Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, Latin and now English – a case of a special kind of lingua franca use and status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article puts forward the hypothesis that a small number of lingua francas (LFs) can be historically observed as having reached a special status and manner of use. Termed here lingua cosmopolitanas (LCs), the proposed distinctive group is exemplified by languages such as Sanskrit, Classical Arabic and Latin, representing a distinctive quasi-universal communicative phenomenon not adequately observed in research. To test this hypothesis, our study compares six LFs in terms of broad sociolinguistic characteristics. These include, on the one hand, post-4th-c. Sanskrit, post-8th-c. Classical Arabic and post-9th-c. Latin, conjectured as potentially LCs, and, on the other hand, post-18th-c. French, post-16th-c. Spanish and post-18th-c. KiSwahili in international use, as likely not of such additional status. The results of the comparison show the former as distinctive, with five characteristics separating them from the three latter LFs. They are found to include (a) loss of native speaker reference; (b) becoming the implicit conduit of the times; (c) fixedness of norm in writing; (d) extreme longevity in stable form; and (e) emergence of and co-existence with ‘daughter’ languages. The findings are then discussed in terms of paradigms describing natural language as a phenomenon in general and LF as a concept in particular. In addition, English is also discussed in the same terms, as potentially an LC in statu nascendi, and tested against the deduced signifiers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".