I almost feel alone in my opinion but does anyone think that the world's languages are a little outdated and dumbed down?
Every language is about one generation out of date. It's unavoidable. A communication tool can't change quickly or the majority of its speakers won't understand it. You can't just publish a list of changes in vocabulary, phonetics, grammar and syntax in the newspaper every week and expect people to learn them, understand them, remember them,
accept them! and start using them correctly. Languages change by unconscious consensus. Attempts to "make them better" by fiat don't work. Only in authority-submissive cultures like early 20th-century Germany will people timidly accept "official" guidance on the evolution of their language. This is why German has such fabulous jingoistic words as
Fernsee and
Fahrrad, when most other Europeans can understand each other across national boundaries using international standard words like "television" and "bicycle."
As for "dumbed down," we older people tend to only notice the "nice things" from our language that the young whippersnappers have discarded, and to rail about how the world is going to hell. We don't accept the fact that those nice things have lost their usefulness and only serve to impede communication. "Yo" is much more efficient and egalitarian than "How do you do, ma'am?"
And we don't even notice new features that make the language more adaptable to a rapidly changing civilization. The formation of words from acronyms and less formal abbreviations is a powerful engine for the creation of new words. Radar, laser, modem, PC (both the noun and the unrelated adjective)--what sorts of cumbersome compound-words would people have struggled with for these concepts in the 19th century?
And then there's the totally new grammatical principle that seems to have arisen, or at least become commonplace, in my lifetime: the noun-adjective compound. Fuel-efficient, labor-intensive, user-friendly, carbon-neutral, how many syllables would our ancestors have needed to express these concepts?
A brand-new constructed language would have all of these same problems within a generation or two.
There's no way to predict the communication needs of future generations, so the task of developing a language that will be perfect for them is daunting.
I think it would be a intelligent thing to design a complex and efficient language from the ground up.
Complexity and efficiency work against each other. Languages always shed some of the complexities of their past in order to provide efficiency to current speakers. The grammar of "Old English" (the name Anglo-Saxon is now preferred) was just as complicated as modern German. Nouns declined for gender and case, verbs conjugated for person, number and tense. This was all simplified under the superstrate of Norman French, so today we only have a few vestiges of the old paradigms: gender and case in pronouns only, nouns have only singular and plural, verbs have only four or five inflected forms.
If you're looking for an efficient language, look no farther than Chinese. A relatively stable civilization over four millennia has allowed the people to create a masterpiece of communication power--and they did this by
shedding complexity. It has no inflections whatsoever: if it's important to make it clear that an action takes place in the future or in the past you just say "tomorrow" or "in the past"; if it's important to make it clear that you're talking about exactly one dog eating more than one fish you just say "one dog" or "many fish"; if it's important to make it clear that you're only talking about male cattle or female teachers you just say "male cattle" or "female teacher." It also has a streamlined grammar: only nouns and verbs and a couple of particles used to parse the sentence; no articles or prepositions, which are infuriatingly vague in their expression of meaning and often become merely noise words.
As a result a Chinese sentence has fewer syllables than even English or French, the most compact Indo-European languages. Now
that is efficiency. As a result the language can be spoken more slowly, which is a requirement in a country with a vast number of dialects, some of whose people only speak Mandarin as a second language. (Cantonese, Shanghai, Fujian, etc., are distinct, mutually incomprehensible languages, not dialects.)
Because of all this Chinese has no trouble adapting to new ideas. It almost never borrows foreign words, which is handy since the phonetics make that nearly impossible anyway.
Can anyone expand on this topic or give their personal opinions on the subject?
I learned Esperanto more than fifty years ago, which was created to address precisely the issues you raise. In addition to another one you didn't mention: it's very easy to learn. Although it has a maddeningly old-fashioned grammar (two cases for nouns, adjectives have to agree with nouns in case and number, verbs have a bewildering paradigm of inflections, nouns are considered masculine unless you add a feminine suffix, etc.), it is still rather efficient and not at all complex compared to Indo-European languages (not when compared to Chinese of course). And we must remember that when Esperanto was created the world was different, at least the European world. There was a strong utopian movement and a sense of internationalism. Millions of people learned the language.
But hundreds of millions did not. There's simply no way to force people to change their language. Only an authoritarian government like the Soviet Union or the PRC can do that. Ireland, a proud nation that withstood centuries of occupation and cultural marginalization, has been free for several generations, yet look at how few of its citizens have bothered to learn Irish. American Indian languages are dying out after they all learned English, despite immense cultural pressure and scholarly assistance to keep them going.
So even if you succeed in building your new improved artificial language, you won't be able to get us to adopt it. It's too much work. Besides, our language is a major part of our identity, both personal and cultural. Very few people ever become as facile in a second language as they are in the one they were taught from birth.
Language shapes our thoughts. Learning a new language provides a new way of thinking, allowing us to reality-test thoughts in one language against the paradigms of the other. Not everyone wants that resource.
Well I'm in no position to say because I don't have a degree in linguistics but something that can be quickly spoken and provide a better abstractual representation of reality.
Looks like you've started already. There is no such word as "abstractual."
But more importantly, why did you think you needed it? What's wrong with "abstract representation of reality"?
