Saturday, 18 February 2012

Auxlang 2012: First 50 words

Okay, moving right along.

I've done the first 50 words or so of the 1000 words to be created for the initial core vocabulary of Auxlang 2012. Another 19 sessions to go.

Once the core vocabulary has been created, then will come the task of generating clusters of words for related concepts, by using standard affixes (nothing so extreme as the Esperanto approach; more like Occidental) and some compounding. That will maybe triple the number of words. This should be thought of as a prototype of a vocabulary: if I don't like it, I can just throw it away. We're not playing for sheep stations here. Anyway, at each stage many valuable lessons will be learned and experience will be gained. Hopefully the end result will be that I will better understand the design considerations for languages such as Sambahsa and Occidental.

Watching the iterative process of me creating this vocabulary over the next 19 sessions is going to be like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Already plenty of problems and mistakes are visible. However, some ideas are beginning to form in my mind for how to deal with them.

We can see I've gone for a reasonably etymological orthography, not to mention I've got some ideas about short and long vowels, which together are contributing to perhaps an excessive number of doubled consonants. In general the current orthography is a little difficult, but not impossibly so; perhaps something workable can come from this.

You can see my philosophical beliefs, for an auxlang, of always using hyphens to form compound words, and always marking the stressed syllable in polysyllabic words; the former helps the latter, because clearly breaking up compounds into their component words assists with accentuation.

You can see some weird stuff like my current tentative practice of placing a backtick (`) immediately after a word to indicate that the word does not have any plural form (that is, for number; it may have a plural for varieties). The idea is to constantly instruct the reader, so that everytime a reader reads a text these facts are constantly reinforced. If the reader wishes to use that word in a sentence to discuss the text, she knows it has no plural and she knows how to pronounce it aloud as the orthography indicates all of this in  reasonably regular manner (although here unexplained).

ENGLISH AUXLANG FRENCH GERMAN Plural / past
abdomen àbdomen ventre m. Bauch m. àbdomens
belly vènter ventre m. Bauch m. vènters
above ùber au-dessus de über ùber
absent àbsent absent abwesend àbsent
accept accèpt accepter annehmen accèpted
accident àccident accident m. Unfall m. àccidents
accompany acòmpany accompagner Begleiten acòmpanyed
accomplish acòmplish accomplir Vollbringer acòmplished
accuse accùse accuser anklagen accùsed
actor, actrice àcter acteur, actrice Schauspieler -in àcters
add add ajouter hinzufügen àdded
address addrèsse addresse f. Adresse f., Anschrift addrèsses
administrative administratìf administratif Verwaltungs- n/a
adventure avènture aventure Abenteuer avèntures
adventurer avènturer aventurier, aventurière
avènturers
adventurous avèntureus aventureux, aventureuse
n/a
advice, counsel còunsel` conseil m. Rat m. no plural
after àfter après nach n/a
afternoon àfter-noon après-midi Nachmittag m. àfter-noons
age àge âge Alter m. àges
agricultural agricùltural agricole Agrar-, landwirtschaftlich n/a
agriculture agricùlture` agriculture f. Landwirtschaft f. no plural
air air` air m. Luft f. no plural
air conditioning climatisation` climatisation, Air conditionné Klimaanlage f. no plural
airplane aviòn avion m. Flugzeug, flieger aviòns
airport air-port aéroport Flughafen m. air-ports
almonds àmond amandes Mandeln àmonds
alphabet alfabet alfabet m. Alfabet n. alfabets
always ìmmer toujours immer n/a
ambulance àmbulance ambulance f. Krankenwagen àmbulances
and ed et und n/a
and ed et und n/a
ankle ànkel cheville f. Knöchel m. ànkels
answer n., response respònse réponse f. Antwort n. respònses
ant ant fourmi
ants
apartment apàrtment appartement m. Wohnung f. apàrtments
apple àppel pomme f. Apfel m. àppels
approximately, circa circa environ ungefähr n/a
apricot àpricot abricot m. Aprikose àpricots
April àpril avril April àprils
argument, dispute dispùte dispute f. Streit m. dispùtes
arm arm Bras m. Arm arms
around aròund autour Um, ringsum n/a
arrive arrìve arriver ankommen arrìved
art art art m. Kunst f. arts
ashtray ash-tray cendrier m. Aschenbecher ash-trays
ask ask demander Bitten àsked
August àugust août August àugusts
aunt tànte tante (du côté du père) Tante (väterlicherseits) tàntes
available avàilible disponible erhältlich n/a
bachelor, single célibatàire célibataire Junggeseller, unverheiratet célibatàires

Key: Red and blue indicate problem words which I think need either to be reconsidered altogether or might need respelling; red ones are considered worse than blue ones. Green (the text, not the background shading) indicates words imported from Sambahsa... mostly small grammatical words. Backtick (`) at the end of a word indicates the word has no plural form (for number; it may have a plural form for varieties). Grave accent indicates the stressed syllable (e.g. àppel). Acute accent modifies the vowel sound, as in French (e.g. café). Pronunciation is similar to but often not exactly like the source languages.

