Sousic: a new language for literature

Big news! Since I finished writing The Joy of Languages eight months ago I have not been idle. And more to the point I have not given up on constructed languages. On the contrary, I have created one intended for serious literary use. The language is called Sousic.

Sousic is a practical artistic language primarily designed for ease of reading. So it's an artlang not an auxlang but it's a practical one intended to be reasonably easy to use. I call it a litlang, a language primarily designed for accessible literary use.

Here's what it looks like:

Sousic

Kan you read dhi? Dhi Lugha es Sousic, practical Lugha pro Literatur.

 

English

Can you read this? This language is Sousic, a practical language for literature.

 
The three primary source languages for Sousic vocabulary are French, English and Arabic. Lugha is the Arabic word for language. The core of Sousic vocabulary is comprised of words shared by English and French, such as practical and Literatur.

Although many of the words of Sousic look identical to or similar to English, French or Arabic words, the rules of Sousic pronunciation are entirely regular. Therefore once the rules of pronunciation have been learned it is easy to read texts either silently or aloud. The Latin alphabet is used without diacritics, so the language is easy to type on any device. Stress falls lightly upon the final syllable of all words except those containing the long Arabic vowels aa, ii or uu. Much of the rich vocabulary of English, French and Arabic is available by virtue of a sophisticated orthography designed primarily for optimal ease of reading (not maximal ease of writing). Above all, Sousic is not a competitor of Esperanto, Interlingua or other auxlangs. Sousic is an artistic project. Sousic is designed for literary use not for active conversational use. Sousic is a language for readers.

Here's another example:

Sousic

Je sui australian Scriter. Natif Lugha os je es English. Dream os je es tu scri Literatur in pluri Lugha. To es Voyage os je, Voyage pro aprend dhas Lugha. Al nom Robert Winter es un literar Pseudonym.

English

I am an Australian writer. My native language is English. My dream is to write literature in several languages. That is my voyage, a voyage to learn those languages. The name Robert Winter is a literary pseudonym.

You can also read a growing literary translation on the official Sousic website.

Note that nouns begin with an upper-case letter and proper nouns are written in italics. Regular verbs are not conjugated. Tense is often indicated by adverbs or context. There is only one irregular verb in the language (the verb for 'to be'). Nouns are never declined, not even for the plural; nouns are generally considered to be intrinsically singular unless indicated otherwise by the presence of other indicator words (such as in the above example the plural determiner dhas which means 'those'). The language contains definite and indefinite articles but their use is optional. Adjectives are never declined. Adjectives can be used as adverbs without any change in spelling.

Sousic has been in serious development since mid-2012. Now in January 2013 it has been simplified, making it powerfully easier to use. It no longer has the complicated and difficult features which it originally possessed early in its development (for example as mentioned in my comment to the previous post ...and the journey ends dated 11 June 2012 16:33). However at this early stage of its development it only has a tiny vocabulary. Writers interested in using the language should wait a few months until the language has stabilised and better documentation becomes available.

If you are interested in learning more about Sousic, please visit its official website:

Sousic: an artlang

And if you would like to follow its development or to discuss Sousic, please visit:

The Sousic Blog

The Sousic Blog will be my primary blog from now on. I may discuss features of other constructed languages there from time to time, such as Sambahsa, Occidental, Lingwa de Planeta, Frenkisch and Universalglot since those languages are influential upon the design of Sousic. I may also discuss any new and interesting constructed languages (artlangs or auxlangs) which I encounter in my research for Sousic. So, please head over to The Sousic Blog if you would like to join in the fun...

... and the journey ends

More that two years ago, on Friday 29 January 2010, I wrote the first post of The Joy of Languages, which was entitled The journey begins...

Nothing lasts forever. It's time for this journey to come to an end. And this time, to really end.

So I will finish that sentence ... and the journey ends.

I've essentially already gone through several cycles of this blog. Ending it and starting it again, revisiting each of the major international auxiliary languages several times in a desperate and frustrated attempt to make one of them work for me as a writer and as a reader, for the purposes of creating and enjoying sophisticated works of literature, only to find in the end that the language other than English in which it is now by far the easiest for me to read literature is French!

Something is badly wrong here. After devoting more than two years of my life to the serious study of constructed auxlangs, they were all outperformed by a complicated and difficult natural language, French, which despite its enormous difficulty for the writer is relatively easy for the reader.

Since I'm a novelist and my intention all along has been to find some auxlang in which I could write novels which supposedly would have been easier for people around the world (for example, in China) to read than reading the equivalent novel in English, that is not a great result.

