Indeed, since then I have been doggedly plugging away at a translation of a formidably gigantic 19th-century novel, La Chartreuse de Parme. Yes, that's right, the novel is in French and I am translating it into Occidental. The beauty of this is that this activity improves my understanding of French, so the time is in no way wasted, and the novel is no longer under copyright so it is freely available.
Where have I been doing this? In my blog in Occidental, which is called Li joya de linguages. As regular readers of The Joy of Languages would know, I have largely stopped blogging in English (except for very occasional posts like this one) until January 2011 so that I can work on my fourth novel.
Anyway, if you have not yet visited Li joya de linguages, I recommend you do so now. I am actively writing and publishing there in Occidental and if you speak any of the major Continental European languages you will probably be surprised to discover that you can understand at least a little Occidental without prior study; quite possibly you may be able to read whole passages relatively easily and understand most of it. Of course, if there is something you don't understand, simply obtain a copy of the novel in your native language and compare. To locate a copy of the novel in your native language, go to the wikipedia page and look at the left margin of the page: here you will see the page is available in several other languages, so click on your native language and hopefully you will find a link to a free, downloadable version of the novel in your native language; otherwise you should be able to purchase a copy from a bookshop as the novel is well known.
A warning to speakers of English: Occidental is much harder for us than it is for native speakers of French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and other Continental European languages. Therefore do not judge the difficulty of Occidental according to its difficulty for English speakers; the language is actually remarkably easy for many Europeans. If your native language is English, quite a lot of effort is required to learn Occidental, although many words are instantly recognisable. For example, here is some Occidental:
Democratic? No. Practical? Yes.
Hmmm. That looks exactly like English! Yes, but it is actually Occidental. Let's take a look at those sentences written out in full, however, and then you realise that Occidental isn't quite so easy for English speakers.
Esque occidental es democratic? No.
Esque occidental es practical? Yes.
Is Occidental democratic? No.
Is Occidental practical? Yes.
So that is what Occidental is like for English speakers. You instantly recognise many of the words, such as democratic and practical but you have to spend some time learning the "glue words" or "linking words" which hold sentences together (here I am intentionally avoiding grammatical terms) such as esque which is a question marker that you can read as "Is it true that... ...?" And you have to learn a little bit about how the verbs work; this is extremely easy since almost without exception the verbs in Occidental are entirely regular and there is almost nothing to memorise (unlike, say, learning French or Spanish). For example in the above sentences es means "is". Now, many Continental Europeans will be able to read the above sentences instantly; Occidental is often really easy for them.
Interested? Here is a list of Occidental resources on the web, including dictionaries and the complete grammar. Try the Yahoo group for general help.
Anyway, all that is beside the point. Here is the point:
The joy is back!
Yes, I'm having fun again. Translating The Charterhouse of Parma into Occidental is a whale of a lot of fun, mostly because the language actually works as a literary language. It actually works. It is practical. It is expressive. It is beautiful. And—here's a novelty—people can actually understand it.
Let's restate this: I have now reached a huge milestone. I have now translated over 2000 words of a single literary work into a foreign language, to literary standard. This would be impossible for me, right now, in any other language; this includes all other natural languages and all other constructed languages.
If this is not a reason to jump for joy, nothing is.
To put this in perspective, my native language is English and I do not fluently speak any Romance language although I know a few words of Portuguese and have a basic, beginner- or early-intermediate-level knowledge of French. Therefore it takes me on average about 20 minutes to translate one long sentence from the French novel into Occidental (and I use a pre-existing English translation of the novel as a guideline). However it is getting noticeably easier.
This is a joy, an absolute joy, and very educational. My knowledge of French is improving exponentially, I am learning much about European history and culture which will be useful to me in my English-language novels, and I am becoming proficient in an eminently practical auxiliary language for literature: Occidental.
Things are looking up.
Hi Robert, I'm really happy for you, and Ima let ya finish, ;) but you might be underestimating English there, compared to "continental European languages" like the Germanic languages, the Slavic languages and the Finno-Ugric languages (and very likely some smaller ones I'm still missing there) English is actually quite closely related to the Romance languages like french, Spanish and Italian (though mostly in vocabulary). So as for how difficult a language based on one of those would be to learn for speakers of other languages, English would probably rank somewhere in the middle of the pack, not at the end.
ReplyDeleteNote: the author of this post does not know any Occidental.
@Jack Dawson: Hi Jack. My apologies, I meant no disrespect to those whose first language is English.