Warning: the above table will quickly become out of date as the language changes during its development. This table will not be updated to reflect future changes in the language made after this post.

Auxlang 2012: A New 'Anglo-European' Project

I am quite happily translating Chapter 4 of La Chartreuse de Parme into Lingwa de Planeta, my current auxlang of choice. The translation has now reached 4200 words. I love LdP for its excellent worldlang features which make it accessible with relative ease to everyone, without requiring the student to have any prior knowledge of European languages. Lingwa de Planeta is welcoming to all and is remarkably expressive.

However, I do look with great temptation from time to time at Sambahsa, an Indo-European auxlang with greater inherent precision than LdP but which is much more difficult to learn and much less accessible to those without good knowledge of at least one Indo-European language. Sambahsa is precise, concise, naturalistic and expressive; however one currently needs a brain the size of a planet to learn and use it successfully. This poses a problem.

Unfortunately, my brain is only the size of a large turnip, so every time I've tried to learn Sambahsa I've only gotten a short distance before giving up and concluding that I must wait until the documentation is so extensive that even turnip-brains such as myself will be able to learn it with relative ease.

Nevertheless when you look at wonderful translations in Sambahsa, you can sense that for those readers who are already fluent in an Indo-European language it could potentially deliver huge literary benefits; quite frankly it probably outperforms all other auxlangs in its suitability for writing sophisticated literary works in the Western tradition. For example, even well respected and highly naturalistic auxangs such as Interlingua seem like creoles (at best) compared to the withering power of Sambahsa; only Sambahsa would dare to have three incredibly irregular verbs, many regular but difficult verbs which undergo major stem changes, a fleet of articles and pronouns and declensions which would make a professional linguist swoon with joy, and vocabulary from Proto-Indo-European. I feel faint...

I blacked out for a while there. I've now regained consciousness.

Sambahsa's not for the faint hearted.

Having said all that, I still really want to learn Sambahsa and I still think that the ideal auxlang for global literary use lies somewhere on the axis formed by Sambahsa at one end and Lingwa de Planeta at the other.

Meanwhile I remain tempted to create my own auxlang.

However, I have now decisively learned:

(1) I cannot create a worldlang. I'm not a polyglot and lack the necessary knowledge. I tried it before with Bahasa Internasional and wisely stopped. To create the best worldlang would require a team of persons knowledgeable in its various source languages; it's not really a job for one person. Meanwhile I'm generally quite happy with LdP. Therefore the worldlang solution for me is to continue writing in Lingwa de Planeta and to continue being a part of its community. That's the best option for reaching readers in Asia, for example. Eventually the necessary bilingual dictionaries will arise.

(2) I still yearn however to use something like Sambahsa which, when used in the specialised niche of writing highly sophisticated literature in the Western tradition, has advantages over a true worldlang; Sambahsa is only part worldlang, it mostly stands firmly in the Indo-European tradition. The nineteenth- and twentieth century auxlangs do not deliver what I'm looking for in this regard. Occidental pointed the way but only Sambahsa continued the journey to a level almost sufficient to rival English or French.

(3) "Write what you know." That is the Golden Rule for writers. Hence, as noted above, I cannot create a worldlang because I'm not a polyglot. However, I do have good working knowledge of English, French and German, sufficient to design an auxlang aimed at writing literature in the Western tradition for those already fluent in a Western European language, providing I make the language closer in design to English than to French or German, because English is the language I know best. Fortunately I do not have to reinvent the wheel because I can stand on the shoulders of giants such as Olivier Simon, the creator of Sambahsa, and Edgar de Wahl, the creator of Occidental. Occidental failed partly because it requires too much knowledge of Romance-language idioms; Sambahsa does not suffer from that problem.

(4) I learn best by doing and by exercising creativity. Probably the best way for me to learn Sambahsa is to learn a little of its grammar at a time, apply those grammatical features to a different vocabulary, analyse how it all works, and modify the grammatical scheme somewhat to suit the different ecosystem. By 'different ecosystem' I mean a vocabulary derived entirely from English, French and German without the Proto-Indo-European words except as they already exist in those three modern languages, and a grammar considerably more influenced by English (especially the verbs) but retaining many Sambahsa-like characteristics. Meanwhile, since the vocabulary I will use is going to be heavily influenced by French, this project will help me to learn French, an ongoing goal of mine. So it's a win-win endevour.

The immediate objection might be: why bother?

My answer is: why not?

It seems like a good learning exercise, and it will be fun.

What I'm proposing is not another Occidental. I've tried Occidental extensively and it is not sufficient; compared to Sambahsa it feels very weak for literature and, like Interlingua, by comparison feels like a creole (at best). However Occidental has important lessons to teach me about the regular yet reasonably naturalistic formation of clusters of words around related concepts; for that it is a worthwhile reference, along with Sambahsa. Probably the best way to describe what I'm considering is that whereas Sambahsa is a "modern Proto-Indo-European auxlang", I am proposing a "modern Anglo-European auxlang" heavily influenced by English, French, and Sambahsa (mainly the grammar rather than the vocabulary), with considerable Germanic elements, and unlike Occidental not requiring any knowledge of Romance-language idioms. It will indeed be very unlike Occidental. The essential features are as follows:

  • The project's working title is "Auxlang 2012". A better name will be chosen once the language has started to take on a recognisable form from which an appropriate name can be derived.

