The Joy of Languages

Finished reading my first story in LdP!

2012-01-15T21:39:00.000+10:00

I have for the first time finished reading a story written in Lingwa de Planeta (LdP). Today I finished reading Mey nocha, o Dronigina (May Night, or the Drowned Maiden); actually it is a fragment, about 1970 words in length. It is one of a number of literary short stories available at the LdP website.

The story was much funnier than I was expecting. Quite hilarious, in fact. I've never read Gogol before; it's obvious, even from reading only the LdP translation, that he was a marvellous writer. It begins with the most beautiful description of Ukrainian nights and then descends into wonderfully light comedy as a drunken Cossack wanders the streets of his village, making a fool of himself and finally barging into the home of the village chief, which he mistakenly takes for his own. It is clever and entertaining.

It is true to say that, providing I only write a paragraph or two at a time, I find it easier to write LdP than to read it. This is a good sign in that, for writers, it proves that the language is reasonably accessible. However, for readers, it demonstrates that reading literature in any language is indeed difficult and that it takes a long time to learn how to do so.

The main challenge for me in reading LdP is the vocabulary: because it is a world vocabulary rather than a regional one or one restricted to just one language group, it is unavoidably difficult to memorise the large number of words required for literary use. To be honest, I find doing so exhausting and am sometimes tempted to give up; what keeps me going is the educational value of learning the words. It would be much easier to learn a language whose vocabulary was already more familiar to me, such as languages whose vocabulary is primarily Latin in origin; however, the available languages in that group (for example, Interlingua) are more difficult than LdP in other respects. It would also be easier to memorise the vocabulary of a language which absolutely minimised the number of word roots and used agglutination or some similar mechanism to create a large vocabulary by extrapolation from this small number of roots (for example, Esperanto as first published); however the available languages in that group have other difficulties. In any case, LdP uses preceding hyphenated particles (syao-gramatika), non-hyphenated prefixes, and non-hyphenated suffixes to achieve this to some extent, although in my opinion the more hyphenation the better (without hyphens, parsing and the determination of stress is sometimes difficult). Apart from the vocabulary, one still has to learn some idiomatic expressions and constructs, as is true in any language. So, it is challenging.

To put this in perspective: Esperanto is challenging, Interlingua is challenging, Ido is challenging, and so too LdP is challenging. They are all so challenging that one must doubt that readers will bother with them, except possibly in the case of Interlingua which is relatively easy to read for native speakers of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and closely related languages. Actually, just the other day I found I could read some Spanish, probably mostly as a result of studying Interlingua; however it seems rather far fetched that Asian readers would bother to learn Interlingua. Anyway, fortunately I've made a New Year's resolution to stick to learning LdP, which removes the need for me to make any further decisions. All I have to do is just stick to LdP, keep reading it, keep writing it, and hopefully sometime this year I will reach a sort of "critical mass" at which time my brain will have sufficiently adapted to LdP that it suddenly becomes dramatically easier. I expect that to happen by about July this year. Let's see if that turns out to be the case.

By the way, it is now almost two years into my journey in the land of constructed languages. So it took me a long, long time to get to the point of finishing reading my first story in LdP. However, for most of that time I was not studying LdP. It's difficult for me to estimate the total study time which I've devoted to LdP over those two years, because I have only studied it intermittently and have meanwhile studied countless other languages and been extremely busy with countless other commitments, but my guess is that I have probably done something equivalent to about six months of part-time study at a comfortable pace. That is, if somebody started studying LdP today and kept going at a comfortable pace for about six months, several short sessions per week, my guess is that they would probably have about my level of proficiency. Although that sounds like a long time, it's not much for language study. So if indeed it starts to become dramatically easier for me by about July 2012, then in round figures that would probably be equivalent to about one year of study time overall. It will be interesting to see.

I will finish this post with a quotation from the story. I've added an English translation which is not intended to be dogmatically literal but rather to convey the general flavour of the text, paraphrasing it somewhat and adding to it a little to capture the personal experience I felt when reading.

So here is the beautiful description of night-time in the Ukraine:

Original LdP

Ob yu jan ukrainska nocha? Oo, yu bu jan ukrainska nocha! Kan ba inu it. Fon mida de skay luna-dilim zai lumi-kan. Gro-vaste kupula de skay fa-chaure, fa-vaste yoshi pyu gro. It glimi e spiri. Ol arda es in argenta-ney luma. Mirakla-ney aira es i lenge i warme, it es fule de juisa e dulitaa, it mah-muvi osean de aroma. Bohlik nocha! Charmaful nocha!

Literal Translation from the LdP

(by Robert Winter)

Do you know Ukrainian nights? Oh, you don't know Ukrainian night! Look into it. From the middle of the sky the moon-clove is shining and looking. The greatly vast dome of the sky becomes wider, becomes yet more greatly vast. It twinkles and breathes. All of the earth is in silver light. The miraculous air is both cold and warm, it is full of delight and tenderness, it causes oceans of aromas to move. Divine night! Charming night!

Literary Translation from the LdP

(by Robert Winter)

Do you know night in the Ukraine? Oh, you don't know night in the Ukraine! Look into it. From the middle of the sky the crescent moon is shining and watching. The great vast dome of the sky widens and falls into ever greater vastness. It twinkles and it breathes. The whole earth swims in silver light. The miraculous air, both cold and warm, is full of joy and tenderness. It brings into motion sweet oceans of aromas. Divine night! Night of charms!

Reference Translation from the Russian

(from the University of Adelaide)

Do you know a Ukraine night? No, you do not know a night in the Ukraine. Gaze your full on it. The moon shines in the midst of the sky; the immeasurable vault of heaven seems to have expanded to infinity; the earth is bathed in silver light; the air is warm, voluptuous, and redolent of innumerable sweet scents. Divine night!

I had not read any English translation of the story prior to reading it in LdP, and also made my translation of the above paragraph without referring to any English translation. I think this demonstrates the literary power of LdP. It's interesting to note the embellishments which I made, when making my literary translation into English, somewhat resemble those in the reference translation (for example, my addition of the word "sweet").

Many thanks to Dmitry and the whole LdP team for this wonderful translation of a classic Gogol story. I hope one day the fragment will be extended to include the entire text. This has indeed been a joy!

I hope this demonstrates the great potential of LdP for literary use. It is very important to note that the LdP is much easier than my equivalent English literary translation, yet conveys the same rich reading experience. Furthermore, the LdP is incomparably better than the English translation from the University of Adelaide; the former is rich and beautiful, the latter is dreary and tasteless, as if written by some dull academic. I suspect that the reason the LdP translation is so wonderful is that it is a translation of Russian literature made by a Russian translator. Reading the LdP makes me feel almost as if I am somehow magically reading the original Russian and through it the genius of Gogol shines. It is a privilege to read it.

Onward...

New Year's Resolution for 2012

2012-01-01T22:53:00.001+10:00

Okay, I have made a New Year's Resolution!

My resolution is to ignore the most recent change to my one-year study plan and to go back to the version of the plan dated 27 November 2011. In other words, to focus on studying just one auxlang: Lingwa de Planeta (LdP).

Recently I had been pleasantly surprised to discover that I could suddenly read an introductory Esperanto novella reasonably easily (with the help of a good dictionary) despite not having studied Esperanto in recent months. That was a pleasant discovery. It conforms to my current hypothesis that (extrapolating from my experiences over the past two years) it probably takes about five years to learn any good auxlang to true fluency. Sure, now I can read a little Esperanto; that's great. But to be able to fluently converse in Esperanto or to write a novel in Esperanto would take me a few more years of study, beyond the few months of work I have invested studying that language so far. The question is: Do I want to put a few years into studying Esperanto?

A key factor here is time. I am a person with many interests and I chronically over-estimate the number of things which I can simultaneously undertake or learn. The truth is that because I am very busy with many other commitments, and also committed to learning French, I really only have time for learning one auxlang. This forces me, as the new year begins, to make a decision and choose between Esperanto and LdP. I choose LdP.

There is a compelling reason to do so. Almost two years ago, when I first started on this long journey, I had the good sense to write the following statement. Since then I have made many mistakes and have gone down many wrong roads. But in retrospect I still think that the following statement is one of the most valuable things I have ever written on this blog. Here it is:

Any constructed language which had more than 1,000 to 10,000* reasonably fluent speakers in 1993, when the World Wide Web was popularised, and which has had a considerable online presence (including lessons and dictionaries) for several years, and which nevertheless has not grown exponentially in number of speakers since that time, has already failed. That is, the language has failed to gain popular acceptance and probably never will gain popular acceptance (unless induced artificially, such as by government decree). This is probably due to the language being more difficult than consumers were willing to accept, relative to the perceived benefits of learning the language.

* That is, a population of reasonably fluent speakers which numbered in the thousands rather than in the hundreds. By reasonably fluent I mean either able to correspond as a pen pal by writing simple letters, and/or able to read texts such as easy Wikipedia articles, and/or able to have spoken conversations.

Esperanto does work, as I discovered recently when suddenly it had become relatively easy for me to read. However, Esperanto has already failed according to the above definition. And I still think that matters.

Please don't misunderstand my intentions here. I certainly do not wish to discourage anyone from learning Esperanto. And I have finally come to understand, from personal experience, that although Esperanto is not perfect it really is a workable language; I can see that if I wanted to put a few years into learning it, I could use it to write novels, and people would be able to read them effectively if they themselves had put five years or so of studying into learning Esperanto to fluency. However, I do think that it is highly significant that, according to the above definition, Esperanto has not succeeded despite there being nothing to hold it back now that the internet is so globally accessible to billions of people. Anybody who wishes to learn Esperanto can now do so for free, using abundant resources freely available online. Yet people are not doing so except in rather limited numbers. Esperanto has thus, according to the above definition, already failed.

Now, one could say, perhaps this means that the whole concept of auxlangs has already failed. One could say that perhaps the failure of Esperanto is just a symptom of the failure of the concept of auxlangs in general. Maybe the vast majority of people will never have any interest in auxlangs and maybe the failure of Esperanto demonstrates this. Maybe. But until we have some mature twenty-first-century constructed languages which offer a global rather than regional approach in their design, we cannot be sure. Much has changed since 1887 when Ludwig Zamenhof (who was undoubtedly a genius) first published Esperanto. Asia is now poised to become the centre of the world's economy by the middle of this century. Travel and the internet has rendered the globe smaller than ever, with more and more interaction between people with no language in common, and with a much larger percentage of these interacting persons speaking no European language. It could be that the failure of Esperanto (which is not a total failure but a partial failure, since thousands do use the language successfully) actually indicates the unrealised potential for the greater success of auxlangs, but that what is needed is an auxlang much more accessible to speakers of Asian languages while remaining accessible to speakers of European languages. Maybe, just maybe, there is a literary future for such an auxlang.

Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) is in my opinion the most mature and promising of the currently available candidates for such an auxlang, for literary use, which fits the accessibility requirements noted above. These accessibility requirements, for speakers of Asian languages, mandate the use of a grammar that is not so dependent on prior knowledge of European grammar as is Esperanto; for example, there certainly should not be any definite article and it is probably best if constructions of tense are fewer and easier than those found in Esperanto. Although I doubt that LdP itself will necessarily be the auxlang which, in the far future, might succeed in gaining the interest of millions of readers of literature worldwide (including readers in Asia) it does seem to me that if the future is to bring the global success of any auxlang, it will be an auxlang that is more accessible to those in China than is Esperanto (and not just to those in China but to those throughout the entire Near-, Middle- and Far-East regions of the planet). In short, the successful auxlang of the future will be less Eurocentric than Esperanto, particularly in the formation of its grammar (and, to a lesser extent, its vocabulary; a lesser extent because Western vocabulary already dominates science). The East, not the West, holds the key to auxlang success. In other words, it is absolutely paramount that an auxlang should bridge the East-West gap; in my opinion Esperanto, although it can certainly be successfully used by most people, contains insufficient Eastern features to optimally be that bridge. LdP I think is closer to what the auxlang of the future might be.

Bear in mind that I am talking specifically about literary use. That is my interest. I am a writer of fiction. I want a language which is good for reading and writing literature. It may be that for science and business it will always be better to use a natural language, due to the great precision of natural languages and the enormous resources available for them; however to be able to use a natural language with such precision probably takes between one and two decades of very dedicated study, unless that language already resembles your native language. I think to be able to fluently use a good auxlang for reading and writing literature takes perhaps five years.

Even if no auxlang ever truly makes it big in the global market for literature, there is the educational benefit of learning auxlangs. For me personally, I'm more interested in the educational benefit which LdP offers than that offered by Esperanto. LdP teaches me words from Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Chinese, Russian, Indonesian, Swahili, and so on which Esperanto does not. It's fun to learn Hindi, Mandarin, Persian and Arabic words and be able to talk about them with my friends. Esperanto does not give me that benefit. I think perhaps I could maybe convince some of my friends to take a look at LdP and to learn a little of it, just based on its use of words from their own native languages. Again, this is something Esperanto does not offer.

Lastly, I think I can make more difference as a writer by choosing LdP rather than Esperanto. One more writer using Esperanto is hardly significant. But one more writer using LdP is highly significant because by comparison the community of LdP users is so tiny. Since apparently it takes about five years to become truly fluent in any auxlang, it hardly makes any difference either way in that, either way, readers would have to invest a few years of study before they could read any novel I might write in either language. Thus very few people would read any novel I might write in Esperanto, anyway, so it is not as if choosing Esperanto over LdP would magically make it far easier for readers to access such a novel. In essence, my original dream when starting this blog, that maybe some auxlang exists in which novels could be written and readers could quickly and painlessly learn to read them, is forlorn. However, for reasons mentioned above, I think LdP is closer to what the successful literary auxlang of the future might look like.

Also, I note curiously, my journey has brought me back to LdP again and again. Every time I have gone off down different roads with other languages, in the end I have returned to LdP. While LdP is not perfect, there is something about it which brings me back again and again. It is, I think, at least somewhat on the right track, at least somewhat an indicator of what a successful auxlang of the future might look like.

By the way, I think the fact that I am an Australian weighs heavily into this decision. I live in Australia. I happen to speak a European language, English, but those of my friends and colleagues whose first language is not English speak Asian languages, not European languages. I cannot imagine getting any of my Chinese, Indonesian, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, Japanese, Korean, or Arabic-speaking friends and colleagues to learn, say, five Esperanto words for fun over lunch. But I can easily imagine having lunch with any of them and getting them interested in learning five LdP words, because LdP contains words from diverse languages around the world, including some prominent Asian languages. This makes it relevant.

Also significant is that the grammar of the European language which I speak, English, is simpler than the grammar of other European languages such as French; the grammar of LdP is more accessible to me than Esperanto grammar, a fact which is of no small significance when one considers that English is the most popular second language spoken in Asia. For example, like English, LdP favours using a standard word order rather than inflection to indicate the accusative, and there is no adjectival agreement. For me as an English speaker, LdP grammar seems much more familiar and less demanding than the unfamiliar grammar of Esperanto; whereas if my first language were French (uses adjectival agreement) or Turkish (uses agglutination), Esperanto grammar would probably seem less intimidating to me.

In 2012 in Australia, the vocabulary of LdP is more immediately relevant to my life and to the life of my friends and colleagues than the vocabulary of Esperanto, which was relevant in 1887 in Eastern Europe. That's not to say that the vocabulary of Esperanto is better or worse than the vocabulary of LdP, but the vocabulary of LdP is I think better suited to the global outlook of the twenty-first century, which is heavily influenced by Asia. Having said that, LdP combines the best of both worlds since most of its vocabulary is from the major successful European natural languages of the world and it still, like other languages, favours Western vocabulary for scientific terms.

I think that studying LdP is the best way to spend my auxlang time this year, at least until the end of my one-year study plan this October. In essence, I've decided it's better to learn one auxlang well than two auxlangs badly.

Onward during 2012...

One Year of Study Revised Again: October 2011-2012

2011-12-18T12:34:00.005+10:00

Update: As part of my New Year's resolution for 2012, I decided to cancel this change and to return to the previous revision of the plan which was made on 27 November 2011. That is, I will not be studying Esperanto but will only study a single auxlang: Lingwa de Planeta. There is only time for one.

Nothing new here. I'm just documenting the recent change in plan brought about by the discovery that I can now read Esperanto with very surprising ease. Esperanto has therefore taken the place filled by Interlingua in my previous plans.

I have the late Claude Piron to thank for this change.

The following four languages will be my focus:

English

French

Lingwa de Planeta

Esperanto

For each of these languages, my goals for the year are:

English : to read and write literature

French : to read literature and other texts

Lingwa de Planeta : to read and translate literature

Esperanto : to read literature and other texts

Explanatory note: My preferred auxlang for writing literature is currently Lingwa de Planeta, not Esperanto. At this stage I am merely reading in Esperanto.

Esperanto suddenly easy to read

2011-12-16T23:29:00.005+10:00

Something very weird has happened.

Due to time limitations, recently I gave up reading and writing Interlingua in order to concentrate on reading and writing Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) and to continue my long-term commitment to learning to read French.

I had finally discovered that I could read French much more easily than I could read Interlingua, assuming in each case that I had a good dictionary and grammar available to which to refer. I would not have predicted that a natural language would prove to be easier to read than an auxlang, once an intermediate level of proficiency had been acquired in both, so this was quite a surprising finding. I suppose the best way to interpret this is that perhaps the study of Interlingua acted to accelerate my progress in French; once it had done so, it no longer seemed necessary to continue with Interlingua.

All this followed my earlier conclusion that, contrary to the sales pitch, it probably takes about five years to master any auxlang. So I was finally in a frame of mind in which I was willing to study for years, not mere months, to learn auxlangs. In this state of mind, then, having given up Interlingua, but still being interested in the passive use of an auxlang for reading only, it seemed reasonable to take another look at Esperanto. Regular readers of this blog will know Esperanto is a language which I have been bitterly disappointed by and which in general I have strongly disliked; however, that was mostly when I expected results in mere months instead of years.

As a writer, I am enthusiastically doing a literary translation in LdP and intend to keep doing so. As a reader, however, there is not yet any opportunity to read news and current affairs and opinions from all around the world in that language. Interlingua to some extent offered me that benefit but my Romance language of choice for such reading is now French rather than Interlingua. So I decided to try some reading in Esperanto, with a good dictionary and grammar to refer to, but without any further study. Having had bad experiences with Esperanto in the past, I did not want to waste any more of my time formally studying it. Either I could read it or not.

To my great surprise, something really weird happened in the past few days.

I returned to Claude Piron's introductory novella, Gerda Malaperis!, which had previously been almost totally impenetrable to me despite extensive Esperanto study and repeated attempts. With great difficulty many months ago I had managed to get a few pages into the novella after studying several Esperanto textbooks over several months and basically getting nowhere. Giving up in disgust, I turned to other auxlangs and even gave up on all auxlangs for a time. Over the last few months I have studied mainly Interlingua and to a lesser extent LdP; I have done no Esperanto study.

Now, just as Interlingua seems to have helped me to learn French, it seems Interlingua and LdP and French must have helped me to learn Esperanto, because without having done any Esperanto study for several months, suddenly out of nowhere I find that I can now easily read Piron's novella! In a few days I have read the first 26 pages of Gerda Malaperis! without having any English translation available yet having no difficultly.

Now that is very, very weird and totally unexpected.

I now see that Esperanto, although quite difficult for speakers of European languages and very difficult for everybody else, actually works surprisingly well for literary use and is easier than most natural languages. There is something about it which really suits the way the human brain works, something about it which makes it uncannily easy to read once the penny drops and you 'get it'; that is, at first the Esperanto system is like a gigantic wall which seems terribly unnatural and impossible to climb over but there comes a time when you find yourself having climbed the wall and suddenly the view from up there is very fine and there is little or no trouble understanding texts of moderate complexity. Suddenly it seems very natural; not 'naturalistic' but natural in the sense of suiting the thinking patterns of the human brain (however, it differs from many natural languages so greatly that at first it can be very difficult to learn indeed). My former intense dislike of the language has now turned into a moderate degree of liking the language; it no longer seems ugly to me but seems practical and clever in design. To be sure, it is somewhat utilitarian in appearance but nevertheless not without its charms. It just... 'makes sense' to me now. I now can... 'feel it'. That is, when reading sentences rapidly aloud, they just 'make sense' and seem to convey meaning in a natural, 'human' manner. It is unnatural in appearance but natural in its ability to be comprehended. It... 'works'.

Now, don't get me wrong. I would still be a bit worried about using Esperanto to write the operating instructions for a nuclear reactor! I think there is rather a lot of potential for misunderstanding in Esperanto since speakers can invent an unlimited number of words by combining affixes, however I now understand that this is analogous to people inventing an unlimited number of phrases by combining words and does not necessarily lead to misunderstanding among experienced users, although undoubtedly it does introduce the difficulty of not being able to find words in the dictionary. Presumably, in the fullness of time, it might be possible in the far future for the operating instructions of a nuclear reactor to be written in Esperanto without causing misunderstanding, as the language and its resources continue to mature. But for now that is beside the point.

Anyway, while I find LdP more beautiful than Esperanto, and more interesting than Esperanto, and more educational than Esperanto, and incomparably easier to write than Esperanto, I am nevertheless amazed to report that I now find Esperanto easier to read than any other auxlang. This is totally amazing to me because I have not studied Esperanto at all in the last several months.