ReplyDeleteMostly my assumption comes from my own experience: Occidental was actually quite hard for me to learn to understand properly, in full paragraphs, beyond just recognising many of the words and decoding simple sentences, and my first language is English. But perhaps this is merely a reflection of my own personal shortcomings as a student of languages rather than a reflection of the difficulty of Occidental to speakers of English in general. One weird thing I have noticed, however, is at least isolated cases in which speakers of Russian and German apparently find Occidental easy to understand, whereas as you quite correctly point out there is so much Romance vocabulary in English that one would generally expect Occidental to be easier for an English speaker than a speaker of Russian or German. Similarly I note that Interlingua (a language similar to Occidental) is relatively popular in Sweden, where apparently some people find it quite easy. My personal theory is that probably all this has something to do with education in Europe compared to education, for example, in Australia; I guess that perhaps in Europe kids get more practice and take more interest in learning other European languages... maybe they get exposure to Romance languages even though they never really learn them to fluency. So maybe Occidental will seem easier and less intimidating to a person in Berlin, Moscow or Stockholm than to a person in Sydney or Melbourne.
My argument here is, I know, a very weak one and I'm not putting it into words well, but the bottom line is it amazes me that apparently quite a few Europeans can pretty much read Occidental at first sight whereas certainly I could not and most of my Australian friends probably could not. There seems to be some truth in this, for whatever reason, even if the first language of a European is not a Romance language.
Having said all that, Occidental is still the easiest of all the auxlangs for me in that it is the only auxlang in which I have been able to translate more than 1,000 words of a work of literature, so clearly Occidental still works for an English speaker like me. By comparison with Esperanto I 'had no hope'.
Oh, the irony...
On a more practical point, I am curious. Are you able to read the novel I have been translating into Occidental. Can you read the text at the following link, for example?
http://joyadelinguages.blogspot.com/2010/11/li-chartruse-de-parma-de-stendhal-parte.html
Hi again Robert,
ReplyDeleteNo, the text behind that link contains too many important words like verbs that I either do not understand or do not understand well enough. I might be able to figure out most of it if I put enough time in it, but on the other hand, I also thought I could do that back in French class.
For instance: this is how far I get with the first sentence:
On May 15 1796, general Bonaparte ?(this should be something like made, looking at the complete sentence) his entrance into Milan ? ? of ? ? army(or weapon, but probably army [edit]definately army, after reading the words after it, which means the words before it should mean "at the head of his"[/edit]) which had recently come across the bridge of Lodi(wherever that is) and had taught the world that after many centuries (loosely translated because of confusion with individual words) Ceasar and Alexander now had a successor.
Okay, so perhaps that went better than expected. What I was going to say here is that the text at the top of your blog and the blogposts you make in occidental seem to be simpler, with more normal, everyday kind of words. I can read that, and I don't need to think about it word for word.
Having said that, the same text in French would probably be readable too. Occidental might contain more English or German words than french, I don't know, but the majority seems to be Romance-inspired. The nice thing about that is that the important words are usually the same throughout the Romance language territory. When I was in Hungary last summer, the only thing I could read relatively well (in the broad sense of the word) on the back of the beercans was Romanian. My bafflingly bad grasp of French, some general knowledge of pizza and pasta names and my English apparently got me through there.
The problem with Romance languages though, or my problem at least, is the writing, the creation of sentences, with all those different forms of words and stuff. A german might be able to pick that up relatively fast, but I couldn't.
If Occidental changes that so much that it's easier to grasp than other artificial languages, than apparently it's a good language. I don't know why one would start from French if one wanted to create a simple language, but if they succeeded I'm very happy for them.
What I meant to say, without implying that anyone insulted English speakers (or insulting them myself) is that many of the words I recognise in these texts are recognisable to me because I speak English. I the paragraph I translated here there is one word where my first association was with a Dutch word (entrada > intrede, sounds Italian though, entrada, and of course entrance is related too). An English speaker with the same "knowledge" of French (which might, thanks to highschool, be a bit more that I like to believe, but still not much) should be able to read it about as well as I did. The problem therefor, as you also kind of indicate in your reaction, might simply be less experience with trying to extrapolate information from a foreign text. Or, of course, the Europeans you spoke too mostly have previous experience with any Romance language, which counts as cheating, because they let you guess words even better than English does.
On a bit of a different branche of the point, how easy something is is relative, you say you find Occidental easier than the other languages you tried, and for Russians and Swedes, that comparison is the same. Especially since the languages they tried are probably natural languages and/or the bigger designed languages, which are all in one way or another mostly based on Romance languages. To them, Occidental seemed easier than the other things they tried, and to you too, so I guess I'm going towards a question here: what makes you say the language is easier to them, "continental Europeans", then to you?
