As described in a recent post, I have now decided upon four languages to use for the remainder of this year, 2010. They are:
English: for writing my much-overdue fourth novel
French: my favourite natural language other than English
Indonesian: winner of easiest natural language competition
Interlingua: the only constructed language still standing
Now, I have to tell you that although I've had a tremendous amount of fun this year, looking at all the other languages, I am now completely exhausted and burned out. If I try to keep going for the rest of the year at the same hectic pace, my brain will short-circuit and all I will be able to say, like Tim Brooke-Taylor, would be:
"I'm a teapot. I'm a teapot. I'm a teapot."
Yes, that's right. I would lose my mind.
Also, to be honest, it is a wee bit embarrassing that I have gotten so carried away with all these languages that virtually no work has been done on my novel. Obviously that state of affairs cannot continue.
So, I am now going to return to being a normal human being and learn languages like normal, sensible people do: a few minutes per day.
Studies have apparently shown that about 10 to 15 minutes a day is very effective in learning a language; the important thing is to do a small amount every day. This is more effective than larger blocks of time once a week. Since I'm learning three languages, I will need to invest about 30 to 45 minutes every day. Not to mention spending an hour or more quite regularly attempting to write some short passages in Interlingua, preparing myself for writing international literature.
Accordingly, this blog will become quieter for a few months. I will still post regularly but not so frequently and not so prolifically. I'll be novel-writing instead.
I do intend to continue regularly posting in Interlingua. When I do so, I will use the concise orthography which I have invented; it is mostly identical to the official collateral orthography of Interlingua but with a small number of radical changes to make the language very significantly less verbose. The grammar is absolutely identical to traditional Interlingua; only the spelling is changed (in a very few cases this results in a completely different word, e.g. hat for habeva).
I think it really is a big improvement and produces a practical, easy language which is tolerably accessible even to those who do not speak a Romance language (unlike traditional Interlingua which is unfortunately just a little too hard to spell and to pronounce, especially for non-Europeans). The concise orthography is experimental at this stage and may change a little.
Onward...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Interlingua gania! It’s not just a language competition that it wins. It wins one more user who can help it develop and become more well-known.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I’m really glad you’ve chosen Interlingua for your novel, because I’ll be able to read it. I wish you feel as inspired the following months as you’ve been so far.
I’ve been thinking about your proposition to eliminate the -E ending in some cases and I think it’s a viable attempt, especially if you establish clear rules (I don’t understand why you adopt 'perfect' but refuse 'modern'). In my opinion, only specific suffixes should be affected by such a change. I’d suggest the past participle ending -TE in both regular and irregular constructions (amat, venit, script, mort), the present participle -NTE and the adverbial suffix -MENTE. Only I think the latter should be changed into more recognizable -MENT, not -MEN, and that it should keep its original stress like in every Romance control language. The current stress pattern splits such adverbs into two units: práctica-ménte, infelíce-ménte.
Yet, we should be aware that, if Interlingua becomes spoken, it will develop as a natural language. Thus, if reducing patterns were encouraged, this feature would probably spread to other contexts and cause anomalies in the future (for instance: felice > feliz, belle > bell, lumine > lumin > lumen, monte > mont, longe > long). People whose native languages have a more restricted phonology could simply drop the final consonants, as in French, so we could have one thing spelled and another spoken (e.g. 'large' could be spelled 'larg', but pronounced 'lar').
@Cláudio Rinaldi: Thanks, Cláudio.
ReplyDeleteI have taken your advice and the advice of others to heart and have finally decided I should mostly leave Interlingua intact with regard to its "-mente" and "-e" endings. The final system upon which I have decided is described at the link below:
http://joyoflanguages.blogspot.com/2010/09/interlingua-simple-spelling-le.html
It is much less radical. Really it is just a few gentle changes, mostly dumping all doubled consonants, marking stress, adopting most but not all of the official collateral orthography, and adding a mere four irregular words to the language (hat = habeva, era = esseva, será = essera, seréa = esserea; three of these are already listed in the IED anyway). I actually retain more words ending in "-e" than does the official collateral orthography, because I do not remove the "-e" when doing so would result in a word of only one syllable (a nice by-product of which is that "ille" becomes "ile" and therefore does not collide with "il"; no ambiguity).
One day I would like to write a novel in Interlingua. My current novel is being written in English. I hope to write poems and short stories in Interlingua soon, after some more study.
I had a life-changing experience today. I showed someone who is a native speaker of Spanish, from South America, a page of beginner-level Interlingua and asked if she could read it and what language she thought it was. She said she could read it very easily, without any problem, and that she guessed it must be Italian. She did not even suspect, not even the tiniest suspicion, that it was not a natural language. Now, here is the surprising part...
When I explained it was Interlingua, a man-made language extracted mainly from Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French and English, she immediately pointed out words from each of those languages she recognised on the page, explaining which was which. She did not express the slightest ridicule towards the language; quite the contrary, she was keenly interested to take a look at the Interlingua website and learn more. The life-changing part is this...
This is the first time I have ever discussed a constructed language with a member of the general public, someone who has presumably never heard of constructed languages, and had them respond with complete respect and interest rather than ridicule. The penny dropped: people see Interlingua as a real language, they accept it as much as any other language. Even when I explained that approximately zero people spoke the language, this information did not result in ridicule or a lack of interest.
