A little parable about design choice and parochiality

[lproven]

As I've doubtless bored people silly with for years, another of my non-computery interests is languages and linguistics. One subsection of this is conlangs: constructed languages, as opposed to natural languages

Comments

[zotz]

My ex-flatmate Justin has a rant on the topic here, in the middle of a pile of other rants that I'm sure you can find for yourself. I think his proposed solution at one point was to get everyone to learn Indonesian, as soon as it has an accepted decimal counting system

[lproven]

Ta for that!

I will have a proper crack at learning Bislama one day. I found Ken Campbell's evangelisation of it as "Wol Wontok" - /world one talk/, a new, simple world language - quite persuasive.

Its pronunciation and in places lexicon have shifted a fair way from standard English, though. E.g. "kilim" (kill him) -> hit, not kill. "Ded" -> sleep, and so on.

Perhaps one day I will have a bash at producing my own simplified conlang, to answer the question. My method would be to quiz lots of comparative linguists to find examples of the simplest language structures, then strip English down to that level. Also remove all the phonemes that various people find tricky. I suspect that the result would be rather like Bislama, which just goes to show that Ken Campbell was one /very/ smart cookie...

[zotz]

I'd never heard of Bislama. Yeah, it's great.

That sort of thing always makes me wonder why languages have so much grammar rather than staying very simple.

[drplokta]

The claim about Klingon and Esperanto is that Klingon has a higher percentage growth rate in number of speakers, not a higher number of speakers.

[lproven]

You may well be right on that, but I've never heard it expressed that way that I can recall!

Klingon v Esperanto

[billchapman]

I'm afraid this growth claim for Klingon isn't true either. I teach Esperanto by post and the internet, and I'm overwhelmed with learners at the moment.

People are learning Esperanto in great numbers- and using it for international links.

[waistcoatmark]

I went to an after-school course in Esperanto and walked out 15 minutes later when it became clear that this "easy to learn" language needed me to remember hte gender of every single noun.

And I was interetsed to learn from a C++ newgroup that
a) Arabic has different words for numbers, depending on what's being counted
b) so, no it wouldn't be easier for everyone if we had a standard internationalised library for converting numbers to natural language equivalents (e.g. 102 -> "one hundred and two"): the Arabic function would have rather more natural language analysis required than you might expect.

[chipuni]

I went to an after-school course in Esperanto and walked out 15 minutes later when it became clear that this "easy to learn" language needed me to remember hte gender of every single noun.

Hrrrrr? Esperanto has no more gender than English has.

There's he (li), she (ŝi), and it (ĝi), and they correspond to English usage.

FYI: I'm just starting to learn Arabic. (I've finished the equivalent of one semester of Arabic.)

Arabic has different words for numbers, depending on what's being counted

Arabic has ordinal and cardinal numbers, exactly as English has. ("one", "two", "three", ... versus "first", "second", "third", ...)

The difference is that Arabic uses ordinal numbers in some places that English uses cardinal numbers. (For example, formal Arabic uses ordinal numbers for telling time.)

no it wouldn't be easier for everyone if we had a standard internationalised library for converting numbers to natural language equivalents (e.g. 102 -> "one hundred and two"): the Arabic function would have rather more natural language

[waistcoatmark]

Odd. Maybe my teacher got it wrong then. I was under the impression that many nouns naming things with with neither X nor Y chromosones had a male or female gender.

[lproven]

Counting systems are not entirely unlike English collective nouns, and there's hours of fun to be had with them.

Grammatical gender is a PITA for Anglophones but quite handy in languages that have it, making sentences such as "take it, and this, and put it in that under that there" /much/ less ambiguous.

What interests me is the prospect of creating the /simplest possible/ language and seeing if it is indeed both useful and very easy to learn.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse

[uon]

Even if you could wave your magic wand and have everyone in the world speak Esperanto, I'm not convinced the benefits would last, given that people are very good at splintering and distorting and moulding language to their own ends. Most of the languages spoken in Europe come from a common ancestor that split into four hundred tongues over the centuries, mostly of its own accord. You don't even need centuries: spoken slang shifts very obviously over the decades, and noticeably over the years. Any field of expertise will develop its own jargon and neologisms, just because it's so much easier to say "byte" than to say "unit of information usually composed of eight elements each of which is constrained to take a value of one or zero, typically representing a single character or small integer

Re: I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse

[lproven]

Oh hell no, I don't want everyone speaking Esperanto instead of their own languages! I don't particularly want anyone speaking Esperanto at all - I have nothing against it, I just feel it's unnecessarily baroque - and actually I am in favour of a large diversity of languages and the reduction or halt of their loss and extinction

[uon]

I don't believe that a really simple conlang would stay that way for long if it took off; I'm not even convinced that such a thing is really possible. Very simple languages gather fluff and crusty bits around the edges because people apply them to real-world situations in which it becomes very tedious to describe certain commonly occurring things, until they end up as not-so-simple languages. If you have two groups of people who start off only being able to use the auxiliary language with the other group, then it will start getting infested with calques and loanwords and funny idioms and wind up being an interesting language in and of itself, but not the very simple language you started with, and one which will seem peculiar and alien to a third group of people who still speak the original auxiliary language.

It's not that I don't think it would be a good thing, I just don't think it would work out in the long run.