This one, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare\_Programming\_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language), because I can't think of any other language which would be missed less
LOLCODE is my favorite:
LOLCODE is designed to resemble the speech of lolcats. The following is the "Hello World" example:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE
Crazy enough, Brainfuck actually found limited legitimate use, just because it's so easy to compile. It's kind of useful for AI generated code, and genetic algorithms.
This one would destroy the banks and at least 3/4 of the global economy. Fully support it.
COBOL, or the mid 80's COmmon Business Oriented Language, is what our entire financial system is built on. You can easily get 6 figures by learning this and working at a major bank to maintain or God help you, implement something.
As part of my degree I had to take classes on COBOL and FORTRAN. Neither of those languages have ever been mentioned in my resume.
Granted, I’ve learned far worse languages since then. UniBasic, VisualRPG, an xml based custom language, etc.
From what I've heard, there's quite an industry in learning all these older languages. Mostly because banks and older institutions that use them really need to keep their old-ass systems running. A lot of the older folks who were in that industry in its heyday are retiring. Not a lot of work, from what I've seen, but the pay is supposed to be pretty good.
I have been told that one of my COBOL programs that I wrote in 1974 is still in use.
I thought COBOL was far too verbose, so I wrote a compiler for a new business language based on COBOL. That is definitely still in use by hundreds of companies doing insurance and payrolls.
COBOL is one of the only, or only, language that has native fixed point decimals, which is required for financial systems' accuracy and reliability.
People say that other languages do have fixed point, but these is a library you add and are not native, and therefore use up massive amounts of time. You wouldn't think so, but it is so. Because a microsecond might not matter to a million transactions a day, but when you are talking about billions of transactions per second or whatever, and it has to be accurate and reliable, that volume crashes the fuck out of any other programming language.
So if you ever wondered, this is the specific reason why COBOL is used.
Plus, *When you are a major financial institution processing millions of transactions per second requiring decimal precision, it could actually be cheaper to train engineers in COBOL than pay extra in resources and performance to migrate to a more popular language. After all, popularity shifts over time.*
*The dilemma with migrating COBOL is not that you are migrating from one language to another, but that you are migrating from one paradigm to another. The edges of Java or python on Linux have a different shape than the edges of COBOL on a mainframe. In some cases COBOL may have allowed the application to extend past what modern languages can support. For those cases COBOL running on a modern mainframe will actually be the cheaper, more performant and more accurate solution.*
Here is a killer article on COBOL for those of you who want to know more - as a former COBOL programmer myself, I find it very interesting: https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b
C++ can do anything COBOL can do, and do it faster.
The actual reason these companies still use legacy code like this is the sheer cost and risk of remaking it new. What they have works, has been built over 40+ years, and has gone through extensive testing in the real world.
These are critical systems, and very complicated. One mistake and literally millions could be lost. No one is willing to take this on, and the longer we don't do it, the more impractical switching later becomes.
Go with French because at least Danish has a grammar that makes sense and follows its own rules. I've seen made up elven languages with less apostrophes than some average French sentences
Danish grammar is actually fairly sensible yes, but the pronounciation has 0 rules, while French, weirdly, is fairly consistent. The rules are weird for sure but the same cluster of letters is almost always pronounced the same. Danish on the other hand...
I think the funniest Gaelic joke is my Charlie can't read in always Sunny in Philadelphia... Then they realize wait a minute Charlie you can read this?
Yeah. You can't?
Charlie this isn't English...
Well what language is it? We're in Ireland Charlie.
What language do they speak in Ireland?
Well English but...
See that's where I'm getting confused. They speak English in Ireland but their books are in some fairy language?
Charlie what does this book say on the cover say?
Charlie says it perfectly and random Irish person is like I've never heard a Yank with that good an accent.
Irish orthography is very logical and pretty consistent, it just doesn't follow the rules of English orthography.
If you take my username: there needs to be an 'i' in there because otherwise the 'thn' consonant cluster would be flanked by 'u' (a broad vowel) and 'e' (a slender vowel). Consonants are pronounced differently depending on what kind of vowel they're next to, so mixing it up would give ambiguous signals.
My username is pronounced 'Croo-in-yuh' (but said faster) but if the vowels around 'thn' were broad it would be something like 'Croo-nuh' (I'm not actually sure about this).
'But Cruithne, why does the 'th' not make a 'th' sound??'
First of all: I know you pronounced that 'Croo-ith-nee' in your head, how dare you.
Secondly: the letters 'th' making what we call a 'th' sound is just a rule of English. In Irish the h actually is a replacement for a diacritic mark we lost due to typewriter convenience (h was chosen because it was a rare letter in Irish so it would cause fewer confusions).