It has been a bizarre discovery for me to have found, without any doubt, that French is much easier for me to read than any constructed or planned language. The reason is mostly because either an auxlang is too difficult to read, having an exhausting and unnatural grammar (such as Esperanto, which seems mechanical and also very unsatisfying stylistically) or because it is too ambiguous due to being naturalistic but lacking important features of the natural languages from which it was derived which (although difficult for the writer) supply precision for the reader which makes it much easier to comprehend sophisticated literary texts without confusion (a good example here is that French is hugely easier to read than Interlingua after a few years of study of both).

So, what have I learned from all this? A surprising fact:

Being easier to speak or easier to write does not make a language easier to read. On the contrary, generally speaking it seems the usual result is that this makes a language more difficult to read.

Auxlangs are primarily designed to be easier to speak and easier to write than natural languages, because they are designed for active use in everyday, general-purpose communication. They are not primarily designed for writing sophisticated works of literature. That is, they are not primarily artistic. And, here's the clue: literature is art. Reading literature is experiencing art.

So, I've been barking up the wrong tree for the past two years. Failing to understand that ease of writing does not equal ease of reading, I've been focussing my attention on auxlangs (which, on this blog, is a term I use to mean constructed international auxiliary languages) which were, in fact, never going to deliver what I was looking for, which was ease of reading sophisticated works of literature; and not just ease of reading but also having robust artistic merit and richness.

I'm not saying that worthwhile works of literature cannot be written in Esperanto or Interlingua, for they surely can and surely have been; but I am saying that it is utterly ridiculous to me that they are more difficult to read than French. I'm just not interested in pursuing them, given that fact.

So, the destination of this blog, the end point, is that I've realised that what I'm looking for is not an auxlang at all. I'm looking for an artlang. I'm trying to create internationally accessible art.

My attempts to work around the problem by creating an auxlang of my own invention were similarly barking up the wrong tree, because firstly (as I wrote in my previous post) it is completely impractical for one person alone to create a modern auxlang suitable for global use in the twenty-first century (such a project requires a team of at least twenty people) and secondly because a typical auxlang is not in fact what I should be looking for. I should be looking for an artlang, one which is reasonably easy to read but also highly expressive and beautiful for literary use. A key feature of such an artlang would be that it is more difficult to speak and to write than most auxlangs, but easier to read (that is, for the purposes of reading sophisticated works of literature rather than merely simple texts).

If the above seems preposterous then imagine the following: suppose that French did not exist as a natural language. Some brilliant group of inventors then invents a language exactly like French, calls the language la langue de la littérature (LdL) and declares it to be an artlang. The world has never, in this hypothetical scenario, seen French before, but suppose that Esperanto exists. Esperantists would look at LdL and declare it to be so absurdly difficult to write that it could never be a viable auxlang; they would laugh at it and say it is ridiculous to think that anybody, for example in Australia, would be able to or wish to learn to read literature in such a difficult language. Then along would come me, a monolingual English-speaking Australian, and I would spend a couple of years trying to learn Esperanto and trying to learn LdL. I would give up on Esperanto several times, finding it incredibly frustrating. I would be able to speak and write simple sentences fairly easily in Esperanto. I would find LdL very difficult but would keep studying it. I would not be able to speak and write in LdL to any very significant degree, because doing so is much more difficult than it is in Esperanto. Nevertheless, I would to my great surprise discover that it is much easier to read sophisticated literature in LdL than in Esperanto, because the former is far more precise and far less ambiguous. This is definitely not preposterous because this is exactly what happened in my journey.

I studied auxlangs for two years and ended up choosing French as my preferred second language for the purpose of reading sophisticated works of literature, partly because it was the easiest.

Now, the interesting thing about this outcome is that an artlang (although not one as massive as French) is quite possible for one single writer to create, and there is an established historical precedent for doing so (for example, Tolkien). Also, people will gladly read short passages or dialogue written in such artlangs, as seen in blockbuster movies, television series, or best-selling novels, whereas few people will gladly read literature written in any auxlang.

So, my journey is over. This blog has ended. I'm finished with auxlangs (at least until such time as a better auxlang, suitable for the twenty-first century, matures or is invented, which will probably require a major project over a decade or so by at least twenty dedicated professionals; when I say "matures", a good example here is Lingwa de Planeta, which shows potential for the future).

I remain interested in writing in constructed languages, but the constructed languages in which I write will be artlangs rather than auxlangs. But such a massive and fundamental change in my approach deserves a new blog, or perhaps even a new book, and does not belong here.

