong.