This will unfortunately be a very quick post as I have little time.
Just wanted to announce that the competition I have been running, comparing 12 natural languages which have reasonably phonetic spelling, in order to choose one as the basis of a possible constructed international auxiliary language, finally has a winner: Indonesian!
The two languages in the Grand Final were Indonesian and Afrikaans. I would dearly love to learn them both but I must discipline myself and focus, focus, focus otherwise I will get nowhere. Especially since I need to get on with improving my French and need to get on with writing my fourth English-language novel, plus continue learning Interlingua, so there is only time for one.
Accordingly, Afrikaans is rejected. I will however probably eventually learn it sometime in the next few years, as it was very difficult choosing between Afrikaans and Indonesian: they both are so easy and have so many strengths.
In the end, Indonesian won because it is slightly better on all of the following counts: easier pronunciation (rapid but less variety of sounds), easier spelling and orthography (more concise, zero diacritics), more international vocabulary (greater proportion of foreign words and contains about 10,000 Dutch words anyway but in a more easily spelled and pronounced form), vastly larger community (this blog would have another 200 million potential readers instead of another 20 million, if I wrote summaries in Indonesian), words more invariant (nouns are not even marked for plurality and verbs not conjugated for tense), overall somewhat easier to learn (although most vocabulary unrecognisable).
At the end of the day, Indonesian also gives me an invaluable opportunity to learn non-European grammar. I think it will thus help me to later come back to Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) with better understanding of how to use that language too.
So the languages for the remaining four months of this year are:
English: for writing my novel
French: my favourite natural language other than English
Indonesian: winner of easiest natural language competition
Interlingua: the only constructed language still standing
During 2011 I'll be returning for another look at Sambahsa, Frenkisch, LdP, and other languages; hopefully these will all have larger communities and be better documented by then. But for the rest of 2010 it is the above four. Note that, depending on how easy Indonesian is, I might or might not modify it slightly to come up with a constructed language based on its vocabulary; but it seems increasingly unlikely that will be necessary as it is so easy anyway.
Onward...
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Not much of a surprise there I suppose, since it's tough to be any easier to learn and pronounce than Indonesian. I think a larger L2 (but not from Indonesia) Indonesian population would be a good idea, since it would help stabilize the language in its official form, whereas as a language spoken in Java or wherever else it acquires a ton of regional slang. As English speakers learning Indonesian we'd have no way to know that though so only standard Indonesian would work with us if we were learning and using it.
ReplyDeleteThe Indonesian Wikipedia BTW has a fairly long article on LFN:
http://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Franca_Nova
I requested it way back when. It might be interesting for you since it can teach you how to talk about languages in Indonesian.
That reminds me, take a look at this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pagef30.com/2010/03/number-of-indonesian-speakers-online-vs.html
Indonesian would actually be in the top ten languages on the internet if Malaysian were included as the same language.
Hey, I had betted correctly that Indonesian would win ! (unfortunately, I did not put any money on my bet...)
ReplyDeleteNaturally, Indonesian has moreover some practical value for you as an Australian.
For an auxlanger, Indonesian is very interesting from the point of view of the simple grammar and of the vocabulary.
Of course, Indonesian grammar inspired me nothing at all for Sambahsa's grammar ;-)) (Sambahsa looks in other directions like etymology, precision, shortness) but it gave me quantities of international words you will surely recognize (the first ones being "sama", "bahasa" & "sellamat" !)
@Mithridates: Thanks for the LFN link, that is really wonderful. Very useful indeed to see how to talk about constructed languages in Indonesian. I am also very happy for LFN to see that it has publicity in Indonesian. Also very interesting to see the huge potential of Indonesian on the Internet. Indeed, it seems like a good language for a blogger.
ReplyDeleteAfter work today I bought "Indonesian Reference Grammar" (2nd ed., Sneddon et. al., 2010) and the "Oxford Study Indonesian Dictionary". The former is 378 pages long, so learning Indonesian properly is not a trivial exercise; however to be honest none of it looks very scary. I think it basically just takes time to learn the idioms and the patterns and some exceptions; no language is truly easy to learn but Indonesian certainly seems satisfyingly toward the easy end of the spectrum yet at the same time satisfyingly powerful and of course natural.