I am currently working on the creation of an artlang and might also possibly be interested in writing in Sambahsa, which in my opinion is arguably better classified as an artlang rather than an auxlang, which explains why it managed to somewhat hold my interest right to the end of this journey.

I would like to very sincerely thank everyone who has commented on this blog and especially those very generous people who have assisted me at length in my endeavours here and elsewhere.

Now at the end of the journey, I will close with what Hemingway described as probably one of the finest words in the entire English language: farewell.

Robert Winter
Brisbane, Australia
May 2012

End of the Auxlang 2012 project

The last seven posts I've made have tracked my Auxlang 2012 project, which was an attempt to create a workable international auxiliary language, through various iterations and using extremely different approaches, all of which in the end turned out to be abortive.

This is the end of that project. It is now cancelled.

The reason is that I came to understand that for me personally to attempt to create a general-purpose auxlang for widespread international use is folly. It's just not a viable thing for me to undertake.

The days of Zamenhof (the nineteenth century) and later von Wahl (the twentieth century) are gone. Polyglots who speak only European languages will not create the successful auxlang of the future.

In my opinion, to make a general-purpose auxlang which could be truly popular for global use in the twenty-first century would require an initial team of at least twenty highly skilled people from around the world. Even so, those twenty people would represent nothing more than a small pilot project, a proof of concept, a demonstration that such a language is indeed possible.

The initial team would in my opinion have to include:

• at least one highly talented, highly motivated native speaker for each of the six official languages of the United Nations (Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish); this means the team must have a minimum of six source-language experts
• at least one professional linguist capable of editing the grammar
• at least one professional lexicographer capable of editing the dictionary
• at least two software developers capable of writing software to support the language
• at least one project manager capable of planning and coordinating packages of work
• at least one technical writer capable of producing documentation for the public
• at least one professional psychologist to advise on human factors relevant to good design
• at least one test manager who could manage trials of written and spoken communication
• at least one business executive willing to assess the language for business use
• at least one senior scientist willing to assess the language for scientific use
• at least one experienced writer willing to test the language for literary use
• at least one experienced manager to lead the project

After adding administrative and accounting support to this, and taking into account the need to oversee trials which would involve dozens of people in testing the language conversationally from time to time during its iterative development, nothing less than twenty people would be sufficient.

Realistically, perhaps the most likely scenario would be a cooperative project between at least six universities with at least three people involved at each university. This would provide the necessary administrative and accounting support, physical and virtual infrastructure, and intellectual ecosystem most likely to engender a good outcome. It would have to be a highly multidisciplinary, interdepartmental project not isolated merely to linguistics departments.

However, universities are not the only places such a project could be undertaken. Nevertheless, a successful project would have to be seriously managed and approached with the same degree of commitment found, for example, in leading not-for-profit humanitarian organisations.

Until we get that serious about creating a good auxlang for global use, we're not going to get one. Considering that there are nearly seven billion people in the world, the fact that no university has managed to get twenty professionals from around the world to collaborate on a pilot project to demonstrate a proof-of-concept new language (which could facilitate global communication and improve intercultural exchange and intercultural understanding) is, quite frankly, pathetic.

But one person alone cannot do the work of twenty. And even the twenty could merely demonstrate the potential, hopefully to the point where there would be sufficient interest from major governments, corporations, not-for-profit organisations or inter-governmental agencies in undertaking a large project replete with bilingual grammars and bilingual dictionaries in dozens of languages. Not for the purpose of establishing some kind of linguistic tyranny (which would be abhorrent) but rather for the purpose of providing practical means of international communication which would be welcoming to all; for example, rather than having a single global auxlang project there could initially be three alternative projects and over time people could decide and vote upon which they preferred to continue funding. Why bother? Because it would be worthwhile having an effective, neutral means of international communication suitable for the twenty-first century and it would perhaps be significant, in the long term, to the survival of humanity; as a civilisation and as a species we must learn to understand each other better in order to build a sustainable and workable future together.

But I digress.

So, my Auxlang 2012 project is cancelled. However, there is something useful which I am capable of doing as one person and as one writer: not an auxlang but an artlang.

More on that in my next post.

Simpel Симпел ㄙ—ㄇㄆㄜㄌ सिमपल سِمپَل : An Auxlang

The Auxlang 2012 project continues.

After two months of iterations (including brief experiments called Prototip, Luqa ya Afrika, and Scientifica), the project has stabilised in a form called Simpel.

