http://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-and-science/technology/a-step-closer-to-skynet-ai-invents-a-language-humans-can-t-read/article/498142?noredir=1

I'm pretty sure this is what Yudkowsky meant when he said AI will come up with solutions we'd never have thought of.

We did think of this though. Esperanto and Lojban exist.

6040649
Interlingua as well, but all those artificial languages contain biases toward certain linguistic groups. Perhaps the Ai's is more universal? I'll have to look into it.

After reading the article and a few related things....
Not more "universal", then, but more efficient and logical. These appear to be negotiated languages that change and evolve depending on the needs of the situation. A generalized/amalgamated version with phonemes easily pronounced by most human cultures (no rolled r's please!) might truly be a universal language!

6040604
Well, it is easy enough to create a language more logical than English: eliminate situational near-synonyms, make sure that each word has only one meaning, and make sure that poetry doesn't develop.

6040604
Being more logical than English isn't a high bar to pass. If nothing else, due to being an archaic but still-living language means that it has picked up all kinds of clutter, and has grown/evolved at the whims of the most common, least intelligent users. Imagine the idiots on the internet today, and how every generation has been packed full of them, and they've always been the brute force guiding English (as well as all other living languages).

Not even remotely surprising.

6041927
Elimination of poetry isn’t desirable though.

Edit: sorry, I misread your question. Judging under the criteria of logical commutation for everyday and tech speach, poetry is undesirable. It is, however, fun, and shouldn’t be eliminated from language for that reason alone.

6959141
Something i like about English is that it is efficient and simple. The little poetry that i can tolerate, I'd rather have in Spanish. Can you conjugate a verb in Spanish?

6959220
I don’t know enough about Spanish to say one way or the other.

6959270
Take the verb to be as an example. In English, it is extremely situational, with its meaning depending on the rest of the sentence rather than on itself. It isn't the same to say "John is a hot air balloon", rather than "John is on a hot air balloon. The first one is existence, and the second is status. In Spanish, they are covered by two different verbs: to exist is "ser", and to have a status is "estar".

This videos only cover indicative mood, though, which is used to state facts. The subjunctive mood is used to talk about desires, doubts, wishes, conjectures, and possibilities. And finally, the imperative mood states commands.

And finally, Spanish conjugates verbs in 1st person singular, 2nd person singular, 3rd person singular, 1st person plural, 2nd person plural, and 3rd person plural, in five times (present, past simple, past continuous, past perfect, future), in indicative and subjunctive, plus a couple more words for imperative mood and the participles. Your typical verb in English adds like a half dozen words to your language; your typical verb in Spanish adds almost a hundred.

Furthermore, Spanish language states that poetry must have rhythm, metric and rhyme. Compared to that, English language poetry is either broken prose or haiku. That pentameter thing is at least more understandable to me as poetry, even if it sounds like jerk language.

6960491
I see. Back in my old Spanish class I never quite saw the point of ser and estar, but that makes a lot more sense now. For someone who grew up a native speaker they have a lot more versatility in verb usage than an English speaker, although that verb versatility makes the language a bit hard to learn for someone who’s native to English.

I’m not entirely sure what you mean about English poetry being all broken prose or haiku though.