So I find, to my surprise, for me personally at this particular point in time the following rankings to be true:

Ease of Reading

From easiest to hardest:

English [my native language]

Esperanto

Lingwa de Planeta

French

Interlingua

Interlingua is hugely easier than French to pronounce when reading aloud, but when reading silently French is now easier for me to understand. Esperanto requires less frequent dictionary use than LdP; the etymology of words in LdP is far more interesting but requires frequent dictionary use, slowing down the experience of reading compared to Esperanto. This frequent dictionary use makes LdP slower than French for me to read, but nevertheless French is definitely more difficult to read than LdP; that is, sometimes difficulty and speed do not correlate.

Aesthetic Beauty

From most beautiful to least beautiful:

French

English

Lingwa de Planeta

Interlingua

Esperanto

Of course beauty is in the eye of the beholder and these are just my personal preferences in terms of aesthetic beauty for reading and writing literature. Esperanto still has its own beauty but feels more utilitarian than the other languages, all of which more often favour beauty over ease of use.

I would say all five languages are beautiful but in different ways.

I am simply amazed to now find Esperanto so easy to read.

Ease of Writing

From easiest to hardest:

English [my native language]

Lingwa de Planeta

Interlingua

Esperanto

French

I can hardly write any Esperanto at all, at this stage.

Lingwa de Planeta hovers near the middle in all three lists: it is a nice compromise for reading, writing, and aesthetic beauty, and it is in my opinion far easier than Esperanto for those who speak no European language. It is currently by far my favourite auxlang for writing literature.

1000 Words of Lingwa de Planeta - Best Literary Language of 2011

2011-12-08T22:03:00.004+10:00

I have reached a major, happy milestone.

My translation of the French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, into Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) has now reached over 1000 words in length.

You can find the translation over at The Joy of Literature. It consists of the opening scenes of the fourth chapter of the novel (mainly because I had grown tired of repeatedly translating the opening of the first chapter into several other languages).

This makes LdP one of only two constructed languages in which I have made a literary translation longer than 1000 words. The other language is Occidental, into which I translated over 5000 words of the same novel. Recently I gave up on the corresponding Interlingua translation after about 900 words. With other constructed languages I never made it past a few hundred words. Which means that LdP has survived my practical, hands-on test. It is in fact the only constructed language in which I am currently still interested in producing literary translations; I was not happy with Occidental, despite creating a long translation, and therefore abandoned it.

I am happy with LdP. It hits the sweet spot between being easy enough to learn and use despite my relatively limited free time, and being sophisticated and expressive and precise enough for serious literary use. It really does fit the description of being a practical International Auxiliary Language in that it is significantly easier than most alternative constructed languages, for literary use in which a relatively high degree of precision is required. And it has the huge advantage of being a highly educational worldlang.

Did you know snova is Russian for "again" / "anew"? Did you know swasti is Sanskrit for "may fortune favour you"? Do you know that hampi is Indonesian for "almost"? You might know that danke is German for "thank you" but do you also know that a synonym from Arabic and Hindi is shukran? How about the word hao, which is Chinese for "good", or jamile, Arabic for "beautiful"? This is seriously educational stuff and a real joy to use for a writer. It is a joy.

Lingwa de Planeta is a language which — although it is new and will take a few years yet to fully develop and stabilise — I highly recommend to any writer interested in producing literature for a truly global audience.

Lingwa de Planeta es jamile lingwa!
Lingwa de Planeta is a beautiful language!

Incidentally, this means that LdP has unexpectedly but indubitably turned out to be my favourite constructed language for literary use, two years in a row: first in 2010 and now again in 2011. Accordingly...

Lingwa de Planeta

is the winner of the Gold Medal

Best Literary Language of 2011

Category: International Auxiliary Languages

Of course this is not any kind of public competition, it is just my personal opinion based on two years of long and dedicated study of many different constructed languages. It will be interesting to see whether or not my opinion changes in 2012 or 2013 but for now LdP is the winner of my personal quest to find an IAL which I feel is best suited for truly global literature.

I've given up Interlingua, another fine language, in favour of spending time improving my French. Strangely, I now find French easier to read.

Incidentally, for any concerned Esperanto readers who may be reading this, although my favourite constructed language for writing literature is definitely LdP, I have recently returned to learning to read literature in Esperanto and there is some chance that I might, after all, warm to the idea of regularly reading in Esperanto, mainly because studying all these other languages has gradually resulted in Esperanto becoming not quite so impossible to read. I'm not sure if my temporary resurgence of interest in reading in Esperanto will amount to anything however; I'm quite likely to lose interest and give up. Whereas I do not expect to lose interest in LdP any time soon.

I expect to reach 5000 words of LdP translation during 2012.

It would not even surprise me if I reach 10000 words.

Onward...

The Strange Journey

2011-12-03T23:00:00.001+10:00

Ah, what a strange journey it is, to learn constructed languages. It is indeed a strange journey to learn unfamiliar natural languages when one is already an adult, but to learn constructed languages is doubly strange.

On the plus side, I am now 22 months into this (some might say ridiculous) journey and yet I'm still here and ultimately have not given up. Still learning, still growing, still journeying, still adventuring. And still constantly surprised. Every time I turn a corner I learn something new and unexpected.

When learning a natural language one learns not only the language itself but also something of the culture or cultures in which that language is used. For example, learning French is opening my eyes to French culture and to the cultures of the francophone world. Becoming progressively more able to read newspapers and novels and magazines in French, for example, is slowly opening up a whole new world to me; such a skill is indeed a profound change and improvement in one's life, especially in this world in which the anglophone media has become so riddled with propaganda and so devoid of real information that being able to read another language is extremely helpful to maintaining a more balanced outlook on the world. Sure, the francophone media might also be riddled with propaganda but at least it is different propaganda. At least one gets different perspectives on the world.

When one learns a good constructed language the cultural effect is even more profound: it throws the door open to all cultures, to learning about the whole world, at least in theory. If a constructed language is easy enough to be learned to a useful degree of international fluency in five years, regardless of one's mother tongue, then in theory it can effectively open the door to all cultures, especially if its design is welcoming to people from all over the world, for example by including words from many languages. One such language is Lingwa de Planeta (LdP), which indeed is the only remaining constructed language which I am currently actively using (that is, not just reading but writing). Through it I am learning words from Sanskrit, Persian, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Indonesian, and several European languages. It is still in its early stages of development but is nevertheless mature enough to allow me, with expert help, to gradually translate a famous French novel into LdP; my translation is already 900 words in length and should exceed 1000 words soon. It is a pleasure to work on.

I don't want to make too much of a song and dance about it in this particular post but, admittedly, LdP has indeed become my de-facto Best Literary Language of 2011, just as it was my Best Literary Language of 2010. I judge it to be so because, voilà (or should I say walaa): it's the only constructed language which I'm still actively using for writing. Even after abandoning it for some months and instead writing in Occidental and later Interlingua, the good design of LdP has magnetically pulled me back to its charms.

So, how is that for a strange journey? I've come full circle.

I also realised that learning any language, constructed or otherwise, is inevitably at least a five-year journey and that nothing shorter should be hoped for, except for gifted polyglots or under conditions of total immersion. In fact I even came to believe that a better name for international auxiliary languages (IALs) would be five-year languages, as such a name would fully prepare the student for the reality of the investment required for fluency. Whereas five years is generally nowhere near long enough to become fluent in English or French, it is probably sufficient for well designed auxlangs.

But wait, there's more...

I discovered that (surprisingly) not only can I now read French more easily than Interlingua and that (unsurprisingly) I much prefer reading French to Interlingua because of its greater beauty and utility, but that something has happened to my brain and that I can now to some extent also read Esperanto (with the aid of a dictionary), even without recent study. (Esperanto is a language which I did considerable study of at the start of my journey and by which I was repeatedly and bitterly disappointed.) There is a part of me that now might prefer to read Esperanto rather than Interlingua when it comes to passively using a constructed language for reading only. Partly this is because of the highly artificial nature of Esperanto, with its parts of speech marked by mandatory endings which although ugly do greatly increase the ease of reading, but mostly it is because there is far more literature available to read in Esperanto, from many more writers around the world. So this is another unexpected outcome of my strange journey: I feel right now that there is some chance that I might begin to use Esperanto passively, a use for which it was never really designed, instead of using Interlingua, a language which was primarily designed for passive use by readers. Meanwhile I have at this time no interest in using Esperanto actively. Oh, the irony!

Whether I will actually do any significant amount of reading in Esperanto remains to be seen. I might indeed do none. I just happened to notice today that I no longer find it too difficult to read, so I might use it passively.

For writing I remain far more interested in LdP.

One Year of Study Revised: October 2011-2012

2011-11-27T17:09:00.004+10:00

It's been just over one month since my last post, in which I declared my one-year study plan for languages. One month down, eleven months to go. So how has it been going? Good and bad.

First, the good: I made 900-word parallel literary translations into Interlingua and Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) from the novel La Chartreuse de Parme. The translations can be found at The Joy of Literature.

Now, the bad: it has sadly become clear that, given my other commitments, I simply do not have the time to learn two auxlangs to fluency at the same time as learning French. Therefore I have been forced to make a choice between Interlingua and LdP. And my choice is LdP. So my revised plan is exactly the same as my original plan except that Interlingua has been removed.

The following three languages will be my focus:

English

French

Lingwa de Planeta

For each of these languages, my goals for the year are:

English : to read and write literature

French : to read literature and other texts

Lingwa de Planeta : to read and translate literature

Explanatory Note:

Why LdP instead of Interlingua?

I believe LdP is clearly a better auxlang than Interlingua for global literary use, being easier to read, easier to pronounce, and incorporating vocabulary from around the world rather than just from Romance languages. It is also easier to speak and to write for those like myself who are not native speakers of a Romance language. Lastly, LdP is primarily designed to be easy whereas Interlingua is primarily designed to be naturalistic; this really counts when it comes to truly global use... for example I cannot imagine readers in China being willing to learn Interlingua but I can easily imagine them being willing to learn LdP. Apart from being easier, the design of LdP pays attention to making people feel welcome by including words from a much more diverse collection of natural languages than the small number of source languages of Interlingua. Since my intention is to write literature for global consumption, rather than merely for European consumption or merely for those who speak Indo-European languages, LdP is clearly a better choice, even taking into account its relative immaturity. In my opinion LdP has greater potential than Interlingua to succeed globally. In other words, for global literary use I have now come to believe that worldlangs are the answer.

As a minor additional note, I have stylistic problems with Interlingua. It is very difficult to write well without being a native speaker of a Romance language, perhaps impossibly so without assistance. To be honest, I also find French easier to read than Interlingua, for passive comprehension, despite the fact that my command of French is so poor that I can barely carry out even a simple conversation. This greater ease of reading is partially because French resources are more readily available. I also enjoy reading French far more than reading Interlingua because in my opinion French is a much more beautiful language. So, to be honest, I'd rather be reading French than reading Interlingua.

One Year of Study: October 2011 to October 2012

2011-10-23T17:19:00.004+10:00

All right, let's see what I can do in a year of serious study.

The following four languages will be my focus:

English

French

Interlingua

Lingwa de Planeta

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....

Frenkisch Grammar 2.01 released!

2011-10-15T18:48:00.005+10:00

David Parke, the creator of the excellent Germanic international auxiliary language, Frenkisch, has updated the grammar of that language. This is big news for any writer interested in writing literature for readers who speak a Germanic language. If you were to write a simple short story in Frenkisch, chances are that such readers will mostly be able to read your story at first sight without prior knowledge of Frenkisch; or, at the very least, they will probably have a good idea of what the story is about.

Just as you can write a story in Interlingua which is easily accessible to speakers of Romance languages, now you can write a story in Frenkisch which is accessible to speakers of Germanic languages.

Do you speak a Germanic language? If so, please take a look at this translation of the start of a French novel into Frenkisch. Are you able to understand it? Please let me know!

If you need a little help to read Frenkisch, you can download its dictionary (the beautifully formatted De Greut Frenkisch Englisch Wordbouk V2 is a little out of date, better to use the HTML files instead) and the newly updated grammar (De Frenkischgrammatik fon David Parke V2.01) from the Files section of the Frenkisch Yahoo Group. All you have to do to obtain these documents is to register as a member of that group, then you can freely download the dictionary and grammar.

Alternatively, you can view the grammar and the dictionary online by following the links at David's new blog, Konstspraik. There you can find out about Frenkisch and his other auxlangs in development. On the right margin of the page you will find the "Useful Files" section.

Frenkisch is one of my top-four favourite auxlangs: Interlingua, Lingwa de Planeta, Frenkisch and Sambahsa. Although it is in a relatively early stage of its grammatical development, it has an excellent large dictionary and is one of the best new auxlangs. I highly recommend checking it out.

Thanks very much to David for this latest update of an exciting new language.

Writing in Sambahsa

2011-10-11T22:38:00.006+10:00

Okay, now I am going to attempt to translate into Sambahsa a paragraph from a famous French novel. This is just a learning exercise, since the paragraph has already been translated by an expert, but I have not yet read that translation. Let's see how well I can do. This is the original French:

- Tais-toi d'abord! Avance-toi là, à cinquante pas en avant du bois, tu trouveras quelqu'un des pauvres soldats du régiment qui viennent d'être sabrés; tu lui prendras sa giberne et son fusil. Ne va pas dépouiller un blessé, au moins; prends le fusil et la giberne d'un qui soit bien mort, et dépêche-toi, pour ne pas recevoir les coups de fusil de nos gens.

And here is an approximate English translation (C. K. Scott–Moncrieff, 1924):

“Will you hold your tongue? Go forward there: fifty paces in front of the wood you’ll find one of the poor fellows of the Regiment who’ve been sabred; you will take his cartridge-pouch and his musket. Don’t strip a wounded man, though; take the pouch and musket from one who’s properly dead, and hurry up or you’ll be shot in the back by our fellows.”

And, just for comparison, here is my Interlingua translation:

- Tace! Avantia la. A cinquanta passos avante del bosco, tu trovará alcuno del povre soldates del regimento qui ha essite sabrate; tu le prenderá su cartuchiera e su fusil. Non spolia un vulnerato, al mínus; prende le fusil e le cartuchiera de un qui es ben morte, e hasta te pro non reciper le colpes de fusil de nostre hómines.

Okay, now here is my best attempt to make a Sambahsa translation. I am a beginner at Sambahsa:

- Sweighe ! Avance ter, ad penkgim stieups ant id bosc, tu trehvsie un iom orm soldats ios regiment quoy ste sabert; tu ghendsie eys palaska ed eys bunduk. Bet ne skehne un veurnto; ghends id bunduk ed id palaska os un qui es druve-ye mohrt, ed speude te, pro ne bihe strehlt ab nies wirs.

Oh boy, that was absolutely exhausting. Sambahsa is a language which clearly works extremely well, with great precision and expressiveness, when written by an expert; as a reader you can clearly appreciate these benefits of the language. In other words, the language clearly works and works very well; it is also highly educational. However, as a writer, it is very difficult until you become an expert, and becoming an expert would be no easy task. Just by way of comparison, today I have made short translations in four auxlangs: Interlingua, Lingwa de Planeta, Frenkisch, and Sambahsa. The difficulty of writing in these languages was in exactly that order: Interlingua easiest, Sambahsa hardest. Just to keep this in perspective, writing in Sambahsa is hugely easier than writing in Latin and very significantly easier than writing in French. It is far more logical, regular, and consistent than those more difficult natural languages. Nevertheless, Sambahsa is not for the faint-hearted.

All right, let's see how I did. I am far too exhausted to attempt to make any further corrections. Lets compare my translation (in purple) with the expert translation by Dr Olivier Simon (in green):

- Tayc preter ! Gwah perodh tetro, penkgim stieups ant id bosc, trehfsies sem iom orm soldats ios regiment quoy hant just esen sabern; ghendsies ud iom eys palaska ed eys bunduk. Bariem mae gwah ad spolye un vurnt; ghend id palaska ed id bunduk os oin qui est druve-ye mohrt, ed spehd, kay ne ses hiht ab ia strehls niesen leuds.

Hmmm. Interesting. Right away I have learned some useful things:

* oin (not un) should be used for "one", in the sense of oin qui est druve-ye mohrt
* kay (not pro) should be used for "in order to"

The latter I think is listed somewhere in the documentation. The former I am not so sure is documented adequately. Anyway, I was not able to find it despite going looking for it; that is, I did find oin but I interpreted it to mean only the number 1.

Apart from those observations, obviously I need to learn a bit more about conjugation in Sambahsa. However, I was pleased to see quoy hant just esen sabern as that is pretty close to what I had almost decided to write, namely quoy just hant esen sabert, but which in the end I had decided against because it was so lengthy and if one is sabred one stays sabred so I thought quoy ste sabert might be acceptable and I liked it because it was shorter. This is tricky because it has to do with whether or not the thing which occurred in the past is considered to be continuing in the present or not.

That's about all I can interpret. Hopefully this exercise will be useful for Olivier, perhaps it will highlight some common errors which the typical student might make.

Incidentally, I now believe that it would take about five years to master any auxlang to fluency such that one could write a good novel in it, and that time estimate applies to all of the four auxlangs mentioned above. That is, although the initial difficulty of writing in Sambahsa is greater than the other three auxlangs mentioned, I believe that after five years of dedicated study all four of these languages would seem to be of equal difficulty; that is, all would seem quite easy to write in.

So what it comes down to is not really a comparison of difficulty, since in the long term they are all about the same in difficulty despite large initial differences in difficulty. Other factors influence the choice of auxlang for the novelist, such as the genre you are writing in, the target audience for the novel, personal preference, available documentation, and so on.

Bear in mind that five years of study of a natural language, such as French or English, is nowhere near long enough to be able to write a good novel, unless you are a genius. Twenty years would probably be a more reliable estimate for French or English, unless your editor writes your book for you!

So, by comparison, five years to learn one of these auxlangs is entirely acceptable to me now.

If only there were 48 hours in a day, I would gladly simultaneously learn all four of these languages to fluency! Each of them has so much to offer. Alas, time constraints prevent me from doing so.

Reading Frenkisch

2011-10-10T23:57:00.003+10:00

David Parke has kindly been making a Frenkisch translation from the French novel La Chartreuse de Parme. Hopefully I will soon find the time to contribute some tentative paragraphs there myself but first I thought it would be interesting to repeat the exercise I recently did with Sambahsa, but this time with Frenkisch. Let's take a paragraph of David's translation and translate it into English, then compare the result with Scott-Moncrieff's 1924 English translation. This tests the precision of Frenkisch. I have read the original paragraph before but not in the last few days.

Here we go! Below is David's translation in Frenkisch:

“Lad dyn musket ond sett di after dat triew, insonderheid, schut nejt befor myn befel… Genaideleus Godd!”, roup’d de korporal aut fersteur’d, “hi kann nejt alssolk lade syn waipen!”. (Hi help’d Fabrice tou doue dis, fortgaiend mid syn opdragen.) “Infall mag en fyndlik ryder galopire an di om tou hacke di, leup om dyn triew, ond schut nejt antill hi is in naij reikwydde, hwann dyn ryder is tri schreden af di: wajt antill dyn bajonett treff naijgenoug syn uniform.”

Using the dictionary and grammar which can be downloaded from the Files section of the Frenkisch Yahoo Group (freely available once you have registered as a member of that group), I have made a translation of the above paragraph into English. Here it is, first literally:

"Load* your musket and position yourself behind that tree, don't shoot before my order... Merciless God!" the corporal cried out, disturbed, "He can not [as such] load his weapon!" (He helped Fabrice to do this, continuing with his orders.) "In case an enemy rider gallops next to and around you in order to hack you, run around your tree, and don't shoot until he is in close range, when your rider is three paces** from you; wait until your bayonet near-enough meets his uniform."

* or, synonymously, "Charge"

** not sure why singular schryde has had a vowel change in the plural form schreden; I'm guessing either a typo, a new grammatical rule, or perhaps schrede is 'yard' and schryde is 'pace'.

Here it is changed into more literary, less literal, English:

"Charge your musket and take up position behind that tree. Don't shoot before my order.... Merciless God!" the corporal cried out in exasperation, "He can't even load his weapon!" (He helped Fabrice to do so as he continued issuing orders.) "If an enemy rider gallops at you to cut you down, run around your tree, and don't shoot until he's in close range, when your rider's three paces from you; wait until your bayonet is just about touching his uniform."

That was great fun. I enjoyed that immensely. What's not to love about a language with such marvellous constructs as genaideleus (merciless), fyndlik ryder (enemy rider), and naijgenoug (near enough, nearly)? It is quite simply lovely. Easy too, for an English speaker with some knowledge of German, when it comes to recognising words and decoding constructions.

Okay, now for the result. How did I do?

Here is the original French:

- Charge ton fusil et mets-toi là derrière cet arbre, et surtout ne va pas tirer avant l'ordre que je t'en donnerai... Dieu de Dieu! dit le caporal en s'interrompant, il ne sait pas même charger son arme!... (Il aida Fabrice en continuant son discours.) Si un cavalier ennemi galope sur toi pour te sabrer, tourne autour de ton arbre et ne lâche ton coup qu'à bout portant, quand ton cavalier sera à trois pas de toi; il faut presque que ta baïonnette touche son uniforme..

And here is Scott-Moncrieff's translation (in grey) compared to my result (in green):

“Load your musket and stick yourself behind this tree, and whatever you do don’t fire till you get the order from me.... Great God in heaven!” the corporal broke off, “he doesn’t even know how to load!” He helped Fabrizio to do this while going on with his instructions. “If one of the enemy’s cavalry gallops at you to cut you down, dodge round your tree and don’t fire till he’s within three paces: wait till your bayonet’s practically touching his uniform.

A great result for Frenkisch! Almost exactly correct except that I got the sense of exasperation (feeling disturbed or perturbed) rather that interruption (being disturbed or interrupted) for the corporal, and also a few very minor stylistic liberties by myself and by David in making our translations.