Meanwhile, I have stopped work on the literary translation into Lingwa de Planeta; unexpectedly I found myself burning out, becoming totally exhausted working on that translation. The exhausting part was (as is the case with nearly all auxlangs) translating idiomatic expressions; there is not enough grammar to make doing so quick and easy. It takes a huge amount of thought (but once written, the result is relatively easy to read and understand). After an estimated 131 hours of work I had translated 5331 words of French into 4731 words of LdP. In the end, the best speed I could manage was a little better than 1 word per minute. I noticed that it was no longer getting any easier and that no matter how hard I tried I could not increase my speed of translation; it probably would have taken a few more months to increase significantly. My comfortable reading speed of LdP is about 30 words per minute, including use of the dictionary. Thus, I can read LdP 30 times faster than I can write it. My unexpected conclusion is that LdP, at least in its current form, is a language which I prefer to use for reading rather than for writing. There are some great stories to read: 'Mey Nocha, o Dronigina' (by Nikolai Gogol) is superb and 'Marjen Raterford she maoris' is good fun and very enjoyable so far (I've read the first three chapters). However, overall I remain concerned that LdP retains too much of a pidgin-like or creole-like flavour at times. The longest literary translation I have made into any auxlang remains 5787 words of Occidental. To the best of my recollection, writing Occidental was similarly difficult but was much faster than 1 word per minute; therefore it appears that Occidental is the fastest auxlang for writing that I've discovered (however, to write Occidental literature one needs extensive help from an editor who speaks a Romance language... just as I needed extensive help from an editor fluent in LdP). Unfortunately I was never fully happy with the style of Occidental either, but for different reasons. However, putting aside all emotions and all considerations of aesthetics and style, from a completely objective point of view the current situation is that the best language I've discovered for writing is Occidental and for reading is LdP. By the way, Sambahsa is wonderful and inspiring but unfortunately I can neither write nor read it easily.

Nevertheless I still dream of a language which combines the respective advantages of LdP and Sambahsa yet minimises their respective disadvantages; Occidental is somewhat in this space but not quite what I'm looking for. And so, unexpectedly, I suppose my two-year journey has led me to understand that perhaps what I really want to do is to use existing auxlangs for reading and to invent a new auxlang for writing. Thus, I shall continue work on Simpel.

For a description of the features of Simpel, visit its homepage.

A true worldlang, the language has four official orthographies! But these are very, very easy and you can choose whichever one looks the most familiar to you. Transliteration between them is direct and trivially easy. Here is the name of the language in the four/five orthographies:

Simpel
Симпел
سِمپَل
ㄙㄧㄇㄆㄜㄌ
सिमपल

I very sincerely hope that a Perso-Arabic orthography will be added in the future, as this is a very important writing system used around the world; however there are significant software challenges with automatically transliterating to and from Perso-Arabic script which I was not able to quickly overcome. I also lack the knowledge and experience required to properly design the best transliteration scheme to map Simpel into Perso-Arabic script. Help from native speakers would be much appreciated.

The person, tense and mood of verbs is indicated by a particle preceding the verb which uses the powerful, precise, concise forms taken from Swahili; this is combined with a largely Western vocabulary which will also contain a very large number of words from other languages around the world. The design of the language is also influenced by Sambahsa, LdP and Occidental.

Visit the Simpel website to stay up to date with latest developments.

Lugha ya Afrika: An Auxlang

Update: the Luqa ya Afrika project has been discontinued.

 Please instead visit the Simpel project.

Well, my Auxlang 2012 project (also briefly known as Prototip) has taken an unexpected and fortuitous turn. I've abandoned the agonies of Indo-European grammar, which is rather difficult for those who speak no Indo-European language, and instead have adopted Niger-Congo grammar. More specifically, I've decided to adapt the grammar of Swahili. More about that in a moment.

The trouble with trying to use naturalistic Indo-European grammar for an auxlang is that the result always seems to end up in one of the following three categories:

• The Advanced Category: Preserving the full power of Indo-European grammar also requires preserving many of its quirks and difficult features such as a system of inflection so convoluted that half the time one cannot figure out what the verb stem is at all. You've got ablaut and nasal infixes causing dramatic changes in verb stems, you've got irregular verbs which are often totally unpredictable, you got inflected nouns and complicated articles and pronouns, you've basically got a complete nightmare for speakers of Asian languages. However, once you have climbed the mountain and learned all this stuff, it works great. If you can climb it. Example: Sambahsa.
  
