For those of you who are new to this blog, let's recap:
Q: Who am I?
A: An Australian novelist, seeking to write literature in languages other than English, especially interested in international auxiliary languages (auxlangs).
Q: What is this blog about?
A: It describes my journey as I set out to discover and learn suitable languages for the purpose of writing literature for readers around the world, without requiring those readers to learn English and without needing translators. In other words, a journey of discovery to see if there are any languages so easy to learn that it would be practical to quickly learn them and enjoy literature in them.
Q: How long have I been doing this investigation?
A: Exactly one year.
Q: How has it been going?
A: On the whole, exceptionally badly.
Q: So did you get any result?
A: Yes, thank goodness.
Q: Which language gave you the best result?
A: Without question, Occidental. I was able to relatively quickly produce a reasonably good literary translation, well over 5000 words long, of the start of the great French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme. My results with all other languages, including Esperanto, were approximately zero; that is to say, no success at all translating any literature longer than about one page.
Q: So would you recommend that language?
A: No. Occidental relies upon the reader having extensive knowledge of European languages, especially since the language is very poorly documented. To write well in Occidental you need to have very good knowledge of one Romance language and one Germanic language other than English; this was possible for me only because I have good knowledge of both French and German. However, for those with such prerequisite knowledge Occidental is the easiest of all the auxiliary languages which is still clearly sophisticated enough for writing an excellent, literary novel. Unfortunately it is a waste of time unless you are content to write only for those who already speak two or three European languages.
Q: Is there a constructed language you recommend?
A: At this point in time I do not recommend any constructed language to professional novelists for writing entire novels. However I am currently re-evaluating Esperanto. Purely as a hobby, Occidental is fully capable right now of being used for writing entire novels to a very high literary standard; for an incomplete example see my recent translation. However, basically nobody would read such a novel except a handful of language enthusiasts who already speak two or three European languages. Also only as a hobby, I believe that Sambahsa and Lingwa de Planeta could probably be used for writing good short stories, although personally I have not been able to do so and virtually nobody would be able to read them at this point in history. Most other constructed languages, and all of the really famous ones (including Interlingua and Ido), I recommend you avoid like the plague... this especially applies to any constructed language other than Occidental which is primarily or mainly based on Romance languages. Phew! Confused yet? The short answer is: I have not been able to find a constructed language I consider suitable for professional use for the purpose of writing an entire novel at this point in history. I am re-evaluating Esperanto.
Q: Is there a natural language you recommend?
A: Yes. I recommend Afrikaans and Indonesian. Both are remarkably easy compared to most other natural languages, and perhaps of similar overall difficulty to Esperanto, if no weight is given to how recognisable the vocabularies are to speakers of European languages. Over the coming year I will be attempting to prove or disprove this hypothesis as I will be learning Afrikaans, Indonesian and Esperanto in parallel. I think there is a hidden opportunity for the use of Afrikaans and Indonesian for international literature which has not yet been seized. If this hypothesis proves to be incorrect, then I think that a constructed language based on Afrikaans, Indonesian, or both could probably perform as well or better than Esperanto for use by novelists.
Q: So what languages will you study this year?
A: These ones...
Q: Why French?
A: Because it is one of the greatest literary languages in the world and I have set myself a goal to be able to read great French literature well.
Q: Why English?
A: Although it is my native language, a writer must never stop learning about his or her language and so I study English as seriously as any other language. This especially pertains to reading great English literature.
Q: What are the biggest lessons you have learned?
A: No constructed language except Esperanto is currently worth considering for the professional novelist for writing a whole novel, and it is not even clear that Esperanto is worth considering. Surprisingly, no constructed language other than Esperanto is even worth considering for the average person who simply wishes to communicate with other people on the internet; that is, to communicate with people other than a few language enthusiasts here and there. Against this, natural languages like Afrikaans (say, if the student speaks only English) and Indonesian (say, if the student speaks no European language) seem about as easy as Esperanto to learn yet allow communication with millions!
