Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, Latin and now English – a case of a special kind of lingua franca use and status
Why this work is in the frame
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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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it