Preamble
After spending the last ten months exhaustively researching constructed languages, only one language was found in which it was practical for me to write sophisticated literature: Occidental. All other constructed languages were too difficult either due to documentation problems, immaturity, or fundamental design characteristics. (Those languages for which the difficulty was largely due to the first two causes will be worth me revisiting in a few years to check their progress and improvement.)
This has been an extremely disappointing outcome: just one usable constructed language, for me personally at this particular point in time, from dozens studied. However disappointing this outcome is, it must be faced up to. There is no point in continuing to divide my efforts between dozens of constructed languages when only one constructed language has delivered to me the results I seek. Accordingly, I should now focus my constructed-language efforts entirely on Occidental for a couple of years.
It is fortunate that, among the available constructed languages, Occidental happens to have the characteristic of being almost ideally suited for the translation of French literature. Even if I end up abandoning Occidental, in the meantime my comprehension of written French will have been greatly improved by the exercise of translating French literature into that language. This is a win-win scenario for me as a writer.
Meanwhile, an unexpected outcome of this journey among constructed languages is that two natural languages were identified which are possibly easy enough and powerful enough to easily serve as international auxiliary languages: Indonesian and Afrikaans. Both of these languages will take me more time to learn to write in than Occidental, mainly because of their unfamiliar vocabulary (especially in the case of Indonesian), but intuitively I feel very strongly that it is essential for me to study these languages in order to have a better linguistic education which will allow me to better evaluate constructed grammars. Indonesian has a simple Eastern grammar and Afrikaans has a simple Western grammar, both of which have been proven effective by millions of speakers and neither of which can be ignored; Esperanto grammar by comparison seems ridiculously difficult.
My Languages Plan
October 2010 - October 2012
October 2010 - October 2012
By necessity, most of my time outside of working hours will be taken up by writing my fourth novel and other English-language writing projects. For pleasure I will continue my study of languages in whatever time is left over. To make maximum use of that limited spare time I will restrict myself to learning the following four languages during the next two years (until October 2012):
French
Occidental
Indonesian
Afrikaans
Indonesian and Afrikaans I will merely dabble in for pleasure, taking them very slowly, but French and Occidental I will continue to study quite seriously. Rather than aiming to be a fluent speaker of any of these languages, which is probably impractical in such a small amount of time, I will instead specifically aim to be a proficient reader of French and a proficient writer of Occidental.
Readers of this blog will note that I have quite often, again and again, published little lists of which languages I will be focussing on and will note that I have nearly always abandoned or ignored such plans. This has mostly been because despite my best intentions the languages on my shortlists turned out to be too difficult and accordingly I had to keep changing direction. But to change direction is better than to give up completely. It will be interesting to see, in the fullness of time, whether the current list of four languages amounts to anything or whether this list too will turn out to be a pointless and embarrassing plan which fails. As always, blogging is all about making one's mistakes in public. Mais, c'est la vie.
I feel reasonably confident however that this time it is different. The experience I've gained, and the advice I have received, during the past ten months tell me that Occidental, Indonesian and Afrikaans are the best choices of the surveyed alternatives for me to focus on, given my particular strengths and weaknesses and my particular literary goals, for the next couple of years. And French, no matter what else happens, is the natural language which I am most committed to learning, despite its very great difficulty, due to its incredibly beautiful literature.
Again, this blog will mostly remain quiet until late January next year. In the meantime, readers interested in Occidental should follow my Occidental-language blog for the literary translations I will regularly be publishing there:
If you wish to encourage and support my efforts to write international literature in the Occidental language, please add youself as a follower of that blog.
Onward...
Sellamat Robert !
ReplyDeleteOccidental is a good choice to approach French for the vocabulary; for the conjugations and the elaborated orthography, it's not exactly so, but it's OK that Occidental will give you a passive understanding of written French (cf. what our friend Jasmin wrote)
I don't remember if I already wrote it but I think that we shall not forget that Afrikaans and Indonesian still have their difficulties.
Afrikaans has kept the strange syntax of Continental Germanic Languages and has a lot of irregular plural and adjectives. In comparison, Netherlandic seems easier to me.
Indonesian is easier, but uses a lot of affixes, and some of which have complicated rules of agreement with the stem that may take as much time to remember that the Sambahsa conjugations.
In any case, continue your translations with Occidental - I learnt it through private translations - and if you practice very regularly, I'm sure you'll know it as well as I do in a few months.
Olivier
http://sambahsa.pbworks.com/
@cafaristeir: Sellamat Olivier !
ReplyDeleteYes I guess it is mainly the vocabulary which is French-like, in Occidental, but there is to some small extent also something about its syntax which occasionally seems just a little more French-like and less Spanish- or Italian-like than Interlingua; overall I find it much easier in my mind to map between French and Occidental rather than between French and Interlingua. Maybe it is just that the overall artistic effect (when read aloud with an intentionally somewhat French-like pronunciation of the letter R) seems more like French than Italian, to me, when writing in Occidental. However, obviously Occidental lacks many of the features of French.
