On a related note, a poll (You have to reply, yes/no is worthless here): Is there such thing as a superior language? Is it meaningful to say that English is better than, say, Mandarin? My answer is yes. (Possible crit.: informational efficiency, beauty, nuance)
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Replying to @ArtirKel
I think you could call a language 'superior' within a particular context and people would understand what you mean. It would be meaningful. But if you lived in China, would it be more useful to know English or Mandarin? We tend to choose languages based on proximity.
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Replying to @sebinsua
Yes, but that's not that interesting to me, in that case one could design a contrived language and it would be useful to know if among people who only speak that. A good framing is: If you could pick a single language for everyone to speak, what would that be
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Replying to @ArtirKel
Difficult to imagine a contrived language replacing one embedded within a group of people. Personally I find it interesting how good idioms/slang from other languages or cultures travel. That captures what I think is important: language is best when playful compression.
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(To be clear: what I'm saying is that groups of people embed their culture within their language, so it's unlikely that you could contrive a language that would be as useful as the one they already use.)
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And, also, we fixate upon language's ability to communicate information and 'tone' efficiently, but difficult nuances and niche languages are also used to create and protect spaces for ingroup. So language which precludes this can only be superior in some respects.
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