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Will the web finally make the dream of a universal human language a reality?

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American



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When I was a kid (OK, a geeky, awkward, childlike 16 year old) a friend of mine and I tried to invented our own pictographic language. Now Zlango, an Israeli software company, has completed the opus that I left behind in 4th period English. Here's my first ever sentence in this new language: Zlango's pictographs are paired with their English word equivalents in the above example, but they could be paired with anything -- and when displayed on, say, cellular phones, are stripped of any translation at all. As you can see, Zlango is not yet as rich as, say, Esperanto. But unlike hieroglyphics or Japanese Kanji, there's hardly any speed penalty when writing it -- the software generates the images for you. However there is, improbably, no word for "share" or "language" -- hence my desire to connect people who do not "shark languish." Ah well, back to the drawing board. via