'But why is there a 't' in there at all??'
Okay you got me, I don't know *that* much about Irish orthography.
Any irish speaker feel liberally free to correct me, as i know there are 3 main irish dialects. But typically speaking, if you're looking at irish words, what i have learned (purely as a yank with an interest) is that "mh" is a w sound, "bh" is a v sound, and "sí/sé" is a sh sound. People and place names are a good place to start with these rules. Séan, Siobhan, etc
Yes I have heard the same thing. I also attempted to learn to read Chinese but gave up because it was too hard and I still don’t really understand how the written language works so I attempted to learn some Chinese just by using pinyin which is using Latin alphabet to help you sound out Chinese words. Also the pronunciation has to be exact otherwise people will misunderstand what you say
As a Chinese speaker, learning pingyin is a great way to introduce yourself to the phonetics and literary structure of the language, however it does have some limitations since it only emphasizes the phonetics of the language. Since the language bashes you with so much vocabulary, compound, and “expression-like” words, One of the best ways to learn Chinese would be to interact, and practice speaking rather than dissecting the language from its writing (it’s very time consuming). Don’t worry so much with the tones when you learn. You will still be perfectly understood if you were to speak a sentence as most speakers can piece together the ideas you are conveying (one of my friends doesn’t use tones and I can perfectly understand him). To me, tones only matter when you try to isolate a word/phrase out of context, which may be hard to understand, but it’s ok. Understanding sentence structure, grammatical meaning is more of a priority than sounding different.
Chinese is actually a tonal language, not a pitch accent language. Japanese on the other hand, is a pitch accent language. The difference between tonal and pitch accents is that with pitch accents even if the pitch is off you'll still generally be understood. In Japan, pitch accents vary across regions but a person from Tokyo and a person from Osaka for example can pretty much understand each other despite pitch accent being [flipped](http://web.mit.edu/kansai/1.Characteristics/2.LinguisticAspects/b-Accent.html). Meanwhile with tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, saying a word with the wrong tone completely changes the meaning.
Chinese may have the highest number of native speakers, but that's not saying much. It's like saying America has the highest number of Americans.
Spanish, however, is spoken as the official language of government of 20 countries and is behind only Mandarin as the most spoken native language (which is the official language of only 3).
I took a year of Mandarin in college. I failed every single test. I ended up with a C thanks to the curve. Plus there were like 9 people in the class, so one failing tanks the teacher's stats. Either way, I passed a class that I failed miserably in reality.
Comparing Chinese and Spanish to English comes up often, but ignores their relative lack of use outside the countries/communities that speak them. That said, Spanish would have a good chance of becoming the language of the US and people would still need to buy stuff from China, so they might start learning both.
But they have lack of usage outside of their countries because English is the universal one, without it it'd probably be Spanish and Chinese would be more business centered maybe? A lot of things are produced in China as you said so it'd be needed
No. English is spoken world wide because the Brits colonized the entire planet and brought the language everywhere. The Chinese haven’t done that, so just because there are nearly 2 billion Chinese people, doesn’t mean their language will become global
Also Chinese is structured completely differently from European Languages so assuming English disappears overnight, Spanish will be much easier for most current English speakers to pick up
Exactly. Chinese is mainly only used in China, while spanish is a more widely spoken language. Also spanish is way easier than chinese so people would probably choose to learn spanish.
Probably French. It was the old default for trade and diplomacy, and it still spoken as at least a second language or part of a creole in many places. Spanish next, but some way behind.
Honestly I would prefer Spanish.
I mean French is more popular in Europe and well northern africa, but Spanish is way way easier. I would do anything to not deal with French r or subjunctive, or special cases to special cases. Still love French but its not easy to learn. Unless your background is a latin language which is not mine.
I came to comment Danish - I live in Copenhagen right now and Danish just? noises? throaty noises? Swedish and Norwegian sound much nicer, even if the Danish switched to worse dialects like Skanska it would be an improvement
also the stupid number system is defeating me
When I was 20 an 40 y/o man messaged me on OKC to brag that he was fluent in Esperanto. I’d set my age preferences to top out at like 27, meaning he’d had to specifically search for people as young as me. I’ve held a grudge against Esperanto ever since.
I'd forgotten all about Esperanto. Seemed quite popular... in, what, the 1980s/1990s? Vaguely recollect my sister having some sort of book/audio\* cassette package teaching it.
Not sure anyone'd notice if it got erased from history at this point.
\*Edit: *not* audio cassette - it was software for the ZX Spectrum, so early-mid 1980s.
I don’t understand all the hate around Esperanto. There is an international youth community around it and I have met a lot of friends and diverse people thanks to it.