Next year I will probably do a comparison of Esperanto to Indonesian, trying to answer the question as to whether Esperanto is or is not significantly easier in the long term, to achieve masterful fluency. Since both are agglutinative languages it is a fair and valuable comparison, I think. I could not predict the answer at this stage; I think it is too close to call. Esperanto no doubt is more regular but against that one has to balance the huge dictionaries and vast literature available for Indonesian, which are an absolutely invaluable asset to a writer, making it much easier to write accurately and well.
Anyway, Indonesian is fun!
You're right about all the slang and massive variations in informal, spoken Indonesian. But that is what makes standard formal Indonesian so attractive and exciting as a literary language: you see, it means it has been proven effective across all those thousands of islands and hundreds of native dialects and languages which make up the country of Indonesia. The mass media use standard formal Indonesian as does the government, and people really understand it. This bodes well for global auxiliary use and we don't need to know the slang and dialects for such international use. It is quite intriguing and promising.
@cafaristeir: Selamat malam, Olivier!
ReplyDeleteGood evening, Olivier!
Yes you did indeed correctly predict that Indonesian would win. I have not forgotten. Well done!
You are right also, Indonesian could be of great practical benefit to an Australian like me, as an important regional language, although that is not at all the reason I chose it. An unexpected benefit is that the government-owned, multi-lingual Australian television and radio broadcaster, SBS, has superb resources available in Indonesian. Check out:
http://www.sbs.com.au/yourlanguage/indonesian
So it will be a lot of fun for me to learn not only the language but also about the culture.
Nice to see some Malay/Indonesian words in Sambahsa. I'm sure I will recognise some other Sambahsa words in Indonesian which harken from Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Dutch; since all except Arabic evolved, I assume, from Proto-Indo-European. Indonesian is reasonably international in this regard, I suppose.
Hmmm... actually, doesn't this make Indonesian really quite well suited as an auxlang, since it has strong influences not only from Indo-European (as above) but also Semitic (lots of Arabic words) and also Sino-Tibetan (a few Chinese words) and of course Austronesian languages. That is pretty remarkable.
Does this mean Indonesian could be said, in conlang parlance, to be a kind of natural worldlang?
Yes, it is somehow a natural worldlang. Malay arose in the South China Sea, a place where various influences met. Several civilizations left their traces: Sanskrit, Arabic/parsi, Chinese, Portuguese, Netherlandic.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I think that the "plus" of an artificial worldlang is to select the most widespread words, what Indonesian/Malay could not always do, as a natlang. Not all Dutch words are international. The "Chinese" words are not Mandarin, but rather Hokien, and they can be ununderstandable to a Chinese from Beijing. On the other side, let's not forget the Portuguese loanwords, though "gereja" (church) "serdadu" (army) and "jendela" (window) wouldn't be recognized by most Europeans.
(and I'm sure whether "Perancis" comes from Portuguese or from low Sanskrit)
But I must confess that I worked a lot on Indonesian loanwords and included them into Sambahsa when there was no preexisting word. I regret that some aspects do not seem to have been explored by linguists. For example, I remember that "peanut" is "kacang" in Indonesian, "karanga" in Swahili, and "kalchang" in Sambahsa.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what a natural language is. Could you please clarify?
ReplyDeleteThank you.
A natural language (or "natlang") is simply a language that already existed by itself among humans (ex: English, Indonesian...) even if it may have been the subject of a linguistic policy (ex: orthographic reform, imposition of "official" vocabulary). On the contrary, constructed languages (or: "conlangs"; ex: Esperanto, Klingon, Na'vi...) have been primarily created by a linguist (a "conlanger") and would not have existed without his/her intervention. There can be conlangs that take their content from existing languages; f.e. Sambahsa, invented by me, takes nearly everything from dead (Indo-European) or living languages. Though it may look like a natlang at first sight, it remains a conlang.
ReplyDelete@Elle Zed: Welcome to the blog and thank you very much for taking the time to leave a comment.
