Update: this approach has since been abandoned. Upon closer examination, using LdP vocabulary with Sambahsa grammar was found to be unsuitable since Sambahsa grammar demands an etymological orthography. Eventually I completely abandoned Indo-European grammar and settled upon using Swahili grammar with vocabulary from English, French and Swahili. The tentative name for this project became Lugha ya Afrika, which means "Language of Afrika" in Swahili.
Auxlang 2012 has been given a temporary name: Prototip. This is a simplification of Prototỳpe. I launched a website on which the progress of the language can be followed. You'll start to see some experimental grammar there over the next few weeks. The name of the site is Prototip: An Auxlang.
The reason for the simplification of the name comes from my recent experimentation with vocabulary. Seeking a way to replace some of the superb but unfamiliar vocabulary of Sambahsa with words more familiar to English speakers, or at least with modern words rather than Proto-Indo-European words, I found to my surprise that the vocabulary of Lingwa de Planeta was consistently better than anything I could come up with, despite it containing many words from unfamiliar languages such as Hindi, Russian, Chinese and Arabic. The way LdP words are written makes them reasonably easy to remember and easy to pronounce, and they look harmonious and believable. Trying to include too many English and French words, as I was doing, does not work because English and French are highly etymological in their orthographies; in many cases a better and more harmonious result comes from other languages rather than, as I was, slavishly using an English, French, or Germanic word. Sometimes the best word really is Swahili or Persian. It just works better.
In other words: if you want to use English vocabulary, speak English; if you want to use French vocabulary, speak French; if you want to use a mixture of modern Indo-European vocabulary and historic Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, speak Sambahsa; if you want to use a simplified worldlang vocabulary, speak Lingwa de Planeta. After this experiment, I can see why Sambahsa doesn't use a much greater proportion of English and French words: because doing so wouldn't work. One needs a very diverse Indo-European vocabulary to make Sambahsa work optimally.
Anyway, bravo Sambahsa!
And bravo LdP!
Once again, I just keep returning to these two languages in particular. But now, for my current needs at this particular point in time, it is mainly the grammar which keeps bringing me back to Sambahsa and mainly the vocabulary which keeps bringing me back to LdP, although overall LdP is my current favourite.
I realised today, as a result of recent experimentation, that the best way forward for further experimentation with Prototip is to use LdP vocabulary for experimentation with elements of a Sambahsa-like grammar.
There is no harm in this, since it means I get to continue learning the vocabulary I am currently learning, which is that of LdP, rather than switching to a different vocabulary, and simultaneously I get to continue learning about the grammar of Sambahsa, as I experiment with a related dialect. If the experiments all fail, I will just go back to using LdP and Sambahsa separately, having meanwhile gained a better understanding of both.
It's a win-win scenario.
Onward...
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Sellamat Robert !
ReplyDeleteIt's really funny to see how you've come to that result, because I was rather expecting something with the vocabulary of Sambahsa (modified in the direction of English) and a LdP-like grammar.
Finally, if you strictly respect the grammar of Sambahsa but use words from LdP, one can eventually believe you're just speaking a dialect of Sambahsa. If Sambahsa would ever gain success, it might be highly probable that speakers would change some words, maybe in the direction of LdP.
However, just one thing I haven't understood : do you still abide by the orthography of Sambahsa, which helped you to keep English and French loanwords recognizable, or do you rather choose a LdP-like orthography ? I suppose "Prototip/Prototype" should follow consistent rules from the start.
Swasti-gro !
Olivier
@cafaristeir: Sellamat Olivier !
ReplyDeleteThat's a good question. I'm not sure yet. Some more experimentation will yield the answer. Intuitively, I feel that the easiest approach is to use the LdP orthography and accentuation pattern, but slightly extended with a few additional Sambahsa-like orthographical constructs which allow for the presence of some Sambahsa-like articles, pronouns, grammatical words and inflections.
Of course, there probably will not be ablaut or other verbal stem changes, but there will still probably need to be a system of verb conjugation using an invariant stem. To follow the experiment, see:
http://sites.google.com/site/prototypeanauxlang/grammar
Go figure, I was expecting to create a language with the robust Indo-European vocabulary of Sambahsa and the simplified, pidgin-like grammar of LdP. Perhaps the inverse may work, but the complex grammar of Sambahsa makes me think that something must be done to reduce its complexity to the bare minimum.
ReplyDelete@Carlos Solis: You're quite correct. I have abandoned my brief experiment with using LdP vocabulary combined with Sambahsa grammar. It didn't work out well.
ReplyDeleteI continue to experiment, seeking an easier Sambahsa-like language with simplified Sambahsa grammar and some kind of etymological vocabulary. Indeed, if we can retain most of the precision of Sambahsa but reduce its difficulty by half, mainly by eliminating or reducing spelling changes to verbal stems and word roots, and combine that with a robust vocabulary, then perhaps an 'easier Sambahsa' is possible. One possibility here is a 'Sambahsa-Occidental' using the vocabulary of Interlingue-Occidental.
However, it seems increasingly likely that I might just end up using Sambahsa itself, as it is becoming more accessible to me as a result of this experimentation. In which case I would end up writing literature separately in two languages: LdP and Sambahsa. The biggest problem with Sambahsa is its relatively weak documentation.
and what happened with your opinions about kotava??, i really would like to know what you will opine about this language. By the way, i have been following your blog, and is super very interesting; i have gone through the same journey, looking a good language to write in, but the main important point to me, is not its easyness to learn, but the important is that that language could have cool features that are not on natural languages or other artificial languages, i am seaching for some sort of special conlang which looks special, and of course useful to expresion sake.
ReplyDelete@Bon: Thanks for the kind words.
ReplyDeleteI'm afraid that I have not had time to evaluate Kotava, so I cannot give any opinion of it. However, there is a new Kotava translation available to read here, which was kindly supplied by Sabrina Benkelloun:
http://sites.google.com/site/joyofliterature/home/literature/xidaxe-ke-parma-1
I'm very busy at the moment working on a translation in LdP and also creating a new auxlang tentatively called Lugha ya Afrika (LyA), based on Swahili but with added English and French vocabulary. More information here:
http://sites.google.com/site/prototypeanauxlang/home
As you can see, it is not my intention to make LyA as easy as possible but rather for it to have an optimal level of ease, given its purposes. I agree that ease of learning is not the sole most important factor, although it took me two years of this journey among languages to finally realise that.
If you are feeling brave, I would probably recommend you consider learning Sambahsa, but it is *very* difficult. If you're not feeling quite so brave, I would recommend you join me in learning Lingwa de Planeta (LdP), which is generally very nice for literature and currently my favourite auxlang.
I've been thinking for a while now that the ideal auxlang would be somewhere halfway between LdP and Sambahsa, which is the space in which I see Lugha ya Afrika sitting; LyA will have much of the inflected, precise grammar of Sambahsa (but in Niger-Congo form instead of Indo-European form) while hopefully retaining much of the transparent ease of LdP (because its verb roots, unlike Sambahsa, will never change, and I will use orthographical conventions which will always make the root of every word immediately obvious; that is, LyA will be easier than Swahili, a language which is already very accessible). However, at this stage, LyA is little more than a twinkle in my eye. I will be continually updating the LyA website to show any progress made.
All the best,
Robert