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I'm setting myself to task, of trying to learn Esperanto, for the porpouses, because that's another interesting thing, is a universal language, a made up language, that's to say.
They're a bit like Brasilia, or Milton Keynes are made up cities; instead of organically growing in the way you feel a community should, they've been actually planned.
And the most famous of those is Esperanto. Though of course there are fictional ones, that had become quite successful.
The most successful at the moment is Klingon, where there is a degree course, as you probably know, and I think someone is doing a musical of that in Las Vegas, all in Klingon.
Linguists have genuinely got into it. It has the full range of structures: verbal structure and prepositional/pronominal structure, that languages must have;
substantives and all of those extraordinary things that languages need in order to express ideas, because some of them are quite complex.
And the newest one is the one that's used in Avatar, by the people of that planet, and actually speak it to the people who device that language, because is a very interesting thing to do.
If only Anthony Burgess was still alive, because, of course, he devised a language too for a film called "Quest for Fire".
Do you remember that? He sort of devised a very early sort of caveman language, a sort of "Ugh" as it were, which is sort of exciting.
Now there is so much to think about the language, I mean there is language in art, of course, in poetry, in persuasion,
in advertising and in rhetoric, that's the way languages develops and I'm afraid there is language extinctions, as you probably know, almost the sort of similar rate to the extinction of species,
and the bio-diversity of the world languages is under a terrible threat.
I was in Australia talking to a linguist there, as well as to a member of an aboriginal community about the disappearances of their languages.
I mean there is a huge number of discrete, individual languages in Australian learners.
And then you get real mystery like in New Guinea there are thousands of languages, and you can literally have a valley where one side speak one and on the other another, and those languages are not in any way related.
They have no common ancestor. Philologists studied it. And seen that they are utterly separate.
Language also tells you an enormous amount about the human mind.
For example, color theory is mentally important to in trying to understand; one of the most important questions linguists have faced over the past hundred years is whether growing up with one language,
that is your native tongue, your lingua materna as they say, whether that alters the ways you think, whether it does affect the way you see, the way you see the world, the way you apprehend the world.
It's called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has been hugely rubbished over the last 30 years, almost as fraudulent.
But, a man, a great linguist in his own way, but who by our standards would be considered an amateur, who claimed the Hopi Indians have no sense of time
or no sense of distance or differences of this or differences of that, and that it alters, entirely the way they saw the world, because of their language.
And this became a popular idea, and this is a sort of Orwellian idea, if you take away freedom out of the language then you take the concepts out of the language.
Most linguists now don't believe that, there is no evidence to suggest that if you are a German you are better able to express abstract ideas of philosophical thoughts then if you are Finnish let's say.
All the works of Wittgenstein or Voltaire can be translated into any language an intelligent person can understand, I mean there are of course;
you see this idea of the primitive language not having the same mechanics, not been able to express things.
It's certainly true that we in English have a massive vocabulary, way larger than any other language.
Just that because we're most sophisticated complex people than Norse or Sicilians or any…
I don't think so to be honest, I think, the culture which we live, the speed in which we demand communication, which is a factor of technology certainly.
That's another thing that interest people enormously, is what technology has done to languages, whether is dumbing us down, or the abbreviations, and the things you referred to earlier are somehow cheap and coarsening the language.
I don't believe that, and I urge people to look at some of the greatest letters ever written in the English language were written by Lord Byron.
And partly through the economy, he was not necessarily the most economical person, but letters were crossed, and since they were very expensive to send,
especially because he was, a lot of the time, in Italy and Greece, and sending them to England cost a fortune by courier. And they went by the number of pages.
So he would abbreviate in exactly the same way, and for the same reason.
There was a lack of bandwidth, with bandwidth being the amount of paper you could send.
So, he filled it with as much as he could, crossing it so you write like that, and crossing so you write the other way like that.
And "your" would become "yr", and so on. And just the same sort of thing-- abbreviating.
Now, was Byron illiterate? I really don't think so. Hard to find anyone more literate, in fact.
The point is, we can change our discourses as we change our clothes. You can't judge someone by the way they're speaking when they're speaking with their friends.
Sensible people have a different language for different people and different circumstances.
I swear in front of my friends. I wouldn't swear in front of my great-aunt. It would upset her. It would just be rude!
And, similarly, you know, people who moan about political correctness,
I don't think they'd use some of the words they'd use that are politically incorrect when in the presence of the minority were it to offend them because it's just bad manners.
And that's actually what it comes down to, this whole thing about political correctness, or swearing.
It's just good manners, it's considering your interlocutor, thinking about their feelings. That's what being a decent person's about.