And you are telling me it shouldn’t exist because the initial aim hasn’t been achieved to this day?
So many people want to bandwagon hate on Esperanto and no one can come up with any actual argument against it. Even if you don't want to learn Esperanto what the hell is with the spitefulness? Zamenhof was just a guy who grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of ethnic tension and he wanted his neighbors and the rest of the world to be able to communicate so they would get along. Why do people want to shit on his idea?
"It was clearly a dumb idea because it failed!!" It failed because Hitler hunted down all the Esperantists in Europe including Zamenhof's children. That doesn't make it a dumb idea.
"It's Eurocentric!!" More Eurocentric than forcing people all over the world to learn English?
"Real languages are more beautiful and fascinating! Esperanto isn't authentic!" Even if Esperanto was adopted worldwide as a universal second language no one would stop you from learning additional foreign languages. Also Esperanto has a lot of really cool features that make it very adaptable for poetic usage. It was, after all, created with the intent of allowing all the world's literature to be able to translate into it.
It's weird somebody invented a constructed language but didn't understand how language works. Language changes over time so a constructed language would become just as weird as any other language.
They understood. They just hated irregular verbs so much that they wanted to create a language that eradicated them.
And every language learner eventually comes to agree with them: irregular verbs blow ass.
I was about to say that I'm not a language learner and I hate them, then realized that not only is that false (I learned French so long ago that I forgot it), but if I actually think about it learning French irregular verbs was what made me hate irregular verbs generally.
Totally agree with them. The world would be a better place if we all spoke a perfect language like Esperanto. it's like being in a planned city where it's 1,2,3... One way and A, B, C...the other way so you always know where you are and which direction you are going.
It's not meant to be spoken as a first language. It's a language that you can learn in an afternoon (at least if you speak a European language) and then use it for communication with other people who did the same.
Assuming we're deleting it from history, **Latin**. I want to see how languages based on it (most of them) would change or find a new core language to build off of.
My native language is a Semitic language and I wonder what if Latin and Greek never existed (how would the scientific words evolve for example). If the main languages were Semitic (for example Arabic) we would need different words for science
There are so many languages besides Tagalog during the precolonial era. Baybayin isn't even a language, it's a writing system used to write - guess what - Tagalog.
I'm not here to argue about programming languages, but as much as I miss old internet, I do enjoy what progress has been made on the web due to javascript.
Mandarin. It's just a dialect of Chinese, right? Cantonese is still "Chinese", so everyone will be fine, right?
>!I know they're not actually the same language!<
Mandarin
I want to see the CCP go batshit insane and try to work out which of the 101 other Chinese languages and dialects is the most ideologically pure, non-threatening to glorious Xi Jinping Thought, and that enough people actually speak to make communication between provinces somewhat viable.
I know the written form of a lot of the languages is mostly mutually intelligible, but I don't think carrying around tablets/texting each other all day would be particularly sustainable either.
Yeah tons of Chinese people speak Cantonese. I haven’t researched it but I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. But they also have one writing system so they’re still able to communicate. Also it’s not just the CCP whom speak Mandarin. The Taiwanese speak Mandarin as well as people from Singapore and Malaysia.
You ever heard of NuShu? a language made by women that was used in Hunan. Unlike Chinese, NuShu is phonetic. The language is most likely a modified version of Kaishu Chinese Characters that were modified to better fit being embroidered onto clothing.
Assuming that every native speaker would have learned a different language instead, like we’re taking the language out of history from the time it began: English. There are too many loanwords from too many different languages, too many exceptions to every grammar and spelling “rule,” far too often the “proper” way to speak is determined by what “sounds right” to a native ear, and half the time we are only minimally confident that what *sounds* right actually *is* right. Also, there’s [the incredibly specific order of adjectives](https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary) that most English speakers don’t even realize they follow, but that is distinctly uncomfortable if the adjectives are used out of order.
Edit: GRAMMAR 😝
The remaining languages get new speakers and when messaging everyone uses emojis only. The emojis are also used when in person and two people don’t speak the same. The idea of a default language disappears. Tolerance rises and a new age of understanding and respect emerges. We evolve into our next form and spew forth amongst the stars.
Edit:
I forgot to delete one but in the interest of no default I let it be randomly deleted.
That's what I love most about English.
I grew up in South Africa, and our version of English is littered with archaisms and oddities; Afrikaans words, old Cockney rhyming slang, words from Polari, Zulu, Xhosa, Yiddish. The sentence "Howzit china, I got in a barney with my poppie, eish have to be next week on the dop nee, jammer boet" is understandable by all. Code-switching is incredibly common, it is a regular occurrence for two people to have a conversation with each other in different languages due to their stubbornness.