Yes the irregular plurals and, I think if I remember correctly, some strong verbs of Afrikaans are a bit of a challenge. Actually I was speaking to a Dutch friend recently and she claimed quite vehemently that Dutch is almost 100% pronounced as it is written; so perhaps Dutch is a viable alternative however my initial understanding is that overall Afrikaans is simpler and easier. I will be interested to find out. As far as the Germanic syntax goes, I rather like that.
Indonesian is by no means trivial to learn, and the affixes can be a bit tricky (but not too bad compared to, for example, remembering the illogical spelling of English words), but I think it is an essential part of my linguistic education. It will teach me how a language can work without articles and largely without declension or conjugation. I hope that two years from now I can take what I know about English, French, Occidental, Indonesian and Afrikaans grammar together and have a much better understanding about the alternative grammatical systems of expressing the same or similar meanings. I still hope also that perhaps a parallel-universe literary language, Austrakaans, is something I might use in a future novel.
Thanks so much for your advice, as always.
Re-sellamat !
ReplyDelete(about Afrikaans & Netherlandic). Afrikaans has only some 10 or less irregular verbs, so that's not a problem at all. The main issue is about the many irregular plurals and adjectives. It's easier when you already know Dutch, but it is not enough.
Ex: In afrikaans, (shirt), "hemp" = "hemde" while Dutch has "hemd" = "hemden".
And it is worse with adjectives. Many adjectives change when they stand before the noun, but that's not always the case.
Adjectives in "-ig" turn to "ige", that's easy.
But others are completely irregular:
"laag" = "lae"
"nuut" = "nuwe";
and some others don't change at all, don't ask me why.
Afrikaans and Dutch have a regular orthography, except for some loanwords. Afrikaans may even be more regular, but it has diphtongs as hard as the ones found in English.
Totsiens !
Olivier
Afrikaans: I have to disagree with Olivier here on Afrikaans as I find it immeasurably easier than Dutch. Irregularity in the plural is completely natural to an English speaker, while adjectives coming before nouns usually change in ways that make them more recognizable to an English speaker, such as reg (right) becoming regte.
ReplyDeleteBut it's grammatical gender that really makes it easier. In spite of all the exposure I've had to German over Afrikaans, I would still always choose Afrikaans if I had to write a document or give a speech in it. German is passively easy to understand due to seeing it everywhere, but it's Afrikaans where I'm much more certain that what I'm writing is correct, and that's mostly due to verb conjugation and grammatical gender, which Dutch has too.
Also keep in mind that it's much easier to switch an adjective around than avoid a definite article. You can say "die land, wat klein is" instead of "die kleine land" if you aren't sure what happens to klein before a noun, but you can't even say "the" unless you know whether it's de or het. Same thing for verb conjugation - if you want to use a verb you have to know how to conjugate it, and if you encounter a verb you haven't used much before but think is irregular you're screwed until you look it up. In Afrikaans that's never a problem.
By the way, if you'd like a quick comparison then try this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=afk
http://ia700307.us.archive.org/28/items/universal_declaration_librivox/human_rights_un_afk_cdb.mp3
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Language.aspx?LangID=dut
http://ia700307.us.archive.org/28/items/universal_declaration_librivox/human_rights_un_dut_mb.mp3
@Mithridates: Thanks! Very interesting.
ReplyDeleteOoooh, interesting comments.
ReplyDeleteIf I heard it correctly, Afrikaans has only 3 irregular verbs, being the ones which also have a past and future tense (although I'm not too sure about this). In Dutch we have a lot more, which often don't make sense at all (for instance, doing: ik doe, ik deed, ik heb gedaan). And our regular verbs have more different forms, in Afrikaans they have just two. That means it's easier to make mistakes in Dutch, infamous in that aspect is the confusion with d, t and dt, which are (at the end of a word) all pronounced the same. So as far as verbs are concerned, Afrikaans wins.
Dutch pronounciation is quite easy when compared to English, but that's a low bar to clear. There are some strange things (for instance, the a in pas sounds the same as the one in passen, but different from the one in pasen). Afrikaans is probably a bit easier due to the absense of some strange lettercombinations. For instance, the Dutch "school", where ch is pronounced as a (Dutch) g turns into "skool", and words like "vriendelijk", where the ij is pronounced as the Afrikaans y/the Englisch I withouth the j-sound at the end (in Dutch you kan use either ij or ei for this, can be confusing from time to time) turn into "vriendelik"
As for the plurals, Afrikaans has some weird ones, but it's only slightly more confusing then Dutch. Take the plural for cow for instance:
Afrikaans = koei -> koeie
Dutch = koe -> koeien
And Afrikaans scores some extra points on sentence construction. The lack of tenses and absense of genders helps here. It may sound a bit uninspired every now and then, but it's effective.
