Also, depending on a locale those exact words have active and totally unrelated meanings. (cigarettes and weird).
Landlord, landlady, I mean, that's ridiculous. Google and all other language activists will have to deconstruct all languages and purge them of historical artifacts that get in the way --all languages contain these things.
I suppose they can slowly replace everyone's languages with a single universal synthetic language like Esperanto but one that's further purified and also controlled by an Academy that ensures meanings remain static and don't deviate from official definitions and uses.
Totally. I understood that from your phrasing and I was sure you were aware of what you were describing. You set up the pins so I knocked em down. (also, I was fascinated with Esperanto as a kid.. and also with Orwell. So your twisty path to saying Newspeak was right on my wavelength and I skipped a few preambles)
[edit] Your profile says "google fanatic". Is this a good time to maybe elaborate on that? I would love to know..
As another comment mentioned, Google scale makes things very complex; a non incidental (i.e. English) global language might be very welcome in certain groups, but it being de facto requires, as you said, of a governing body that can regulate and enforce that.
At least in Spanish, there is such a body, the RAE (Real Academia Española, The Royal Spanish Academy), which decrees "unanimously" which words and phrases are canonical Spanish and which not, including regulating regionalisms found across every Spanish speaking country. As you might expect, outside a certain... circle, the RAE is a laughingstock.
The idea that a single entity could rule the way people communicate at that level of granularity, so insidiously, from the perspective of a layman looks unprecedented and unfathomable, that is, until you present them with a taste of the modern scale at which mega corporations operate.
So, consider for a minute an organization like the RAE having Google scale and Google reach. Would something like that mean the starting point of a (very) slippery slope, a snowball rolling down, powered by the pockets of the wealthy and the might of the policymakers? A future where the principles governing the cryptocurrency world will end up driving global policy?
I mention cryptocurrencies because one of their most prominent characteristics is that "Code is Law". As i see it, it's the inexorable outcome resulting from the underlying technological platform, its limitations and its philosophies, not something intended but more of an emergent property exposing the fundamental tradeoffs required to automatically run strict policies at a scale that large.
What would it take then for public policy to go the same route? For a hypothetical evil group of policymakers in awe of the success of Google et al exerting such outsized influence, to take over the same path, and to transform actual, fiscal law into an unwieldy paradigm, a sort of "Law is Code is Law".
We already see glimpses of it when there are leaks and whistleblowers illuminate us about the dark operations of the governments using megacorps to influence the public, but how far would success with this sort of policies with "innocent" subjects like grammar would bring them closer to applying it to the whole cake?
Well, back then grammatical genders had not been conflated with sexual genders. It was, pardon the language, inconceivable, that they would be conflated. Lots of languages have gendered nouns and some have gendered verbs.
Nouns aren't actually grammatically gendered in Esperanto. But when a noun refers to something that can physically have gender, male is the root or default.
Esperanto was invented by a single individual who spoke several languages but who didn't have formal training in linguistics.
It basically started off as a pet project of a young (teenage) language enthusiast, so I wouldn't scrutinize his decisions too carefully or expect every decision he made to be optimal.
Or every decision made back then to conform to today's societal values. no language will ever meet that bar. instead of allowing this natural evolution, seems Google (and let's say 10 people at Google) seem to have decided to be the arbiters of linguistic integrity.
Landlord, landlady, I mean, that's ridiculous. Google and all other language activists will have to deconstruct all languages and purge them of historical artifacts that get in the way --all languages contain these things.
I suppose they can slowly replace everyone's languages with a single universal synthetic language like Esperanto but one that's further purified and also controlled by an Academy that ensures meanings remain static and don't deviate from official definitions and uses.