+306 The universal language should be Latin. It's the root of English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German, so it would be the easiest for most people to learn. It would be convenient for studying classical texts, and plus, it sounds fucking cool. Amirite?

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I;m trying to learn Latin now. It's actually supposed to be spoken in a n italian accent, so that makes it sound a bit less col, since it make it sound less ancient.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Actually the five languages derived from Latin are Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese. English and German are not derived from Latin. Bit I see your point.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

But don't a lot of English words come from Latin words? Not as much as Italian and Spanish, but still..

by Anonymous 13 years ago

English has some words derived from Latin because of exposure over time to Latin languages

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Yup And the Egnlish language has derived even more words from the French language (I think this caused or was around the same time as the Great Vowel Shift)

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Yes, many English words are derived from Latin. However, the English language is not derived from Latin despite the similarities.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Also, the majority of people in the world probably don't speak Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, or Italian.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Actually, in regards to the number of native speakers, Spanish is the second most common language in the world. Portuguese, French, and Italian are fairly common as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li...ative_speakers

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Yes, but there a lot of other people that speak a lot of other languages, even if they don't all speak the same language. It's just a guess, but it's pretty likely that the sum of everyone tht speaks French, Spanish, Romanian, Portuguese, and Italian is less than the sum of all of the other languages that are currently spoken.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

English is a germanic language, but about 60% of our words derived from Latin.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

60 percent doesn't make a new language very much easier to learn. And even if we counted English as a Latin based language, most of the world doesn't speak a language derived from Latin.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Both English and German have Anglo-Saxon origins, not Latin. Latin is also super complicated, and that's why it died out.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Latin is definitely not super complicated. It's has less exceptions than English, and is pretty straight forward.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

not the UNIVERSAL language, though. there isn't any Latin in Hindi, Mandarin, Arabic and a lot of others

by Anonymous 13 years ago

As someone who reads Latin almost fluently now, I have to admit that it is pretty complicated. But I've found that people who are good at math are good at Latin, since it works so much like a puzzle. And not everyone in the world is good at math. Also, the Latin language currently needs no accent. Since it is an extinct language and no has heard the accent in its original form, we can only guess as to what the accent is, which is pointless. And the only Latin anyone needs to know is in X-Treme Latin by Henry Beard, for the record.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Currently learning Latin. About 10 weeks in. Maybe it's because I'm still new or because I'm learning classical Latin instead of cruder Latin, but it seems impossible for anyone to be fluent in it while still speaking with some complexity.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Pffft, "easiest for all to learn". Yeah right.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Why not? There would be a lot of cognates for people who speak those languages, and those languages have to comprise at least a third of the total.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Well vocabulary-wise, sure, I guess they all have something in common with Latin. But take Latin as a second language disregarding all vocab, and you get one of the most complex languages to learn. I mean, if you want an easy language for all to learn, take a SIMPLE one, without many rules. Like English. It's the simplest language I know.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and all other languages derived from Latin are just regional adaptations of the language used by the people of an area that were eventually codified. There is no correct accent in which to speak Latin. I can read latin pretty well and it isn't so easy to lean, but probably easier than English.

by Anonymous 13 years ago

The conflict of Classical and Ecclesiastical pronunciations could be interesting. To quote my Latin teacher... "One, I was at a conference, and the guy next to me asked, "Quis shit?" It took me a minute to realize that Ecclesiastical Latin pronounces 'sc' as 'sh'." (Or something like that. Quis scit = who knows.)

by Anonymous 13 years ago

I have to agree with the last few points, but Chinese or maybe an internationally popular language like English or French would be the best option if you're trying to make it convenient for as many people as possible. Of course, English sucks with its number of grammatical rules and exceptions to those rules (among other things(, French has pointlessly complicated verb tenses (not to mention certain nouns being "masculine" or "feminine"), and Chinese writing has way too many characters

by Anonymous 13 years ago

hahaha i took three years of latin at a rigorous private school. i wanted to die

by Anonymous 13 years ago

oh yeah i didnt really learn practically anything. I think a different language would be much easier than latin

by Anonymous 13 years ago