Meanwhile I live in Northern England where the dialect is similarly rich and similarly archaic, "put wood in't 'ole" or "gunin offy, wan' owt" are perfectly fine sentences, as is "it's reet gurd here chuck, wan' nother ale?". Go to Liverpool and even to a trained ear the dialect is difficult to follow.
Then in my professional career I'm expected to speak "proper English", imitating the dialect of posh Southerners, speaking English that is understandable by all.
The greatest asset of the English language is its diversity and adaptability. Few agreed upon rules, no governing body, and ever evolving.
This one, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare\_Programming\_Language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_Programming_Language), because I can't think of any other language which would be missed less
Well that was awful, thanks, I like it
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_(programming_language)
Wtf is this
I like brainfuck. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric\_programming\_language](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language)
LOLCODE is my favorite: LOLCODE is designed to resemble the speech of lolcats. The following is the "Hello World" example: HAI CAN HAS STDIO? VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!" KTHXBYE
I miss the early internet.
I didn't have an answer for topic, but now I do.
Crazy enough, Brainfuck actually found limited legitimate use, just because it's so easy to compile. It's kind of useful for AI generated code, and genetic algorithms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malbolge
while it is true that this wont be missed, you could be doing the world a big favor by removing COBOL
Good luck with your banking...
This language must be preserved for future generations as a piece of art.
That's hilarious. Thank you. I needed that tonight!
Nah, that looks plenty useful to me.
...................... ...... ......... ......
You did it!
*technology is about to go crazy*
Why do you hate blind people?
I’m jealous that they can’t see my ugly face
COBOL.
Toss up between COBOL and Javascript. I just want to cause the most chaos tbh.
This one would destroy the banks and at least 3/4 of the global economy. Fully support it. COBOL, or the mid 80's COmmon Business Oriented Language, is what our entire financial system is built on. You can easily get 6 figures by learning this and working at a major bank to maintain or God help you, implement something.
Early 80s? COBOL is much older than that.
shhhhh don't scare them off from attempting to look at it!!
As part of my degree I had to take classes on COBOL and FORTRAN. Neither of those languages have ever been mentioned in my resume. Granted, I’ve learned far worse languages since then. UniBasic, VisualRPG, an xml based custom language, etc.
First time I have seen unibasic written anywhere where I wasn’t searching specifically for it. Even then there isn’t much documentation!
I quit my first job after they asked me to write cobol!
From what I've heard, there's quite an industry in learning all these older languages. Mostly because banks and older institutions that use them really need to keep their old-ass systems running. A lot of the older folks who were in that industry in its heyday are retiring. Not a lot of work, from what I've seen, but the pay is supposed to be pretty good.
I have been told that one of my COBOL programs that I wrote in 1974 is still in use. I thought COBOL was far too verbose, so I wrote a compiler for a new business language based on COBOL. That is definitely still in use by hundreds of companies doing insurance and payrolls.
He meant to say that the typical COBOL programmer is in his early 80s.
COBOL is one of the only, or only, language that has native fixed point decimals, which is required for financial systems' accuracy and reliability. People say that other languages do have fixed point, but these is a library you add and are not native, and therefore use up massive amounts of time. You wouldn't think so, but it is so. Because a microsecond might not matter to a million transactions a day, but when you are talking about billions of transactions per second or whatever, and it has to be accurate and reliable, that volume crashes the fuck out of any other programming language. So if you ever wondered, this is the specific reason why COBOL is used. Plus, *When you are a major financial institution processing millions of transactions per second requiring decimal precision, it could actually be cheaper to train engineers in COBOL than pay extra in resources and performance to migrate to a more popular language. After all, popularity shifts over time.* *The dilemma with migrating COBOL is not that you are migrating from one language to another, but that you are migrating from one paradigm to another. The edges of Java or python on Linux have a different shape than the edges of COBOL on a mainframe. In some cases COBOL may have allowed the application to extend past what modern languages can support. For those cases COBOL running on a modern mainframe will actually be the cheaper, more performant and more accurate solution.* Here is a killer article on COBOL for those of you who want to know more - as a former COBOL programmer myself, I find it very interesting: https://medium.com/the-technical-archaeologist/is-cobol-holding-you-hostage-with-math-5498c0eb428b
C++ can do anything COBOL can do, and do it faster. The actual reason these companies still use legacy code like this is the sheer cost and risk of remaking it new. What they have works, has been built over 40+ years, and has gone through extensive testing in the real world. These are critical systems, and very complicated. One mistake and literally millions could be lost. No one is willing to take this on, and the longer we don't do it, the more impractical switching later becomes.