  • Vocabulary will be from English, French, German. Words shared by English and French are preferred, but there will be a good smattering of German vocabulary also, mainly used in cases where there is no agreement between English and French and neither the English nor French word is well suited for the orthography and phonetic structure of the language. Except for rare exceptions like articles and pronouns, Sambahsa vocabulary will not be used, although of course the above process will result in many modern words which appear similar to their Sambahsa forms. The main influence of Sambahsa is to be on the grammar, not the vocabulary; in fact the influence of English on the vocabulary will be far more marked than the influence of Sambahsa.

    Generally speaking, where there is no agreement between French and English, many nouns will be French, many adverbs will be German, and many verbs will be English; however, English nouns will take precedence in technical fields in which English terms already dominate, such as aviation and computer science. Very special attention will be paid to making the language suitable for easy use by English-speaking scientists who might wish to write scientific abstracts in the language (but unlike Interlingua they will not need to know any Romance-language idioms to do so). The language will, overall, be very obviously more Germanic than either Interlingua or Occidental, and far easier for English speakers.

  • Grammar will be heavily influenced by the brilliant design of Sambahsa, which has achieved such a wonderful combination of brevity and precision. However, some of this will be sacrificed in order to reduce difficulty; in particular a major design goal is to ensure that verbs can be very easily found in the dictionary (accordingly the verbs in Auxlang 2012, while they may undergo stem changes, will do so to a lesser degree and in a more limited and more regular fashion; for example there may be ablaut but probably not nasal infix changes). Verbs will be based on a simplification of the English scheme; the system of tense, aspect and mood will not resemble Romance languages at all. Adjectives will precede their nouns, as in English. There will be no adjectival agreement. There will be less declension than in Sambahsa. Plurals will generally be somewhat more regularly formed, although some irregularity may still be retained. The grammar will probably end up as a cross between Sambahsa and English; the most likely Sambahsa feature to remain at the core of the language (but in a more regular form) is the system of articles and pronouns, which is a highly successful system.

  • Orthography will aim to be easier than Sambahsa but more difficult than Lingwa de Planeta. The language shall not attempt to be a worldlang, so it does not have to be capable of faithfully importing so many words as Sambahsa can, but its design will keep in mind the aim of allowing English- and French-speaking scientists to easily read and recognise technical words. Nevertheless the orthography must of course be vastly easier than English or French overall; to this end the stressed syllable of all polysyllabic words will always be marked with a grave accent. Furthermore, the language freely accepts the use of the acute accent as imported from French words; this means the language will be more difficult to type on a computer than Sambahsa but will be easier than Sambahsa and Interlingua to read aloud. There will never be any doubt as to which syllable is to be accentuated. The phonetic system shall allow a few more verb sounds than most auxlangs, and there shall at times be a distinction between short and long vowels, often indicated by doubling the following consonant to indicate a short vowel.

    A final e at the end of a word, coming directly after a consonant, will mostly be silent as in French; however, final consonants will always be pronounced even without any e, unlike French. Also unlike French, the pronunciation of vowels will never be strongly nasalised.

To get started, I am experimenting with translating a list of 1000 common words in seven languages from langsites.com, which describes itself as "a site for language-lovers" where "knowledge is free and 100% recyclable!" I am eternally grateful for this wonderful website, apparently created by professional conference interpreter Brian Huebner.

Having nearly gone insane searching unsuccessfully for a decent trilingual word list for English, French and German (at least 1000 words long), finally by luck I stumbled across the aforementioned list. Voilà, pas de problème. Thus saved by the gods,I have continued with some tentative ideas as below.

The tentative Auxlang 2012 words are shown in green. Note the use of the grave accent to indicate the stressed syllable; further note that mostly the stressed syllable is as would be found in English (this language is not intended to be yet another a Romance clone; Auxlang 2012 is more closely related to Sambahsa and Frenkisch than Interlingua, and it makes no attempt to be comprehensible to Romance-language speakers without prior study). The other thing to note is the "Plural / past" column, which shows either the plural or the simple past tense forms, as appropriate; the influence of English is very obvious here. The verbal system is not a Romance one!

Anyway, that's all for now. Further details as I figure them out...

I'm not proposing this as any kind of great auxlang to solve all the world's problems, I'm just having some fun experimenting with a literary and scientific auxlang which might be worthwhile for some limited purposes. Auxlang 2012 is not intended to be a serious competitor to Sambahsa, Lingwa de Planeta, or any other language. It's just a hobby!