ReplyDeleteTo answer your question, by "natural language" I mean a language which evolved naturally, such as Indonesian, French, English, Russian, Mandarin, and so on. In other words, I mean what most people understand when they hear the term "language".
Most people probably do not know that there are also some artificial languages, which did not evolve naturally but were actually designed and created. Such languages are called "constructed languages". The most famous constructed language is called Esperanto, although personally I don't like Esperanto so I am instead learning a different constructed language called Interlingua. You can find out about constructed languages here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxlang
And you can read about Interlingua here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
By the way, I think Bahasa Indonesia is a very beautiful language and I am very happy to be learning it. I have just started to learn it.
I am learning Indonesian and Interlingua at the same time, as I wish to see if a natural language (such as Indonesian) can be just as easy as a constructed language (such as Interlingua) to learn. Constructed languages are generally easier to learn than natural languages; for example Interlingua is certainly much easier to learn than French or Mandarin. But I think perhaps Indonesian might very easy too. I hope so.
To consider a language as "good" is also to analyse the way of building words, their derivation and the logic behind this. Indonesean is a conglomerate of original or borrowed words but without a develloped system. Here e.g. Latin has more spirit. So I cannot consent in the common euphoria of pushing high this creol language.
ReplyDeletehttp://de.eurana.wikia.com/wiki/Homepage_%28EN%29
@Klaus H. Dieckmann: Indonesian is clearly an enormously successful and effective language. It is one of the great languages of the world. It is spoken by far more than 150 million people and is the official language of the fourth largest country in the world (by population). To quote Wikipedia:
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_language
"Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries. Indonesia is the fourth most populous nation in the world. Of its large population the number of people who fluently speak Indonesian is fast approaching 100%, thus making Indonesian one of the most widely spoken languages in the world."
There is, therefore, absolutely no need for anyone to promote the Indonesian language: it is already massively popular and massively successful and no doubt will continue to be so. I feel very privileged to have the opportunity to learn this wonderful language which I admire very much.
Of course, I also admire Latin, which is another beautiful language; I only wish that I had the time to learn all these wonderful languages.
@Robert, Sorry, did I read you wrong, or did you imply that Indonesian is an Indo-European language?
ReplyDeleteFor the record, it is not. It's in the Austronesian language, originating in Asia.
The first Austronesian peoples seem to have come out of Taiwan, thousands of years ago.
It includes the languages of the Philippines, Malay, Indonesian, most other Indonesian languages and many Papua-New Guinea languages and the languages of the Pacific -- Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian. This includes Maori and Hawaiian. The Austronesian peoples also settled as far afield as Madagascar. The Malagasy language isn't African, it's closest to some languages of Borneo.
I am aware of many similarities between Maori and Indonesian. For example Maori ika = Indo ikang. Maori rima = Indo lima.
My brother in law is Indonesian. His English is terrible. I have even gone so far as to suggest that he learns Maori, which he may find easier.
@David Parke: Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that Indonesian was Indo-European; I am aware that it is Austronesian. I must have typed something when I was confused (and unfortunately I am frequently confused).
ReplyDeleteThanks for the information about Austronesian languages. That is really fascinating. What a huge geographical distribution. Even Malagasy?! Wow. I didn't know about similar words in Maori and Indonesian, either.
It will be interesting to see if I can recognise much of the other Austronesian languages, other than Bahasa Melayu, after learning Indonesian.
No misunderstanding for me ! I rightly got that Robert meant that Indonesian's vocabulary contained an important wordstock from IE languages. Malgasy may even have some 35 Sanskrit loanwords, which would imply that the Austronesians broke up after the Sanskrit-Hindic influence wave.
ReplyDeleteLet's quote:
Sanskrit "megha", Malgasy "mika" = "cloud" ; Sambahsa "mighel" = "mist"
Sanskrit "sakhi"; Malgasy "sakaizi" = "friend"; Sambahsa "sokwi" = "fellow"
Sanskrit "jagâra", Sambahsa "gehr" = "awake"; Malgasy "zaha" = "investigate".