[Try the same thing with Esperanto: most people will just laugh at you and think you are weird. Why? Because they cannot recognise the words and because the orthography looks highly artificial, like some kind of robot-speak or toy language, some kind of of Klingon or science fiction. Yet other (perfectly good) constructed languages look too much like unsophisticated pidgins and people cannot believe they could be useful. In short, most people laugh at the very idea of a constructed language; trying to get past that resistance is almost impossible.]
In a smaller way, Lingwa de Planeta does the same thing. Show a Chinese or Arabic speaker some LdP and they will be genuinely pleased to recognise words from their languages. Again, the penny drops: people do not ridicule languages which contain clearly recognisable words from their own language.
I call this "the Interlingua effect". It is most powerfully manifested in Interlingua, since a Spanish speaker instantly sees half of his or her own vocabulary right there on the page.
People do not ridicule that!
This is a major insight. I now believe that Interlingua literature really could be marketable.
You've taught a lot to your readers, Robert, and we're thankful for that. You've done your research in such a passionate but humble way, so minuciously but so thoroughly at the same time!
ReplyDeleteI've always been convinced that a truly global language should be similar to LdP or Pandunia, including words from the most widespread linguistic groups so that most people could recognize something of their own language there, even if just a single word (I see how Hungarians are proud that Zamenhof included one Hungarian word in Esperanto: kolbaso). Its grammar should be quite simple, intermediate between isolating and agglutinating. A few irregularities could be admitted for the sake of concision (as with Interlingua short past participles, which I'm really fond of).
Today, I think such a language would be ideal for Easterners, and a more recognizable and naturalistic option would be better for Westerners only. I haven't found a compromise yet (it'd certainly be easier with a reformed Occidental than it is with Interlingua).
Well, after all we can't forget these Romance auxlangs were designed for a time when Europe and the US still ruled colonies all over the world, expecting that the so-called North Atlantic civilization would spread everywhere. Only for this reason, they simply couldn't be perfect anyway.
@Cláudio Rinaldi: Thanks, Cláudio. Yes, I agree, a language which incorporates vocabulary from the whole world would be such a joy and presumably very popular: the only tricky part is how to design the language.
ReplyDeleteI also agree, it would be great to have a truly global language (rather than one dominated by Western influences) which really celebrates and includes the whole of humanity. This is one of the reasons I like Lingwa de Planeta; it is a noble concept (although still, I think, a little too European-dominated in its vocabulary). Not to mention it would be a lot of fun! Everyone loves to see words from their own language used in other languages; it's fun to spot them.
Imagine schoolchildren all around the world learning a few words of a hundred different major languages, in some sort of coherent linguistic scheme such that years later they would still remember, for example, that "jameel" was Arabic for "beautiful" and "hao" was Chinese for "good" even if they grew up in Iceland or Estonia. It would be a better world.
However, I often struggle with the question of how would one decide which words to choose for the vocabulary of the language. One could not have all Chinese words for the A section of the dictionary and all Spanish ones for the B section and so on. One could probably not have all Icelandic words for adjectives and all Hungarian words for nouns. And so on. I suppose the distribution might have to be randomised; but randomised schemes are much harder to remember than ones which follow some kind of pattern. Perhaps, for example, most words pertaining to concepts regarding weight (mass, heaviness, lightness, gravity) could come from Russian whereas words pertaining to concepts of colour could come from all languages (since some languages probably have nice words for certain shades of colour which other languages lack). Anyway, this is a difficult challenge because one also has to fit all this vocabulary into a common orthography and common grammar. Tricky...
I think maybe Indonesian is one of the best natural languages to demonstrate this, as it has absorbed words from many diverse languages and converted them into a simple, standard, phonetic orthography (although obviously not retaining all the phonemes of the source languages, which would be too hard).
I am excited about the literary potential of Interlingua, however, as I think maybe it could form a useful gateway to the European languages, just as Indonesian is a useful gateway to the Asian languages. Anyway, I do not believe in "one language to rule them all" (to paraphrase from The Lord of the Rings) so I'm quite happy to use Interlingua for some purposes, while using Indonesian, Lingwa de Planeta, Sambahsa and other languages for other purposes.
Its fun, useful, and practical to learn about Romance languages by learning Interlingua, even though it teaches me nothing about Chinese and Hindi and Arabic and Swahili. What would be great is if Interlingua-like languages existed for other regional language groups: how about, for example, a simplified Chinese based only on pinyin and incorporating several dialects (not just Mandarin), or simplified pan-African language. Ah, a man can dream...
It's really a pity that all regional interlinguas are European. I'd like to see also simplified versions of national languages. Once I sketched a "Basic Russian", as I gave up studying the original language.
ReplyDeleteI think your criteria for choosing a language could also be used to choose eligible words. In a range of important linguistic groups Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Semitic, Indo-Aryan, Malayo-Polinesian etc.), we could find words easy to pronounce and write. Of course, we'd have to balance the choices so that not only Indonesian and Japanese words would fit. Also, I think words shouldn't be changed in order to fit phonological patternes, such as in Toki Pona.
It's an idea to be developed.