  
• The Illusory Category: Recognising that the Advanced Category is prohibitively difficult, language designers forgo its trials and instead try to take neither the high road nor the low road but make a path which purports to be halfway between the two. Look! they say, You can have your cake and eat it too! You can have all those European words you know and love, complete with their difficult spelling so they look like real French or English or Latin, but with a simpler grammar. Hooray! And look how great it all works... if you already fluently speak a Romance language and thus already unconsciously know hundreds or thousands of Romance-language idiomatic expressions. For anybody else, these languages are just illusions. Neither as easy as creoles nor as capable as natural languages, they are in some respects the worst of both worlds. Examples: Occidental (the better of the two) and Interlingua.
  
  
• The Creole: Recognising that neither the Advanced Category nor the Illusory Category are practical propositions for those who speak no European language, except for a few very dedicated and brave souls, language designers forgo both and sprint straight towards the only naturalistic solution which is proven to work in the real world: the creole. With grammars stripped right back to the bare minimum, more isolating than synthetic, and spelling and pronunciation simplified in the extreme, these languages do actually make quite good sense from a design point of view. They are, initially, easy. However when one tries to write sophisticated literature in them, one discovers that their simple grammars lack the tools needed to easily deconstruct the idiomatic expressions of natural languages into plain language which can be understood regardless of cultural background; languages in the Advanced Category provide better tools here, reducing the dependence on memorising idiomatic expressions. Accordingly, the Creole is easy to get started with but fiendishly hard to write really advanced sentences in, the kind of sentences needed for sophisticated literature. The solution is to learn hundreds or thousands of idiomatic expressions in the constructed Creole itself, unique to it. This is very similar to the situation with the natural languages Indonesian and Afrikaans which previously seemed to me to be possible solutions; they also require massive memorisation of idiomatic constructs. Examples: Novial (to some extent) and Lingua Franca Nova (fully).

Personally, I've not been entirely happy with any of these three categories.

Now, you could use Esperanto, but its grammar is also essentially Indo-European grammar but transformed into a kind of mechanical clockwork. It's very nineteenth century. It's a kind of lumbering, ponderous, nineteenth-century steam train puffing its way around the world in great clouds of steam and coal dust, making whirring and grinding noises like a giant industrial-age factory. My point here is that Esperanto is not naturalistic, it is extremely artificial, like some creaky old factory with a leaky roof and rows of rusting machines. However, the factory is still productive and it cranks out very cute little biscuit tins quite reliably for export around the world, and people enjoy the biscuits too. Unfortunately it's just not my cup of tea, although it does work; however, it is also not particularly accessible to those who speak no Indo-European language, so let's move on...

Next we arrive in the twenty-first century, boldly dive into the intrepid realm of worldlangs (a realm to which Esperanto absolutely does not venture) and we find Lingwa de Planeta. This is something truly special. Although containing mostly Indo-European words, there is a fundamental influence of Chinese on the grammar, including many of the most frequently used words, and languages such as Russian are far more influential on the grammar than are Western European languages. Arabic and Hindi also play prominent roles in the vocabulary. LdP is very clearly more precise than the Creoles such as Lingua Franca Nova, while being only moderately more difficult; by means of an ingenious mechanism known as facultative precision and a series of fiendishly precise and well designed grammatical markers and particles, LdP manages to deliver good precision despite having an isolating grammar, which means that there is less need to memorise countless idiomatic expressions. The language is beautifully expressive for literature but admittedly does rely heavily on context; on the other hand, all languages rely on context so this is not necessarily a bad thing. LdP is currently my favourite auxlang, and so much so that I am working on a lengthy translation with pleasure. It is probably the only auxlang which in my opinion is definitely likely to be easily accessible to speakers of Asian languages, including for the purpose of reading highly sophisticated works of literature.

However, obviously I am still not one hundred percent happy, otherwise I would not be dabbling in the creation of a new auxlang myself. Essentially, I want the ease of LdP combined with the greater precision of Sambahsa (lesser reliance upon context); essentially I want the gain without the pain, to paraphrase a bodybuilding expression. It's not that LdP isn't adequate; it is more than adequate. It's just that it troubles me that it forces me to heavily compromise on things such as the expression of tense; essentially I sometimes feel that stylistically it occasionally seems a bit too creole-like.

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if some kind of compromise could be found between Sambahsa and LdP? That's kind of what has been driving me on this Auxlang 2012 project.