The other major reason for embarking on this project is to use my skills as a software architect and software developer to experiment with generating extensive self-referential documentation for the language. For example, after the 1000 "seed words" have been defined (each seed word being defined in the 7 natural languages: English, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Italian and Spanish as per the aforementioned list) I will then write software to generate a large monolingual dictionary, defining all other words using only the seed words and a few additional grammatical words (or at least coming as close to doing so as possible). That is, the computer will generate a large dictionary which will make it possible for readers to easily find every word in a text such as a short story or scientific abstract. The design philosophy will be to write both the grammar and the dictionary in the language itself, and have the computer auto-generate as much of that documentation as possible.

Accordingly, you will notice the language will have, somewhat like Occidental, a rather rigid yet logical system of word formation which is highly regular and less naturalistic than Sambahsa and Interlingua. For example, you will notice that the word for "actor" and "actress" is acter; there will not be sometimes -or and sometimes -er to represent a person who carries out a particular activity or profession, instead it will always be -er. Furthermore, I see no need for male and female forms of such nouns which describe people; obviously modern English usage is a major influence here. And so on.

Well, this should be lots of fun...

ENGLISH AUXLANG FRENCH GERMAN Plural / past
abdomen àbdomen ventre m. Bauch m. àbdomens
belly vènter ventre m. Bauch m. vènters
above ùber au-dessus de über ùber
absent àbsent absent abwesend àbsent
accept accèpt accepter annehmen accèpted
accident àccident accident m. Unfall m. àccidents
accompany acòmpany accompagner Begleiten acòmpanyed
accomplish acòmplish accomplir Vollbringer acòmplished
accuse accùse accuser anklagen accùsed
actor, actrice àcter acteur, actrice Schauspieler -in àcters
add add ajouter hinzufügen àdded
address addrèsse addresse f. Adresse f., Anschrift addrèsses
administrative administratìf administratif Verwaltungs- n/a
adventure avènture aventure Abenteuer avèntures
adventurer avènturer aventurier, aventurière
avènturers
adventurous avèntureus aventureux, aventureuse
n/a

Friday, 17 February 2012

BIG NEWS: L’Étranger by Camus in Sambahsa!

Recently the inventor of Sambahsa, Dr Oliver Simon, announced that for the first time an entire novel has been translated into the language.

That would be exciting enough in itself, but it gets even better: the chosen novel is L’Étranger by Albert Camus. This is one of the great novels of French literature, written by one of its greatest authors. In English the title is often translated as The Stranger but is perhaps better thought of as The Outsider. That Sambahsa is capable of translating such a classic bodes very well.

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to see in the new auxlangs of the twenty-first century, such as Sambahsa and Lingwa de Planeta. Serious, major literary translations which retain most of the literary expressiveness of the original but which are easier to read and which are thus, at least theoretically, more internationally accessible.

The title in Sambahsa is Is Gospoti.

For further details, please see the original announcement.

Bravo, bravo, bravissimo!

Thank you, Olivier!



P.S. This news is a major temptation for me to take time out of my Lingwa de Planeta studies to read Is Gospoti in Sambahsa, however due to being extremely short of time I will probably delay reading it until 2013. This could be good timing since there is now increasing interest in Sambahsa and new students are currently joining its small community; accordingly by 2013 there will probably be further improvements in resources and documentation, produced by the community, which will make reading easier. For example, an online Glossword-style dictionary would be very convenient; even better would be an online dictionary in which one could type the conjugated form of a verb, as read in the novel, and which would automatically retrieve the corresponding verbal stem and its meaning.

Joy of Literature: Kotava and Occidental added

The Joy of Literature, a companion site to this blog, contains reference translations which are useful to students of auxlangs.

The site continues to grow and now contains translated literature in Lingwa de Planeta, Sambahsa, Frenkisch, Interlingua, Occidental and Kotava. Apart from myself, the very kind contributors to the site include Dmitry Ivanov (Lingwa de Planeta), Dr Olivier Simon (Sambahsa), David Parke (Frenkisch) and Sabrina Benkelloun (Kotava).

The main focus of the site is currently the French novel by Stendhal, La Chartreuse de Parme, from which various chapters are being translated into various auxlangs. This serves as a comparative showcase of the literary capabilities of these auxlangs.

Today I have added a Kotava translation kindly supplied by Sabrina Benkelloun. Kotava is a mature a priori language in which a significant body of literature already exists, hosted at the Wikikrenteem site.

Personally, a priori languages are not currently my preferred cup of tea, since I prefer a posteriori languages partly for practical reasons and partly for their educational value. However, as Henry David Thoreau said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds...", so there is nothing to stop me from changing my mind in future and coming to like a priori languages. After all, an a priori language, suitably designed, does not so much favour one group of students (say, speakers of European languages) over another (say, speakers of Asian languages) but is approximately equally difficult for everyone, thus making it neutral. However, the trouble with Kotava is the English-language resources available for learning Kotava are rather limited; accordingly I've never been able to properly assess the language. Kotava would presumably become more popular if it were better documented in languages other than French; good French documentation exists.

I am of course unfortunately far too busy to learn any additional languages myself this year. I'm already fully committed to working on my LdP translation of the Stendhal novel, which is now 4200 words long.

