The following four languages will be my focus:
For each of these languages, my goals for the year are:
English : to read and write literature
French : to read literature and other texts
Interlingua : to read and translate literature
Lingwa de Planeta : to read and translate literature
The aim is to make this study synergistic. For example, Latin terms which I learn from studying French and Interlingua might be incorporated into my English writing; certainly they will be useful to me as a reader of sophisticated texts in the English language, as will be terms from Arabic, Persian, Russian, Hindi and Chinese which I will learn from studying Lingwa de Planeta. This is not just about expanding my linguistic horizons, it is also about gaining cultural and historical knowledge—useful things indeed for a writer.
This is different from the many lists of languages to study which I have previously made on this blog, each of which I quickly abandoned and changed. What's the difference? I grew up.
While hopefully I have not lost my youthful sense of humour, I have lost the youthful magical thinking that a language can be mastered in six months. Therefore I no longer am inclined to jump from language to language in the vain hope that one of them will deliver the magic ability to gain fluency quickly. Instead I see obtaining mastery of any auxlang, for a novelist such as myself, as a five-year process, and I am more inclined to choose languages which suit my literary goals rather than which are the easiest to learn. Since learning French is a labour of love to which I am already committed, the combination of English, French and Interlingua makes perfect sense; the combination is undoubtedly highly synergistic. Lingwa de Planeta provides what none of these three languages does: a true worldlang, equally welcoming to everyone, and which is primarily designed to be easy rather than faithful to any existing grammar or grammars.
In the longer term, if I wrote a novel in English and simultaneously translated it into Interlingua and Lingwa de Planeta, I could theoretically reach readers anywhere in the world without further translation. Many people interested in international communication already read either English or a Romance language. Those who read a Romance language will be able to read Interlingua with relatively little study since it so much resembles natural Romance languages. For those who speak no European language, Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) is the best solution I have seen; I would not expect a speaker of Chinese or Indonesian to find Interlingua easy to learn, but I would expect them to find LdP very accessible; I confidently expect that such students could easily become fluent readers of LdP after five years of study. LdP is a welcoming language to all, more so than any other literary auxlang I have ever seen; the emotional benefit of seeing words from your own language in an auxlang, no matter what country you come from, cannot be overstated.
Incidentally, at this stage in my journey I would not even consider Esperanto at all. It is outclassed by the other choices available. For novelists seeking a naturalistic auxlang I would instead recommend Interlingua. For novelists seeking an easy-to-learn auxlang, I would instead recommend LdP.
One thing I have found, with regard to time management, is that I find it very stressful to try to do too much, and trying to do too much results in very little getting done. Accordingly as much as I would love to simultaneously study Sambahsa and Frenkisch this year, I have decided to put them to one side for now while focussing on the above four languages. This is probably good timing anyway since the documentation for both of these languages is currently being expanded and improved and a year from now both of these languages will probably be significantly easier to study because of this improvement in documentation. I remain extremely impressed by both of these languages and hope to see their user communities grow.
To follow my ongoing translation of a famous French novel into Interlingua and Lingwa de Planeta during the coming year, please visit The Joy of Literature, a companion site to this blog. There you will also find translations in other auxlangs, including Sambahsa and Frenkisch, kindly made by others.
Hopefully at the end of this one year of study I will be able to comfortably read literature in French, Interlingua, and LdP, and able to comfortably make translations into Interlingua and LdP.
But only time shall tell. Onward....
Lingwa de planeta... do you know what's keeping me from studying the language??? It's the orthography! I don't like so many w's and k's and y's! At first looks, it appears a little more than bad English . For instance, look at this: kompyuter-ney sosietaa or kompyuter-ney sivilisasion .
ReplyDeleteI don't hate the language but I'm not sure how to appreciate the beauty in it! Perhaps, a more Sambahsa style orthography will do: compiuter-nei societá and compiuter-nei civilisacion .
Or perhaps I'm wrong because, as they say, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder! ;)
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn used to seek for solutions in Russian proverbs. Now I'm remembering several: on the one hand, "Man intends, but God disposes", on the other hand, "A good beginning is a half of work" and "First think, then do".
ReplyDeleteAll in all, seems like the proverbs endorse a good planning, at the same time making a reservation like you did: "only time will tell".
@Demian. So you prefer reading C as [k] in some cases and as [s] in some others? We prefer to have separate letters for them, so our sivilisasion reminds Norwegian sivilisasjon or Indonesian sivilisasi.
Sellamat !
ReplyDeleteSambahsa has here "computer" [kompÜtër], "societat" & "civilisation", where "c" sounds [ts].