My conclusion is not that constructed languages cannot work but that the design of currently available auxlangs is badly flawed for global use. There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that two factors are jointly responsible for this suboptimal design and hence failure: (a) that most auxlangs are based primarily on Romance languages; (b) that most auxlangs are based only on European languages and, even worse, presume knowledge of European languages.
When you start to learn Indonesian (a powerful but easy Austronesian language) and Afrikaans (a powerful but easy West Germanic language whose grammar became naturally simplified in Africa), you realise that the complicated ways of European languages (and of Esperanto) are not the way forward. Indeed, Afrikaans and Indonesian were partly constructed languages (namely their excellent, very easy orthographies) yet are massively successful with millions of speakers (from many different native languages) and have been used to run major governments and to teach in universities in all subjects! There is no need to have all the declension and conjugation of major European languages; even declining nouns for the plural really is not necessary (it is not present in Indonesian and removing it from an auxlang based on Afrikaans would still yield a comprehensible language with only very minor grammatical modifications).
Basically, if one wishes to have any so-called 'internationally recognisable' vocabulary (read 'Latin vocabulary recognisable to speakers of European languages and to most scientists in most countries'), one should do it through the lens of a non-European language (such as Indonesian) or at the very least through the lens of a non-Romance language (such as a Germanic language with the simplest possible grammar which is still powerful, like Afrikaans) and never through the lens of a Romance language. Why? Because as soon as the language designer thinks like a Romance language you get all the baggage associated with Romance languages and it all goes wrong. Romance languages generally do not lend themselves well to simplification of their grammars, and Romance-language drift (the tendency of native Romance-language speakers to corrupt Romance auxlangs with their native-language habits, resulting in a lack of mutual comprehensibility between speakers) ruins even those Romance-language auxlangs with more sophisticated grammars.* Supporting this hypothesis, Esperanto has a highly artificial, highly bizarre grammar which does not much resemble that of natural Romance languages despite most of its word roots being taken from Latin or Romance origin; hence, it manages to avoid most of the curse of being Romance-based and has achieved the greatest popularity. However, Esperanto is still greatly overcomplicated due to it being based only on European languages and it is cursed by the European habit of excessive (although entirely regular, in this case) conjugation and declension. Hence, it has had considerable but ultimately very limited success. Many students give up on it.
Still, perhaps Esperanto will hold out adequately in the comparison this year to Afrikaans and Indonesian as I study them all in parallel. Only time will tell. Should it not do so, I will consider if Afrikaans or Indonesian are easy enough for international literary use as they are; they may well be so. Finally, if I have still not gotten a result I might consider creating a constructed language based mainly on Afrikaans, Indonesian, or both, perhaps for a literary project.
Q: Is there a natural language you recommend?
A: Yes. I recommend Afrikaans and Indonesian. Both are remarkably easy compared to most other natural languages, and perhaps of similar overall difficulty to Esperanto, if no weight is given to how recognisable the vocabularies are to speakers of European languages. Over the coming year I will be attempting to prove or disprove this hypothesis as I will be learning Afrikaans, Indonesian and Esperanto in parallel. I think there is a hidden opportunity for the use of Afrikaans and Indonesian for international literature which has not yet been seized. If this hypothesis proves to be incorrect, then I think that a constructed language based on Afrikaans, Indonesian, or both could probably perform as well or better than Esperanto for use by novelists.
Q: So what languages will you study this year?
A: These ones...
Afrikaans
Indonesian
Esperanto
French
English
Q: Why French?
A: Because it is one of the greatest literary languages in the world and I have set myself a goal to be able to read great French literature well.
Q: Why English?
A: Although it is my native language, a writer must never stop learning about his or her language and so I study English as seriously as any other language. This especially pertains to reading great English literature.
Q: What are the biggest lessons you have learned?