This demonstrates the power, precision, style, and expressiveness of Frenkisch for literary use. Remember that speakers of Germanic languages could probably easily read such a translation with little or no prior study, an advantage not to be sniffed at!

Bravo, David!

Huge Sambahsa translation of Stendhal available! Also Interlingua, Frenkisch...

2011-10-08T15:29:00.001+10:00

Over at the new Joy of Literature site which now accompanies this blog, an ongoing translation of the great French novel La Chartreuse de Parme is underway, starting with Chapter Four which features scenes from the Battle of Waterloo. By the way, I mean 'great' only in the sense of it being a great literary work, not in the sense of agreeing with any views expressed therein. But I digress.

Anyway, along with my humble contribution of an Interlingua translation, and David Parke's kind contribution of a Frenkisch translation, both of which are in their early stages, Dr Olivier Simon has 'gone nuts' (as we say in Australian English, to imply 'worked with great enthusiasm') and finished the entire chapter, producing a Sambahsa translation of over 6,000 words! Since each of these translations shows the original French and an English translation in parallel, this is the perfect opportunity for students wishing to learn how to write literature in these constructed languages.

That Olivier was able to so quickly create (in a few days) such a large translation demonstrates the maturity of the Sambahsa language and its grammar. An achievement not to be sniffed at. Also notable is that the Sambahsa text is shorter than both the English and the French, demonstrating that Sambahsa is indeed a capable yet concise language. Being concise is a virtue not to be underestimated.

To celebrate Olivier's amazing achievement, I am going to attempt to translate some of the Sambahsa into English without reading either the original French or its English translation. Since I have not read the end of the chapter, this is a valid test. Let's test the precision of Sambahsa, a language at which I am a beginner barely capable of writing a few short sentences, by doing this exercise. Unfortunately, Sambahsa is rather difficult and so I think I had better start with just one paragraph, the fifth-last paragraph of the chapter, which I have never read. Let's take a look at the Sambahsa:

Is sergeant, currend ex id herbehrg, hieb viso sien colonel falle, ed iom credih grave-ye vurnen. Currt apter Fabrices ekwum ed seht id ak os sien saber do ia nugvers ios fur; so fallt. Ies hussars, vidend ep id brigv tik iom sergeant ped-ye, upergaloppent ed feugent jaldi. So qui eet ped-ye mwaungsout do id rur.

Okay, here goes. First I will make a literal translation, to demonstrate some aspects of Sambahsa grammar. Highlighted in yellow are shown some interesting Sambahsa constructions:

The sergeant, running out of the inn, had seen his colonel fall, and believed him gravely wounded. He runs behind Fabrice's horse and cuts the point of his sabre into the kidneys of the thief; that one* falls. The hussars, seeing on the bridge only the sergeant on foot, gallop over** and flee quickly. That one*** who was on foot escapes into the countryside.

* meaning the thief

** strongly implying "over the bridge"

*** meaning the one who was on foot (that is, the sergeant)

I am no expert on Sambahsa tenses but it seems to me that the text is written using an unusual literary device of tense formation, namely that some of the text uses the present tense although the action occurs in the past. Since this is just the sort of trick that the original author, Stendhal, liked to get up to, I'm assuming it has been translated as such. Now let's convert all this into literary English:

The sergeant, running out of the inn, had seen his colonel fall and believed him gravely wounded. He ran behind Fabrice's horse and cut the point of his sabre into the kidneys of the thief, felling him. The hussars, seeing on the bridge only the sergeant on foot, quickly galloped over and fled. The man on foot escaped into the countryside.

Okay, that's about the best I can do without spending too much time looking up documentation. This was a fun exercise, didn't take too long, and I enjoyed it immensely. I was able to deduce here and there a few words which were not found in the dictionary, and was reasonably comfortable doing so, extrapolating from what is in the dictionary. This shows I am getting more comfortable with Sambahsa. Mind you, reading the whole chapter would take me a long time.

I must say, I like the literary quality of Sambahsa, it is very fine.

Okay, now for the result. How did I do?

Here is the original French:

Le maréchal des logis, en accourant de l'auberge, avait vu tomber son colonel, et le croyait gravement blessé. Il court après le cheval de Fabrice et plonge la pointe de son sabre dans les reins du voleur, celui-ci tombe. Les hussards, ne voyant plus sur le pont que le maréchal des logis à pied, passent au galop et filent rapidement. Celui qui était à pied s'enfuit dans la campagne.

And here is Scott-Moncrieff's translation (in grey) compared to my result (in green):

The serjeant, as he hurried from the inn, had seen his colonel fall, and supposed him to be seriously wounded. He ran after Fabrizio’s horse and plunged the point of his sabre into the thief’s entrails; he fell. The hussars, seeing no one now on the bridge but the serjeant, who was on foot, crossed at a gallop and rapidly disappeared. The one on foot bolted into the fields.

Another fantastic result for Sambahsa! Almost exactly correct.

Sambahsa really is an amazing literary language of great quality. It's only drawback is its difficulty.

Bravo, Olivier!

New website: The Joy of Literature

2011-10-02T14:14:00.005+10:00

As a companion to this blog, I have created a new site!

Please visit:

The Joy of Literature

My initial project there will be to work on my ongoing literary translation of the novel La Chartreuse de Parme into Interlingua, Lingwa de Planeta and Frenkisch. There is also a Sambahsa translation. For reference, the novel is also shown in English and in the original French. The site is still under construction, so don't be alarmed if you can't see your favourite language there yet.

Translations will continue to appear on this blog, in order to obtain corrections and feedback for new paragraphs which will subsequently appear in the reference works at The Joy of Literature.

Interlingua: Le Cartusia de Parma | Chapter 4 | Part 1

2011-10-01T23:36:00.009+10:00

And now we return to Stendhal's great novel, La Chartreuse de Parme. To make doing the translation more interesting, I have jumped forward to the start of the fourth chapter, in the thick of the action. The events described herein take place during the Battle of Waterloo, in 1815. These battle scenes greatly influenced both Hemingway and Tolstoy, and represented a new style of realism that for the first time showed at least some small part of the dreadful reality of war in stark contrast to the notions of glory which prevailed at the time. Stendhal also uses humour to show the absurdity of these naive concepts of glory. Hemingway's own powerfully realistic descriptions of war in novels such as For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms partly owe their heritage to Stendhal. Accordingly, Stendhal's novel is a fit test of the capability of an auxlang for advanced literary use.

Interlingua     dictionario   grammatica
Traduction: Robert Winter, 2011

LE CARTUSIA DE PARMA
Stendahl

CAPÍTULO IV

Níhil pote eveliar le, ni le colpes de fusil, tirate ben presso del parve carretta, ni le trotto del cavallo que le cantinera flagellava con su tote fortia. Le regimento, imprevistemente attaccate per nubes de cavallería prussian, post haber credite al victoria tote le die, retira se, o plus tosto fugiva verso Francia.
    Le colonnello, un bel júvene hómine, ben vestite, qui habeva succedite Macon, esseva sablate; le chef de battalion qui le reimplaciava in commando, un vétulo con capillos blanco, mandava le regimento a facer halto.
    - Maledicte sia vos...! ille diceva al soldates, in le témpores del república on attendeva usque fortiate per le inimíco ante fugir.... Defende cata póllice de terreno, e face vos morir, ille critate, imprecante; ora il es le solo del patria que iste Prussianos vole invader!

French
Text of the original novel by Stendhal, 1839

LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME
Stendahl

CHAPITRE IV

Rien ne put le réveiller, ni les coups de fusil tirés fort près de la petite charrette, ni le trot du cheval que la cantinière fouettait à tour de bras. Le régiment, attaqué à l'improviste par des nuées de cavalerie prussienne, après avoir cru à la victoire toute la journée, battait en retraite, ou plutôt s'enfuyait du côté de la France.
    Le colonel, beau jeune homme, bien ficelé, qui venait de succéder à Macon, fut sabré, le chef de bataillon qui le remplaça dans le commandement vieillard à cheveux blancs, fit faire halte au régiment.
    - F...! dit-il aux soldats, du temps de la république on attendait pour filer d'y être forcé par l'ennemi... Défendez chaque pouce de terrain et faites-vous tuer, s'écriait-il en jurant; c'est maintenant le sol de la patrie que ces Prussiens veulent envahir!

English
Translation: C. K. Scott–Moncrieff, 1924

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA
Stendahl

CHAPTER IV

Nothing could awaken him, neither the muskets fired close to the cart nor the trot of the horse which the cantinière was flogging with all her might. The regiment, attacked unexpectedly by swarms of Prussian cavalry, after imagining all day that they were winning the battle, was beating a retreat or rather fleeing in the direction of France.
    The colonel, a handsome young man, well turned out, who had succeeded Macon, was sabred; the battalion commander who took his place, an old man with white hair, ordered the regiment to halt.
    “Damn you,” he cried to his men, “in the days of the Republic we waited till we were forced by the enemy before running away. Defend every inch of ground, and get yourselves killed!” he shouted, and swore at them. “It is the soil of the Fatherland that these Prussians want to invade now!”

Comparative example #5

2011-10-01T13:04:00.010+10:00

This is the fifth in a series of comparative examples in various languages. The purpose of these examples is to document idiomatic expressions. They should also serve as a useful tool for students of these languages. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Key

IT = Italian

EN = English
IA = Interlingua
IN = Interlingua [alternative]
MO = Mondial
LP = Lingwa de Planeta

SB = Sambahsa
FK = Frenkisch

Warning: These examples use a non-standard orthography.

Literary Quotation

IT: Ormai noi tutti ci siamo a poco a poco adattati alla nuova concezione dell'infinita nostra piccolezza...1

EN: By now we all, little by little, have adapted to the new conception of our infinite smallness...

IA: Ora nos omnes poco a poco ha adaptate nos al nove conception de nostre infinite parvitate...²

IN: Hodie nos omnes poco a poco ha essite habituate al nove conception de nostre infinite futilitate...3

MO: Ora tute nos poco a poco ha adaptate nos al nov conception de notre infinite petitese...⁴

LP: Pa nau, oli nu shao-po-shao he adapti a nove konsepta de nuy no-fin-ney syaotá...⁵

SB: Nun vásya wey ye lýtil ed lýtil hams adjústen sékwent id nov idée de nies infiníte lytilnéss ...⁶

FK: Nou have wi all graduell anpass'd ons, tou de niew begripp af onser onbegrenc'd luttelheid...⁷

¹ The original Italian from Il fu Mattia Pascal, by Luigi Pirandello.

² My own Interlingua translation, which I think is perhaps more faithful than Boalt's, below.

³ From Le defuncte Mattia Pascal, translated into Interlingua by Pian Boalt.

⁴ I think this will be my last Mondial translation for a while. Definitely a nice language, with easier spelling than Interlingua, but this is offset by the relative lack of available documentation which makes writing more difficult and time-consuming. Also since I am already committed to learning Interlingua properly, and the two languages are different yet so closely related, trying to learn both simultaneously might lead to me making unintentional errors in Interlingua. I might come back to Mondial again later, after I have mastered Interlingua and when more documentation exists. Coincidentally, a relative lack of documentation compared to Interlingua is also what keeps me from using Sambahsa more often; I will probably use Sambahsa more frequently as its documentation gradually expands. Sambahsa is however much better documented than Mondial already.

⁵ I am enjoying my return to LdP enormously. What a great language! And, hurray, you don't have to speak a Romance language to be able to use it. Anyway, the challenges for me in this sentence were several. Of primary concern were the proper way to write infinite (my best guess is no-fin-ney) and smallness. All this raises some questions about hyphenation (to hyphenate or not to hyphenate), especially when, as I am doing here, one is coining words not yet found in the dictionary. I prefer to hyphenate (for clarity, ease, and style) however could be pursuaded otherwise.

⁶ Although Sambahsa is a lovely language which I admire very much, I was very surprised to see that despite Sambahsa's relatively huge dictionary of over 11,000 entries, there were several English words I could not find for this sentence: adapt, habituate, finite, infinite, concept, conception, smallness, littleness, futile, futility. In the end I decided to look up adjust, settled for idée, and guessed infiníte and lytilnéss. These may well be incorrect guesses. It was not at all clear how to say all in this context. It also took me a very long time to look up matters of declension, conjugation, and accentuation, which are complex. Sambahsa is a wonderful language but I am not quite ready for it yet. I think I need to keep studying Interlingua and Frenkisch and return to Sambahsa later when my experience has increased. Right now I find Interlingua a challenge, to put this in perspective. Update: Olivier has sent me some corrections for this translation, I have not yet updated this post to include those corrections. I hope to do so soon.

⁷ I am also enjoying my return to Frenkisch enormously. Quite frankly, I had forgotten how very beautiful Frenkisch is. It is really naturalistic and has a wonderful, somewhat difficult orthography, which gives it a characteristic beauty; I think the name of the language is appropriate since you can see the influence of French on the orthography, and I love both French and German so this is the ideal language for me to use as a companion to Interlingua, for a change of pace. By the way, I no longer agree with my previous comments about Frenkisch being too hard; now, I absolutely love it! What is really great is that my Dutch, Swiss, and German friends will be able to understand me if I write to them in Frankisch, just as my Italian, Portuguese and Spanish friends will be able to understand me if I write to them in Interlingua. Such benefits, for a writer, are not to be overlooked. My apologies for any mistakes I have made in the translation, I am just getting back into Frenkisch again. Also, I am not marking the stressed syllable yet because I cannot remember how to determine it. Many thanks to David for his kind corrections (see comments below). More later...

Comparative example #4

2011-09-29T22:05:00.010+10:00

This is the fourth in a series of comparative examples in various languages. The purpose of these examples is to document idiomatic expressions. They should also serve as a useful tool for students of these languages. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Key

IT = Italian

EN = English
IA = Interlingua
MO = Mondial
LP = Lingwa de Planeta

SB = Sambahsa
FK = Frenkisch

Warning: These examples use a non-standard orthography.

Literary Quotation

IT: Copernico, Copernico, don Eligio mio ha rovinato l'umanità, irrimediabilmente.1

EN: Copernicus, Copernicus, my dear Don Eligio, has ruined humanity, irremediably.

IA: Copérnico, Copérnico, mi don Eligio, ha ruinate le humanitate, irremediabilemente.2

MO: Copérnico, Copérnico, mi don Eligio, ha ruinate le humanitá, iremediablemente.³

LP: Kopérnikus, Kopérnikus, kare don Elijio, he ruini jenley, no-reparibilem.⁴

SB: Coppernic, Coppernic, mien kyar Don Eligio, hat ruinen menscgenos, irremediable-ye.5

FK: Kopernikus, Kopernikus, myn dur Don Eligio, ha ferderv'd menschheid eiwig.⁶

¹ The original Italian from Il fu Mattia Pascal, by Luigi Pirandello.

² From Le defuncte Mattia Pascal, translated into Interlingua by Pian Boalt.

³ Here we see the simpler spelling of Mondial compared to Interlingua.

⁴ See comments from readers, below. Also, it has been suggested on the LdP Yahoo Group that perhaps this should be written bu-reparibilem rather than no-reparibilem, as one LdP user has suggested that the latter could be taken to mean 'damageably' rather than irreparably. Meanwhile, it is fascinating to note that another good alternative is the Chinese-style construct, bu-mog-repari-kem, which I really like conceptually except that it is a little long.

⁵ Sambahsa translation kindly supplied by Olivier.

⁶ Another option here, kindly supplied by David, is Kopernikus, Kopernikus, myn dur Don Eligio, ha ferderv'd menschheid, onheilbar. One must, alas, bear in mind that due to the possible alternative meanings of ferderv'd, apparently this could humorously be misinterpreted as Copernicus, Copernicus, my precious Don Eligo, has corrupted mankind
irrecoverably (replete with unintended sexual innuendo)!

Comparative example #3

2011-09-28T15:08:00.005+10:00

This is the third in a series of comparative examples in various languages. The purpose of these examples is to document idiomatic expressions. They should also serve as a useful tool for students of these languages. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Key

IT = Italian

EN = English
FR = French
IA = Interlingua
IN = Interlingua [alternative]
MO = Mondial
LP = Lingwa de Planeta
SB = Sambahsa
XP = Expériment

Warning: These examples use a non-standard orthography.

Literary Quotation

IT: Ho detto troppo presto, in principio, che ho conosciuto mio padre.1

EN: I have said too quickly, in the beginning, that I have known my father.2 /

    In the preface I said that I had known my father. I spoke too soon.3

FR: J'ai dit trop tôt, au début, que j'ai connu mon père.4

IA: Io diceva troppo presto, in le prefacio, que io cognosceva mi patre.5

IN: Io ha dicite troppo presto, in le principio, que io ha cognoscite mi patre.6

MO: Yo dicavi tro tosto, in le preface, que io conosavi mi patre.7

LP: Me shwo tro kway, in preworda, ke me koni may patra.8

  
SB: Ho sáyct piór jáldi, in id prefáce, od ho gnoht mien páter.9

XP: Ae too kwik did sey, béyso í-vut begíning, that ae did no mae fáther.10

¹ The original Italian from Il fu Mattia Pascal, by Luigi Pirandello. The beginning (principio) to which Pirandello refers is the beginning of the novel, the premessa (preface or forward).

² Literal translation.

³ Literary translation. I have taken the liberty of using "preface" instead of "beginning" as although this loses a little of the flavour of the original, it makes the meaning entirely clear.

⁴ My best guess; I am currently learning French.

⁵ A straightforward translation into Interlingua, designed to be as easy as possible to read. I have used the simple past tense and explicitly used prefacio (preface) instead of principio (beginning). This is wonderfully easy to read, and is sufficiently literary to be enjoyable and worth reading, but it does not retain quite the same exquisite flavour as the original text. This is the way I would choose to translate the text in most auxlangs other than Interlingua; in other words, using the simplest and easiest translation which does not totally destroy the literary merit of the work.

⁶ From Le defuncte Mattia Pascal, translated into Interlingua by Pian Boalt. Here we see the style of translation favoured by Boalt, which is to translate the Italian in the most direct manner possible, preserving most of the quirks and idioms of that language and of Pirandello's style. This practice means that reading books in Interlingua involves learning many, many different idiomatic expressions and styles of writing, inherited from whichever language the original text happened to be in. Although this makes reading difficult, it allows one to feel as if one is reading the original Italian text without having to learn Italian. One feels close to Pirandello, rather than separated by a translation. Learning Interlingua is difficult but it is not as difficult as learning Italian, so the study time needed is less. Incidentally, this is a very easy example; many of Boalt's sentences are vastly more idiomatic. Nevertheless, her Mattia Pascal is my favourite literary translation in an auxlang.

However, only in Interlingua would I attempt to preserve such difficult and highly idiomatic constructions. In Interlingua this is appropriate because Interlingua is a registration of existing language, a gateway to existing language, not an artificial construction. In other words, Interlingua does not try to be easy. I do not think that such a difficult and impenetrable style of writing is suitable for auxlangs which are primarily intended to be easy, such as Esperanto, Mondial, Lingwa de Planeta and even Sambahsa. I include Sambahsa in the latter group because the difficulties of Sambahsa have been preserved by its creator not because they are a registration of Proto-Indo-European but because the difficulties yield other practical advantages such as brevity, precision, specificity, and greater ease in deconstruction complex natural language idioms into easy-to-understand Sambahsa forms. Therefore, when writing in auxlangs other than Interlingua I will usually choose the simplest, easiest translation possible, whereas when writing in Interlingua I will preserve many difficult idioms.

⁷ I have to say that although due to time constraints I had originally planned to forego including Mondial in the comparative examples, I am now glad that I have included the language. I think it really fills the space between Interlingua and Lingua Franca Nova, making a very admirable compromise between the two and arguably forming a best-of-both-worlds solution. Its main drawback is that it feels a little mechanical compared to Interlingua, but one must bear in mind that those who speak no Indo-European language would not find it so. However, it is not a worldlang.

⁸ I am so glad that I have recently returned to LdP, mainly because it is a worldlang and a very well designed one, too. Here we see that I simply throw all marking of tense out the proverbial window because it is not necessary. The meaning of the sentence is still clear without it, and the number of decisions needed by the writer to create the sentence is dramatically reduced (compared to English where one must choose between several possible tense formations). Lovely, simple, easy, and sufficiently precise... if you think in the mindset of Chinese or Indonesian. When writing LdP one must not think in the mindset of Western European languages; one must remember that LdP is not a European language but is more like an Asian language which happens to use many European words; perhaps it is best likened to Indonesian (it also uses many European words). I assume that it would even be possible to further simplify this sentence, rather like Indonesian does, by relying upon common sense and context and using even fewer words. Suggestions welcome!

⁹ Isn't Sambahsa lovely? Works really well, fantastic language, mature, literary, good for speakers of Indo-European languages with an interest in linguistics. I tend to get it wrong when trying to write it, mostly because better documentation is needed, but the documentation has made giant steps forward already and hopefully will make further steps forward as more people discover the language. Not for the faint-hearted, however.

¹⁰ This Expériment sentence is pronounced exactly as in the English sentence "I too quick did say, in the beginning, that I did know my father." except that the words "in the" are replaced by béyso i-vut. This particular example would be largely comprehensible without prior study when heard by an English speaker, except that they must study the system of articles and particles used. Articles are constructed according to an entirely regular algorithm which indicates: primary case (sundry = none of the four other primary cases applies, nominative, accusative, dative, genitive), secondry case (pure = no secondary case, addessive, ablative, allative, inessive, elative, illative), mode (generic, generalising, definite, indefinite, numeric, divisive), and number (singular, plural). This is similar to but even more powerful and even more regular than the system of articles used by Sambahsa, and serves to provide unambiguous precision from precise grammatical rules without ever, for example, needing to decline a noun. In this example, the article i-vut shows: i- = inessive, v = definite, ut = sundry, and the lack of any final s on the article indicates the following noun is singular. There is no confusion about when an article must be used before a noun because the answer is: always! Incidentally, this is at the opposite end of the spectrum from LdP for which the answer is: never! Both are valid approaches. The example happens to use English words, but words from any language would work just as well because there is never any declination, conjugation or inflexion of any kind.