Hm, I'm not sure I'm making sense here anymore. Ah well...
@Jack Dawson: Thanks for your reply.
ReplyDeleteActually, it is quite encouraging to hear you were able to decode so much of the start of that novel, "The Charterhouse of Parma", which after all was published in 1839 and accordingly uses very old and rather florid language. Translating it into Occidental has been quite a challenge for me.
I would say Occidental is about as easy compared to most natural Romance languages as Afrikaans is compared to most natural Germanic languages, or perhaps even easier still. In other words, it is very significantly easier. One of my long-term projects is to try to compare Indonesian, Afrikaans and Occidental in terms of ease of sophisticated literary expression but regardless of the familiarity of their vocabulary. My guess is that all three will be in the same ballpark but that Occidental will probably be the easiest of the three... but it's not a foregone conclusion by any means. Occidental spelling is more difficult than that of Indonesian, for example.
To answer your question, I think the single main thing which makes me think that Occidental is way easier for Continental Europeans (a phrase I am mostly using to emphasise the exclusion of the UK and to highlight an area where many learn 3 or 4 languages in school) is that, to my great annoyance, there seems to be a long history in the Occidental community of Europeans just kind of "picking Occidental up" and learning it from reading it. That is, it seems there is this history of people from that region learning Occidental mostly from reading Cosmoglotta or other periodicals and from studying the grammar of Occidental written in Occidental without a translation thereof. For me this is impossible; only because an English translation of the grammar was made available to me was it possible for me to get anywhere with the language, and without my Occidental-English dictionary I'd have no hope. It has really infuriated me that the Occidental community has not produced more learning materials in English and other languages but instead seems to sit back and rely upon Europeans mostly being able to pick it up without translated learning materials. What hope then do speakers of Asian or Afrikan languages have of learning Occidental if the Occidental community expects them to just pick it up from reading Occidental? I have observed a similar "lazy teaching philosophy" in the Interlingua community.
So, to summarise, I have noticed that for me, as an English speaker, English-language learning materials for Occidental have been absolutely essential. In contrast, my impression has been that Europeans can often just learn Occidental without translated learning materials, to a much greater degree.
Of course, I may be mistaken.
You could be right, but I don't know, since I haven't tried learning it. I was just looking for some kind of explanation for the effect as you described it, since it sounded kind of weird.
ReplyDelete(Just for clarification, "the same text" that I thought I'dd be able to read too was meant to be the text of your blog, not the ancient French from the book. Reading it back it looks a bit confusing.)
On aslightly related note: I encountered the opposite problem of what you descripe. If you try looking for sites for learning Afrikaans online you find mostly English sites. There is little material in Afrikaans itself. Of course it sounds a bit silly to want to learn a language in that language, but if you know enough to understand the language than reading further in that language really is more fun than just reading about it in another one.
But to close with an encouraging note: yes, seeing how readable your blog is (the post about Indonesian being simple only gets confusing in the examples, where the context to determine words from is mostly missing) I could see Europeans with some language education read books from wherever in Occidental. That is, if the translators would be kind enough to try and not use the most advanced features and there weren't lots of books (and especially the popular ones) translated into their home language or English, which many among that demographic speak well enough to read books in it.
ReplyDeleteIn a way, using unsuitable languages for international communication is killing the chances of the more suitable ones...
Bondie !
ReplyDeleteJust two things :
- La Chartreuse de Parme is not written in "ancient French", this is just good literary French, that could be written today. Stendhal was said to be reading every day a few articles from the Code Napoléon, to improve the clarity of its own redaction (unfortunately, modern law texts are poorly written and often unreadable).
- I agree that the on-line resources for Afrikaans are very scarce)
Olivier
Hi Olivier,
ReplyDeleteThe term Ancient French was meant to refer to the "very old and rather florid language" Robert descriped, I just thought I might as well exaggerate a little extra. I have not read the original French text, nor would I know how it looks.