Granted, it's not perfect, and if I knew more about Indonesian (or Swahili? or any creole?) I might very well find that to be easier. But Afrikaans does seem to beat Dutch on the easy front. With a noticeable lead, if I'm any judge of it.
In the category fun facts, it's a popular (but probably quite incorrect) believe in the Netherlands that our language is one of the hardest to learn in the world. But that one probably goes arround in more countries.
As for German: it confuses me. Like Mithridates, I had a lot more exposure to German than to Afrikaans, and while I can understand bits and pieces of German I could not hackle myself through a correct sentence if my life depended on it. And while Dutch is closer related to Afrikaans than to German I'm pretty sure Afrikaans can be seen as objectively easier, a lot easier.
Greetings,
Jack Dawson
@Jack Dawson: Thanks, Jack. Very interesting comment. I really hope to learn enough Afrikaans over the next few years to be able to read and enjoy literature in it and maybe even write literature in it. At this stage it does seem to me that Afrikaans really could be a viable international auxiliary language for literature, in those rare cases where writers and readers are willing to invest some time in learning a language when they have no language in common; I will be very interested, once I've learned enough Afrikaans, to compare its utility in this respect against Indonesian and Occidental, two other major contenders. Right now it seems to me the order of difficulty is: Occidental easiest, Indonesian next easiest, and Afrikaans still easy but harder than the other two. However these relatively difficulties go out the window if the reader is more familiar with the vocabulary of one of these languages over the other: in this respect Occidental wins for pan-European use, Afrikaans wins for pan-Germanic use, and Indonesian wins for Southeast-Asian use.
ReplyDeleteThere would also seem to be an opportunity to lift the grammar of either Indonesian or Afrikaans, probably the former, and apply it to different regional vocabularies, to get the easiest auxlang, but at the present point in time I do not yet know enough of either language to judge. I will continue to study them. In the meantime Occidental is finally working very well for me and I am translating a French novel into that language (see my Occidental language blog); in future I might try parallel translations of the same novel in Indonesian and Afrikaans for comparison.
Hi, Robert! I've got a question to ask. It's about Indonesian and I was just wondering if you know a book to learn Indonesian that's available online?
ReplyDelete@Ĉetano: Hi, Ĉetano! I'm sorry, I don't know any good e-book for learning Indonesian which is available for free online; however you can order traditional printed books inexpensively from online retailers such as The Book Depository (free delivery worldwide, new books, cheap prices, usually very reliable):
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bookdepository.co.uk/
or AbeBooks UK (secondhand books, online store for numerous small secondhand bookshops, extremely cheap prices, mostly reliable, small delivery fees):
http://www.abebooks.co.uk/
I guess if you live in the USA then Amazon would also be economical but for me in Australia the delivery charges of Amazon are a killer. Sorry, I am not trying to advertise retailers here and I have absolutely no connection to the above retailers, but it was a revelation to me discovering such inexpensive and convenient sources of books, so I am passing it on here. I get most of my language books in this way.
By the way, once you can speak Indonesian well you can order Indonesian books from Indonesian online retailers: most are very cheap! But my Indonesian isn't good enough for that yet.
Anyway, for Indonesian I am using "Teach Yourself Complete Indonesian" (Byrnes and Nyimas, 2010) with the accompanying CD audio recording. The audio recording is good but the book is adequate at best and often annoying; unfortunately I have not found a really excellent introductory book.
However, on the plus side, I have found some excellent reference books. "Tuttle Compact Indonesian Dictionary" (Davidsen, 2009) appears to be excellent and is INVALUABLE when trying to use the above Teach Yourself book (whose in-built dictionary is woefully inadequate even for the texts within the book itself). This dictionary has 30,000 entries and is well laid out; avoid cheaper dictionaries, get this one.
The dry, academic, but superb reference books on Indonesian grammar are by James Neil Sneddon (et. al.). I would not be without them, they are fantastic! "Indonesian Reference Grammar, 2nd ed." (2010) and "Understanding Indonesian Grammar. A student's reference and workbook" (2000).
I think learning some Indonesian is almost a 'must' for anybody interested in constructed languages. It seems to be a very good language which has most of the features one would include in a constructed languages, however it demonstrates very well the principle that you still need (even in the easiest language) a grammar sophisticated enough for sophisticated use (hence the grammar tomes, above) and more importantly you get to experience first-hand what it would be like, for example, for a Chinese-speaker to learn Esperanto or Occidental when they recognise none of the words, no common vocabulary.
Indonesian is a lot of fun, I recommend it, and I have the feeling it could be used as an IAL if people were willing to learn all the unfamiliar word-roots; in my opinion it might well turn out that Afrikaans, Indonesian, and Esperanto are all about the same degree of difficulty overall, assuming the student speaks only Chinese and therefore the familiarity or unfamiliarity of vocabulary is not a factor. However that is what this year is about for me; I cannot yet reach any conclusion regarding this.