Expériment sentences are divided into blocks separated by commas. The particle béyso indicates that the current block is an adverbial expression which modifies the preceding block.

Expériment:
i-vut = definite article (definite, sundry, inessive, singular)
no = know (maybe gno would be better, similar to Sambahsa, but for now will ignore etymology)
sey = say
i : [i] short
o : [o] long
oo : [u] long
u : [u] short
r : as in non-rhotic English
th : as in the English words the, that, father but never as in the English word thought; optionally, as [d] (if too difficult for the speaker)
sey : as in the English word say

Comparative example #2

2011-09-26T20:27:00.009+10:00

This is the second in a series of comparative examples in various languages. The purpose of these examples is to document idiomatic expressions. They should also serve as a useful tool for students of these languages. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Key

EN = English
FR = French
IA = Interlingua
IN = Interlingua [alternative]
MO = Mondial
LP = Lingwa de Planeta
SB = Sambahsa
XP = Expériment

Warning: These examples use a non-standard orthography.

Likes

EN: I like ice-cream.
FR: J'aime la glace.
IA: Io ama gelato.

IN: Io ama le gelato.

MO: Yo ama le gelato.
LP: Me pri aiskrem. 
SB: Kámo swadgléhdj.

XP: Ae laek lum áes-kreem.

Above we see the trouble with languages which have definite articles. In English, the definite article must not be used here. In French, it must be used here. In Interlingua, I believe it should not be used here, although Romance-language speakers would probably use it. In Sambahsa I have no idea, since in this case any definite article would be used only in the sense of a generalisation, just as it is in French, and I am not sure how Sambahsa treats generalisation. Which brings me finally to Lingwa de Planeta: here we see a great strength of LdP, that there is no guesswork about when to use the definite article because, like Russian or Chinese, there is no definite article. It is easier to write LdP than all of these other languages in this respect, although of course one must however ensure that from the context one makes the meaning clear despite the lack of an article.

Update: Olivier has since told me that in Sambahsa the definite article is not used when one is making a generalisation, only when one is referring to a specific instance of something, so now I know the above is correct. Excellent!

Expériment:
lum = definite article (generalising, accusative, pure, singular)
ae : diphthong [aj]
ee : [i] long
i : [i] short

Comparative example #1

2011-09-25T23:41:00.010+10:00

This is the first in a series of comparative examples in various languages. The purpose of these examples is to document idiomatic expressions. They should also serve as a useful tool for students of these languages. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.

Key

EN = English
FR = French
IA = Interlingua
IN = Interlingua [alternative]
MO = Mondial
LP = Lingwa de Planeta
SB = Sambahsa

Warning: These examples use a non-standard orthography.

Occupations

EN: I am a writer.
FR: Je suis écrivain.
IA: Io es un scriptor.
IN: Io es scriptor.
MO: Yo e scriptor.
LP: Me es skriber.
SB: Som scriptór.

EN: We are writers.
FR: Nous sommes écrivains.
IA: Nos es scriptores.
IN: Nos son scriptores. /
    Son scriptores. /
    Nos sómos scriptores. /
    Sómos scriptores.

MO: Nu e scriptores.

LP: Nu es skriber.
SB: Smos scriptórs.

EN: We are good writers.
FR: Nous sommes de bons écrivains.
IA: Nos es bon scriptores.
IN: Nos son bon scriptores. /
    Son bon scriptores. /
    Nos sómos bon scriptores. /
    Sómos bon scriptores.
MO: Nu e bon scriptores.
LP: Nu es hao skriber.
SB: Smos gohd scriptórs.

EN: We were good writers.

FR: Nous étions de bons écrivains.

IA: Nos esseva bon scriptores.
MO: Nu evi bon scriptores.
LP: Nu bin hao skriber.
SB: Éemos gohd scriptórs. / Éems gohd scriptórs.

Reference: Key to comparative examples

2011-09-25T22:38:00.009+10:00

Key to Languages

The languages used in the comparative examples from this date forward are:

EN = English
FR = French
IA = Interlingua
IN = Interlingua [alternative] ¹
MO = Mondial
LP = Lingwa de Planeta
SB = Sambahsa
FK = Frenkisch
XP = Expériment ²

Suggestions and Corrections

Readers are welcome to suggest changes to the comparative examples or to make corrections. Just add a comment to the blog post in question and I will update it accordingly. I especially hope that experts in French, Interlingua, Lingwa de Planeta, and Sambahsa will contact me regularly. In this way we can make this blog a useful resource for students of these languages.

Marking of Stress: Interlingua

I choose to mark the stressed syllable of all irregularly stressed words in Interlingua by using an acute accent, as is done in Spanish, to ensure that the pronunciation of Interlingua is not much more difficult than that of Spanish. Officially, Interlingua is not written with accents, so readers should just ignore the accents when looking up words in Interlingua dictionaries. Here is an example:

EN = man 

IA = hómine

To find the Interlingua word in the Interlingua-English Dictionary, look up homine without any accent marks.

Marking of Stress: Sambahsa

Similarly, I choose to mark the stressed syllable of all polysyllabic words in Sambahsa by using an acute accent, merely as a learning exercise for myself to ensure that I fully understand the entirely regular stress patterns of Sambahsa. Unlike Interlingua, Sambahsa has no irregularly stressed words, but the rules of accentuation in Sambahsa are somewhat complicated. Officially, Sambahsa is not written with accents. Here is an example:

EN = writer

SB = scriptór

To find the Sambahsa word in the Sambahsa-English Dictionary, look up scriptor without any accent marks.

Marking of Stress: Lingwa de Planeta

The official orthography of Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) currently uses doubled vowels to indicate irregular stress, but I prefer instead to place an acute accent above the vowel in question and not to double the vowel. For example, the following word is stressed on the final syllable just as it is in French; the LdP word sounds virtually identical to the French word from which it is derived:

FR = voilà

LP = walá

To find the word in the LdP-English dictionary, replace any vowel marked by an acute accent with the same vowel doubled twice without the accent; thus, you should look up the word as walaa.

¹ Interlingua: Alternative Form

The official Interlingua-English Dictionary lists some words in square brackets. For example, [somos]. Such words are valid alternatives which may be used in Interlingua; these include a handful of irregular forms of the verb esser (to be) which will be instantly recognisable to speakers of Romance languages but which do make the language slightly more difficult. Where this would cause a difference compared to standard Interlingua, I show the alternative phrase. Furthermore, when there is a choice of using a highly idiomatic and highly naturalistic expression, I also show this as an alternative phrase even if it does not use any alternative words. Generally, the alternative form is more suitable for writing fiction as it retains more of the flavour and character of natural Romance languages. The standard form is more suitable for non-fiction writing, where one wishes to use the simplest possible expression rather than the most literary expression.

² Expériment

This is not a real language, and certainly not a stable language, it is just a series of thought experiments, playing with grammatical ideas. Loosely based on the fledgling grammar of a language called Olive which I began to develop recently and then abandoned, which featured a complicated but entirely regular set of mandatory articles. These mandatory articles, combined with the grammar, effectively mark parts of speech to a considerable extent, but without mutilation of words. I will mark the stressed syllable of all polysyllabic words with an acute accent. Compound nouns will always be formed using hyphens. There will be no polymorphism of words whatsoever: no declension, no conjugation, no inflexion; a word is a word is a word and never changes. A system of particles will compensate for this to preserve precision; for example, number will be indicated by a particle or assumed from context since nouns will never be declined, not even to indicate the plural. A great advantage of this is words from virtually any language can be imported since there is no need for their form to be amenable to any kind of change; this is a good approach for a worldlang. I will use an ad hoc vocabulary which may not be consistent from example to example (in other words, for now I will just choose any old word I feel like for the purpose of the grammatical example, just as a placeholder). The whole point is just to experiment with grammatical ideas in order to develop new grammatical constructs through a process of creative improvisation. I recommend that readers should ignore the Expériment entries completely, they are of little or no significance at this stage. You may consider them to be merely the private notes of a madman, unless you have a particular interest in conlanging...

Interlingua: Le Cartusia de Parma | Part 1

2011-09-10T19:12:00.008+10:00

Unsurprisingly, despite my best intentions to confine myself to the pleasure of reading Interlingua and to not consume my scant free time in making translations, I was unable to resist the compelling temptation to begin work on an Interlingua translation of the great French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, written by Stendhal in 1839. I had previously translated more than 5000 words of this work from French into another constructed language called Occidental but was not entirely happy with the result and decided not to continue with that language. Despite my previous reservations, I am now happy enough with Interlingua to wish to proceed with a translation of the entire novel to be done gradually over the next five years as I slowly become fluent in Interlingua.

The quality of my translations will gradually improve as I learn Interlingua (and as my French improves) over the months and years to come. At the end I will rewrite the entire translation to what will hopefully be a professional standard and so we will have one more novel thus added to the corpus of Interlingua literature. After that I will start writing original novels in Interlingua, assuming that the experience has heightened rather than lessened my admiration for the language, unless a more suitable language appears in the meantime.

From reading Gode, I have very recently come to understand that Interlingua was not intended to be a constructed international auxiliary language, unlike Esperanto. Therefore Interlingua is not a competitor to Esperanto and should not be judged as such. Rather, Interlingua is a registration of the latent common language that is present in European languages which derive largely or partially from Latin. In other words, Gode and his colleagues extracted from several European source languages an extensive common vocabulary and a minimal grammar which contained shared features found in those source languages: this is Interlingua. The fact that Interlingua is not as difficult as its source languages is largely just a fortunate happenstance; Interlingua, unlike Esperanto, was not designed to be as simple and easy as possible. Rather, Interlingua is merely as simple and easy as it happens to be, and is merely as complex and difficult as it happens to be: no more, no less. That is, Gode intentionally did not make Interlingua any simpler and easier because in doing so he would have made the language a less faithful representation of the latent common language which actually exists. His purpose in publishing Interlingua was not to create a new auxiliary language for the world but rather to make the world aware of a language which already existed. Now, of course, this story should be taken with a grain of salt since nothing is ever quite that simple, but that is in essence what Interlingua is about; a fact, I might add, that the UMI does always not make clear, since it has an unfortunate tendency to promote Interlingua as if it were a language which was designed to be as simple and easy as possible, which clearly it is not. Incidentally, apparently Gode was very wary of the idea of any kind of Academy that would decree what does and does not constitute valid Interlingua, because such an Academy might make arbitrary decisions.

Interlingua is best thought of as a kind of Modern Latin.

To give a concrete example: it may be, very possibly, that Mondial really is significantly easier and simpler to use than Interlingua, and that therefore Mondial might be a better candidate for global use as an international auxiliary language, assuming that its current revival proves to be a lasting and successful one and that a community of users develops. A good example of its relative ease is that the infinitives of all verbs in Mondial end in -ar whereas those of Interlingua can end in either -ar, -ir, or -er. So it is easier to conjugate verbs in Mondial because you do not have to remember three patterns, only one pattern. This is clearly a sensible design feature of a language which is designed to be as simple and easy as possible. But it clearly would not be a sensible design feature of a language which is designed to remain true to the shared common language which already exists in European languages, because it represents simplification to the point of extreme regularity which is not found in that shared common language. In other words, Mondial is correctly designed for what it is, and Interlingua is correctly designed (or faithfully registered) for what it is. The absolutely key point which Gode tried to explain to people but which has not really been made widely known and which I only discovered this week myself, is that, to speak to this particular example, Interlingua and Mondial are not competitors!

Rather than worrying about competition from Mondial and Esperanto and other constructed languages, the UMI should wish those languages every success, because they are not competitors to Interlingua. Even if there were a billion speakers of Esperanto, it would still not be a competitor to Interlingua because billions of people would still speak European languages and Interlingua would still be highly relevant to those speakers of European languages, or to those wishing to learn about European languages. If people wish to learn Occidental instead of Interlingua, the UMI should wish them every success also; that language is a bit simpler and easier than Interlingua, and similar in concept, but was clearly designed to value regularity and ease more highly than does Interlingua, which places a higher value on being natural. Occidental takes that extra step which Gode was not willing to take, a step towards being simpler and easier which steps across the line beyond which regularity has become so great that it no longer is an accurate registration of the shared common language because the degree of regularity is no longer 'believable' (that is, people can tell that the language was designed and it is not so plausible as a natural language). The whole point of Interlingua is that it is a registration of natural language; albeit that the natural language concerned is latent.

So, whether or not Interlingua is easier or harder than these other languages (and let's face it, Interlingua is usually harder than them) is not the point. This is something which I never really understood until now. Furthermore, it is absurd to talk about whether Interlingua is better than Esperanto or than any other language (notwithstanding the fact that I myself have often erroneously done so); Interlingua is neither better nor worse, it is simply what it is. Likewise, English is not better or worse than French; English is English; French is French; they are simply what they are. However, if you wish to be an airline pilot then English is better than French for air traffic control because English is the international language of air traffic control. Similarly, if you wish to learn about European languages then Interlingua is better than Esperanto because Interlingua is a registration of a common language latent in European languages and it essentially adds almost no artificial elements. On the other hand, Esperanto might be better than Interlingua if you wish to communicate with someone who does not speak a European language, because Esperanto uses artificially designed elements in an attempt to be as easy as possible. Esperanto is designed, it is artificial. Interlingua is extracted, it is natural. Again, this story has to be taken with a grain of salt because nothing is really that simple, but in essence this is a reasonably true portrayal of the different philosophies involved.

Now, totally by coincidence and not by design, it just so happens that for me personally (an English speaker), after a great deal of frustration and even having given up on Interlingua in utter disgust because it was too difficult, took too long to learn, and required me to learn impenetrable Romance-language idioms, it has turned out in the long run that Interlingua is the language in which it appears it will be easiest for me to read and write novels. I guess what this means is that there must be method in the madness of extracting a language like Interlingua in such a naturalistic manner; somehow, it works and is a reasonable method despite its relative irregularity. And since I wish to write novels in the manner of European languages, it is suitable for my purpose, especially since I wish to simultaneously learn one of its source languages: French. I estimate that about five years of study will be required for me to truly master Interlingua, however because of its extreme naturalism I believe it will be well worthwhile because it will teach me a huge amount about Latin and European languages. For example, believe it or not, the study of Interlingua has already expanded my English vocabulary, especially with respect to obscure terms derived from Latin.

Incidentally, I truly believe that gaining literary mastery of any international auxiliary language probably takes about five years; that is, I do not wish to give readers the impression that if I chose some language other than Interlingua, for example Esperanto, I would somehow be writing novels of professional quality in half the time. I would not be. There are no shortcuts. So what's the difference? Basically, if my first language were Chinese then I think that even five years might not be sufficient time for me to master Interlingua so as to write a great novel, whereas maybe five years might just be long enough to do the same in Esperanto... maybe. Interlingua leverages an existing knowledge of one or more European languages to provide the student with a foundation for its study, hence making five years a realistic time-frame for me personally. To restate this, maybe I could write a mediocre novel in a year or two from now, but to truly write a masterpiece I think would take five years of Interlingua experience.

Anyway, that was a very long-winded way of coming to the first installment of my translation of La Chartreuse de Parme into Interlingua. This is a labour of love.

Oh, by the way, I have decided to retain the traditional orthography of Interlingua until such time as professional linguists, perhaps in the far future, eventually reform its spelling. Now that I understand what Gode was trying to achieve, I can see that the traditional orthography is certainly superior to the collateral orthography because of the etymological information it contains and because it accurately reflects English and French, for example; however I draw the line at the excessive and vexatious difficulty of determining the stressed syllable. Therefore I choose to mark the stressed syllable in all irregularly stressed words; this, I think, is the best compromise for now and honestly I cannot see that doing so in any way reduces the naturalistic quality of Interlingua.

I hope you will enjoy this translation as it unfolds...

Let's begin!

Interlingua dictionario grammatica
Traduction: Robert Winter, 2011

LE CARTUSIA DE PARMA
Stendahl

LIBRO PRIME

CAPÍTULO PRIME
Milano in 1796 [mille septe centos novanta-sex]

Le 15 [dece-cinque] de maio 1796, general Bonaparte faceva su entrata a in Milano al cápite de ille arméa júvene que veniva de passar le ponte de Lodi e de inseniar al mundo que post tante séculos Cesare e Alexandro habeva un successor. Le miráculos de bravura e de genio, al queles Italia esseva teste, in alcun menses eveliava un pópulo addormite; octo dies áncora ante le arrivata del franceses, le milaneses videva in les níhil plus que un banda de brigantes, habituate a fugir sempre ante le truppas de su majestate imperial e royal: illo esseva al minus lo que esseva repetite a les tres vices le septimana in un parve jornal si grande como le mano, imprimite sur papiro immunde.

French
Text of the original novel by Stendhal, 1839

LA CHARTREUSE DE PARME
Stendahl

LIVRE PREMIER

CHAPITRE PREMIER
Milan in 1796

Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la tête de cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, et d'apprendre au monde qu'après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaient un successeur. Les miracles de bravoure et de génie dont l'Italie fut témoin en quelques mois réveillèrent un peuple endormi; huit jours encore avant l'arrivée des Français, les Milanais ne voyaient en eux qu'un ramassis de brigands, habitués à fuir toujours devant les troupes de Sa Majesté Impériale et Royale: c'était du moins ce que leur répétait trois fois la semaine un petit journal grand comme la main, imprimé sur du papier sale.

English
Translation: Scott–Moncrieff, 1924

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA
Stendahl

BOOK ONE

CHAPTER ONE
Milan in 1796

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of gallantry and genius of which Italy was a witness in the space of a few months aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere rabble of brigands, accustomed invariably to flee before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to them three times weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one’s hand, and printed on soiled paper.

Reading Interlingua going well!

2011-09-08T20:03:00.001+10:00

Writing Interlingua is much, much harder than reading it. Which explains why this post is being written in English. I have just returned home after a hard day at work and have neither the time nor the energy to attempt to write even one paragraph in Interlingua.

However, reading Interlingua is now becoming progressively easier for me. I am making very slow progress reading the novel Le defuncte Mattia Pascal and it is very difficult but it is also an absolute delight and often hilarious as well as being a fascinating philosophical journey. I am forcing myself to look up each and every unfamiliar word to ensure my vocabulary expands; this has the unexpected benefit of improving not only my Interlingua vocabulary but also my English vocabulary and improving my knowledge of European history as it relates to such subjects as mythology, politics, religion and etymology. Essentially, I am learning obscure English words from learning Interlingua, and being exposed to a lot of historical information when I go reading about the origin of words. Because Interlingua is essentially a registration of natural European languages, its words and idioms are rich in culture and history. This is a major unexpected benefit of returning to the study of Interlingua. Actually I think it should be thought of as Modern Latin. I think Interlingua is really a scholarly, literary, and scientific language. Very suitable for literary use. As much as the difficult spelling is a bugbear, it is annoying me less and less because of its Latin-like appearance and its preservation of English- and French-like forms which is particularly relevant and advantageous for scientific and literary use. Stress should be marked, however, as it is very difficult to remember how to pronounce words with respect to which syllable should be stressed; I am forcing myself to read aloud. Ultimately, I think professional linguists need to reform Interlingua spelling; I will leave it up to them, perhaps the changes required are only minimal, given the nature of the language and the use for which it is was mainly designed: passive reading rather than active use.

At lunchtime I read a short story in Interlingua, Ed Mort - Le Trappa, by Verríssimo. While nowhere near the great literary standard of the aforementioned Pirandello novel, this little short story is laugh-out-loud funny. I had tried to read it several times before and gotten nowhere or almost nowhere, some months ago. But now, having only just resumed Interlingua study very recently, I was able to read the whole short story without a dictionary and understand most of it; certainly I had no trouble following the story. Highly recommended if you are looking for something to make you laugh. But be warned, if you read it on the train others will stare at you as you burst out laughing! The story of a bumbling private detective in Brazil. Very, very entertaining.

I was surprised to see how easily I was able to read Le Trappa, and also surprised to see how easily I was able to read an edition of Almanac de Interlingua yesterday.

So, the Interlingua reading is going well. One step at a time...

I expect to be fluent within five years.

"Reveni, Interlingua. Toto es pardonate!""Come back, Interlingua. All is forgiven!"

2011-09-04T21:58:00.001+10:00

Interlingua dictionario grammatica

Hodie io legeva alcun paginas ex Le Defuncte Mattia Pascal de Luigi Pirandello, traducite per Pian Boalt. Iste libro es le plus difficile del libros in mi parve bibliotheca de libros in interlingua. Le traduction vermente meraviliose e bellissime del polyglotta Pian Boalt es diabolicamente difficile ma vale le pena. Il es como on lege le texte italiano original. Il es como on ascolta le voce de Pirandello e anque su riso sapente e jocose. Ita, reveni, Interlingua. Toto es pardonate!

English

Today I read a few pages from The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello, translated by Pian Bolt. This book is the most difficult of the books in my small library of books in interlingua. The genuinely marvellous and most beautiful translation by the polyglot Pian Boalt is diabolically difficult but worth the pain. It is as if you are reading the original Italian text. It is as if you are listening to the voice of Pirandello and also his wise and playful laughter. So, come back, Interlingua. All is forgiven!

