Speaking in Tongues
Generic word usage and generic patterns of speech and format are in many respects cross-cultural and provide the foundation for "Universal Translation." The other necessary ingredient is a common Equivilancy (a conceptual matrix); a One to One Mapping of all languages to a single interface.
Western languages tend to be accretionary, Asian languages tend to be conceptual and therefore reveal the key to universal translation through a conceptual sieve. When we examine the conceptual structure of such languages, we once again find Triadic Structures. A single word (conceptual root I data unit) can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective depending on how it is used in a sentence, (Object I Action I Description). As an example: Frogness; we have a noun (frog), a verb (jump), or an adjective (jumpiness). We could attempt to construct a conceptual matrix, (Left-Brained Westerners); but millions of Asians have been perfecting such languages for millennia.
My personal choice, the pick of the litter, is Vietnamese; a simple, elegant, and very powerful language. There are many reasons for this choice, besides personal bias. Vietnamese is closely related to Chinese which is good in itself.
Even better, Vietnamese was "phoneticized" by Portuguese Jesuits in the 17th Century, and can be written with a standard European keyboard. Over the centuries, Vietnam has been successively occupied by the Chinese, the Portuguese, the French, the Japanese, the French, and, recently, by America.
The Vietnamese are "People of the Book," they are very studious and academic people who revere writers and poets, and there are many of them who are adept translators of many languages. Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, their largest word has 7 letters, the average word has 3-4 letters and so it is also a very compact language. This language becomes the one to one base map that all other languages are mapped to.
