"American" English...

Exactly, you're a fool to suggest language had no laws prior to the 1800's. The printing press is possibly one of the most important inventions in history, it allowed the production of written word at a rate previously unimaginable. It was invented by Johannes Gutenberg in 1445 allegedly, and before that books were produced in a scriptorium by poor buggers who would hand copy books all day long. (Resulting in some beautiful books though )

With such a small number of people being able to read and write in them days, they would establish standards and spellings they agree on, and with the invention of printing presses production rates would have soared, and standards would have to exist. Imagine if each of the Gutenberg bibles was full of different spellings, in one a road might be "road" in the next it might be "wibbledyshazzlegooba". Nonsense. If they didn't stick to standards, the reader wouldn't know what the hell some words are.

As CodeCat has pointed out, all the European languages are related in ways and connected through common parent languages. Languages evolve, they didn't appear out of thin air... the only one that did that is Elvish, even then, Tolkien spent years and years working on it to the point that it could be considered a true language.

Edited by Calamity_Jones, 02 March 2007 - 01:45 AM.

Of course, there's no problem with inventing a language. The only trouble though is that you'll be missing the whole point of a language: a common form of communication between individuals. Nobody's stopping you from speaking a language you invented yourself, but one could wonder what the point is if nobody understands you. Kinda defeats the purpose of speaking in the first place.

Not if you're Anonymous, it doesn't.

In essence, a language is just a protocol. In the computer sense, that is. A protocol is a set of mutual agreements and standards for communication between entities. HTTP is the protocol that webservers use to request and transfer web pages. And in that same sense, each language is a protocol used to transfer all kinds of information between individuals that speak the same language.

The main difference is that each networking protocol is generally suited to only a specific purpose. That makes sense, because it would be far too difficult to write a protocol that is efficient at doing just about anything. A language however IS actually a protocol that has just about any purpose. And that's why languages can conflict with each other: they both fill up the same 'space' in the need for communication. FTP and HTTP can't do the same things, so they both have their own place. But you can say the same things in English and Dutch.

Which only strengthens my belief that there aren't any good or bad languages, only forms of communication. Some have simpler rules than others, some have a smaller 'base' to build on but more extensions, in a sense. But no language is inherently better than another. They all do the same thing: convey information.

FTP and HTTP can't do the same things, so they both have their own place. But you can say the same things in English and Dutch.

you can also say the same things in POP and IMAP

Strange as it sounds, but I have a friend that can actually read binary code.

01010100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100011 01100001 01110100 00100000 01100011 01101000 01100001 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01100111

Thats what was shown on the matrix which apparently just means the dog chased the cat or something like that. maybe we should use binary as a lanuage or expand it by adding a 2

If you add a 2, then it wouldn't be binary any more would it

it would be trinary