I have very recently come to understand that, for literary purposes, we should not be talking about one year to learn international auxiliary languages (IALs or auxlangs) but five years. I now believe that IALs should properly be called five-year languages (5YLs).

After five years of serious part-time study you can expect to be fluent enough to read sophisticated literature and to use the language well in general. Although this sounds like a long time, it actually isn't. It is realistic. The advantage of a good auxlang is not that you can learn it miraculously quickly (unless it happens by chance to closely resemble your native language) but that after you have invested five years in studying it you can expect to use it much more accurately, more correctly, and more easily than a native language. In other words, after five years seriously studying Interlingua or Esperanto, with a good teacher or with good learning materials, you can expect to speak the language well enough to communicate very effectively. Whereas after five years seriously studying English you will probably not communicate very effectively (unless speaking it every day) and you will probably always feel inferior to native English speakers.

For me this is the breakthrough. It took me more than a year and a half to realise that what has completely sabotaged me from succeeding until now has been the unrealistic expectation that I should be able to learn and fluently use an auxlang in a short period of time such as a few months or one, two or even three years. Incorrectly, I had assumed that an auxlang which would take longer than that to learn would not be worth learning. Incorrectly, I had assumed that if readers could not learn an auxlang in just a few months they would then not read a novel written in an auxlang. Both incorrect assumptions. I am now convinced that my previous belief that about three years is necessary to achieve fluency in Esperanto or Interlingua was a gross underestimate. We should be talking about five years, approximately half a decade on average, as being required to learn them well.

I think the propaganda, especially by Esperantists but also by those promoting Interlingua and other languages, which loudly trumpets that one can learn to use these languages after very little study and in very short timeframes, is an enormous strategic mistake by the auxlang community. That propaganda nearly made me abandon auxlangs forever because I became bitterly disappointed and disillusioned that I was not able to get big results in one year. The propaganda gave me unrealistic expectations and when those unrealistic expectations were not met, I quit. As indeed I presume most students of auxlangs similarly quit.

I even incorrectly reached the conclusion that all auxlangs based primarily on Romance languages were a waste of time because one could not effectively use them without learning countless Romance-language idioms; it is correct that one must learn countless Romance-language idioms and that doing so indeed does take several years, but it is not correct that therefore such a language is a waste of time. On the contrary, it means that at the end of that five years of study not only can you understand Interlingua but also you can understand a considerable amount of written Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. In fact you can even have simple conversations with speakers of those languages. Just because something takes five years does not mean it is a waste of time. I understand that now.

Incidentally, Esperanto has its own countless idioms to learn and to learn it well enough to write a good novel would I am sure also take about five years. In other words, to truly master any language takes at least about five years; good auxlangs are able to deliver mastery in that timeframe whereas most natural languages probably require ten or fifteen years to really master.

Anyway, back to the subject of Interlingua...

Come back, Interlingua. All is forgiven!

I no longer need Interlingua to deliver results to me in one year. If it delivers results in five years, that is fine. I have given up on the "magical thinking", on the "impossible dream" that somehow readers around the world could read an auxlang novel after just a few months of study. As much as I would love that to be possible, it is not possible. My journey so far in the world of auxlangs has taught me that much. On that dream I must give up. But there are many people around the world who are motivated to communicate internationally and a good number of those people would be willing to invest five years of study in a good auxlang if they judged that the language concerned could be useful to them. Interlingua is an unusual case since, somewhat contrary to what I have just said, highly educated speakers of popular Romance languages could probably learn Interlingua for the purpose of reading a novel in less than a year, because Interlingua so closely resembles their own languages that there is relatively little for them to learn; for others it remains a five-year language, however.

The spelling of Interlingua needs to be reformed. Its difficult spelling and inconsistent pronunciation is a significant problem, although ten times less so than English. However, I have decided to have faith that at some point in the future professional linguists will probably be invited to reform the spelling of Interlingua, since we have recently seen official spelling reforms of French, German and Portuguese which are all source languages for Interlingua! Sooner or later the Union Mundial de Interlingua (UMI) will wake up and come to its senses and realise that if it ever wants to attract a large number of students it will need to reform the spelling; the current collateral orthography however is not suitable. The eventual reform will probably eliminate most but not all doubled consonants but will probably preserve the final -e of most adjectives (the collateral orthography goes too far in removing these) and will probably either mark stress with an acute accent or will standardise pronunciation such that stress is entirely regular. Eventually we will end up with an Interlingua almost but not quite as easy to spell as Spanish; a little extra difficulty is justifiable for international recognition. Anyway, for now I will use the traditional orthography of Interlingua until such time as professional linguists or officials of the UMI carry out a reform. Once they have finally done so it will be a simple matter to convert manuscripts from the traditional orthography to the reformed orthography.

Yes, Interlingua is difficult. Yes, it has a problem with drift towards the native language of the writer or speaker. However, for literature this is a double-edged sword. Suitably annotated with explanations for any obscure idiomatic expressions used, an Interlingua novel has the power to let the user experience the literary flavour of a natural Romance language without learning the natural language. This will be difficult for the reader but still easier than learning Spanish, Portuguese or Italian. And I for one am enjoying Pirandello in Interlingua enormously, although ironically its extreme difficulty was a major factor in me previously quitting.

Spoken Interlingua, as spoken in the Scandinavian style, is easy to understand. Despite its somewhat diabolical spelling, Interlingua works very well when spoken aloud. I find understanding Radio Interlingua quite easy and I was even able to clearly understand a recent video interview of participants at a recent Interlingua conference in Bulgaria. Written Interlingua in the Scandinavian style is not very difficult either. Five years should be ample time to master that kind of general conversational use and general technical writing. Written Interlingua in the style used by native speakers of Romance languages is generally difficult.

So, I am enjoying reading Interlingua literature but I do not expect to be able to read the most sophisticated novels, such as Pirandello's, with complete and effortless ease for another four years yet. At that time however I expect to probably be able to read a little Spanish, Portuguese and Italian as a result and also to be able to make myself understood in basic conversation with speakers of those languages. I also expect to be able to start writing really well, including to start writing really good novels in Interlingua, around 2015.

In the meantime, the recent incipient revival of Mondial, a very similar language to Interlingua but considerably easier in spelling and pronunciation, and with a slightly more precise grammar, is of great interest. The UMI had better hurry up and get serious about spelling reform or they may start to lose out against competitors like Mondial which might as it gains popularity cause users of Interlingua, including myself, to jump ship to Mondial or something similar. The UMI should not make the mistake of assuming that Mondial will fail as Interlingue Occidental did; unlike Occidental, the Mondial language was never really greatly promoted and has thus never really failed. With a little promotion it could conceivably reach the same number of users as Interlingua (about two hundred) within a few years and, unhindered by excessively difficult spelling and pronunciation, could quite conceivably overtake Interlingua in popularity, especially if it were strategically promoted in Asia, which is quite likely since its current promoter speaks fluent Korean. Interlingua by comparison, with its current orthography, is a very difficult proposition for promotion in Asia. Anyway, it's great to see Mondial rising again.

The other thing to bear in mind is that, on a five-year timeframe of study, once upcoming 'world languages' like Lingwa de Planeta and Sambahsa have proper textbooks available they may become very viable alternatives for the novelist; these are not artificial languages like Esperanto but are similar to natural languages either conceptually or in vocabulary and are likely to be relatively attractive to a global public, especially given their world vocabularies.

Compared to Mondial, the chief (and possibly only temporary) advantage of Interlingua is that it has an established body of literature which is enjoyable to read. I look forward to an official spelling reform being announced as soon as possible, so that it becomes easier and more enjoyable to write as well.

I wish every international auxiliary language ongoing success.

But for now, I am really enjoying reading Interlingua.

Interlingua, all is forgiven.

Six months later... Back to Interlingua!

2011-08-16T15:23:00.005+10:00

This is just a quick update as it has been six months since my last post and I thought people might like to hear about what has happened since I wrote my Novelist's Farewell to Auxlangs.

I am not intending to get back into blogging regularly, as time does not permit.

So, anyway, what has happened?

Indonesian

First of all, I did put considerable effort into learning some Indonesian. It is a very fine language. Unfortunately it turned out that it is not, after all, so easy as to make it a good candidate for a global auxlang. Mostly because, like any other natural language, it requires the memorisation of a vast inventory of idiomatic expressions and idiomatic constructions before one can communicate in it to an advanced degree. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that much of its vocabulary is not globally recognisable and by certain irregularities in its grammar. So, in summary, I greatly underestimated the difficulty of Indonesian. I have discovered it is not a viable choice for the novelist seeking to write in an auxlang for easy consumption by a global audience. It would be too hard for readers to quickly learn.

Sambahsa, Legvlingua, Classicus

Secondly, I put some considerable effort into a few other languages. I tried to learn enough Sambahsa to be able to write in it but failed. I really like that the grammar of Sambahsa is sophisticated and powerful, reducing the need for ambiguous idiomatic expressions because there is so much more inherent meaning built into its grammar than is found in other auxlangs which have easier grammars. In other words, Sambahsa is very significantly less ambiguous (definitely for the newcomer, probably also in general) than most popular auxlangs. Unfortunately to be honest I still find its orthography too difficult, especially the manner in which its verbs change their spelling (due to ablaut and conjugation) which to me often makes it difficult or impossible to find words in the dictionary. My response to this was to come up with a simplified, entirely regular scheme for conjugation, in cooperation with Dr Olivier Simon, the brilliant inventor of Sambahsa, which resulted in a simpler dialect called Legvlingua. To be honest, if there were already a big community of Sambahsa writers and lots of printed dictionaries and textbooks available for the language I would probably use it. But for now it remains just out of my reach (even in the simplified Legvlingua form) and, a bit like Indonesian but for different reasons, a bit too hard for readers to quickly learn with the currently available documentation. I am also grateful to Olivier for assisting me in another venture, a simplified form of classical Latin which I was developing called Classicus; it also featured greatly simplified conjugation and also did not quite deliver the ease I was seeking at this time.

Olive

Thirdly, I put much effort into trying to create a language of my own, called Olive. The basic design philosophy was to create a language using mostly familiar vocabulary from five primary source languages (English, French, Portuguese, German and Norwegian) but using an intentionally alien and unfamiliar grammar to ensure that, unlike Interlingua, users would not be tempted to "drift" the language in the direction of their native language because the highly strict and highly precise grammar would not allow them to do so. The grammar would be very different to that of Sambahsa, and not based on that of Sambahsa, but similar conceptually inasmuch as it would be precise and demanding and thus capable of encoding the idiomatic expressions of natural languages in a standardised grammatical form; like Sambahsa, Olive would not require the user to memorise so many idiomatic expressions. Computers would be used to auto-generate a large dictionary according to sophisticated algorithms which ensured precision; the language would be domain-specific to the domain of that vocabulary and grammar. Computers could therefore be used to validate any Olive text. I wrote several dozen pages of (now hopelessly out-of-date) documentation and put countless hours of work into this (continually evolving and changing) project. Although the concept is definitely promising, I simply do not have the time to pursue this project further. After doing some soul-searching I realised today that my choice is simple: either be a novelist or be a language-creator. There is currently not time for both. Being a novelist wins.

French

And that sums up my six months in the world of natural and constructed languages, other than to mention that I have been neglecting my French studies but that nevertheless my French is slowly improving. Strangely, it is still easier for me to read French than to read any constructed language, which says a lot about the deficiencies of constructed languages! I read French very slowly but with much joy. Such a beautiful language and such beautiful literature. Currently reading Camus and Stendhal.

What now?

So, where to from here? I could just abandon all constructed languages but I feel that by doing so I would miss out on the enjoyment that they can bring. I would like to take a small fraction of the time which creating Olive would have required and invest that instead into the simple pleasure of reading literature in a constructed language. Since a sizeable body of literature is only available in two constructed languages, Esperanto and Interlingua, it is a choice between them (although interested readers should note that short works of literature are also available in a few other notable modern languages including Sambahsa, Lingwa de Planeta, and Lingua Franca Nova). Basically I would like to choose a language in which reading literature could be an enjoyable pastime for me in the same way that reading French is a pleasure.

I am entirely happy neither with Esperanto nor Interlingua. Esperanto is inherently ambiguous because many of its words, formed on-the-fly by agglutination, often cannot be found in dictionaries. It is also surprisingly difficult to learn to an advanced level suitable for reading sophisticated literature. Interlingua is inherently ambiguous because although its words are clearly listed in very nice dictionaries, its idioms are woefully poorly defined and vary so greatly from writer to writer that the language often descends into little more than gibberish. I have ranted about this in the past but have calmed down somewhat since then. The thing about Interlingua is that some writers are easy to follow while others are virtually impossible.

In summary, I have a choice between Esperanto (ambiguous words, relatively precise sentences) and Interlingua (ambiguous sentences, relatively precise words); either way you should probably bank on about five years of study before you can happily read sophisticated literature. Apart from the obviously lengthy task of learning vocabulary, in the case of Interlingua most of that five years is learning Romance-language idioms (and not just from one Romance language, either, since idioms vary between writers based on their native language). In the case of Esperanto maybe it is inherently less prone to gibberish but nevertheless remains largely impenetrable without very extensive study to learn its own unique idioms. Esperanto is more popular. Interlingua is more natural and (this is a telling advantage) is somewhat readable at first sight to Romance-language speakers. Depending on what your native language is, your talent for learning languages, and the number of hours per month you invest in study or in reading either Interlingua or Esperanto, the actual time it takes you to become fully capable of enjoyably reading sophisticated literature (such as an entire novel) without difficulty could vary considerably. However, with the exception of native Romance-language speakers or polyglots, for whom enjoying an Interlingua novel might be possible within several weeks of discovering the language, otherwise I now think it is best to assume that about five years of careful study is required. Actually, I think that is how auxlangs should market themselves: as "Five-Year Languages". Thus, students would have realistic expectations and would not get disappointed and (like me previously) give up. I now believe that prior to today I was seriously mistaken about how quickly one can realistically expect to learn an auxlang to an advanced level; so please disregard any earlier advice or estimates I have given.

The stylistic differences are a matter of taste. Since I love French it is hardly surprising that the style of Interlingua is more aesthetically pleasing to me than the style of Esperanto, although along with this comes the almost ridiculously more difficult spelling (but if you love French you already love ridiculous spelling and difficult pronunciation anyway). So, at the end of the day, which language would I personally rather read literature in for enjoyment? Interlingua. It does have a kind of clumsy, stumbling, excessively difficult beauty about it and sounds particularly nice when read aloud. It is, more or less, literary in flavour.

So since I am faced with either giving up on constructed languages entirely, or struggling (at times painfully) to read and enjoy some literature in a constructed language just for fun, I choose the latter. The thing that tips the scales for me is Piet Cleij's marvellous Dictionnaire Français-Interlingua. I might even have a go, using that formidable volume, at translating La Chartreuse de Parme into Interlingua one day just for fun as doing so might improve my French comprehension. I have however no illusions that Interlingua is suitable for readers who do not speak a Romance language; it is not (that is to say, not without years of study; of course Interlingua is indeed suitable for anyone willing to seriously study it for a few years). On the other hand, Romance-language readers can read it to some extent, so at least that is something positive.

Reading in Interlingua

And so I will be reading literature in Interlingua just for fun.

I'll try to remember to report here in another six months on whether or not that reading went well.

I guess if it does go well I might consider doing some writing in Interlingua one day. It will take me a long time, however, to soak up its idioms and I would not expect anybody other than Romance-language speakers to be able to read anything I might write in the language. But that is quite a lot of people...

A Novelist's Farewell to Auxlangs

2011-02-17T22:24:00.000+10:00

A year ago I began this amazing journey, essentially in search of a constructed international auxiliary language in which I could write novels for a global audience. The idea was to find a language easy enough for readers to learn relatively quickly, well enough to read and enjoy a novel, but which was still powerful enough and unambiguous enough to allow literature of the highest standard.

I worked incredibly hard on this quest. The first thing you will notice, if you pick a dozen posts at random and read them, is that I continually changed my mind. Again and again and again and again I would make little lists of the languages which I had 'decided' to learn above all others, but I would stick to learning them only for a few days or a few weeks before creating a new list of languages, often dramatically different from the previous list. This was a symptom.

One month I would be singing the praises of a particular auxlang; the next I would abandon it in disgust. To make matters worse, I went through the entire cycle about three or four times, shuffling languages like cards in a hopelessly loaded deck and dealing them out to myself over and over. I attempted to learn most of the major auxlangs about four times, and when either failure or disappointment came, as it always inevitably did, I wondered if the problem was me (not the languages). Perhaps if I had only tried harder it would have worked out, I thought. This was another symptom.

Finally I came around to learning Esperanto for about the fourth time, since it was the only auxlang still standing as a reasonable choice for the novelist who wishes to write for readers who have no knowledge of any European language. Unsurprisingly my conclusion, like the first three times around the linguistic merry-go-round, was that Esperanto was simultaneously excessively difficult and excessively ambiguous and overall was woefully inadequate. It is one thing to be rather too difficult. It is another thing to be rather too ambiguous. But to learn a language which is simultaneously difficult and ambiguous? Another symptom.

There is a rather large and smelly clue here. What causes all these incredibly intelligent and creative language designers to keep drafting new languages despite the existence of Esperanto? And what caused me to go on a gigantic trek through every auxlang I could find, despite trying Esperanto first? Obviously the answer is that Esperanto, despite its relative popularity, is deeply flawed and that its flaws are not minor but are actually unacceptable. Yet despite a plethora of competing auxlangs, none is today a significant success in terms of number of speakers; most have a few dozen speakers at best. Another symptom.

So putting all these symptoms together what can we conclude? That unfortunately there is no currently available constructed international auxiliary language which is well suited for global literary use at this point in time. There are some languages which show considerable potential but most of them are either too poorly documented or too immature at this point in time. Other languages are generally excellent but not well suited to use by those who do not already speak a European language; although they might be admirable languages their design is not necessarily aimed at maximum ease of use. The bottom line is that right now the language I am looking for does not exist.

One year of repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall attempting to find something which does not yet exist is long enough. It is time to admit defeat.

So, this is a novelist's farewell to auxlangs.

I hasten to add that there are many enjoyable auxlangs out there which one can beneficially learn as a scholar of Indo-European languages or for fun as a private hobby. But for the serious novelist aiming to write the next War and Peace, in a language both easy and powerful, a language accessible to the whole world and not just to those who speak European or Indo-European languages? None.

I furthermore hasten to add that the whole endeavour of creating constructed languages is not a waste of time merely because the languages invented to this date have not found an acceptable solution. On the contrary, this is all the more reason to keep trying, keep inventing, keep thinking laterally. Quite frankly, there is little doubt that if a consortium of major governments ever officially decides to sponsor the creation of an international language, and is willing to fund the endeavour to the tune of a few hundred million dollars, employing the best linguists from a hundred countries around the world, such a project would almost certainly produce a better result than any constructed language currently in existence and would probably hugely facilitate international communication. Creating a language is like a space program: the European Space Agency can make a much better rocket than even the most brilliant genius who builds rockets in his garage. The auxlangs we have now are just backyard rockets.

By the way, in case you think spending a few hundred million dollars on creating an international language is too expensive, consider that the European Union currently spends an estimated €800000000 per year on translation!

For me personally, the existence of Indonesian makes any further investigation of the currently available auxlangs redundant. That has been the truly surprising and unexpected destination of my journey: I found a (mostly) natural language which outperforms all of the auxlangs I have encountered. And this, I now realise, should not be surprising since Indonesian was partly constructed; Indonesian in fact represents a lesson for the European Union to learn from and indeed for the entire planet to learn from. Indonesia, a country consisting of thousands of islands whose inhabitants speak hundreds of different native languages, created Bahasa Indonesia (the proper name of the Indonesian language) as an official standard language with a simple constructed orthography. Essentially Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau dialect of Malay, standardised and rationalised. Compared to Esperanto, for example, it is clearly superior; the only reason this is not quickly apparent and not widely known is because the vast majority of Indonesian words are not recognisable to Europeans.

Now, I am not sure if I will ever write novels in Indonesian. I might, although because it is a national language it could be difficult to convince international readers around the globe to make the investment of learning it, even though it is a much easier language to learn than English. But I am learning Indonesian with great pleasure and at the very least I will enjoy reading books in it myself. And there is some possibility I might one day try to organise the creation of an international auxiliary language based on Indonesian grammar but with more internationally-recognisable words taken from around the planet; such languages are known as worldlangs. Such a language could be called something like Bahasa Internasional, which simply means 'International Language'.

But that is for the future, some time after I have learned Indonesian, and in the meantime I also have the pleasure of learning French to keep me happy.

And so, thanks for reading over this past year. Now I say not "Onward..." but "Farewell", because this is the end of my journey. Adieu. Selamat tinggal.

This is a novelist's farewell to auxlangs.

The End

Esperantists please help!

2011-02-16T01:54:00.002+10:00

Okay, so today I went back one last desperate time and scored all the major constructed languages against various important criteria just to be sure there was not something I had missed. Although a few languages scored quite highly against these criteria, all of these high-scoring languages were simply not practical to use for novel-writing, mostly because of a lack of large and readily available multilingual dictionaries... and sometimes because of other factors such as excessive ambiguity or immaturity. Some languages are pretty good but so much rely on knowledge of European languages that they are just not practical choices for a novel aimed at readers around the entire globe. So after eliminating these high-scoring languages based on such essential practical considerations, after all my long travels it really does boil down to only two practical choices:

Esperanto
Indonesian

On the objective criteria, these languages scored moderate scores rather than high scores but when taking into account essential practical concerns such as those mentioned above, they are the only two that make the grade.

