How practical is it to create a language that caters to every single language out there?

I'm only 18, and I'm not nearly as educated about linguistics as a lot of you guys, so maybe the answer isn't as complicated as I am making it. But, given the extraordinary diversity of languages on our planet, is it really reasonable to attempt to make a language that is accessible to everyone? I'm asking this because I saw several posts on the thread about Esperanto being Pro-Genocide that discussed how Esperanto is clearly bias towards Westerners. Which then lead me to think, "Well, then we need to make a language that is less Western and more globalized. But then..how would you even do that?" I feel throwing in a bunch of languages into one would make it less accessible for EVERYONE (which, I suppose would be more "fair" as it would require roughly the same amount of effort to be learned by everyone), but is that practical? Wouldn't it be more practical just to examine a few larger scale languages from different areas (e.g. English, Russian, Spanish, Mandarin) and work with those as opposed to trying to mix a ton of other, smaller languages into the equation? But then there is the issue of leaving out small indigenous groups who have very obscure languages..

And then, another question..if one were to create a language that attempted to assimilate several other languages, how would..it be proportioned? Like, since X% of the people on the world speak English, for example, would X% of that language's vocabulary and grammar be similar to English? Or would all languages be represented more or less equally, regardless of the number of speakers, since that would be considered "fair"?

Bleh, maybe these are all stupid, irrelevant questions. It's just late where I live, and you know how your brain can start thinking about silly things when it's 1:30am..

Thoughts?

They're attempting this with Lojban, but it's not as simple as Esperanto. It has its own grammar that is based on logic and doesn't contain any parts of speech normally associated with grammar. The etymologies of the words stem from Mandarin, English, Hindi, Spanish, Russian, and Arabic, but that doesn't mean that any words are recognizable at all. They used percentages of speakers to decide which languages had more importance.

One thing that is common to all occupants of our planet whatever their mother tongue, is the ability to follow simple rules. In this respect, Esperanto with its almost 100% systematicity based on simple rules is already universal.

There are so many languages out there and they are so different that it is imposible to create a language that suits everyone. If you take words equally from all those languages then you will recognize few of them only and all the rest would be a complete mystery to you. So are the rules of grammar. Such a mixture would be inedible - there would be no profit for anyone at all. Esperanto is much better than that and I suggest we stay with it...

Can you make a language appropriate for people of all cultural and linguistic backgrounds? No. Not a chance. Not a single hope in hell. It shan't happen. Not now. Not ever.

HOWEVER: there's a thought that many have had on this topic. Supposing each general linguistic region makes its own intermediary language (such as with Esperanto for European languages, Afrihili for the horn and east of Africa etc.), one might then be able to create an intermediary between the intermediaries. So in a kind of weird, roundabout way, you could create a language appropriate for most people. Of course, starting up a language and movement a la Esperanto for each of these areas, then somehow creating a uniting body to blend the languages (and possibly movements) would be a logistical nightmare.

Still, this could never really work for everyone. So many languages just have such fundamental differences between each other (for example, languages without, what many would consider, such ordinary concepts as nouns or adjectives). Unfortunately you can never cater to absolutely everyone.

Oh, and there's an army of conlangers out there who will never stop trying to achieve this goal. Maybe just getting close enough, without being perfect, shall work.

Regarding the vocabulary it's quite easy to put noone at an advantage: Just use an a priori (i.e. totally new created) vocabulary.

But for the grammer it seems quite hard. I think the most useful solution is to choose a morphologic typology, which is half isolating and half agglutinating with high segmentability. Esperanto is near that. The third extreme in morphologic typology would be the polysynthetic languages, but since these are quite difficult to learn and have almost died out on our planet, i would leave them out.

Fenris_kcf:Regarding the vocabulary it's quite easy to put noone at an advantage: Just use an a priori (i.e. totally new created) vocabulary.

But that's not a language that caters to everybody, but rather a language that caters to nobody.

A language that's somehow easy and intuitive to everybody just isn't possible.

Bruso:

Fenris_kcf:Regarding the vocabulary it's quite easy to put noone at an advantage: Just use an a priori (i.e. totally new created) vocabulary.

But that's not a language that caters to everybody, but rather a language that caters to nobody.

A language that's somehow easy and intuitive to everybody just isn't possible.

We often tend to think in terms of adult learners. In that context, then I agree that there simply is no one constructed language that is going to be equally easy for everybody. Like it or not, somebody, somewhere, somehow, is going to have to put forth some kind of effort to learn something.

However, we tend to forget that, to some degree of approximation, all languages are about equally easy for all children in immersion environments. As Mario Pei pointed out in his book "One Language for the World," if we (figuratively speaking) would just pick a language -- almost any language will do if it has adequate vocabulary -- and teach it to all children around the world, then the "interlanguage problem" would be largely solved. (Granted, there could be practical issues in accomplishing this.) Until such time as that might happen (I am not holding my breath), we just have to make do as best we can, realizing that with adult learners there simply is no perfect solution.

Forigite

bartlett22183:
We often tend to think in terms of adult learners. In that context, then I agree that there simply is no one constructed language that is going to be equally easy for everybody. Like it or not, somebody, somewhere, somehow, is going to have to put forth some kind of effort to learn something.

However, we tend to forget that, to some degree of approximation, all languages are about equally easy for all children in immersion environments. As Mario Pei pointed out in his book "One Language for the World," if we (figuratively speaking) would just pick a language -- almost any language will do if it has adequate vocabulary -- and teach it to all children around the world, then the "interlanguage problem" would be largely solved. (Granted, there could be practical issues in accomplishing this.) Until such time as that might happen (I am not holding my breath), we just have to make do as best we can, realizing that with adult learners there simply is no perfect solution.

I would question the assertion that almost any language will do. I wonder if there aren't some languages that are easier than others for native speakers. For example, I consider myself reasonably educated and quite familiar with English, it being my native language. However, there are some grammatical constructions that still give me problems.

Think of how much time, effort and money could be saved on language instruction for native speakers if English was as simple and regular as Esperanto.

Aaron