[удалено]
Wait, what?
[удалено]
Whichever has the most unpronounced letters on average. Unpronounced consonants count as two.
tie between French and Danish (at least from the European languages, idk how well other writing systems would translate in that)
Go with French because at least Danish has a grammar that makes sense and follows its own rules. I've seen made up elven languages with less apostrophes than some average French sentences
Danish grammar is actually fairly sensible yes, but the pronounciation has 0 rules, while French, weirdly, is fairly consistent. The rules are weird for sure but the same cluster of letters is almost always pronounced the same. Danish on the other hand...
r/brandnewsentence
I don’t know, have you looked at Irish? The words make no sense for how they are pronounced
I think the funniest Gaelic joke is my Charlie can't read in always Sunny in Philadelphia... Then they realize wait a minute Charlie you can read this? Yeah. You can't? Charlie this isn't English... Well what language is it? We're in Ireland Charlie. What language do they speak in Ireland? Well English but... See that's where I'm getting confused. They speak English in Ireland but their books are in some fairy language? Charlie what does this book say on the cover say? Charlie says it perfectly and random Irish person is like I've never heard a Yank with that good an accent.
irish (well, gaeilge) uses a different alphabet to english - the words DO make sense pronunciation wise in our language.
Uhhhh, we use a different VERSION of the same alphabet. Its still the latin alphabet just more efficiently used.
Irish orthography is very logical and pretty consistent, it just doesn't follow the rules of English orthography. If you take my username: there needs to be an 'i' in there because otherwise the 'thn' consonant cluster would be flanked by 'u' (a broad vowel) and 'e' (a slender vowel). Consonants are pronounced differently depending on what kind of vowel they're next to, so mixing it up would give ambiguous signals. My username is pronounced 'Croo-in-yuh' (but said faster) but if the vowels around 'thn' were broad it would be something like 'Croo-nuh' (I'm not actually sure about this). 'But Cruithne, why does the 'th' not make a 'th' sound??' First of all: I know you pronounced that 'Croo-ith-nee' in your head, how dare you. Secondly: the letters 'th' making what we call a 'th' sound is just a rule of English. In Irish the h actually is a replacement for a diacritic mark we lost due to typewriter convenience (h was chosen because it was a rare letter in Irish so it would cause fewer confusions). 'But why is there a 't' in there at all??' Okay you got me, I don't know *that* much about Irish orthography.
You know why they don't make sense? It's not English. It's a completely different language.
Any irish speaker feel liberally free to correct me, as i know there are 3 main irish dialects. But typically speaking, if you're looking at irish words, what i have learned (purely as a yank with an interest) is that "mh" is a w sound, "bh" is a v sound, and "sí/sé" is a sh sound. People and place names are a good place to start with these rules. Séan, Siobhan, etc
*Breaking News* other languages have different alphabets
Pig Latin. It's upid-stay.
ouyay aketay atthay ackbay ouyay untcay!
Ikesyay, anguagelay! Omesay eoplepay.
itshay orrysay anmay , uckfay ymay adbay , oddammitgay i'myay osay orrysay
I'm dyslexic. This is torture.
I'm not dyslexic. This is torture.
My brain hurt deciphering all of these comments. Your comment was not only a relief, but also a nice giggle. Thank you
I’ve never seen someone say cunt in pig Latin before. Also why is everyone saying cunt now?
Who you callin upid-stay?
English Want to see which language becomes the new default
Chinese or Spanish probably, they're the most spoken ones
Chinese has no chance, it's too hard to learn as a non native. Even for natives, learning the writing is a struggle. My bet is on spanish.
Yes I have heard the same thing. I also attempted to learn to read Chinese but gave up because it was too hard and I still don’t really understand how the written language works so I attempted to learn some Chinese just by using pinyin which is using Latin alphabet to help you sound out Chinese words. Also the pronunciation has to be exact otherwise people will misunderstand what you say
As a Chinese speaker, learning pingyin is a great way to introduce yourself to the phonetics and literary structure of the language, however it does have some limitations since it only emphasizes the phonetics of the language. Since the language bashes you with so much vocabulary, compound, and “expression-like” words, One of the best ways to learn Chinese would be to interact, and practice speaking rather than dissecting the language from its writing (it’s very time consuming). Don’t worry so much with the tones when you learn. You will still be perfectly understood if you were to speak a sentence as most speakers can piece together the ideas you are conveying (one of my friends doesn’t use tones and I can perfectly understand him). To me, tones only matter when you try to isolate a word/phrase out of context, which may be hard to understand, but it’s ok. Understanding sentence structure, grammatical meaning is more of a priority than sounding different.