It is horrifying to me that I have not been able to find any constructed language other than Esperanto which could meet my needs right now in 2011 vis-a-vis writing novels for a truly global readership. But no matter how many times, very recently, I reassess, the answer comes out the same:

Esperanto
Indonesian

That's it. There are other relatively easy natural languages out there, such as Afrikaans, but they are clearly outdone by Indonesian: a language so streamlined that the designers of constructed languages could learn much from it. And there are constructed languages which are probably far better than Esperanto, such as Novial, but these simply cannot compete on practical terms because they lack good multilingual dictionaries and sufficient maturity. Actually it is quite tempting to just abandon all constructed languages, for the purpose of novel-writing, and instead have some fun learning to read and write in Latin; doing so would be horrifically difficult and would take many years but would be very, very cool. When you start having these thoughts you realise you have gotten desperate and what is more you have gotten off track. So, get back on track...

Putting Latin to one side, since it is totally off-topic, we now return to the business of trying to write a novel which will be easily accessible to readers all around the globe who are willing to learn the language concerned. The depressing thing is you then realise it can't be done; essentially, either speakers of European languages or speakers of non-European languages are going to be advantaged (the former in the case of Esperanto and the latter in the case of Indonesian). But Esperanto, although flawed, is probably just barely acceptable in its accessibility to speakers of non-European languages. And Indonesian, although very difficult at first for speakers of European languages because of the largely unrecognisable vocabulary, is probably just barely acceptable in its accessibility to speakers of European languages.

That is an important point so let's highlight it:

Esperanto is just barely acceptable in its accessibility to speakers of non-European languages. These people will have an ongoing struggle with it, since the difficulty here is both the grammar and the unfamiliar vocabulary. On the plus side, those interested in global communication will be more inclined to learn it than Indonesian since the latter is perceived as a regional language.

Indonesian is just barely acceptable in its accessibility to speakers of European languages. These people will initially struggle with it, since the difficulty here is mostly not the grammar but the unfamiliar vocabulary. On the plus side, about five orders of magnitude more people speak Indonesian than Esperanto!

But these two languages are still the best, and possibly the only, reasonable choices for the novelist in 2011 seeking to reach all readers without translation. Overall the difficulty of the two languages, averaged between those who speak a European language and those who do not, is probably about the same; the difficulty is distributed in different ways. Indonesian is in my opinion an easier language than Esperanto but they are both in the same ballpark. In other words:

I know of no language which does better than being just barely acceptable in its accessibility and difficulty to all persons around the planet.

Anyway, what it my point?

Well, it is that although I am enjoying learning Indonesian immensely, and it does seem to me to be a superior language to Esperanto by quite a large margin, nevertheless it is rather exhausting learning the vocabulary. Also, to be fair to Esperanto, I am to some extent experiencing a similar problem with not being able to find some Indonesian words in the dictionary, due to its extensive use of affixes; this problem of not finding words in the dictionary is much worse for Esperanto than it is for Indonesian, but it is still a problem. Anyway, I expect that after a few months Indonesian will become dramatically easier for me, and probably will be a significantly easier and less tiring language to read for me than Esperanto, but there is considerable effort involved in getting to that point due to the relentless demands of learning the vocabulary from scratch. The vocabulary of Indonesian is however similarly small to that of Esperanto, since both languages minimise the number of word roots which must be learned, achieving this reduction by the use of affixes.

So, to be fair, I am now a little more willing to cut Esperanto some slack and perhaps to be a bit more open to its difficulties. Which finally brings me to the point of this whole post. Esperantists reading this, please help!

Here is what I need help with:

sinteno

Why is it that such an apparently common and important Esperanto word as sinteno, which would be frequently used in literature, cannot easily be found in the best Esperanto dictionaries? The word means "attitude".

Obviously there must be something fundamentally lacking in my understanding of how Esperanto works. There must be some principle which I have not learned. Because the only other alternative I can think of is that the available dictionaries for Esperanto are of poor quality. The problem must either be with my understanding or with the quality of the dictionaries. So, which is it?

Here is a sentence from an Esperanto translation of the French novel, Le Diable au corps. Below it I show the original French and an English literary translation. Finally my own, pedantically literal, translation of the Esperanto into English.

Ĵak neniel komprenis la sintenon de sia edzino.

Jacques ne comprenait rien à l'attitude de sa femme.

Jacques didn't understand his wife's attitude at all.

Jacques in no way understood the attitude of his wife.

Now, when I came across the word sintenon I had no idea how to translate it. Literally, it was impossible. I have what I believe is the most modern and best English-Esperanto-English dictionary (Wells, 2010), and it does not list sinteno. It also lists sin/o as "bosom; lap" and tenon/o as "tenon" (a very obscure English word of utterly no relevance); the latter is irrelevant anyway, since it is not ten/o. Then I found teni/o which helpfully means "tapeworm"; ditto. I then looked in the PIV, the definitive uni-lingual dictionary of Esperanto and it also did not list the word. Finally I cheated and looked at the original French. After seeing l'attitude it was then possible for me to use the Wells dictionary in reverse, looking up "attitude" in the English-Esperanto section and finding indeed sinteno.

This was maddening. I just thought it was ridiculous that such a common word could not be looked up in the dictionary.

Now, as I type this post, and completely by chance, I have stumbled across the answer. I see in Wells there is an entry for ten/i which is defined as "hold; keep; maintain; have" and has a sub-entry, not easy to see or find for the beginner, which says sin~o "attitude". I had earlier gone looking for sin- to see if it was some kind of standard prefix but as noted found only sin/o as "bosom; lap". Now, typing this post, it finally occurred to me that perhaps the prefix might be si- not sin- and therefore I finally found the entry for si as "(reflexive pronoun) himself, herself, itself, themselves, oneself; ~n (prefix) self-;" and thus it dawned on me that the construction sinteno must mean "self-hold" or "self-keep" or "self-maintain" which one might guess means "the manner in which one holds oneself or maintains oneself, one's bearing" and perhaps that is ambiguously "attitude". Indeed, it is pleasing to discover that the lernu! online dictionary does actually list a definition for sinteno as "attitude, posture" but since I had already checked both Wells and the PIV unsuccessfully, I did not bother looking there.

This is a pretty typical experience for me when trying to read Esperanto. It is quite common not to be able to find words in the dictionary; this is actually a mild case since at least the word could eventually be found. Often quite important Esperanto words, in a literary sentence, are not to be found anywhere in any dictionary, because of the free word and affix combination allowed.

Anyway, any Esperantists reading this, please help!

What am I doing wrong here? Why is it so hard to find words in dictionaries? Should the dictionary in fact list sinteno as a primary entry or not?

How can we expect someone from China, for example, to be able to look up and find the definition of sinteno when even someone like myself who speaks English and French cannot successfully find such a definition? It's a concern. The irony is that such a Chinese reader could instantly find attitude in an English-Chinese or French-Chinese dictionary!!! By the way, in Indonesian it is sikap, and it is clearly listed as a primary entry in my Indonesian-English dictionary. The corresponding intransitive verb, bersikap, "to display an attitude" is also clearly listed as a primary entry. This is a clear example of Esperanto being more difficult. By the way, ber- is a common verbal prefix in Indonesian; once you get to know a little Indonesian you can often quickly recognise parts of speech.

These kinds of things are extremely frustrating with Esperanto. On the plus side, when I am feeling lazy it is nice that most of the word roots are recognisable, unlike those of Indonesian which I must learn from scratch.

I continue to put most of my time into Indonesian, however, as it still seems to me to be superior overall. Nevertheless I am willing to cut Esperanto a little slack, providing I can one day understand weird stuff such how to find sinteno.

Indonesian: highest power-to-weight ratio

2011-02-10T22:27:00.006+10:00

Okay, after recently giving up all reasonable hope of using a constructed language this year to write a novel for global consumption, I turned instead to the easiest natural language of sufficient power: Indonesian.

I am a rank beginner at Indonesian. Today I finished reading my first textbook of Indonesian grammar; more precisely, a workbook. The book is Understanding Indonesian Grammar. A student's reference and workbook (Sneddon, 2000).

I turned to this grammatical workbook because I was getting bored, and really not learning very much, by using a typical Teach Yourself volume. Personally I find it much more effective to learn a language by first studying an overview of its grammar and then immediately diving in and starting to read novels.

Sneddon's excellent workbook has 179 pages devoted to explaining the core grammar of Indonesian. There is plenty of empty space on the pages, the font is comfortably large, and about one-third of text consists of exercises. So although 179 pages sounds like a lot of grammar, really it is not too onerous (by comparison the grammar workbook Step by Step in Esperanto is more than 250 pages). I did not do any of the exercises and I did not attempt to memorise all the details; instead I simply read the text at quite a fast pace, not even reading the exercises, to sort of familiarise myself with the lay of the land. Now when I continue reading the translated novel Harry Potter dan Kamar Rahasia I will go back and consult this workbook, along with its chunky companion volume Indonesian Reference Grammar, and with my trusty Tuttle Compact Indonesian Dictionary close at hand. For guidance I have a copy of the original English novel, so one can quickly and easily learn idiomatic expressions.

Now, after reading these 179 pages which describe the grammar of Indonesian to an advanced level suitable for university students, I have to say that absolutely no constructed language I am aware of can compete. Remember, the orthography of Indonesian is a carefully designed construct and Indonesian is in fact truly a proven auxiliary language; most Indonesians speak it as a second language and there are hundreds of first languages in Indonesia spread over thousands of islands. It should hardly be surprising, then, that Indonesian should turn out to be the Rolls Royce of auxiliary languages, despite being largely a natural language. Anyway, take Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Occidental, Novial, Lingua Franca Nova... pick any constructed language you like and study it in parallel with Indonesian and I think you will find it pales in comparison to Indonesian. This assumes two things: (1) you speak no European language; (2) you are willing to accept a somewhat greater burden of memorisation as Indonesian is somewhat more irregular than some of these artificial languages, however these small irregularities soon become second nature (they feel very natural because, for example, they greatly assist pronunciation).

What do I mean by cannot compete? I mean power-to-weight ratio. Imagine yourself here as a student who does not speak any European language. If we refer to the precision and literary capability of a language as its "power" and the burden involved in learning the language as its "weight", nothing beats Indonesian. Some constructed languages have less "weight" (are a bit easier to learn) but they definitely do not have the same "power" (ambiguity is a common problem, another is insufficient vocabulary). Other constructed languages have much greater "weight" (typically requiring knowledge of similar European languages) and yet despite this greater difficulty deliver less "power" (typically because of inconsistent usage and a lack of well-developed idioms, not to mention difficult spelling). Esperanto perhaps has most (but not all) of the same "power" as Indonesian but has hopelessly more "weight"; it is over-engineered and riddled with European characteristics, such that any weight savings achieved by its lesser irregularity are well and truly outweighed by its excessively European grammar (it insists on such unnecessary things as a definite article, declining nouns for the plural, and conjugating verbs for tense... all totally alien and confusing constructs for many people around the world).

Lingwa de Planeta is a step roughly in the right direction, and its existence represents a glimmer of hope that perhaps language designers will finally start to move, en masse, in a more practical direction (away from the difficulties of European constructs and towards an easy, non-European language). But after studying Indonesian I realise (contrary to my previous opinions) that LdP did not go far enough in this direction. It is still much too closely influenced by European languages; too many of its features seem like concessions to recognisability by Europeans and this paradoxically increases the "weight" of the language without increasing its "power". Things like the European use of a verb meaning "to be" (which Indonesian does without perfectly well in most sentences), some European-like personal pronouns, some European-like prepositions, and allowing the declination of nouns for the plural, unfortunately carry a lot of baggage with them. I now cringe when I see any constructed language which uses the preposition "de", for example. That brings with it much baggage associated with how that preposition is used in Romance languages. I am not knocking European languages; I love European languages! But some non-European grammars or a priori grammars might have a better power-to-weight ratio. I'm not sure how it happened, but LdP has ended up seeming over-engineered compared to Indonesian; intuitively it seems there are too many confusing little particles to remember and syntax seems much more difficult. I would like to see LdP streamlined, drifting it somewhat in the direction of Indonesian or some similar language. Anyway, in its current form LdP cannot compete with Indonesian.

A word of warning: Indonesian is not a creole. Indonesian is certainly not simplistic. Perhaps it is even fair to say it is not simple. The best single word by which I can describe Indonesian is: powerful. Of the truly powerful languages in the world of which I am aware, in my opinion Indonesian is the easiest. To call it simple is perhaps misleading. Better to call it easy compared to its power. There are more powerful languages (French, for example) but I have never seen a language with a better power-to-weight ratio. Compared to Indonesian, French is a beautiful but gigantic and heavily-laden jumbo jet which needs two miles of runway just to get off the ground. Indonesian is like a nimble jump jet which can take off vertically, requiring no runway at all, unsurpassed in power-to-weight ratio. There's just nothing like it. It simply defeats all comers. It punches above its weight and delivers more bang for the buck than all the constructed languages.

At least that is how it seems to me. I have been wrong many times before and perhaps I am wrong this time too. Only time will tell.

Onward...

Esperanto dropped in favour of Indonesian!

2011-02-03T01:38:00.004+10:00

Warning: huge post for a huge decision. Let's go...

Is Esperanto extremely easy? I don't think so.

Below are some quotes from Step by Step in Esperanto*, which is a respected and classic text first published in 1948. By the way, to the best of my knowledge, there is no verifiable evidence that the number of non-native Esperanto speakers has greatly increased in the 62 years since then!

* Butler, 9th edition, 1991, ISBN 0939785013

Consider the section entitled "Advice to the Student":

Quote 1: "The average magazine article is not a safe guide to style. Nor is every printed book!"

My comment: This means that, in the experience of Montague Butler, the celebrated author of this respected textbook, readers cannot rely upon Esperanto magazine editors and book publishers to get the language right. This is a major worry. It indicates that many magazine editors and book publishers underestimate the difficulty of Esperanto and unwittingly get it wrong. Not a good sign. Please note that Butler is referring not to the occasional magazine article but to the average magazine article! This indicates a widespread problem.

Quote 2: "Live mentally in Esperanto-land. Think in Esperanto. Write your note-books, your diary, your accounts, in Esperanto. Practise conversation with yourself.... Describe to yourself what you see as you walk along the street. Translate mentally the Sunday sermon, the shop advertisement, the newspaper article.... Take every opportunity of hearing and speaking the language.... In the Group meeting... [avoid] the hangers-on who, by persistently talking English, never get beyond 'Bonan tagon. How are you?' and waste your time as well as their own. If possible, attend an Esperanto Congress..."

My comment: Whoa! Slow down there! That is a heck of a lot of work for a language which is supposedly extremely easy. What that quote describes is the level of effort required to learn a natural language, the typical failure of most students to learn more than the rudiments of a natural language, and the typical methods learned to learn a natural language. Yes, Esperanto is obviously easier than difficult natural languages such as Chinese or French, but reading this quote makes me conclude that Esperanto must be approximately equally difficult to learn as the easiest natural languages such as Indonesian or Afrikaans. Otherwise, there would be no need to recommend this extreme effort; the prescribed activities represent a very high level of commitment!

If you followed Montague Butler's advice but instead of applying it to Esperanto you applied it to Afrikaans (if you speak English) or Indonesian you would very quickly learn one of those languages to a high standard, sufficient to truly enjoy reading novels in between six months and three years, with ever-decreasing use of a dictionary along the way. It is a fallacy to suggest that Esperanto is markedly easier than all natural languages just because it is markedly easier than most European languages! Actually, averaged over students from the entire planet, many of whom know no European vocabulary and no European grammar, in my opinion it is almost certain that Indonesian is easier than Esperanto while remaining a highly expressive and powerful language.

Quote 3: "The standard of some Esperantists is deplorably low, and they seem content to have it so. Even propagandists have been known whose errors make a sensitive listener shudder. You owe it to the language and to yourself to aim higher than this.... Treat it with at least the same respect as that which you would give to any other living language."

My comment: Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... this is not good! I think most honest Esperanto speakers would admit there is a big problem with what are called Eternaj Komencantoj (eternal beginners); a problem which is symptomatic of the moderate difficulty of the language. But to proclaim "You owe it to the language... to aim higher than this" makes me recoil in horror. The student does not "owe it to the language" to do any such thing. That is an absurd statement (and the sort of thing which would be said in a cult which demands loyalty). That is like saying that "the consumer owes it to Apple to learn how to operate an iPod"; imagine how far Apple would have got if it took that attitude! Instead, Apple said, "we owe it to the consumer to make iPods easier to use than devices sold by our competitors". And they indeed did so. Thus, countless millions of consumers bought iPods. One cannot expect countless millions of consumers to learn Esperanto simply by telling them they 'owe it to the language' to try harder!

Finally, instructing the student that he or she must treat Esperanto with the "same respect as any other living language" is tantamount to a veiled admission that, in fact, Esperanto is about as difficult to learn as the easiest natural languages. And this conclusion is reinforced by the following quote.

Quote 4: "It does not follow that because you speak fluently you speak well. Never imagine that you have no more to learn. No, not even when you have passed an examination."

My comment: The same is true of the easiest natural languages (and indeed of the hardest natural languages). In other words, Esperanto is no easier than the easiest natural languages and similarly one is never finished learning.

Quote 5: "Join your national Esperanto association, and thus support the movement.... Wear the Esperanto star.... Join (or found) the local Esperanto group. Form a class among your friends. If you are able to teach and keep a class, you will be a valuable gain to the movement. But teaching is an art, and a poor teacher can quickly kill any class."

My comment: What?! You must be joking! Firstly (in Quote 2) you tell me to apply myself with a very high degree of commitment to numerous simultaneous methods of learning the language. Okay, that does not sound any easier than learning Indonesian. Secondly (in Quote 3) you tell me to apply myself to an equal degree as is required for a natural language. Okay, so that definitely is not any easier than learning Indonesian. Thirdly (in Quote 5) you virtually admit that despite even all that commitment the language is not easy enough to succeed of its own accord but rather its speakers must band together in a kind of gigantic network-marketing organisation. You actually tell me to support the 'movement'. What?! I am a language student, not a recruit and not a disciple! I wish merely to communicate internationally in a relatively easy language. Not sign up for a tour of duty, not join a movement, not start a class, and not become a soap-powder salesman. This is exactly like network marketing (or, less kindly, like a cult); instead of aiming to improve the product to make it as good as possible, the product is kept the same and massive campaigns are launched to indoctrinate recruits who sell the product and who indoctrinate new recruits. Such behaviour is a tell-tale sign that the product, in this case Esperanto, would not successfully 'sell itself' because the truth is that although it might be a good product it is not significantly better than its competitors. Specifically, this is a tell-tale sign that Esperanto definitely cannot be massively easier than the easiest natural languages, otherwise it would have outsold them. I repeat, this does not mean that Esperanto is a bad product; it just means it is on a par with simple natural languages in terms of power and ease, not greatly better than them.

To crown it all, not only students (Quote 3), but many magazine editors (Quote 1), book publishers (Quote 1), and teachers (Quote 5) cannot get the language right and do more harm than good. Clearly, any last vestige of hope that Esperanto is somehow massively easier than even the easiest natural language is clearly quashed by these facts. So what we have in Esperanto is a language which is okay, which works, and is a reasonable auxiliary language, but which is as difficult as some natural languages. In other words, Esperanto is a good product which an aggressive network-marketing organisation can sell reasonably effectively, but not a product which will 'sell itself' and simply walk off the shelves. Esperanto is not the iPod of languages.

Esperanto

versus

Indonesian

Esperanto is okay. It works. It's even good. You can learn it. But you need to be aware there are natural languages which are about as easy to learn, like Indonesian (which incidentally has over 100 million speakers).

Here is a very important point: even though nearly all the words of Indonesian are totally unrecognisable to me, and I will have to learn them all from scratch, in my opinion Indonesian will still be easier for me than Esperanto for the purpose of writing novels. And I only speak European languages!

You see, Indonesian only uses relatively few roots, as does Esperanto, and it forms easily-remembered words by the use of affixes, as does Esperanto; so one quickly becomes more and more fluent in Indonesian as there are not nearly as many words to memorise as there are in, say, English. Therefore I am not worried about having to learn the vocabulary of Indonesian almost completely without the aid of any familiar word roots. However, in truth, Indonesian has many words from Dutch and a few words from English, some of which are clearly recognisable; the names of the months, for example, are totally recognisable to any European. But even without this, the unfamiliar vocabulary really isn't that big a problem because of the logical use of affixes, many of which also indicate parts of speech. The big advantage of Indonesian is its grammar, which is so much simpler and easier than Esperanto that it outweighs the need for me to memorise more unfamiliar word roots. However Indonesian is not a simplistic language; its grammar is very powerful and takes time to learn.

And here is the really indisputable point: if I can learn Indonesian, as a Westerner almost totally unfamiliar with its vocabulary, and write novels in it, then almost certainly anybody can learn to read those novels with similar ease. But if I write a novel in Esperanto, which might seem easier to me because many of its word roots are recognisable to me as a speaker of European languages, that is no guarantee that people who speak no European language could as easily learn it; maybe they can but maybe they cannot. It remains a big unknown. Taking this into account, quite frankly things are looking dim for Esperanto. Right now it seems very unlikely that it will be my choice over Indonesian. Indonesian, assuming that I can indeed learn it properly, is a much safer bet.

A Thought Experiment:

Esperanto with Unfamiliar Roots

Quite honestly, if you are truly writing literature for a global audience and not just pretending to do so while really, in fact, only writing literature which is easily accessible to those who speak a European language, most of the supposed advantages of Esperanto go out the window.