A: No constructed language except Esperanto is currently worth considering for the professional novelist for writing a whole novel, and it is not even clear that Esperanto is worth considering. Surprisingly, no constructed language other than Esperanto is even worth considering for the average person who simply wishes to communicate with other people on the internet; that is, to communicate with people other than a few language enthusiasts here and there. Against this, natural languages like Afrikaans (say, if the student speaks only English) and Indonesian (say, if the student speaks no European language) seem about as easy as Esperanto to learn yet allow communication with millions!
My conclusion is not that constructed languages cannot work but that the design of currently available auxlangs is badly flawed for global use. There is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that two factors are jointly responsible for this suboptimal design and hence failure: (a) that most auxlangs are based primarily on Romance languages; (b) that most auxlangs are based only on European languages and, even worse, presume knowledge of European languages.
When you start to learn Indonesian (a powerful but easy Austronesian language) and Afrikaans (a powerful but easy West Germanic language whose grammar became naturally simplified in Africa), you realise that the complicated ways of European languages (and of Esperanto) are not the way forward. Indeed, Afrikaans and Indonesian were partly constructed languages (namely their excellent, very easy orthographies) yet are massively successful with millions of speakers (from many different native languages) and have been used to run major governments and to teach in universities in all subjects! There is no need to have all the declension and conjugation of major European languages; even declining nouns for the plural really is not necessary (it is not present in Indonesian and removing it from an auxlang based on Afrikaans would still yield a comprehensible language with only very minor grammatical modifications).
Basically, if one wishes to have any so-called 'internationally recognisable' vocabulary (read 'Latin vocabulary recognisable to speakers of European languages and to most scientists in most countries'), one should do it through the lens of a non-European language (such as Indonesian) or at the very least through the lens of a non-Romance language (such as a Germanic language with the simplest possible grammar which is still powerful, like Afrikaans) and never through the lens of a Romance language. Why? Because as soon as the language designer thinks like a Romance language you get all the baggage associated with Romance languages and it all goes wrong. Romance languages generally do not lend themselves well to simplification of their grammars, and Romance-language drift (the tendency of native Romance-language speakers to corrupt Romance auxlangs with their native-language habits, resulting in a lack of mutual comprehensibility between speakers) ruins even those Romance-language auxlangs with more sophisticated grammars.* Supporting this hypothesis, Esperanto has a highly artificial, highly bizarre grammar which does not much resemble that of natural Romance languages despite most of its word roots being taken from Latin or Romance origin; hence, it manages to avoid most of the curse of being Romance-based and has achieved the greatest popularity. However, Esperanto is still greatly overcomplicated due to it being based only on European languages and it is cursed by the European habit of excessive (although entirely regular, in this case) conjugation and declension. Hence, it has had considerable but ultimately very limited success. Many students give up on it.
* It is better to simply learn a natural Romance language!
Still, perhaps Esperanto will hold out adequately in the comparison this year to Afrikaans and Indonesian as I study them all in parallel. Only time will tell. Should it not do so, I will consider if Afrikaans or Indonesian are easy enough for international literary use as they are; they may well be so. Finally, if I have still not gotten a result I might consider creating a constructed language based mainly on Afrikaans, Indonesian, or both, perhaps for a literary project.
Well, here's to Year Two!
Onward...
Happy birthday Robert !
ReplyDelete"Heureux qui comme Ulysse a fait un long voyage"...
Well hold on there a second with Ido - I believe you gave it a total of some two days or so, so I don't think you could recommend "avoiding it like the plague". It remains for me the IAL I find the easiest to use even after all this time, and the one that most accurately reflects the derivation of languages like Korean, Japanese and Turkish - the natural languages that I am best at.
ReplyDeleteAh, sent that comment off a bit prematurely. Here's my criterion for whether someone can recommend avoiding Ido like the plague or not: if they have completely read through the KGD. Without that one's knowledge of the language remains superficial. Takes about a week to do so, and your knowledge of Occidental, Esperanto and French should make it not too difficult.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I had nearly the same thought as Dave. Since you seem to find some qualities in Esperanto, then you should appreciate Ido. It has no daft hats, no mandatory accusative, looks more natural than Esperanto (a taste of Romance), in short, it is quite superior to Esperanto in nearly all fields. The only big difference is that it has a far smaller community, but which still exists and quite living. (My reason not to prefer Ido over Occidental is that it keeps the obligatory endings of Esperanto).
