A few times I’ve come upon the power of a common language in the last few days.
I’ve seen a video about a meeting of Amazonian pajés (shamans) and herbalists sharing and maintaining traditional plant use, facilitated through the common language Portuguese, I’ve read about the success of the Zapatistas where native people are helped in their efforts by the common language Spanish. And just now a post in Anarchism & Social Ecology mixing Spanish and English just as comfortably as my family juggles three languages at home.
Do you know of other examples?
I thought one of the non-evil possible uses of a LLM could be to create a new language like Esperanto, and ideally it would simply be a mix of English and Spanish, to connect a maximum number of people? Or are artificial languages always doomed to fail?
Edit: title, because there is not one language of solarpunk
I always thought that artificial languages always needed more stickiness. I learned some Esperanto, but it is easily forgotten if there is no need to use it.
Solarpunk, like many Libertarian Socialist paradigms, really shines with diversity, so languages focused on Solarpunk sound quite weird, like having homogeneous aesthetics. Usually, language changes, like the way Zapatistas talk in Spanish, pursue specific goals that can be done within a language rule set or some mixture between different languages like Spanglish (Spanish + English) or Portuñol (Portuguese + Spanish). The whole point is to be able to communicate a concept.
Now, like the examples you have shown, it seems easier to frame the “Solarpunk language” not as a language per se but as a dialect. Since some geographies share more common communication than between language speakers, it happens in English, Arab, Spanish, French, and Chinese… When you learn to speak those, there is always the question of whether you sound like a foreign person or a native from someplace.