I think a language such as Interlingua can only justify the existence of "c" because it makes the sound of "c" in ci, ce, cy a distinct sound from "s". That is, "c" in ci, ce, cy has a [ts] sound distinctive from [s]. If they are not different sounds, then a phonetic spelling system can't really justify the existence.
ReplyDeleteFortunately, IL's vocabulary is mostly Latin-based and it's usage of "c" follows the common evolutions of "c" from Latin into the modern Romance langauages. In all the Romance languages that IL refers to, "c" plus a frontal vowel has changed its sound away from [k]. If however you have a language where there are lots of non-Romance words where [k] could be followed by a front vowel ([e], [i] etc), then using "c" becomes problematic. In Romance words, such sound combinations are unlikely, and are mostly evolved from Latin qu, not c. When IL must have a [k] sound in front of a [e] or [i] vowel, it pussy-foots awkwardly around the issue and uses an irregular mish-mash of "ch" or "k". "ch" is also used a lot for [S] or [tS], so it makes a real mess.
But although IL's spelling aims to be sort-of regular, it puts much more priority on being etymological.
My theory is there are two levels of phonetic or regular spelling:
The first is uni-directional regularity. This is when you can look at a written word and be certain how to pronounce it. Letters don't always have to have the same pronunciation, but they do have the same pronunciation in a certain context. And it's possible that the same sound/phoneme can be spelled in more than one way.
The second is bi-directional regularity. In this situation, the same letter is always pronounced the same way. And the same sound is always spelled the same way This is when you can hear a word and know exactly how spell it. Languages that have only been written down recently often have a strictly bi-directional phonetic spelling system. An example of this would be New Zealand Maori. Having a truely phonetic spelling system often relies on the language not having a large corpus of ancient texts and the orthographer having little sentimental attachment to the etymology of words.
Most European languages that have been written and printed for centuries have only uni-directional regularity. Even relatively regular ones such as Spanish are only uni-directional. If I see a written word in Spanish, I have a high level of certainty of the correct pronunciation -- which is good. BUT if I hear a word with a [x] sound, I can't always be certain whether I should spell it with "g" or "j". And there are so many words where I can't possibly know that they must be spelled with an initial silent "h". If I hear [etSo], how do I know whether to spell it "hecho" or "echo"? -- which is not so good. There are so many words that as a beginner you could get wrong and must be learned arbitrarily. Interlingua just about achieves uni-directional regularity. It's about as uni-directional regular as many natural European languages. Although it many cases it relys on prior knowledge of at least one of its source languages to get the pronunciation right. But let's say you are learning IL and don't speak any of it's source languages or any Western language for that matter. You see an unfamiliar word; "China". How do you know whether the "ch" should be pronounced as [tS] or as [k]?
And some languages such as English are infamously irregular in either direction! And French isn't much better.
If you are striving for a bi-directional level of phonetic spelling, you can't really have "c" unless you can assign it a distinctive pronunciation, so you know when you should use it instead of "s" or "k". If you are using only graeco-romance words, you could just about do it, but otherwise, it will get messy.
See also Jespersen's thoughts on "the greatest mischief-maker in European languages", i.e. the letter C:
ReplyDeletehttp://nov.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIL_C
@David P. : Very excellent analysis !
ReplyDeleteNow, I can say that Sambahsa has uni-directional regularity (even Esperanto or Ido don't have perfect bi-directional regularity); because it wants visual recognizability for West-European words as much as possible.
One of the reasons of English's awkward orthography is the fact that the written language was fixed (Bible printing) just before the Great Vowel shift (discovered by Jespersen himself) happened !
Oh, btw, "kompyuter" is the exact Tagalog word. Wordlangers often take words in that form in which they are imported to other languages, esp. the creole forms, because then they are simpler in pronunciation and orthography. So whenever in LdP you meet hu (who), fo (for), bikos (because), kek (cake), leta (letter), hok (hawk), lif (leaf), ambrela (umbrella), finga (finger), and so on, this is not bad English, it's most probably Bislama or Tok Pisin.
ReplyDelete@ Dmitri
ReplyDeleteGood example. From this moment onwards I will think of Bislama when I look at a LdP text. That's a great idea. (^_^)
That's right. Please don't expect LdP to look and behave like French or Interlingua. In many respects it's rather like Bislama or another creole.
ReplyDeleteIt's also interesting to see what Google Translate "thinks" about different conlangs. There is a certain logic in how it determines languages. Thus, Interlingua is automatically recognized as Italian, Frenkisch as German or Dutch, Sambahsa as English (sometimes as German). As to LdP, Google gives Indonesian, or Turkish, or Swahili, or
Albanian, or Maltese... Interestingly, it has no idea about Esperanto and Ido.