Finally, a potential solution came to me. I had looked previously in the direction of Indonesian and Afrikaans, thinking they would deliver what I was looking for, but their grammars turned out to be too reliant on memorising countless idiomatic expressions; essentially their grammars are a bit too simple to deliver the full toolbox of grammatical features needed to deconstruct natural-language idiomatic expressions into plain language. English itself, by the way, also suffers from this problem. And then finally, over the last couple of weeks, I studied Swahili grammar. Wow!!!

Swahili is like a wake-up call for auxlang designers everywhere. Studying Swahili, anybody with an interest in constructed languages can quickly see how the amazingly powerful and precise features of Swahili grammar could easily be made a little more regular and converted into an incredibly precise and powerful, yet easy, auxlang. How about a synthetic system of verb conjugation so precise that it arguably even exceeds the precision of Sambahsa, yet does not require changes to verb roots (to use the Swahili terminology), and uses prefixes rather than suffixes?! How about a system of grammatical gender and concordance which is in some ways similar to the precision of French but which is incredibly easy since the 'gender' (class or category) of nouns is indicated by a prefix?! How about the ability to import many words from many languages yet not have to worry about mutilating them when forming the plural, since plurals are formed simply by adding a prefix to nouns?! I mean, wow!!! Swahili is fantastic inspiration for conlangers. It looks likely that Swahili will prove to be the language I was hoping Indonesian or Afrikaans to be: the ideal candidate upon which to model the grammar of an auxlang for sophisticated literary use. Only time will tell.

However, for vocabulary, English and French and Arabic are good compatible choices which provide internationally recognisable words. So my intention is to combine English and French vocabulary with Swahili vocabulary and grammar; since Swahili already contains many Arabic words, this essentially results in an international vocabulary of English - French - Arabic - Swahili.

Finally, Swahili is not an Indo-European language. It is a Niger-Congo language. So we avoid the aforementioned problems associated with Indo-European grammar; instead, we begin with a kind of grammar already proven to be successful for those who do not speak any European language.

The tentative name of the language is Lugha ya Afrika. This means "Language of Africa" or "African Language" in Swahili. For further updates concerning this language, visit the official website; at some time in the future this link may stop working as the site is migrated to a more permanent home.

Personally, I very much doubt that I could create anything as good as Lingwa de Planeta or Sambahsa, but at least I can have fun trying. Whatever happens, it will be a good learning experience.

Onward...

Auxlang 2012: Bravo LdP! Bravo Sambahsa!

Update: this approach has since been abandoned. Upon closer examination, using LdP vocabulary with Sambahsa grammar was found to be unsuitable since Sambahsa grammar demands an etymological orthography. Eventually I completely abandoned Indo-European grammar and settled upon using Swahili grammar with vocabulary from English, French and Swahili. The tentative name for this project became Lugha ya Afrika, which means "Language of Afrika" in Swahili.

Auxlang 2012 has been given a temporary name: Prototip. This is a simplification of Prototỳpe. I launched a website on which the progress of the language can be followed. You'll start to see some experimental grammar there over the next few weeks. The name of the site is Prototip: An Auxlang.

The reason for the simplification of the name comes from my recent experimentation with vocabulary. Seeking a way to replace some of the superb but unfamiliar vocabulary of Sambahsa with words more familiar to English speakers, or at least with modern words rather than Proto-Indo-European words, I found to my surprise that the vocabulary of Lingwa de Planeta was consistently better than anything I could come up with, despite it containing many words from unfamiliar languages such as Hindi, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. The way LdP words are written makes them reasonably easy to remember and easy to pronounce, and they look harmonious and believable. Trying to include too many English and French words, as I was doing, does not work because English and French are highly etymological in their orthographies; in many cases a better and more harmonious result comes from other languages rather than, as I was, slavishly using an English, French, or Germanic word. Sometimes the best word really is Swahili or Persian. It just works better.

In other words: if you want to use English vocabulary, speak English; if you want to use French vocabulary, speak French; if you want to use a mixture of modern Indo-European vocabulary and historic Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, speak Sambahsa; if you want to use a simplified worldlang vocabulary, speak Lingwa de Planeta. After this experiment, I can see why Sambahsa doesn't use a much greater proportion of English and French words: because doing so wouldn't work. One needs a very diverse Indo-European vocabulary to make Sambahsa work optimally.

Anyway, bravo Sambahsa!

And bravo LdP!

Once again, I just keep returning to these two languages in particular. But now, for my current needs at this particular point in time, it is mainly the grammar which keeps bringing me back to Sambahsa and mainly the vocabulary which keeps bringing me back to LdP, although overall LdP is my current favourite.