Today I have also added the lengthy Occidental translation from the first and second chapters which I completed a year ago in January 2011; I had neglected to add it to the Joy of Literature site until now. It is my longest translation into any auxlang to date, 5787 words long. I no longer work in Occidental, having abandoned it in favour of LdP; therefore the LdP translation will undoubtedly soon become my longest.

Many thanks to everyone involved for your very kind contributions, advice and assistance. I hope the Joy of Literature continues to be useful for students interested in reading and writing literature in auxlangs.


P.S. By the way, I am aware that there are some other translations of the start of Chapter 1 in various auxlangs which are not yet available on the Joy of Literature site. They are however available in the form of earlier posts within this blog, the Joy of Languages. My apologies; I just haven't had time to transfer them yet due to being very busy with other things in life. I plan to do so when eventually I get around to translating the entirety of Chapter 1 into Lingwa de Planeta, so they will all be there for comparison.

Thursday, 9 February 2012

Journey's end? LdP and Sambahsa

This should be an interesting and useful post, I think.

Really what this post is about is taking into account everything I've leaned over the past two years of voyaging amongst auxlangs and compressing it into one small diamond.

Language, I think, is a vast interconnected net of associated concepts which cannot be entirely understood by analysis at any one stratum alone (from the microscopic world of the grapheme, to the medium of the individual word, to the macroscopic worlds of the idiomatic expression and the sentence) because interrelationships exist within and between all strata simultaneously, and these are inseparable from our culture and from the nature of our brains and bodies. Like the myriad connections and relationships and associations and interactions which exist at all strata in the human world (from the infinitesimal world of neurotransmitters at the synapse, to the vast interconnected neural network of the brain, to the elegant musculature of the larynx, to the sublime physiology of the ear and the eye, to the intricate symphony of neuromuscular coordination that allows the hand to hold a pen and write, to the everyday world in which we shake the hand of a friend, to the worlds of the family and the town and the city and the province and the nation and the United Nations) language is connected and holistic and, in its human form, inseparable from our nature and our cultures. Art, science, culture, language, history, evolution, human nature are all intertwined with and connected to the languages we speak, write and read. Language is as mysterious and as vast in its interconnected structure as is the human brain and as is human history. Language is culture and biological human nature, inseparable.

So, no wonder I have not found it easy to try to understand language well enough to understand what the ideal auxlang would look like! Trying to understand that, as the lyrics of the pop song say, is like trying to throw your arms around the world. And, as the song suggests, you are going to wake up with a bad hangover.

The thing about a language is that once you've learned it, it seems easy. Once you've learned it, you've changed the structure of your brain because your brain actively adapts in response to studying the language. This is known as brain plasticity. Your perspective concerning the relative ease of a language compared to other languages is changed by the very act of learning a language. It's all circular.

Several thousand concepts, expressed in words, the grammatical relationship between words, and in other structures such as idiomatic expressions, must be learned in order to fluently use a language for literary purposes. These cannot properly or accurately be learned in total isolation from culture but must be related to culture; they are extensions of culture, one might say. Although some languages are easier than others, depending on the current structure of your brain, its inherent abilities, its age, and the languages you already know well, there is no short cut. Languages are hard. All of them.

Nevertheless, as long as we generally understand all of the above and thus do not fool ourselves into thinking that there will ever be an effortless auxlang, and provided we go into the endeavour of learning an auxlang on the basis of it being expected to take us about three to five years to learn to a good level of general utility, then we can arguably call certain auxlangs "easy" but only relative to more difficult languages, and bearing in mind that one man's meat is another man's poison (what is easy for a native speaker of Chinese may be difficult for a native speaker of English, and vice versa).

I don't think there is any way around needing a large vocabulary. No matter how many schemes we invent to try to form words out of regular constructs by compounding and by the use of affixes and the like, there is in this universe an infinite number of things to be named and an infinite number of concepts to be referred to. Certainly we should make an effort, when designing auxlangs, to use regular patterns which make the memorisation of vocabulary easy, but this need not be overdone; that is, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that an infinite number of things can be given names in the vocabulary of an auxlang without having to remember at least several thousand unique nouns such as "rose" or "petunia". We cannot go about the place saying "red-flower-with-thorns" instead of "rose" in any general-purpose language. So, it's an illusion to try to endlessly simplify vocabulary. Words are words. We need thousands of the little buggers. And there's no way around that in the long run.

The next logical step from the above paragraph is that although there may be a place for some a priori words and other a priori elements in a language, the majority of concept clusters need to be based upon a posteriori words; apart from anything else, since vocabulary is theoretically infinite in size, and ultimately any a priori scheme would need to be defined by its relationship to existing a posteriori vocabularies in other languages, we might as well just cut out the middle-man, save everyone a needless additional layer of pain, and use an a posteriori vocabulary. Since grammar is not entirely separable from vocabulary (everything is interconnected at multiple strata simultaneously, including both vocabulary and grammar), quite frankly we might as well use many a posteriori grammatical constructs as well (obviously we may wisely employ a scheme to simplify and make more regular these constructs, and the addition of some a priori grammatical constructs can also be worthwhile).

