"Mark A. Mandel" <thnidu at yahoo.com>wrote: > > --- Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> wrote: > > Anyway, everybody in the world ought to speak English. It's an **easy**, > > flexible language with a great children's literature. > I refuse to respond to trolling. I refuse to respond to trolling. I refuse to > respond to trolling. Actually, English does have a few things to recommend it as a universal language. First, of course, is that it's already so popular. Secondly, and this is based on my experience only - I havn't investiagted the claim, so if I'm wildly worng please don't mock me - it's *short*. Stuff that takes ten seconds to say, an inch to write, in English, when translated into French or Spanish takes twenty seconds to say, and an inch and a half to write. (Obviously a language using an ideograph writing system would obviously take less space to write, but it takes just as long to say, and I think any ideographic writing system would be right out as a universal language for reasons of learning time.) Thirdly, it *is* flexible, in the sense that it steals stuff from all sorts of other languges without having to distort them much to make them sound natural. That's mainly aesthetic, but aesthetic is good in language, and it enables the language to grow easily. I believe I read once (can't remeber where) that there are about half a million "acknowledged" English words (they're in the unabridged dictionary) and only about a hundred thousand in most Romance languages. However, I've always thought that the best way to create a universal language is to give up on the "language" part and instead create universal *grammar* into which word bases from any language may be inserted. It might not let everyone speak to each other, but translation computers would actually become useful tools, because all they'd have to deal with would be changing the *vocabulary*.