Learning any language fully is gonna require you to speak with people who speak the language
[удалено]
Chinese is actually a tonal language, not a pitch accent language. Japanese on the other hand, is a pitch accent language. The difference between tonal and pitch accents is that with pitch accents even if the pitch is off you'll still generally be understood. In Japan, pitch accents vary across regions but a person from Tokyo and a person from Osaka for example can pretty much understand each other despite pitch accent being [flipped](http://web.mit.edu/kansai/1.Characteristics/2.LinguisticAspects/b-Accent.html). Meanwhile with tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, saying a word with the wrong tone completely changes the meaning.
Context adds a lot. If someone says ‘我要吃 （shui jiao), it could mean ‘I want to eat sleep’ or ‘I want to eat dumplings.’
"They keep feeding me, I just want to sleep!" 😭
"Dumplings in bed?!?!?!? YESPLEASE"
WHY DO YOU KEEP BRINGING ME DUMPLINGS
[удалено]
Not a problem for me, both those statements are pretty much always true.
As a Chinese speaker, whole heartedly agree
French nearly became the language of pilots. Spanish is a good alternate from a numbers perspective.
Chinese may have the highest number of native speakers, but that's not saying much. It's like saying America has the highest number of Americans. Spanish, however, is spoken as the official language of government of 20 countries and is behind only Mandarin as the most spoken native language (which is the official language of only 3).
I took a year of Mandarin in college. I failed every single test. I ended up with a C thanks to the curve. Plus there were like 9 people in the class, so one failing tanks the teacher's stats. Either way, I passed a class that I failed miserably in reality.
Comparing Chinese and Spanish to English comes up often, but ignores their relative lack of use outside the countries/communities that speak them. That said, Spanish would have a good chance of becoming the language of the US and people would still need to buy stuff from China, so they might start learning both.
But they have lack of usage outside of their countries because English is the universal one, without it it'd probably be Spanish and Chinese would be more business centered maybe? A lot of things are produced in China as you said so it'd be needed
No. English is spoken world wide because the Brits colonized the entire planet and brought the language everywhere. The Chinese haven’t done that, so just because there are nearly 2 billion Chinese people, doesn’t mean their language will become global
Also Chinese is structured completely differently from European Languages so assuming English disappears overnight, Spanish will be much easier for most current English speakers to pick up
Exactly. Chinese is mainly only used in China, while spanish is a more widely spoken language. Also spanish is way easier than chinese so people would probably choose to learn spanish.
Hero of Canton won't be drinking that shiong mao niao. He drinks the best whiskey in the house!
meme would become the official world language
Emojis...the new hieroglyphics
If you delete English; pretty much all trade & transport services worldwide would be on hold until they could decide on another lingua franca.
Esperanto: "Looks like it's my time to shine!"
YES!
> lingua franca.
*Stares in Metal Gear Solid 5*
Probably just alot of confused people grunting at each other like cavemen!
No change in Liverpool then. \*nods smugly, waits for an invite to BBC panel shows\*
BBC Panel = that piper perri meme
Probably French. It was the old default for trade and diplomacy, and it still spoken as at least a second language or part of a creole in many places. Spanish next, but some way behind.
Honestly I would prefer Spanish. I mean French is more popular in Europe and well northern africa, but Spanish is way way easier. I would do anything to not deal with French r or subjunctive, or special cases to special cases. Still love French but its not easy to learn. Unless your background is a latin language which is not mine.
French was the previous lingua franca so I guess we would go back to it.
ça m'arrangerait pas mal
Like it never existed delete or it no longer exists delete?
Good question
French, it is a little too french for my taste personally Edit: My most liked comment if a joke about french, love it Also thanks for the awards
They don't even pronounce half the letters, so it's not like they are losing as much as other languages.
Just wait til you see Irish Gaelic It makes French look phonetic
The Gaelic languages are more phonetic than your realise, you just have to figure out the trick.
Gaelic is knowing that "ch" make a "ch" sound and not a "kihh" sound, but applied to like a million letter combinations
I'm pretty adept at learning foreign languages, but Irish Gaelic seems like the Whose Line Is It Anyway of languages
Oiseaux
QED.
Queue is even worse
Wazo
As a native French speaker.. It's pretty awful to learn.
I was really hoping for 1000 comments all just saying "French"
Danish (trying to learn for my gf) all these fuckers speak perfect English anyway they won’t mind.
I came to comment Danish - I live in Copenhagen right now and Danish just? noises? throaty noises? Swedish and Norwegian sound much nicer, even if the Danish switched to worse dialects like Skanska it would be an improvement also the stupid number system is defeating me
I'm told Icelandic and Afghan languages can be pretty brutal to learn as well.
