[ExI] Linguistic shifts

[Damien Broderick]

On 12/21/2010 10:49 AM, spike wrote:

> So we start by eliminating figures of
> speech specific to our own cultures, and migrate towards words that have
> more universal and very specific meanings.

Esperanto hasn't exactly taken over the world.

You might have noticed that generational and other tribalisms go in 
exactly the opposite direction: mutations, ellipses, neologisms, 
inversions.

And I suspect that as the global landscape becomes ever-more 
interconnected and blandized, there will be an increasing pressure to 
reclaim or invent linguistic differences. That might well occur parallel 
to the "business/political" trend to uniformity, but as ever more humans 
drop out the loop of production and marginal political influence I can 
foresee an increase in creoles that are deliberately unintelligible to 
Others, especially the hegemonic. (AI translators will presumably have 
little trouble keeping up, although it might be expedient/polite not to 
make that too obvious.)

Damien Broderick