If you are Chinese and you cannot recognise 99% of the word roots in Esperanto, and you simultaneously have to deal with the complicated European grammar of Esperanto, Esperanto does not look like an easier language than Indonesian. Yes, the grammar of Esperanto is mostly regular but that does not change the fact that it is a European grammar featuring things such as a definite article, conjugation of verbs, declination of nouns for the plural, adjectival agreement with nouns, compound tenses, Romance-language prepositions... and countless European constructs which are alien to speakers of Mandarin. Indonesian has none of that unnecessary and overcomplicated grammatical baggage.

Moreover, Indonesian is one of the most spoken languages on the planet, with far more resources available than Esperanto, and with well over 100 million speakers most of whom speak Indonesian as a second language. It is a proven auxiliary language. It is also largely mutually intelligible with Malay, and thus quite a large geographical region of the earth uses similar languages. Not to mention the vast number of Dutch and Arabic words in Indonesian.

Basically, to the best of my knowledge, you cannot find a better natural language among languages spoken by more than 10 million people, which has more of the features desired of an ideal constructed auxiliary language. This should not be too surprising since Indonesian is indeed partly, to some extent, a constructed language: especially its orthography which uses the Roman alphabet with no diacritics (like English, but massively, massively easier to pronounce).

Still not convinced? Okay, how easy is Esperanto, really? Let's see...

Here is a sentence in Esperanto:

Sur la nigraj tabuloj estas poemo.

Great! If you speak a Romance language (there is that dreaded requirement again) and English, you will pretty quickly learn and remember that nigra = black, tabulo = table, estas = is, and poemo = poem. Also, let's cheat a bit and imagine you had read somewhere that -j indicates the plural. So this means:

On the black tables is a poem.

Or, in better English which means the same thing:

There is a poem on the black tables.

Wow! Esperanto is so easy! This is a walk in the park!

But is it truly? What if you only speak Chinese?

Let's do a thought experiment. You only speak Chinese. You come across an Esperanto textbook and you read that same sentence. Here is what you see:

Di itu hitamaj mejaoj adas syairo.

Wow! Esperanto is impossible! This language is meaningless!

What the heck does that mean? Can't recognise anything. Actually, this example isn't as bad as it would really be, since many people reading this might be able to guess that mejaoj probably refers to tables from Spanish mesa. By the way, the above example approximately uses Indonesian words, mutilated by the addition of the mandatory endings of Esperanto parts of speech (red), but with Esperanto word order and grammar. This is not an Indonesian sentence!!!

Because of the mandatory word-endings Esperanto uses, with a little study you (remember, you are Chinese in this thought experiment) could figure out the following:

? ? [adjective] [noun] [verb] [noun]

And after a little more study you figure out:

On 'some' [adjective] [noun] [verb] [noun]

At this point you know the sentence contains two nouns, but who cares? The mandatory endings of Esperanto which mark parts of speech (-o for nouns, -a for adjectives) really don't help much when you cannot recognise the words.

You are really confused, because the second word is apparently something called the 'definite article' (like 'the' in English, but you know no English) and its use makes no sense to you. So you think of it like 'some'.

Now, you have finally recognised the common verb 'to be' but you don't understand at all this strange business of changing its ending to indicate tense: that is totally foreign since verbs in Chinese do not change their form.

Finally, your head hurts because of these confusing -j endings which this stupid language has; you gather these have something to do with there being more than one of the noun, which makes sense, but you cannot understand how there could be more than one of the adjective, so you decide it is safest to ignore the complexity and translate in the singular. Maybe you guess:

On some black table was a poem.

Then you double-check your book, scratch your head a lot, and finally after much pain figure out it means:

On some black table is a poem.

Finally you ask an instructor and he explains it really is:

On some black tables is a poem.

At least, that's as far as you get before you give up in disgust. What crazy Westerner imagined this language would be easy for the whole world? Not only are all the words unrecognisable but the grammar is extremely difficult.

End of thought experiment.

Comparison:

Esperanto vs Indonesian

The point is, for most of the world Esperanto word-roots are not recognisable and appear to be nothing more than incomprehensible gibberish. Esperanto really is not easy for most inhabitants of this blue planet, and its complicated grammar does not help.

Now you are yourself again and you speak English. Here is some real, proper Esperanto (from the novel Kun Diablo en la korpo, translated by Michel Duc Goninaz from the original French novel by Raymond Radiguet):

La voluptemo, kiu kun ni naskiĝas, kaj manifestiĝas ankoraû blinda, kontraûatende fortikiĝis.

The underlined words you will probably not find in your dictionary. So even if you are an intermediate student of Esperanto and speak English and therefore understand European tense-formations you get maybe:

The [noun], which with us is born, and manifests itself still blind, [adverb] strengthened.

Hmmm. Okay, from the dictionary you find volupto as 'sexual pleasure', and depending on how advanced your Esperanto study is you either do or do not understand that the suffix -em- means 'inclined to' or 'tending to' and that it can be put into words to change their meaning. Let's say you do. So you guess that voluptemo probably means something like 'inclination to sexual pleasure'. However, here is one of the very worst things about Esperanto: you cannot check this conclusion because that word is not listed in your dictionaries. You can only guess. Esperanto therefore is inherently ambiguous. Anyway, we get:

The tendency for sexual pleasure, which is born with us, and manifests itself still blind, [adverb] strengthened.

What about that dreadfully long word, kontraûatende. That isn't listed in the dictionary either, so you are totally forced to guess what putting together the two words kontraû and atende means. Well atendi is 'to wait' so atende must be some adverb meaning 'by waiting' or 'waitingly' or 'expectantly'. And kontraû is a preposition meaning 'against' or 'on the contrary'. So you guess that kontraûatende is an adverb meaning for something to be done in a manner which is contrary to expectations, or unexpectedly. Heaven help you because there is no way to find this word in your dictionary. Again, inherently Esperanto is ambiguous because writers use words often not found in commonly-used dictionaries (and sometimes in no dictionary). Exhausted, we finally devine:

The tendency for sexual pleasure, which is born with us, and manifests itself [while] still blind, unexpectedly strengthened.

It's a good thing we speak a European language, because this would have driven a speaker of Chinese nearly insane. He would have to take some aspirin and lie down for a while, in total disbelief that anybody calls this language easy.

What I mean is, go back and do the above exercise again but imagine that every single word in that complicated sentence was completely unrecognisable to you. Not even remotely easy. Basically, if your first language is Chinese then Esperanto is like a natural language: quite difficult.

So how did we do? Here is the original French from Le Diable au corps, and Christopher Moncrieff's (rather liberal) English translation:

La sensualité, qui naît avec nous et se manifeste encore aveugle, y gagna au lieu d'y perdre.

... that sensuality with which we are all born, and which expresses itself before it has learned some discernment, gained rather than lost ground.

Well, to be fair to Esperanto, we did kind of okay. We got the general meaning reasonably well, although we totally missed 'sensuality' and the concept of 'unexpectedly' seems to have been added by the Esperanto writer.

The trouble is, we cannot look up these words in the dictionary we have at hand, so without being able to read the original French we are still just guessing.

Well, this post is too long now so we will just take a quick look at an Indonesian sentence for comparison. I contend that many Indonesian sentences can easily be understood by those who speak no European language, after minimal study and with the aid of a dictionary (unlike Esperanto you can find nearly all Indonesian words in a good dictionary). Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs essentially never change their form (with a few very simple and easy exceptions); affixes are used to create derived words but these derived words are nearly all listed in the dictionary (not much guessing required, if any).

Bukan untuk pertama kalinya pertengkaran meledak di meja makan rumah Privet Drive nomor empat.

Yes, it's the first sentence of the second Harry Potter novel. Now, even if you just get out your dictionary, knowing almost no Indonesian at all, here is what you get by translating word-for-word into English (or Chinese... or whatever...):

Not for first time argument explode at table eat house Privet Drive number four.

With my very basic Indonesian knowledge I would easily translate:

Not for the first time an argument breaks out at the dining table at the home located at number four, Privet Drive.

Note the present tense. This is a normal and proper way to tell stories in many languages. It is not a 'pidgin' or 'crude' approach. It is normal style.

Here's the original English:

Not for the first time, an argument had broken out over breakfast at number four, Privet Drive.

I rest my case. There is no need for the ridiculous grammatical complexities of Esperanto; to Europeans they are neither ridiculous nor especially complex, but to someone from China, and many other countries, they may appear so. The only overhead of Indonesian is having to learn unfamiliar vocabulary; in all other respects it generally appears to me to be a much better global auxiliary language.

Final score for Esperanto: it works but it is not extremely easy, rather it is about the same difficulty as the easiest natural languages, such as Afrikaans (for English speakers) or Indonesian (for Chinese speakers). However, for those who do not speak a European language it is clearly a much more difficult language than Indonesian, and since most of the world's population do not speak a European language well, it seems to me that I cannot justify choosing Esperanto over Indonesian for writing global novels, unless doing so in Indonesian proves to be impossible. Therefore my decision is:

Indonesian Wins: I must first try to write in Indonesian, and only return again to Esperanto if my attempt to write literature in Indonesian fails.

Well, that was a quick year!

With Afrikaans and Esperanto quickly bypassed, and Indonesian chosen as my language of choice in which to read and write international literature, my study plan for 2011 comfortably shrinks down to only:

Indonesian
French
English

Plus I will probably take up an auxlang, possibly Sambahsa and/or Lingwa de Planeta as an enjoyable hobby, perhaps for the occasional short story.

I will only return to Esperanto if Indonesian fails for me.

Onward...

Intertaal: Afrikaans sonder Infleksie

2011-01-31T23:57:00.002+10:00

This post is my farewell to Afrikaans, at least for now...

Okay, so lately I have been studying Afrikaans, Indonesian and Esperanto to compare them for possible use as international auxiliary languages (auxlangs), especially for the purpose of writing novels for a global market.

The idea is to find a language which highly-motivated readers from any country in the world could learn well enough to easily read a novel, with the aid of a dictionary, after no more than three years of part-time study. It is extremely important that the language chosen must be easily learned by those who do not speak any European language! On this score, Esperanto and Afrikaans are almost (but not quite) immediately disqualified since there is no doubt that both are immeasurably easier for speakers of European languages. Indonesian is equally difficult for everyone, except that those who have never used the Roman alphabet before are at an initial disadvantage which soon disappears.

Well, it is time for a verdict on Afrikaans. And the verdict is:

Afrikaans is a wonderful, beautiful, easy language but unfortunately it relies just a little too much on good knowledge of Germanic-language idioms, and has too many quirky expressions of its own, to stand any chance against English. Afrikaans would stand an excellent chance of succeeding as a global auxiliary language, for example for literary use, if English did not exist. Afrikaans is easier than English but still very powerful. However in today's world, anybody in China or Korea or Iceland or Nigeria or Peru or Egypt or Malaysia or Russia who might be willing to learn Afrikaans would almost certainly be more willing to learn English, even though English would take twice as long to learn. Therefore there is no point me embarking on writing literature in Afrikaans to reach a global market; however there would definitely be a point if I wished to reach Dutch readers but without the complexity of learning Dutch. I see Afrikaans as a good pan-Germanic auxlang but not as a perfect global auxlang.

Nevertheless, learning Afrikaans is an absolute joy and it is something which possibly I may continue as a hobby; I might even write literature in Afrikaans but not with any illusion that such literature would be read globally.

At the end of the day, Indonesian is clearly easier than Afrikaans while retaining approximately the same expressiveness and power. Therefore it just does not make sense for me to choose Afrikaans over Indonesian for global literature.

This brings it down to a battle between Esperanto (a more accessible auxlang for speakers of European languages) and Indonesian (a more accessible auxlang for speakers of Asian languages). So all my Afrikaans study time will now go to Indonesian, since in theory Esperanto should require less hours of study.

Intertaal:
Afrikaans sonder Infleksie

But before I leave Afrikaans, I would like to point out how I would create a simple constructed language from Afrikaans which would simply use existing Afrikaans dictionaries. Let's call it Intertaal. The word taal means language, so Intertaal means inter-language or international language.

I would do the following:

(1) Intertaal shall be identical to Afrikaans in absolutely all respects except for the rules listed below. That is, Afrikaans dictionaries can be used without modification and all idiomatic expressions used in Afrikaans should also be used in Intertaal, but modified such that those expressions do not violate the rules listed below (for example, all nouns must be written in their singular form).

(2) Nouns shall never be declined for the plural. The singular form of a noun, as listed in Afrikaans dictionaries, is the only form which shall ever be used in Intertaal. To indicate that an isolated noun is plural, it is mandatory to precede that noun with the word som. If there are adjectives preceding the noun, these adjectives go between the word som and the noun. If there are multiple plural nouns listed in a phrase they are either: (a) each preceded by som; or (b) the first noun is preceded by som and the last noun is followed by somme.

Explanation: som is an Afrikaans word meaning 'sum' or 'amount', and somme is the plural of this Afrikaans word and means 'sums' or 'amounts'. In Intertaal these words are used in a similar way to 'count words' in Asian languages such as Indonesian; they are markers which indicate plurality. The word som can be preceded by a number or an adverb for greater precision, but the word som can never be omitted. While using som and somme in this way will appear bizarre for an Afrikaans speaker, it would nevertheless be easy to remember. Please note that the Afrikaans word sommige, meaning 'some', is valid in Intertaal, and that the Intertaal word som does not mean 'some' but is merely a plural marker. Lastly, note that the use of nie...nie for negation in Afrikaans, which is also valid in Intertaal, provides the design justification for the construct som...somme.

The reason for rule (2) is to completely remove the difficulty of Afrikaans nouns having irregular plurals, thus eliminating one of the major difficulties of an otherwise easy language, while retaining the normal singular spelling.

In the examples below, black indicates both correct Afrikaans and correct Intertaal; blue represents Intertaal only; green represents Afrikaans only. Note that the indefinite article 'n is pronounced as in "a" in English ([ə] e.g. "a man").

Examples:

man = man
perd = horse
vlag = flag
en = and
sommige = some
drie = three

'n man = a man
'n perd = a horse
'n vlag = a flag

die man = the man
die perd = the horse
die vlag = the flag

som man = men
som perd = horses
som vlag = flags

die som man = the men
die som perd = the horses
die som vlag = the flags

die som man, som perd en som vlag = the men, horses and flags
die som man, perd en vlag somme = the men, horses and flags
die man, som perd en vlag somme = the man, horses and flags

sommige som man = some men
sommige som man, perd en vlag somme = some men, some horses and some flags
drie som man, perd en vlag somme = three men, three horses and three flags
drie som man, som perd en vlag somme = three men, horses and flags
'n man, som perd en drie som vlag = a man, horses and three flags
'n man, sommige som perd en vlag somme = a man, some horses and some flags
'n man, sommige som perd en drie som vlag = a man, some horses and three flags

(3) Adjectives shall not change their form, regardless of whether they precede or follow the noun they describe. This is the same as in English. The dictionary form of the adjective shall always be used in Intertaal (unlike Afrikaans, in which adjectives preceding the noun often must be irregularly inflected).

Example: the adjective 'young' in Afrikaans dictionaries is jonk. However, in Afrikaans this adjective must be written as jong when it precedes the noun. Such changes are irregular and difficult to learn. So the reason for rule (3) is to remove the second major difficulty of an otherwise easy language. This will make the language look very wrong to an Afrikaans speaker but the language will nevertheless remain fully comprehensible to Afrikaans speakers.

Special exception: in those rare cases in Afrikaans in which two phrases with different meaning can result from using one or other spelling of an adjective, this distinction shall be preserved in Intertaal (however such cases are rare).

Die jong visserman. Die visserman wat jonk is. = Afrikaans

Die jonk visserman. Die visserman wat jonk is. = Intertaal

The young fisherman. The fisherman who is young.

(4) Diminutive forms of nouns shall never be used except when they are listed in the dictionary. For example, katjie means 'kitten' in Afrikaans and is listed in Afrikaans dictionaries as a precisely defined noun with a specific meaning and a specific spelling. All such words are preserved in Intertaal. However, all other uses of diminutives which are not so listed in Afrikaans dictionaries shall never be used in Intertaal. For example, in Afrikaans it is very common to use diminutive forms of nouns to express affection, to express approval, to express contempt, for emphasis, and so on; all such diminutive forms of nouns are never used in Intertaal (unless they are so common that they are listed as primary entries in Afrikaans dictionaries, not merely in sentences exemplifying common idioms) ; instead, in such cases, the standard dictionary spelling of the noun (not the diminutive form) is used in Intertaal and the noun is preceded with the word kie.

katjie = kitten

Is jy bang jou handjies sal vuil word? = Afrikaans

Is jy bang jou kie som hand sal vuil word? = Intertaal
Are you afraid you're going to get your hands dirty?

In the above example we see a combination of rule (2) and rule (4) since the Afrikaans word handjies is both plural and diminutive, but is not to be found in the dictionary as a primary entry, thus in Intertaal the singular, non-diminutive form of the noun must be used, which is hand. We place the plural marker, som, in front of the noun; before that we place the diminutive marker, kie. The word kie (pronounced like 'key' in English) sounds like the ending of diminutive nouns in Afrikaans, so it is easy to remember (katjie sounds like 'cat key' in English).

And so, rule (4) has eliminated the third of the three major difficulties in an otherwise easy language; apart from its unpredictable, irregularly inflected plurals, adjectives and diminutives Afrikaans is virtually entirely regular. Removing these three irregular aspects of the language yields a much easier auxiliary language, so much easier than English that it now starts to look like a viable proposition for alluring a few potential students away from English.

(5) There are no other changes; in all other respects Intertaal is identical to Afrikaans. Thus, one can use Afrikaans books as a guide to how to speak Intertaal, merely transforming every inflection of adjective or noun which would violate rules (2), (3) or (4) into their equivalent uninflected Intertaal forms. Furthermore, other than kie and the name Intertaal, there are absolutely no words in Intertaal which do not exist in Afrikaans, and there are only two Afrikaans words which take on additional new meanings in Intertaal: som and somme. All idiomatic expressions come directly from Afrikaans into Intertaal, but always transformed according to rules (2), (3) and (4). Thus there is never any confusion about how to say things which demand idiomatic expressions (such as 'How old are you?', 'They are holding hands.', 'What time is it?' and so on); the correct way is always the Afrikaans way, but stripped of inflections.

Another name for Intertaal could be Afrikaans sonder Infleksie
(Afrikaans without Inflection) or Afrikaans sonder som Infleksie (Afrikaans without Inflections); the last name is a bit too long-winded, therefore the preferred name is Intertaal and the alternative name is Afrikaans sonder Infleksie.

Warning: Indonesian is still easier than Intertaal would be.

Afrikaans is Wonderful!

Afrikaans is a wonderful, beautiful language just the way it is and it does not need to be changed in any way. I will most probably eventually continue to learn it as a hobby and might even write some literature in it.

The notes on my proposed constructed language, Intertaal, as a global auxiliary language for literature, should in no way be taken to imply that I think Afrikaans itself should be changed. Afrikaans is perfect just the way it is, but it is perfect as a national language rather than as an auxiliary language. As an auxiliary language it is very good but Indonesian I think is significantly easier.

Onward...

First Anniversary of The Joy of Languages

2011-01-29T01:00:00.066+10:00

Okay, it's official. I've spent a whole year of my life writing this blog. Happy birthday The Joy of Languages! You are one.

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...

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...

Stendhal novel in Esperanto...

2011-01-22T00:34:00.004+10:00

All right, today is Friday and so it is an Esperanto study day.

Without further ado, let's keep moving and try Esperanto. The task I set myself for today was to translate just one sentence from French into Esperanto: the first sentence of the great novel La Chartreuse de Parme. See recent posts for comparative translations in several other auxlangs; note especially the gigantic translation which by some miracle I managed to make in Occidental, a very nice language indeed but unfortunately one which requires extensive prior knowledge of European languages to use (due to its at-sight design), something which Esperanto does not require.

So, the question is, how badly did I go wrong on my first attempt? Esperanto speakers, please help! I am a total beginner and have no idea what I am doing.

One thing I will say for Esperanto: it is really fun to be able to go to Vikipedio (that's the Esperanto Wikipedia) and find articles about most of the things you are translating. How about a word for 'charterhouse' in Esperanto? Somebody has already proposed Kartuzio (rightly or wrongly) so there is no need for me to invent my own word. This makes a nice change from having to go it alone.

Tomorrow it is Indonesian study day. Hopefully eventually I will translate the first chapter of this novel into Indonesian, Afrikaans and Esperanto, to compare with my Occidental translation, and see which turns out to be the easiest and best of these languages for the novelist seeking to write international literature.

That whole process might take me about a year.

Esperanto

La Kartuzio de Parmo

de Stendhal

Unua Libro

Unua Ĉapitro

Traduko de Robert Winter

Versio 0.01 (21-a de januaro 2011)

Milano en 1796

Corrected version (supplied by kind readers)

La 15-an de majo 1796, Generalo Bonaparte eniris Milanon ĉekape de sia yuna armeo, kiu estis ĵus transirinta la Ponton de Lodi kaj montrinta al la mondo ke post tiel multe da jarcentoj, Cezaro kaj Aleksandro havis posteulon.

My original attempt (contains errors)

La 15-an de majo 1796, Generalo Bonaparte eneris Milanon antaŭe de lia armeo kiu lastatempe transiris la Ponton de Lodi e instruis la mondon ke post tiel multe da jarcentoj Cezaro kaj Aleksandro havis posteulo.

Glosaro en la angla / Glossary in English

* Kartuzio:: Charterhouse (fr. Chartreuse) [Kartuzio esas tipo de monaĥejo.]

* Parmo:: Parma, a city in Italy (it. Parma; fr. Parme)

Original French

La Chartreuse de Parme
de Stendhal

LIVRE PREMIER
CHAPITRE PREMIER

Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la tête de cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, et d'apprendre au monde qu'après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaient un successeur.