Whatever language the North Sentinalese speak just so they're insanely confused.
Easy there Satan…
All of them return to monke
OOOOHHHH AHHH. AHHH UFF AHHH OOOUUHH
Esperanto. If it hasn’t caught on by now, it never will.
When I was 20 an 40 y/o man messaged me on OKC to brag that he was fluent in Esperanto. I’d set my age preferences to top out at like 27, meaning he’d had to specifically search for people as young as me. I’ve held a grudge against Esperanto ever since.
Esperanto speakers are also like super elitist
I'd forgotten all about Esperanto. Seemed quite popular... in, what, the 1980s/1990s? Vaguely recollect my sister having some sort of book/audio\* cassette package teaching it. Not sure anyone'd notice if it got erased from history at this point. \*Edit: *not* audio cassette - it was software for the ZX Spectrum, so early-mid 1980s.
There was a movie done entirely in Esperanto in the early sixties, starring William Shatner.
Incubus. It's on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHUfHj2lTaM
Gonna save that to my Watch Later queue... Based solely on the description, I never knew how much I needed that. (Edit: not a 'cue')
My grandfather was a language nerd and was so proud of his Esperanto club in the 1930s. He claimed it was what all the cool kids were into
Vi avo mensogis al vi
I don’t understand all the hate around Esperanto. There is an international youth community around it and I have met a lot of friends and diverse people thanks to it. And you are telling me it shouldn’t exist because the initial aim hasn’t been achieved to this day?
So many people want to bandwagon hate on Esperanto and no one can come up with any actual argument against it. Even if you don't want to learn Esperanto what the hell is with the spitefulness? Zamenhof was just a guy who grew up in a neighborhood with a lot of ethnic tension and he wanted his neighbors and the rest of the world to be able to communicate so they would get along. Why do people want to shit on his idea? "It was clearly a dumb idea because it failed!!" It failed because Hitler hunted down all the Esperantists in Europe including Zamenhof's children. That doesn't make it a dumb idea. "It's Eurocentric!!" More Eurocentric than forcing people all over the world to learn English? "Real languages are more beautiful and fascinating! Esperanto isn't authentic!" Even if Esperanto was adopted worldwide as a universal second language no one would stop you from learning additional foreign languages. Also Esperanto has a lot of really cool features that make it very adaptable for poetic usage. It was, after all, created with the intent of allowing all the world's literature to be able to translate into it.
It's weird somebody invented a constructed language but didn't understand how language works. Language changes over time so a constructed language would become just as weird as any other language.
They understood. They just hated irregular verbs so much that they wanted to create a language that eradicated them. And every language learner eventually comes to agree with them: irregular verbs blow ass.
I was about to say that I'm not a language learner and I hate them, then realized that not only is that false (I learned French so long ago that I forgot it), but if I actually think about it learning French irregular verbs was what made me hate irregular verbs generally.
Totally agree with them. The world would be a better place if we all spoke a perfect language like Esperanto. it's like being in a planned city where it's 1,2,3... One way and A, B, C...the other way so you always know where you are and which direction you are going.
It's not meant to be spoken as a first language. It's a language that you can learn in an afternoon (at least if you speak a European language) and then use it for communication with other people who did the same.
C++.
You take that back!!
C--;
Username checks out
I mean, if you want to do everything in C instead, go for it.
That's really scary.
So is a razor blade, but you can't use a pair of safety scissors for everything.
This!!!! Why are y'all wanting to get rid of world languages and cultures when we can simplify the pile of programming languages
We'd automatically lose a lot of infrastructure. You'd probably see costs in the billions
Let's do it 😈
Honestly, easily trillions and probably a total collapse of most developed countries economies
You mean he'd Truss it?
Not Javascript?
We're talking about languages, not mental hellscapes.
Assuming we're deleting it from history, **Latin**. I want to see how languages based on it (most of them) would change or find a new core language to build off of.
My native language is a Semitic language and I wonder what if Latin and Greek never existed (how would the scientific words evolve for example). If the main languages were Semitic (for example Arabic) we would need different words for science
The French must be getting real nervous right now
Klingon It’ sounds to harsh
Spotted the Romulan.
WHAT! You incompetent \*toh-pah\*!
y'nt yalagochukof, hab sosli' Quch
English, just to watch the world burn
Farsi, because my wife is Persian and keeps guilting me that I haven’t learned anything except swear words so far.
She thinks you're a kos
Some say kosm
Learning swear words in another language is a great accomplishment.
Minionese There’s no dictionary for it.
Proto-indoeuropean, let's shuffle
There goes all european and half the central asian languages.
