It's Time for a Common Human Language

   Recently Google+ entered it's open beta phase and also released a new feature that allows you to share entire circles with your circles. The result has been an explosion of circling even among average users like me. With all this circling I noticed more and more different languages being used. I've seen at least six so far. I only speak english so a lot of what some people say will be lost without translating every post and comment, which would get old real fast. And this got me thinking about something I had thought about a few years ago. Why after all this time do we still not have a common human language?

   It's become commonplace in our day to day lives to talk to people from other ends of the world. But still it tends to be only people who speak our language. On web pages and documents it's easy to translate things but it's still no guarantee that the original piece of information won't get distorted or lose some of it's original meaning. When chatting or watching a movie or listening to music it becomes even more difficult. 

   With the rise of mobile web and with more and more people on the net, now seems like a great time to start building a standard human language. Why make an entire new language? To put it simply, ego. No one is going to want a standard language if it's simply taking one of the current languages and saying, "This is the default language". If it was english, every non english speaking person would be upset their own language wasn't chosen. To keep everyone happy, or at least civil, we should make a new one.

   I think the best way to go about it would be to follow the open source crowd surfed methods often used in creating computer programming languages. Representatives from different countries would participate and come up with the basic syntax and nuances. This would allow bits of everyone's culture to be woven into the language.

   Implementation of the language once it's created would be a matter of simply promoting it and using it alongside our other languages. I think the web would be critical in this aspect, simply build it out slowly from the open source project. As it gets more popular, people can start putting it into websites and applications. Even if it's just as an option like any other language pack. If we were able to get one of the big web companies's support it would help speed up the process.

   The end goal isn't to replace our original native languages, but to create a language that sits side by side to our native languages. I think it's important for something like this happen. Not only would it help the species communicate but it would help create an important bond that could cross national and cultural borders.

   This is just a rough idea that I wanted to get out. I'm curious to hear what other people think about it. I looked around the web a while ago but didn't find much on the subject, which really surprised me.