ReplyDeleteYou can find many informations there : http://interlanguages.net/yindex.html
Olivier
Your blog is great and inspired by it, I've set myself a task of enjoying literature in two languages - Sambahsa and Japanese - this year.
ReplyDeleteAfter your previous year's experiments with auxlangs, I'd be waiting to see how you perform with natural languages. :)
Here's a quick summary of Ido vs. Esperanto explained to a tr/ja/ko speaker. In most cases they are the same, not always.
ReplyDeleteverb infinitive to -o noun: Ido is tr -mek to -me, ja is like -su to -shi, ko is like -da to -gi. Done. Espo is like that in most cases, but sometimes you'll get the object of a noun instead.
-anta/ata/onta/ota and all the rest: easy to explain for both since they're the same. -anta is like yapmak to yapan whereas -ata is yapmak to yaptığı, ja is just the infinitive for the first and -rareru for the second (followed by a noun), ko is replacing -da with -neun for the former, -da to -eojineun for the latter.
Adjectival agreement and accusative: Espo is like European languages here so requires a separate explanation. Ido is explained like this:
If the word order is the same as English, treat it like English. Me havas kato.
If you want your native word order, -n is like tr -i (kalem-i), ja wo, ko reul.
The article in both Ido and Espo needs to be explained, but having just one is nice.
-a to -o: Ido is like putting the suffix adam/hito/saram after an adjective, since it just means "someone with those qualities". Espo it can mean a number of things, intuitive for an IE speaker but maybe not so much for others.
Maybe that's enough for now. Espo is of course much easier for speakers of these languages than English, but I do enjoy not having to explain things like bluajn librojn. It isn't a mind-wrackingly difficult concept but can give the impression right in the beginning that this is a language that is harder than English (like English but now add adjectival agreement, bwahahaha!), and it's nice to be able to avoid that.
@cafaristeir: Thanks! :-)
ReplyDelete@Eto Demerzel: Thanks. Great to hear you will be reading literature in Sambahsa and Japanese this year. Let me know how you get on, especially with Sambahsa.
@Mithridates: Thanks for the information, Dave. Yes, you're right, I am being a bit harsh on Ido here and lumping it in the "avoid like the plague" category along with Interlingua might falsely give readers the impression that it is just a naturalistic mess like Interlingua, when in fact as you point out it is quite different and has been very deliberately engineered by a team of scientists to a very finely honed degree: basically, improving on Esperanto. If Esperanto is the basic Ford Model T then Ido is the Bugatti Type 35: faster, sleeker, and radiating Italian style.
However I didn't have an especially good experience during my short abortive attempt to learn Ido some months ago; basically the instruction manual for the Bugatti Type 35 was a little daunting. Sometimes one merely wants to drive to the corner shops to buy milk and for this the Model T is sufficient. But you are right, I probably should have given it more time. Anyway, strike one was that I didn't personally get too far with the language; that is, its improvements over Esperanto didn't really seem to get me better results as a student in the long run and I failed to learn both Esperanto and Ido.
Strike two is that in my mind it really isn't all that different to Esperanto and it is hard to justify choosing a language spoken by a tiny fraction of the number of speakers and having only a tiny fraction of the available literature, when at the end of the day they are very similar languages. Also, and this is really the killer: if Ido really were going to succeed it already would have done so. Analysis cannot always predict which languages will succeed or fail but observing the behaviour of the market is telling: consumers have rejected Ido. In terms of this rejection by consumers, Ido is similar to Interlingua.