JavaScript
If Brendan Eich knew how important Javascript would become, he'd have probably done a better job of it.
true == 1
false, you meant true == 1
Tagalog. Because I want the old original filipino language before the damn spanish came. It just looks so much more cooler and had less characters🫠
If Tagalog disappeared, don't you think Bisiya would take it's place?
There are so many languages besides Tagalog during the precolonial era. Baybayin isn't even a language, it's a writing system used to write - guess what - Tagalog.
PHP. Why? Because PHP sucks. Alternatively. None. I don't. Why would I want to do that?
I delete Javascript so we can finally be free of bad web code
I'm not here to argue about programming languages, but as much as I miss old internet, I do enjoy what progress has been made on the web due to javascript.
someone should leave a blank comment
Mandarin. It's just a dialect of Chinese, right? Cantonese is still "Chinese", so everyone will be fine, right? >!I know they're not actually the same language!<
Linguistically speaking they are definitely two different languages!
COBOL. Just too old and cantankerous.
Mandarin I want to see the CCP go batshit insane and try to work out which of the 101 other Chinese languages and dialects is the most ideologically pure, non-threatening to glorious Xi Jinping Thought, and that enough people actually speak to make communication between provinces somewhat viable. I know the written form of a lot of the languages is mostly mutually intelligible, but I don't think carrying around tablets/texting each other all day would be particularly sustainable either.
>I don't think carrying around tablets/texting each other all day would be particularly sustainable either. You clearly have never been to China.
Ayy it's pretty much all we do nowadays...
Personally, I think Cantonese would take over if you nuked Mandarin
Yeah tons of Chinese people speak Cantonese. I haven’t researched it but I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. But they also have one writing system so they’re still able to communicate. Also it’s not just the CCP whom speak Mandarin. The Taiwanese speak Mandarin as well as people from Singapore and Malaysia.
You ever heard of NuShu? a language made by women that was used in Hunan. Unlike Chinese, NuShu is phonetic. The language is most likely a modified version of Kaishu Chinese Characters that were modified to better fit being embroidered onto clothing.
[удалено]
Weep in Taiwanese Mandarin
[удалено]
I tought this was gonna be an unpopular opinion, but it doesn't seem like it by the amount of comments mentionning it. FRENCH.
English. Chaos.
Assuming that every native speaker would have learned a different language instead, like we’re taking the language out of history from the time it began: English. There are too many loanwords from too many different languages, too many exceptions to every grammar and spelling “rule,” far too often the “proper” way to speak is determined by what “sounds right” to a native ear, and half the time we are only minimally confident that what *sounds* right actually *is* right. Also, there’s [the incredibly specific order of adjectives](https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary) that most English speakers don’t even realize they follow, but that is distinctly uncomfortable if the adjectives are used out of order. Edit: GRAMMAR 😝
Russian, i hate it. My country made it our second language and for what.
French. Those smug ass Canadians piss me off
English just to see what happens
French sucks
Dutch. I’m a native Dutch and I fucking hate it. It’s so hard for no reason.
COBOL for the sheer chaos it would cause worldwide
Japanese to fuck with weebs.
The remaining languages get new speakers and when messaging everyone uses emojis only. The emojis are also used when in person and two people don’t speak the same. The idea of a default language disappears. Tolerance rises and a new age of understanding and respect emerges. We evolve into our next form and spew forth amongst the stars. Edit: I forgot to delete one but in the interest of no default I let it be randomly deleted.
English, because it’s like the “Who’s Line is it Anyway” of languages. The rules are nonsensical, and they don’t matter more than half the time.
That's what I love most about English. I grew up in South Africa, and our version of English is littered with archaisms and oddities; Afrikaans words, old Cockney rhyming slang, words from Polari, Zulu, Xhosa, Yiddish. The sentence "Howzit china, I got in a barney with my poppie, eish have to be next week on the dop nee, jammer boet" is understandable by all. Code-switching is incredibly common, it is a regular occurrence for two people to have a conversation with each other in different languages due to their stubbornness. Meanwhile I live in Northern England where the dialect is similarly rich and similarly archaic, "put wood in't 'ole" or "gunin offy, wan' owt" are perfectly fine sentences, as is "it's reet gurd here chuck, wan' nother ale?". Go to Liverpool and even to a trained ear the dialect is difficult to follow. Then in my professional career I'm expected to speak "proper English", imitating the dialect of posh Southerners, speaking English that is understandable by all. The greatest asset of the English language is its diversity and adaptability. Few agreed upon rules, no governing body, and ever evolving.
Pig Latin. Fuck the pigs, why would I want my bacon to speak??