I realised today, as a result of recent experimentation, that the best way forward for further experimentation with Prototip is to use LdP vocabulary for experimentation with elements of a Sambahsa-like grammar.

There is no harm in this, since it means I get to continue learning the vocabulary I am currently learning, which is that of LdP, rather than switching to a different vocabulary, and simultaneously I get to continue learning about the grammar of Sambahsa, as I experiment with a related dialect. If the experiments all fail, I will just go back to using LdP and Sambahsa separately, having meanwhile gained a better understanding of both.

It's a win-win scenario.

Onward...

Auxlang 2012: Sambahsa orthography, English vocabulary

The beauty of experimentation is that it can tell you when you are on the wrong path. Sometimes a failed experiment is more valuable than a successful one. And as the Turkish proverb says, "No matter how far you have gone down the wrong road, turn back." Excellent advice.

My recent experiments with trying to create a vocabulary very clearly failed due to orthographical problems. Clearly it would take years for me to develop the necessary expertise to be able to design an orthography capable of reasonably faithfully importing words from English, French and German (in which Romance-language grammar will not be used for verbs).

Now, let's do a thought experiment:

(1) Imagine I already have a capable orthographical system, one which is not only capable of reasonably faithfully absorbing words from Western European languages but also from other languages such as Arabic and Persian, and imagine that orthography has already passed extensive testing;

(2) Imagine I wish to take that orthography and use it to import words from various source languages in order to create a prototype vocabulary;

(3) Imagine I then want to experiment with applying various grammatical systems to that prototype vocabulary in order to test a prototype language in different forms.

The key point here is that what I am really doing is prototyping. A prototype is something you build and then potentially might throw away; several prototypes might be built before you decide to keep one and turn it into something more permanent. Hmmm...

It is at this point in the thought experiment that my brain finally switched on. The truth is, it does not matter what source language I import words from into the prototype language, providing the orthography can handle words from the chosen source language and that the words are reasonably compatible with the grammatical systems I might try. I can make a small vocabulary from a single source language, that would be fine for building and testing a prototype auxlang. If it works, I can throw that vocabulary away and make a new vocabulary later using the same orthography.

So, what I need for prototyping is a suitable source language for vocabulary which (taking into account my interests) has both French and Germanic words. There is such a language. It's called English.

Ah. Penny drops. Thought experiment is now getting somewhere.

The necessary orthography already exists: Sambahsa orthography. The only thing I need to do is just add a grave accent to that orthography, which shall indicate the stressed syllable in polysyllabic words. No other changes.

All right, so I can easily build a prototype vocabulary simply by respelling English words in Sambahsa orthography: this will result in some phonetic changes to the English words but will remain reasonably etymological.

There is a major ancilliary benefit: I will soon have learned how to read Sambahsa texts aloud simply by the practice I will get from transliterating English words into Sambahsa.

Now let's do another thought experiment. Imagine a fictitious scenario in which a language closely related to English in vocabulary, but with a different grammar, could have developed. Here's one scenario...

First, let's imagine as suggested a couple of years ago on an excellent blog, that a country exists and has existed for many centuries, a country in which Sambahsa originated and where it is still fluently spoken by millions today. The imaginary country is located in Asia Minor, near eastern Turkey.

Second, let's imagine that there is a friendly professor of Sambahsa who lives there and who has a keen interest in auxlangs. He decides that he would like to enlighten English speakers concerning the benefits of Sambahsa grammar, by creating a language called Sambahsa-Anglodialect (as opposed to Sambahsa itself, whose full name is in fact Sambahsa-Mundialect). The Anglodialect uses grammar very similar to the Mundialect but its vocabulary is chiefly taken from English words transliterated into Sambahsa orthography. Thus, Anglodialect forms a kind of a bridge or gateway language, introducing students to Sambahsa grammar without any vocabulary difficulty, because once they have learned the orthography they will easily recognise nearly all words.

So the professor transliterates a few thousand English words into Sambahsa orthography, publishes a grammar for the new language, and voilà! Now all English-speaking students have to do is learn the orthography and they can quickly understand nearly all words. They thus quickly learn Sambahsa grammar. Later, they learn Sambahsa-Mundialect with ease.

So that is my idea. To help myself learn Sambahsa, I am going to play the role of the imaginary professor and transliterate 1000 English words into Sambahsa orthography (with the sole addition of the grave accent to indicate the stressed syllable). Then I will play around with those words to do two things: (1) properly learn Sambahsa grammar; (2) experimentally see if a useful prototype Auxlang 2012 can be thus built. That's win-win.