Strike three is that it is more heavily influenced by Romance languages than Esperanto. Its designers have, making the Bugatti instead of the Model T, deliberately gone for that wonderful Italian style and finesse. Ido is a step closer to the naturalistic Romance philosophy, and I am now totally convinced that is a step in the wrong direction. Again, analysis fails but the observed behaviour of consumers speaks volumes: here we have a language very similar to Esperanto but made to look more like a Romance language. And what happens? Consumers rejected it. Presumably somehow, despite Ido's other advantages for Asian-language speakers, its more Romance-like look carries with it some kind of disadvantage.
Continued in next comment...
... continued from last comment.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, I am not disagreeing with you about what makes Ido easier than Esperanto for Asian-language speakers, but merely pointing out that nevertheless such students have not adopted the language despite its very significant publicity last century. There must be some reason for this, whatever the reason is, and I guess it has to do with the Romance thing.
Anyway, my recommendations in this post are primarily aimed at novelists and Esperanto definitely beats Ido here, due to the limited vocabulary of the latter and the far smaller body of available literature. Basically there are Ford dealerships everywhere but only a few Bugatti showrooms here and there.
I totally agree with you, however, about the ridiculous demands placed upon the student to learn systems of adjectival declension and verb conjugation. Suppose your first language is Indonesian or Mandarin and you are looking at some constructed language or other and that language forces you to conjugate verbs and to decline nouns for the plural, even if it doesn't force you to use adjectival agreement; you would just shake your head and wonder why these language designers don't realise such things are unnecessary. Esperanto is way too hard in this regard.
Of course there is a place for heavily declined and conjugated languages like Sambahsa, which I greatly admire, but maximum ease and maximum simplicity was not a design goal of that language. Whereas Esperanto has no excuse because it always purported to be extremely easy, which it is not; however it has had the greatest success with consumers.
I see it a bit differently: a language that has been around for x number of years while the internet has been around hasn't necessarily had its chance if there is no real central place to learn and use it, and Ido's web presence is probably the worst of the big three. There's no Lernu for everyone to go to to learn it, and no central place to use it either. Yahoo Groups, activity here and there on Facebook and Twitter, and of course there is the ULI but that's just for news and not a place for users to gather. Ido IMO has not yet had a chance to make itself known. I would like to set up something like that and then give it about five years. If interest is the same after that I will deem it a failure in the eyes of the public.
ReplyDeleteIn contrast, Interlingua doesn't have a central area to use it but it does have a stable central area to learn it, so we can make some judgments about it already.
I really do recommend reading the KGD though as it isn't just a manual about Ido but one that goes over a lot of situations that answer quite a few of the issues you've brought up when doing writing on your own. How to be clear in a language that is nobody's native tongue is particularly important. The other thing I like about Ido is how it began as a reform, but then stopped after it was done and has hardly changed. Many projects fail due to not being able to avoid the temptation to constantly tinker.
You mentioned that you made a similar comparison of computer languages, concluding that Ruby was the best compromise, if I recall correctly. Might you write a summary of the reasons for the conclusions that you came to? It would be very interesting.
ReplyDelete@Summer camps Switzerland. Essentially Ruby provides the sort of productivity gain (2- to 4-times more productive than Java for most small software-development tasks) that auxlangs supposedly provide over natlangs (generally auxlangs claim to take only about one quarter the study time to learn and use compared to natlangs).
ReplyDeleteOther languages which give similar productivity gains to Ruby are Python and Groovy; that is, interpreted dynamic scripting languages. Essentially the benefits of compile-time checking and strict typing are overrated. C, C++, C#, Java and the like are really only worthwhile when extremely high performance is needed. Otherwise, for small projects, Ruby is more productive nearly every time. Ruby outshines Python and Groovy in the small details, but these add up to make it significantly better in my opinion; however this is somewhat a matter of taste.
It is sad to see that auxlangs have not taken the world by storm the way open-source programming languages such as Ruby have. Auxlangs should learn from how Ruby and Python are marketed and distributed, free of charge, by large communities of users. Languages such as Interlingua make the fatal mistake of not providing their dictionaries and learning materials copyright-free.