As far as what vocabulary to use, derived from which natural languages, that really comes down to the central question: who is going to use the language and for what purpose? Since we've already decided above that a posteriori vocabulary is best (albeit simplified and made more regular), it makes sense to choose source languages whose vocabulary will appeal to or be culturally relevant to the expected users. I'm interested in writing literature in auxlangs for global rather than regional consumption, in such a way that makes that literature easier for most people than the extensive difficulties of reading (silently or aloud) literary English. The most likely readers of that literature would be internet users from around the world who are well educated, probably already speak a European natlang for international communication (most commonly English) but as likely as not do not speak any European language natively. They will most likely be people interested in learning about many other cultures, present and past, like I am. Therefore the sensible choice of vocabulary would probably be divided about equally between English words (or words which are easily memorised by English speakers), and words from major non-European languages. In other words, a worldlang with a very significant, if not major, influence of English on its vocabulary but replete with a culturally diverse vocabulary of significant past and present world languages.

Just in case it is not clear from the above, Esperanto would absolutely not meet these vocabulary requirements! Neither would Interlingua and neither would any of the other major auxlangs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those languages were invented when the world was a very different place.

Compared to the monolithic task of importing and documenting vocabulary, the other desirable features of an auxlang are relatively trivial to achieve except the first:

  1. self-referential (dictionary and grammar written in the auxlang itself)
  2. very easy pronunciation
  3. very easy orthography
  4. very easy dictionary use (quickly and easily find any word seen in a text)
  5. relatively easy to memorise, at least compared to most natural languages
  6. regular, logical grammar of moderate difficulty (the moderate difficulty is required in order to: retain very good precision when needed; minimise the need for the idiomatic expressions which a weaker grammar would unfortunately require; allow the idiomatic expressions of natlangs to easily be translated into plain language which is globally accessible regardless of cultural background)
  7. extensible (able to accept an infinite number of new words and concepts in future, from diverse languages around the world, to express concepts from diverse cultures)

Putting this all together, my journey has very clearly and very definitely brought me to two languages: Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) and Sambahsa. These two languages are the destination of my two-year voyage amongst constructed languages.

The train has reached the final station. I've arrived. Two years of research paid off.

Welcome to the destination: "LdP-Sambahsa Station".

The answer to my literary needs lies somewhere on the continuum between LdP and Sambahsa. At present it appears that LdP will best meet my needs but I can always switch to Sambahsa next year if for any reason it doesn't.

LdP outscores Sambahsa on points 2, 3, 4, and 5 although even it is not as easy (intentionally so) as it potentially could be on these points. Sambahsa outscores LdP on point 6 and maybe 7 but at a cost of greater overall difficulty; this is by design.

And, most significantly, should neither LdP nor Sambahsa meet my needs then the solution would be simply to write in a modified dialect of one of these two languages (which essentially would merely represent a middle-ground between them, by slightly modifying one of the languages to be slightly more like the other). I think, in summary, that the best compromise for a global literary auxlang has already been invented in the form of these two languages; both are excellent approaches. There is nothing much to be gained by starting from scratch and reinventing the vocabularies; their vocabularies are already excellent, although with different regional biases.

Well, I'm off to see if they sell cups of tea at this station.

It's been a long ride...

Saturday, 4 February 2012

Second Anniversary of the Joy of Languages

I started this blog just over two years ago, on Friday 29 January 2010.

During that time I've generally made a fool of myself by changing my mind countless times, repeatedly making so-called 'final' decisions which didn't last very long. That's the embarrassing part. The less embarrassing part is that hopefully at least to some small extent I've made a worthwhile contribution to the topic of the use of international auxiliary languages for literature.

Well, I suppose I should not feel so embarrassed since, after all, a blog is a very different thing to a book. In a blog, the writer does his thinking and does his experimentation in public, more or less in real time. Of course it is natural that by a process of trial and error some things will work well and other things will not work so well. And of course it is natural that if hardly anything works well, and there do not seem to be any credible alternatives left to try, one will revisit those things which have already been found not to work so well, in the hope that perhaps upon the second, third, fourth or fifth try they might start working, perhaps due to having in the meantime gained more experience.

That is pretty much the story of this blog.

Curiously, the one language to which I have successfully returned and to which as it happened I awarded my personal "Best Literary Language" award two years in a row was Lingwa de Planeta (LdP). Like many of the other auxlangs, I repeatedly abandoned and then resumed the used of this language; unlike the others, I am still very actively using it now.

Lingwa de Planeta is currently the auxlang in which I have made my second-longest translation (currently 3766 words and rapidly increasing); my longest translation so far was in Occidental (about 5787 words). I have no doubt that in the near future my LdP translation will surpass the length of the Occidental one. In short, for whatever reason (these things are rather difficult to reliably predict or to analyse) it so happens that no other auxlang has been so productive for me in a literary sense than LdP. To put it another way, it seems that in general LdP has been very effectively designed.