@Jack Dawson, @cafaristeir: Thanks for the interesting comments. Jack, I am really encouraged by your ability to read my post about the Indonesian language (other than the examples, which I agree are difficult without context), and by your thoughts that Europeans could read books written in Occidental if the writer tries to keep it simple and avoids the most advanced features of this language. This is very encouraging indeed. Thanks. Just for anybody else reading this, the post about the Indonesian language is here:
ReplyDeletehttp://joyadelinguages.blogspot.com/2010/12/indonesian-grammatica-temporal-marcas.html
By the way, the French novel from 1839, "La Chartreuse de Parme" which I am translating into Occidental, is located here:
http://joyadelinguages.blogspot.com/2010/11/li-chartruse-de-parma-de-stendhal-parte.html
Now I fully understand that French, unlike English, has been rather stable in its literary form for a few centuries, and that Stendhal (the author of that novel) was highly influential as someone who modernised not the language itself (which was relatively stable) but the novel: he introduced a style of greater realism, particularly regarding battle scenes, which 90 years later was to be quite influential on writers like Hemingway.
However (and please bear in mind my French is very poor) when I read "La Peste" by Albert Camus (1947) there is immediately a clarity and unobstructed brilliance, a tremendous modernity, about the style of writing that by comparison makes Stendhal seem florid and old-fashioned in style. To put it bluntly, Stendhal writes long waffling sentences which seem designed to impress the reader with his erudition whereas Camus writes clean, no-nonsense, powerful prose. Camus reminds me of Hemingway in style. Stendhal reminds me of Dickens (but without "ye olde words" since French has been stable for longer).
Anyway, the bottom line is that Stendhal's *style* of writing seems very old and more convoluted compared to the brilliant clarity and modernity of Camus. To be fair, Camus basically won the Nobel Prize in Literature partly for this brilliant new clarity which was perfect for discussing matters of truth and ethics and morality. In short, I wish I were translating "La Peste" (The Plague) instead of "La Chartreuse de Parme" (The Charterhouse of Parma") as I prefer the modern style of the latter and also it would be very much easier for newcomers to Occidental to read in translation. Intentionally, when translating Stendhal, I'm retaining most of the floridness and not trying to cut it down, except for some of the very idiomatic expressions which I intentionally simplify.
So, alas, "Li Cartusie de Parma" (that's the title in Occidental) isn't the easiest book to read. However as a translator one must attempt to remain true to the style of the original and if I were not to do so it would lose value as a reference translation anyway.
Just for comparison, here is my Occidental translation of the start of "La Peste". I think it is much easier to read than the Stendhal. What do you think?
http://joyadelinguages.blogspot.com/2010/11/litterari-traduction-li-peste-de-albert.html
And now for something completely different: I have just ordered copies of "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets" in four languages as reference translations: English, French, Indonesian, Afrikaans. Now waiting for these to be delivered. The book is not my cup of tea but it is a perfect opportunity to get a reference translation which includes Indonesian AND Afrikaans versions, something not easy to find.
Of course, as with Camus (unless I wish to use the Canadian copyright loophole) it is not possible due to copyright for me to publish a Harry Potter translated into Occidental. On the other hand, you never know, perhaps I should give JK Rowling a call...
:-)
Sellamat Robert !
ReplyDeleteStendhal's influence came long after his death. During his life, he was nearly completely misunderstood and he knew this; that's why he dedicated la Chartreuse de Parme "to the happy few" (in English ! Did he foresee you would like it !)
Camus is well-known for his terse style, both in his narration and his writing. Many foreign students of French choose it because of that... I think he influenced the Newyorker Paul Auster (the City of Glass).
A concise style I like well is Lovecraft's one. Though I am not an unconditional fan of his visions of horror, I appreciated his way of writing (moreover, I think his works are now copyright-free).
OK, Harry Potter books are a huge money factory for JKR; however, (at least the first volumes) have been translated into Latin; and it is even the biggest book ever translated into Old Greek since the Renaissance. If your motivation is very serious and you know how to act with editors, you may be able to get the rights for a translation into an auxlang.
(I am currently working on the Sambahsa-English dictionary; I hope it will be over in the next weeks...)
Olivier
@Robert Winter:
ReplyDeleteOf course to really read long texts like books people would still need to learn a bit about the language. The positive side of it is apparently one can do the learning mostly by just reading books, what the idea behing learning it was anyway.
As for the Harry Potter books: I don't know about Australian law, but many countries allow placing quotes to some degree, although it's probably not to enough of a degree to really help you in publishing what you're learning from it here. Let's just hope they'll cut you some slack as long as you don't copy (or translate, as you already wrote, too bad) the entire book.
Oh, and about la peste: I can't really tell if it's easier. At this point I'm "translating" by just trying to identify words and seeing if anything starts making sense. La pestelooks like it contains a bit more normal/daily words andreads a bit easier, but it's not a very big difference, there's still bits I'm having trouble with.
Things like the sentence contruction, the overall "build" of the story or the subjects the books deal with may well be easier, but I don't think I can read it well enough to be much of a judge of that...