I was wondering (hint, hint) if some kindly scholar (hint, hint) could perhaps give me a flying start by offering to transliterate the following 100 English words into Sambahsa orthography, using the grave accent to show stress (using whatever stress pattern is necessary for the Sambahsa orthography, not necessarily English stress). (The French words are only shown to eliminate ambiguity, clarifying the sense of the English word.) Thus, I will see how to write English phonemes in Sambahsa orthography (approximately, of course, since not all English phonemes exist in Sambahsa orthography).

If not, no worries, it will just take me a bit longer.

Update: Indeed some kind scholarly passer-by did assist me with filling in the first 100 words, see below. Many thanks to Dr Olivier Simon! This is a very good start, although mixed results. More discussion later...

ENGLISH	ANGLODIALECT	MUNDIALECT	FRENCH
abdomen	abdòmen	abdòmen	abdomen m.
belly	bèlly	gvènter, gwiwòt	ventre m.
above, over	abòve	ùper	au-dessus de
absent	absènt	absènt	absent
accept	accèpte	accèpte	accepter
accident	accìdent		accident m.
accompany	accompàny		accompagner
accomplish	accòmplisch		accomplir
accuse	accùse		accuser
actor, actrice	actòr, actrìce		acteur, actrice
add	add	addeih	ajouter
address	addrèsse		adresse f.
administrative	administratìve		administratif
adventure	adventùre	aventure	aventure
adventurer	adventùrer		aventurier, aventurière
adventurous	adventuròus	aventureùs	aventureux, aventureuse
advice, counsel	[ concìl ]	concìl	conseil m.
after	àfter		après
afternoon	afternòun		après-midi
age	àge		âge
agricultural	agriculturàl		agricole
agriculture	agricultùre		agriculture f.
air	air		air m.
air conditioning	air conditiòning		climatisation, Air conditionné
airplane	airplàne		avion m.
airport	airpòrt		aéroport
almonds	almònd		amandes
alphabet	alphàbet		alfabet m.
always	olwàiyse		toujours
ambulance	ambulànce		ambulance f.
and	aind		et
and	aind		et
ankle	àinkel		cheville f.
answer n., response	respònse		réponse f.
ant	àint		fourmi
apartment	apàrtment		appartement m.
apple	àpel	àpel	pomme f.
approximately, circa	cìrca		environ
apricot	apricòt		abricot m.
April	aprìle		avril
argument, dispute	argùment, dispùte		dispute f.
arm	arm		Bras m.
around	aràwnd		autour
arrive	arrìve		arriver
art	art		art m.
ashtray	aschtràiy		cendrier m.
ask	ask		demander
August	augùst		août
aunt	ont		tante (du côté du père)
available	aveilàble		disponible
bachelor, single	bàitschler, sìnghel		célibataire
back	back		dos
backpack	backpàck		sac à dos m.
bad	bad		mauvais, vilain
balcony	balcòn		balcon m.
ball	ball		balle f.
banana	banàne		banane f.
bank	bank		banque f.
basil	bàisel		basilic m.
basis, foundation	bàse, fundatiòn		base f.
bath	bath		bain m.
bathroom	bathròum		salle de bains f.
batteries	batterìe		piles
be able to	→	ghend	pouvoir
be, to	→	ses	être
beard	berd		barbe f.
beautiful	beautéitplen		beau
beauty	beautéit		beauté f.
become	→	bih	devenir
bed	bed		lit m.
bee	→	bei	abeille f.
beef	beuf		boeuf m.
beer	bir		bière f.
before	bifòr		avant
beginning	bighìning		début m.
behind	bihàynd		derrière
believe	bilìve		croire
below, under	bilòw, éunder		sous
better than	bètter dthan		meilleur que
between	bitwìhn		entre
bicycle	bic`ycle		biciclette f., vélo m.
big	big		grand
bill, invoice	bill, invòys		facture f.
bird	beurd		oiseau m.
birthday	beurthdèy		anniversaire m.
bitter	bìtter		amer
black	black		noir
blind	blind		aveugle
blond	blond		blond
blood	blod		sang m.
blue	blou		bleu
boat	boot	boot	bateau, -x
book	buk		livre m.
border	bòrder		frontière f.
boring	bòring		ennuyeux
bottle	botèl		bouteille f.
box	box		boîte f.
brain	bren		cerveau m.
brakes	braiks		freins
bread	bred		pain m.
break	→	bregh	casser
breakfast	[ brehgfàst ]		petit déjeuner m.