Recently I found that I could read Esperanto much more easily than before, despite not having studied it much in recent months. Actually I now realise that this is pretty much true of any of the major auxlangs, I just happened to notice it first with respect to Esperanto. I have also noticed that my comprehension of written French has greatly improved (whereas I still can hardly write a correct sentence in French, far less a literary paragraph). That is, there seems to have occurred a simultaneous improvement in my ability to read multiple languages, even those languages I have not been actively studying. I now understand, after reading an excellent non-fiction book called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, that what really was happening was that my brain was changing as a result of the intensive study of languages, in such a way that improved my ability to parse and comprehend written language; this is known as brain plasticity. Presumably this is the physiological mechanism which explains why the study of auxlangs has been found to be beneficial to learning natlangs.

I have focussed nearly entirely on written language and hardly at all on conversational language; thus I cannot undertake significant conversations in any auxlang. However I can read aloud quite fluently and expressively in LdP, Occidental, and Interlingua, providing that I have previously studied the text in advance, using a dictionary to identify any words which are unfamiliar to me. In the case of French I have focussed nearly entirely on reading and hence can hardly write or converse in the language. This focus on written language is appropriate for me as a writer and reader, here in Australia.

So, where to from here? To paraphrase Douglas Adams, "I've got the answer but I don't think you're going to like it..."

Enter the Twenty-First Century

I noticed something recently. It's obviously no longer the nineteenth century, when Esperanto was invented, a fact of which I was already well aware. But what dawned on me very recently was something equally profound: it's also no longer the twentieth century, when Interlingua and most of the other major competitors to Esperanto were invented and published. What I mean is, it dawned on me that we now live in a very, very different world.

In short, times have changed.

The relative importance of different languages in the world (that is, in the global economy and in international trade and politics) has changed. The languages of Asia and the Middle East have become very important and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future; the region of Central Asia and the Near East also holds a place on centre stage in world events such that its languages will continue to increase in global importance. And for me as an Australian writer in the twenty-first century it is now absurd to think of using a language for world literary use which does not include great influences from non-European languages. Business people in Australia regularly learn Mandarin, Japanese or Indonesian; we do not expect our customers and suppliers and business partners to necessarily be fluent in English. Nevertheless, English remains of paramount importance in the world today and is the de facto international language of business and science. Other major Western European languages are also highly important globally, especially Spanish, French and Portuguese, or regionally, especially German and Russian. As the saying goes, we live in interesting times.

What I am interested in is the idea of writers and readers from all over the world, from very different cultures and whose native language is very often not a European one, being able to enjoy literature without translation. This would be achieved by the use of one or more auxlangs designed for global rather than regional use. Such an auxlang should be of sufficient ease such that professional writers could write flawless novels (with the help of a professional editor but without a translator) after only five years of dedicated study and such that regular readers could use it to comfortably read a novel (with the aid of a dictionary) after only five years of casual study. I had previously hoped that shorter time-frames might be possible but after two years of studying auxlangs I have concluded that five years is realistic. (By the way, such a five-year time-frame is unrealistically low for English literature. One or two decades might be more realistic.)

Writers reading this will understand why I seek to use an auxlang for such international literature rather than writing in a natlang and relying upon translations into other natlangs; a translation increases the distance between writer and reader and much is lost in translation. By choosing a language which both writer and reader can use, the full literary value of a work of literature, aimed at a truly global market, can be realised. For example, even with my lowly intermediate-level French, which allows me to read French novels painfully slowly (so slowly that I've never completed one), it is absolutely obvious that the English translations pale by comparison to the original French text, reducing the great to merely good.

Now, does writing in an auxlang mean that we have to forego some of the incredibly subtle nuances of natlangs? Yes, absolutely! But we should not worry about that since such things are generally lost in translation anyway, especially to languages dramatically different to the original language. Furthermore, writing in an auxlang forces us, if we endeavour to write well, to abandon the idiomatic expressions of our native language and instead make a conscious effort to reach out to the reader (whose first language might be, for example, Farsi or Mandarin) using literary plain language which could reasonably be understood despite major cultural differences between writer and reader. This is a wonderful, creative way to write.

Furthermore, I could embark on spending the next decade learning Russian in order to fully enjoy a short story by Gogol but might well still be oblivious to much of the fine nuance in his prose. Maybe it would take me two decades to become fluent enough as a reader of Russian to truly understand every aspect to a level similar to a native speaker. But by reading the same works translated into, say, Lingwa de Planeta by a native speaker of Russian, I could enjoy probably 70-80% of the full effect of reading the original Russian text after three to five years of studying that auxiliary language. The next week, hypothetically speaking, I might read a novella translated from Chinese or Arabic or Indonesian, made easily accessible via Lingwa de Planeta. All of that is merely good, but where it really becomes great is when writers from around the world start writing directly in Lingwa de Planeta, such that readers from all around the world can read their works without translation. Of course, all this is pie in the sky stuff, but it could well become real.

