If you know of anyone interested there’s an taster course on Saturday afternoon as well. Tickets to the show are free, but you need to book using this link http://www.thelanguageshow.co.uk/page.cfm/link=7

Don’t hold me to this – this is just what came into my head, and me expressing appreciation for the comment. Thank you!

So I don’t think your belief that the brain prefers simplicity is borne out by the evidence of comparative linguistics.

I disagree with the “but we still need a more descriptive way to communicate with humans.” Not necessarily. You may want to convey more “information” than is captured in the three words “movie Redmond tonight.” Whether you’re communicating with a machine or a human, language does not dictate intent. So I don’t think we need more descriptive means to communicate ‘with humans’. Instead, i would say we need to convey different information sometimes, and hence have to create a discriminant construct in the language to indicate the deviation – that’s not addition of undue complexity, because it is a necessity. Conversely, if more than one such discriminant exists, it becomes redundant – that is complexity. On the other hand, while the three-phase construct may have begun simply due to making it easy for us to communicate with a machine, there is no denying that if there was no loss of information while doing so, then we did in fact hit upon a more context-free and simplified way to express it.

Bill Chapman – I stand corrected. I seem to have quoted Esperanto without sufficient background research. What I wanted to say is this: What we know as “English” today, is not what I knew as English in a different country 10 years ago, and that wasn’t what I read as English from the 18th century either. While the name remains, the language is drastically different. A “new” language may have sounded exciting, but perhaps the reason it isn’t widely in used, while possibly due to political reasons, is also partially due to the fact that the language which a large part of the world knew was open to adaptation. If something was too complicated, and hence prompted a new language, it would be easily picked up by the current tongue too, and it was.

Language is changing, I agree with that. Words, word forms, writing styles, all are in flux all the time. We need new words to describe new ideas, trends, concepts and technologies all the time while still retaining many of the old ones. However, all this leads to the language becoming more complex (this is more true in a globalized world, for example, we speak Hinglish and not pure Hindi or pure English) and not _necessarily_ simplified.

Brian, I was not overestimating the position of English, but simply used English as a sample of the style of language in use. One of the key reasons English is so resilient, despite being grammatically confusing, and has a phonetically ambiguous script, is because it is a growing language. There are many languages which are adapting, which are thriving.

My comment is essentially about how the form we use on FB and Twitter may not really be English if we were to consider grammar as the definition of a language. Esperanto is certainly a good idea, but when the competition is adaptive, the competition can pick up the same ideas pretty fast. My own native language may not survive beyond my generation – not because there is anything wrong with it, but simply because it won’t adapt.

In fact, even if Esperanto has complex parsing rules, it may suffer the same fate as the 19th century English. People may certainly use it, but it may not be what it started out to be. The idea here is that whether you call it English or Esperanto, the world will, incrementally, lean towards reduction of entropy in the system.