And just in case you think that computers will remove the need for auxlangs because computer-aided translation will make cross-cultural communication easy, I have three things to say: firstly, this is literature we are talking about and literature is quintessentially human and should remain so: an interplay between human writer and human reader, not a machine language; secondly, when it comes to art we should not become dependent on machines and neither should we depend on machines for international cross-cultural understanding if we wish to survive as a planet and as a species; thirdly, we are a very long way from having good machine-translations of literature.

So why not Esperanto, Interlingua, or one of the other major auxlangs from the nineteenth or twentieth centuries? Because they have already failed, and they are gaining less and less traction rather than more and more traction with the general public, because times have changed and the world has moved on. Esperanto, the world's most successful auxlang, is simply too European, too difficult, and too old-fashioned to capture the imagination of writers and readers on a large scale throughout Asia, Africa and the Middle East. It is like a kind of quirky wind-up toy, a gigantic and impressive toy which consists of a great mechanism of springs and cogs; certainly an interesting curiosity but one quickly grows tired of it when one notices that it hardly contains a single word root from one's own region of the world.

Quite frankly, Esperanto by and large does not even capture the imagination of many people in English-speaking countries. I'm not saying, dear reader, that you should not learn Esperanto, by all means go ahead and learn it if you wish to, but in my opinion although Esperanto is a workable language it is rather like a nineteenth-century European locomotive, puffing its way around the world in a great cloud of coal dust and steam, engendering bemused looks of disbelief from those it passes by. Nevertheless I think its inventor, Ludwig Zamenhof, was a genius, was apparently a man of very noble convictions, genuinely did something good for the world, and that his invention, Esperanto, was a great achievement... for the nineteenth century. Times have changed and it is time to move on. The same goes for other highly artificial constructed languages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Interlingua and its kin are less like clockwork toys, being more naturalistic in appearance; that is, people could easily think Interlingua or Occidental were actually natural languages at first glance. However they are relentlessly European to the point of being largely inaccessible to those whose native language is not a European one. By the way, I'm not implying that naturalistic auxlangs are necessarily better than more artificial ones; rather, my conclusion is that none of the auxlangs of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, regardless of whether they are naturalistic or artificial in flavour, will succeed in the twenty-first century (failing a government decree).

My personal conclusion, then, is three-fold:

- all auxlangs suitable for literary use are difficult

- the auxlangs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lack relevance in today's changing world in which non-European languages and cultures are now of first-order importance globally; they are therefore not seen as being worth the effort (especially since the already considerable difficulty of learning them is at least doubly difficult to those who do not speak any European language; those accepting such heroic effort generally choose to learn English instead of a constructed auxlang)

- only those twenty-first century auxlangs which include a large degree of influence (in vocabulary and grammar) from non-European languages and which are truly "up with the times" in their design paradigms (thus making them of acceptable difficulty to consumers globally) have any chance of great global literary success in a free market (without government decree).

This leads me specifically to my decision that, unless I have a change of heart, I'm not going to bother learning any nineteenth- or twentieth-century auxlangs. I hereby permanently give up Esperanto, Interlingua, and all the rest of the auxlangs of the last two centuries.


What I am saying is: the answer lies with the new not with the old.


Fortunately there are two good candidates that I am currently aware of, and should neither of these prove to be successful for my writing endeavours then I will probably seek to become a co-inventor of some new language, unless in the meantime another excellent language is released.

The two auxlangs which remain for me are therefore, quite clearly:

(1) Lingwa de Planeta
(2) Sambahsa

I am currently focussing on LdP for the remainder of 2012, in order to give it a really thorough and fair literary evaluation and not just a half-hearted test drive. If it turns out that LdP does not meet my needs then the next step will be to focus on Sambahsa in 2013. I do expect, however, that with some relatively minor evolutionary changes to improve its still-young grammar, which presumably will be made by the LdP community over the course of the year, it is quite likely that LdP will meet most of my literary needs. Furthermore, LdP is easier than Sambahsa for those from the Far East.

I do think that the solution to a viable twenty-first century literary auxlang for popular global use lies somewhere on the continuum between these two worldlangs: the relatively easy LdP, with its free-wheeling and non-threatening grammar which is accessible to everyone but which at times lacks precision, or the intimidating and demanding grammar of Sambahsa (simplified from Proto-Indo-European) which delivers relentless precision. Mostly I prefer the former but sometimes I crave the latter.

If neither LdP nor Sambahsa work out for me, then I will be looking for other new twenty-first century auxlangs or becoming involved in creating one myself, perhaps as a kind of compromise between the two (such a project would probably require international collaboration right from the start, with at least one team member representing each major language group; it would not be an impossible or endless task with the right team).

I will not, however, be writing literature in nineteenth-century or twentieth-century auxlangs. So, it's goodbye to Esperanto, Interlingua, et. al.

Nau nu zai go for!
Now we are making progress!

Onward...

P.S. Many, many thanks to the brilliant inventors of LdP and Sambahsa. Your work is keeping the dream of better international communication and understanding alive for the twenty-first century.