English (translated by Scott–Moncrieff)

The Charterhouse of Parma
by Stendhal

First Book
First Chapter

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor.

Anything but Romance... why auxlangs fail

2011-01-20T08:18:00.009+10:00

IMPORTANT UPDATE: 4 September 2011: I no longer agree with the opinions that I expressed below. In fact, I have chosen to return to Interlingua as it has become my language of first choice in which to read literature! The opinions I expressed below do make sense if you expect (a kind of magical thinking) to be fluent in an auxlang within a few months or a year. But if you accept that to be an unrealistic goal and instead you view learning an auxlang to fluency as a five-year process, then auxlangs based on Romance languages are fine and in fact have many advantages. My frustration and disappointment expressed below were the direct result of my unrealistic expectations of how quickly a language could be learned. Those unrealistic expectations were the result of unwise propaganda from organisations and persons promoting various international auxiliary languages, including speakers of Esperanto and Interlingua, which suggested that rapid fluency was likely. I now think that auxlangs should be promoted as "Five-Year Languages", thus preventing unrealistic expectations and preventing gross disappoinment and disillusionment such as I experienced below. Had I fully understood right from the start that five years are, on average, required to master any of the major auxlangs to fluency, I never would have become disillusioned but rather would have happily continued to make slow progress towards the very worthwhile goal of fluency. In fact, auxlangs based on Romance languages are very advantageous because studying them gives you the advantage of subsequently being able to understand a considerable amount of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Moreover they allow you to easily learn and understand scientific terminology, including Latin terms (for example, used to name features on the Moon and on Mars). It simply takes a few years of study to achieve, and that is worthwhile. END OF UPDATE

One of the great challenges of writing this blog is to demand one thing of myself: complete honesty. I have always been of the belief that if I am not honest then this blog is of no value. I think whatever value this blog has is due to its honesty.

Accordingly, I have been willing to make a complete fool of myself in public. Again and again readers have seen me wildly enthusiastic about one language after another only to go on to... get very poor results. You have seen me honestly become enthralled by various languages and then honestly become disappointed by them; you have seen me go through extreme changes of opinion, swinging from one view to another, as I have desperately scrambled to find a language that works for me. Regular readers will know I am a novelist and I am seeking a language suitable for writing international literature in... and I mean novels, not just short stories. Therefore auxlangs which many others find quite acceptable (for general conversation and for writing short articles in magazines) have been unacceptable to me because they are not up to the requirements of writing a good novel (this requires a very large vocabulary, unambiguous grammar, and most importantly the ability to dismantle the idiomatic expressions of natural languages either into unambiguous plain language or into well-established idioms in the auxlang, requirements that very few constructed languages meet... in fact virtually none and certainly not, for example, Interlingua).

Late last year I came to the conclusion that I had completely wasted my time by studying auxlangs and that I wanted my nine months back!

Then, at the eleventh hour, I managed to salvage a literary result by producing a translation into Occidental, eventually of more than 5700 words in length, of the beginning of the great French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme. This translation might even have the benefit of being somewhat comprehensible to some Continental Europeans (but not to most British readers) with perhaps only a few weeks of prior study and access to a dictionary; some especially well educated readers who already speak several European languages might even be able to get the gist of it without any prior study. This is unlike Esperanto, the world's most popular constructed language, which is nearly completely incomprehensible without extensive prior study.

But... so what?

Here's what happened after I published my translation, which was for me a great personal achievement: nothing. About three people congratulated me, on an Occidental-language Yahoo group, where my translation will sit unnoticed for the next ten years gathering dust. This is because there is no active community (other than perhaps a couple of dozen people who sporadically produce very little content in very inconsistent styles and in minor variants of the language, which frankly are not absolutely mutually comprehensible) for the Occidental language. Now, this lack of any truly significant community is a clue. Let's investigate.

Here is a list of the constructed languages with a truly significant community, say more than 1000 users of the language, other than Esperanto:

none

Okay, that didn't go too well. Let's try a different approach. Here, to the best of my knowledge, is a list of the constructed languages other than Esperanto in which published novels are available (either in print or just as e-books):

Interlingua

Hmmm, that's weird. If we have a language with huge dictionaries, as Interlingua has, in which novels have been published, how come it has no significant community of users? Aha. Here is the answer. To save time I will cut straight to the chase and will reveal the secret finding of my one year of study:

Because it does not work. It is gibberish. For the novelist, most auxlangs based on Romance languages are a complete waste of time and, ultimately, are either fundamentally gibberish or too difficult to understand without extensive knowledge of relevant natural languages. Auxlangs based on Romance languages are nearly always not "standalone" languages which one can study on their own without reference to any natural language. This is why nobody, other than a tiny handful of language enthusiasts, uses them (even if you disagree with my conclusions here, the fact remains that no Romance-language auxlang has a truly significant community of users, something which is hard to explain unless my hypothesis here is correct... Romance-language auxlangs do not work).

Here is the best way to communicate internationally using a language which is based on a Romance language or which resembles a Romance language:

Don't. Use a real Romance language instead.

I totally understand now why the auxlang movement has failed, except Esperanto which has had a limited degree of success and actually has a small but significant community of users, maybe a few thousand people around the world. It is because nearly every significant auxlang is based on Romance languages and auxlangs based on Romance languages do not work. If they worked, people would be using them. They don't work.

Why don't they work? Because dumbing down Romance-language grammar produces auxlangs which are inherently ambiguous gibberish despite looking very impressive at first sight and despite in some cases have massive vocabularies. Proper Romance languages (not counting creoles here, to keep the discussion simple) have difficult and complex grammars: that is how they work, and this ultimately inherits from Latin. Furthermore, Romance languages inherently work by virtue of thousands of highly idiomatic expressions, which are unique to each Romance language, and upon which intelligible communication depends. Auxlangs which use Romance-language vocabulary attempt to simplify this and it simply does not work. This is why Interlingua drifts in the direction of the native Romance language of its speaker or writer, becoming at best ambiguous and at worst gibberish to others.

Even Occidental, by far the best of the group for novelists, is too inconsistent among its tiny group of users and quite frankly is too difficult to learn unless you already know two European languages other than English, consisting of one Romance language and one other language, preferably a Germanic one. By the way, Occidental is the best of the bunch because its grammar has Germanic influences which make it possible to use it more easily without having to have such extensive knowledge of natural Romance languages.

The other approach, that of Lingua Franca Nova, to use Romance vocabulary with a creole grammar, in some ways has more merit because it is further from natural Romance languages and thus produces less drift, but unfortunately it does not work either as unless one is an absolute and seasoned expert in the language it is impossible to write without a massive degree of ambiguity, which is a drawback of its creole grammar. I tried again recently and failed. That is, Romance-based auxlangs have a choice between: (a) using difficult grammars and unreliable idioms which require extensive prior knowledge of various natural languages (often resulting in gibberish); or (b) dumbing down the grammar to that of a creole (not necessarily a bad strategy) which usually fails and usually produces a language which ultimately is equally or more ambiguous.

I'm tired of writing this post now. I give up. I leave you with this advice:

(1) Do not use any auxlang based primarily on Romance languages. My intention is to never do so again. This leaves only Esperanto, Lingwa de Planeta, Sambahsa and Frenkisch to choose from out of the most significant auxlangs.

(2) Do not use any auxlang based on an Interlingua-like process of averaging the vocabulary of related natural languages. This rules out Frenkisch*. This is because the same kind of Interlingua-like drift problems will occur and you will not be able to learn and use the language as a "standalone" language without needing to simultaneously study several natural languages.

(3) For the novelist, you need extensive vocabulary: this currently rules out Lingwa de Planeta, although it will get there eventually one day in the future. Lingwa de Planeta shows a lot of promise but is currently in an early a stage of its evolution, suitable only for short stories at this stage, not novels.

(4) For the novelist, you need extensive multi-lingual documentation and reference materials: this rules out Sambahsa, although one day hopefully it will have these things. However, possibly Sambahsa may still require too much knowledge of various natural languages to be used "standalone" without simultaneous study of natural languages; the jury is still out on that.

* Update 30 September 2011: I sincerely regret saying the above about Frenkisch. Now I understand that just as Interlingua is a useful language, so too could Frenkisch be a useful language. Frenkisch is a fine project of high quality and I am embarrassed now that I said such negative things about it here. Again, this was a consequence of my "magical thinking" than somehow a language could be learned to fluency in a few months. Now that I realise that learning any language to fluency takes years, Frenkisch appears to me to be a valuable linguistic resource and one which could grow into a viable international language with a little more development of its grammar in the years to come.
END OF UPDATE

This leaves the novelist with only one reasonable current choice: Esperanto. Please bear in mind I am not recommending Esperanto, because I do not speak Esperanto yet. However I am going to learn it. At this stage the most likely outcome is probably that I will also be disappointed by Esperanto and probably will choose not to write novels in it, but at least it is in with a chance. The most likely outcome is I will choose to use Afrikaans or Indonesian instead.

Well, that's it. My study plan for 2011 is:

Mondays, Thursdays: Afrikaans

Tuesdays, Fridays: Esperanto

Wednesdays, Saturdays: Indonesian

Any day (unrestricted): French, English

A few parting points:

(a) Occidental is a nice language fully capable of having novels written in it, but basically depends on the reader already speaking at least two European languages to be able to read it with minimal prior study; this is pointless since the language is not a "standalone" language but depends on knowledge of other languages. Were it massively popular I would write novels in it, and those novels would not be excessively ambiguous because idioms would have been established by popular use. However it is not massively popular and never will become so, because it requires too much knowledge of other languages at the current point in time at which its multi-lingual documentation is virtually non-existent.

(b) Occidental would be a better language if it had more non-Romance elements. Which is essentially what Sambahsa is, a very admirable language.

(c) An auxlang based very closely on a simplification of just one Romance language, rather than averaging several Romance languages, could work, since all the idioms could be unambiguously inherited from that single language. Thus, Basic Spanish something like Basic English. But I would not bother because languages like Afrikaans and Indonesian are fully capable and are easier.

(d) Esperanto will have to prove itself to me to be able to rival Afrikaans and Indonesian both in terms of power and ease. I am highly doubtful it will.

(e) At-sight languages are dead. Forget them. (An at-sight language is one designed to be comprehensible without prior study or with little prior study; while this sounds like a nice idea I now realise this is usually a fatal flaw since it utterly depends upon one having knowledge of certain natural languages, thus making the auxlang not a "standalone" language which one can study or use without having to simultaneously study other languages. Interlingua is the classic example of this and it suffers from the worst of the drawbacks of this, making it essentially inconsistent gibberish. The absurdity of this was recently driven home to me when I realised I can now read French more easily than reading Interlingua!)

Onward...

Stendhal novel in Lingua Franca Nova

2011-01-17T19:33:00.001+10:00

Following on from my last three posts, for comparison, here is a Lingua Franca Nova translation of the first page of the novel La Chartreuse de Parme. This translation was very kindly supplied by Simon Davies.

If you are interested in reading more literature in LFN, you can visit the literary section of the LFN wikipedia, where you will find several translated works.

Lingua Franca Nova

LA MONCERIA DE PARMA
par Stendhal

Libro 1
Capitol 1

Milano en 1796

A 15 maio 1796, jeneral Bonaparte ia entra Milano a la testa de acel armada joven cual, par traversa la ponte de Lodi, ia veni de fa la mundo aprende ce, pos tan multe sentenios, Cesar e Alexandro ave un seguor. La miracles de coraje e de jenio, atestada par Italia, va velia pos alga menses un popla dorminte; ma a un semana ante la ariva de la franseses, la milananes ia regarda los como ancora sola un colie de banditos, abituada a fuji sempre ante la soldatos de Se Altia Imperal e Rial: a la min, esta ia es repeteda a los a tre veses semanal en un jornal peti, no plu grande ce un mano, primida sur paper susia.

En la Eda Media, la lombardianes republiciste ia mostra un coraje egal a acel de la franseses, e se premio ia es vide la destrui intera de se site par la imperores de Deutxland. De cuando los ia deveni sujetos fidos, se conserna xef ia es la primi de sonetos sur teletas de tafeta ros a la aveni de la sposi de un fem joven parteninte a alga familia nobil o rica. A du o tre anios pos acel epoca grande de se vive, esta fem joven ia aseta usual un amiror: la nom de esta "cavalor servinte", elejeda par la familia de la sposo, ia ocupa a veses un loca onoros en la contrata de sposi. Ia ave un canion entre esta costumes femin e la emosias profonda provocada par la ariva nonprevideda de la armada franses. Costumes nova e pasionos ia apare pronto. Un popla intera ia persepi, a 15 maio 1796, ce tota cosas cual el ia respeta a ante es suprema riable e, a veses, odios.

La parti de la rejimento final de Austria ia indica la cade de la ideas antica: risca se vive ia deveni aora modos; on ia vide ce, per es felis pos sentenios de sensas blanda, on debe ama se pais con un pasion real, e xerca atas eroin. A ante, on ia es afondada en un note profonda par la continua de la tirania jelos de Carolus Sinco e de Philippus Du; pos cade la scultas de estas, on ia es subita inondada par lus. Ja tra sincodes anios, cuando la Ensiclopedia e Voltaire ia broti en Frans, la monces ia cria a la bon popla de Milano ce aprende leje, o aprende an cualce cosa de la mundo, es un labora forte nonusos, e ce, si on va paia bon se desi esata a se prete e ta reconta fidos a el cada de se pecas peti, on va es cuasi serta de ave un loca bela en paradiso. Per completi la irita de esta popla tan temable e razonos a ante, Austria ia vende barata a los la vantaje de no debe furni soldatos nova a se armada.

Original French

Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la têtede cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, etd'apprendre au monde qu'après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaientun successeur. Les miracles de bravoure et de génie dont l'Italie futtémoin en quelques mois réveillèrent un peuple endormi; huit joursencore avant l'arrivée des Français, les Milanais ne voyaient en euxqu'un ramassis de brigands, habitués à fuir toujours devant les troupesde Sa Majesté Impériale et Royale: c'était du moins ce que leur répétaittrois fois la semaine un petit journal grand comme la main, imprimé surdu papier sale.

Au Moyen Age, les Lombards républicains avaient fait preuve d'unebravoure égale à celle des Français, et ils méritèrent de voir leurville entièrement rasée par les empereurs d'Allemagne. Depuis qu'ilsétaient devenus de fidèles sujets leur grande affaire était d'imprimerdes sonnets sur de petits mouchoirs de taffetas rose quand arrivait lemariage d'une jeune fille appartenant à quelque famille noble ou riche.Deux ou trois ans après cette grande époque de sa vie, cette jeune filleprenait un cavalier servant: quelquefois le nom du sigisbée choisi parla famille du mari occupait une place honorable dans le contrat demariage. Il y avait loin de ces moeurs efféminées aux émotions profondesque donna l'arrivée imprévue de l'armée française. Bientôt surgirent desmoeurs, nouvelles et passionnées. Un peuple tout entier s'aperçut, le 15mai 1796, que tout ce qu'il avait respecté jusque-là étaitsouverainement ridicule et quelquefois odieux. Le départ du dernierrégiment de l'Autriche marqua la chute des idées anciennes: exposer savie devint à la mode; on vit que pour être heureux après des siècles desensations affadissantes, il fallait aimer la patrie d'un amour réel etchercher les actions héroïques. On était plongé dans une nuit profondepar la continuation du despotisme jaloux de Charles-Quint et de PhilippeII; on renversa leurs statues, et tout à coup l'on se trouva inondé delumière. Depuis une cinquantaine d'années, et à mesure quel'Encyclopédie et Voltaire éclataient en France, les moines criaient aubon peuple de Milan, qu'apprendre à lire ou quelque chose au monde étaitune peine fort inutile, et qu'en payant bien exactement la dîme à soncuré et lui racontant fidèlement tous ses petits péchés, on était à peuprès sûr d'avoir une belle place au paradis. Pour achever d'énerver cepeuple autrefois si terrible et si raisonneur, l'Autriche lui avaitvendu à bon marché le privilège de ne point fournir de recrues a son armée.

En 1796 l'armée milanaise se composait de vingt-quatre faquins habillésde rouge, lesquels gardaient la ville de concert avec quatre magnifiquesrégiments de grenadiers hongrois. La liberté des moeurs était extrême,mais la passion fort rare; d'ailleurs, outre le désagrément de devoirtout raconter au curé, sous peine de ruine même en ce monde, le bonpeuple de Milan était encore soumis à certaines petites entravesmonarchiques qui ne laissaient pas que d'être vexantes. Par exemplel'archiduc ', qui résidait à Milan et gouvernait au nom de l'empereur,son cousin, avait eu l'idée lucrative de faire le commerce des blés. Enconséquence, défense aux paysans de vendre leurs grains jusqu'à ce queSon Altesse eût rempli ses magasins.

English (translated by Scott–Moncrieff)

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of gallantry and genius of which Italy was a witness in the space of a few months aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere rabble of brigands, accustomed invariably to flee before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to them three times weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one’s hand, and printed on soiled paper.

In the Middle Ages the Republicans of Lombardy had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their city razed to the ground by the German Emperors. Since they had become loyal subjects, their great occupation was the printing of sonnets upon handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta whenever the marriage occurred of a young lady belonging to some rich or noble family. Two or three years after that great event in her life, the young lady in question used to engage a devoted admirer: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the husband’s family occupied an honourable place in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from these effeminate ways to the profound emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the French army. Presently there sprang up a new and passionate way of life. A whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that everything which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous, if not actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one’s life became the fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after centuries of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one’s country with a real love and to seek out heroic actions. They had been plunged in the darkest night by the continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; they overturned these monarchs’ statues and immediately found themselves flooded with daylight. For the last half-century, as the Encyclopaedia and Voltaire gained ground in France, the monks had been dinning into the ears of the good people of Milan that to learn to read, or for that matter to learn anything at all was a great waste of labour, and that by paying one’s exact tithe to one’s parish priest and faithfully reporting to him all one’s little misdeeds, one was practically certain of having a good place in Paradise. To complete the debilitation of this people once so formidable and so rational, Austria had sold them, on easy terms, the privilege of not having to furnish any recruits to her army.

In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of four and twenty rapscallions dressed in scarlet, who guarded the town with the assistance of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian Grenadiers. Freedom of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; otherwise, apart from the inconvenience of having to repeat everything to one’s parish priest, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good people of Milan were still subjected to certain little monarchical interferences which could not fail to be vexatious. For instance, the Archduke, who resided at Milan and governed in the name of the Emperor, his cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in corn. In consequence, an order prohibiting the peasants from selling their grain until His Highness had filled his granaries.

Stendhal novel in Sambahsa

2011-01-11T19:15:00.006+10:00

Following on from my last two posts, here is a nice example of another translation of the first page of Stendhal's great French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, this time in that other great literary language, Sambahsa.

Many thanks to Dr Olivier Simon for this translation and for the added bonus of an audio recording in his own voice.

Wonderful stuff.

Sambahsa (translated and read by Dr Olivier Simon)

ID CARTUSIA OS PARMA

ab Stendhal

1st Capitel

Milan in 1796

Download the audio recording in Sambahsa!

Dien 15 mai 1796, general Bonaparte entrit Milan ye id cap tos yun agmen quod hieb just upermarchet id brigv os Lodi, ed manthiht id mund od pos tant secules Caesar ed Alexander hieb un successor. Ia miracles om yowngki ed genie quom Italia buit weitwodd unte oik munts protiebud un swehpihn folk; dar octo diens pre id admarche iom Franceois, i Milaneses vis in iens tik un gakowpos briganden, quoy semper eefeuge ant ia trupps Eysios Imperial ed Royal Majestat : to eet bariem quo im repetih tris ielg hevd un handplatu smulk journal, drucken ep murdar papier.

In Mediev, i respublican Lombards hiebeer beviden un yowngki egal tei iom Franceois, ed i stahiel vide ir urb alnos rasen ab iens cesars Deutschlands. Pon hiebeer bihn derv subjects, ir megil besoyn eet drucke sonnetts ep smulk handchirks ex pemb taft quan arrivit id wehden uns gwenak bayghend sem noble au riche familia. Dwo au tri yars pos tod megil zaman siens gwit, sa gwenak emsit un cavalier-servente : yando id nam ios cicisbeo chusen ab id familia xihsit un honorable place in id wehdmonium. Eent dalg ta effeminat mores ud ia profund emotions id impreviden arriven ios franceois heir dahsit. Mox surrexeer nov ed passionat mores. Un hol folk vighieb, dien 15 mai 1796, od quantum id hieb respecten tuntro eet souverain-ye joking ed yando karih. Id exmarche ios senst regiment os Osterreich mierk id fall iom aw idees : exdehe sien gwit bihsit alamode ; buit viden od kay ses noroct pos secules fadereihnden sensations, id patria tohrb ses liubht med un druv liubh ed wehrgs neren tohrb ses iskwt. Anghen eet mergen do un deub noct ab id continuation ios jalous despotisme om Charles V ed Philip II, ir statues buir volvihn, ed fauran anghen wohs luce-gintou. Pon circa penkgim yars, ed ye meis id Encyclopédie ed Voltaire udbrohg in France, ies munks ee-crieneunt ei selli pledveh os Milan od euctum lises au semject scheischaung eet un baygh inutil strehngen, ed od payghend-ye baygh exact-ye id uscher sieni pleban, ed narrend-ye ei vafa-ye quant sien lytil synts, anghen eet takriban yakin os habe un bello place in paradays. Kay parerghe tod prevst-ye tem terrible ed tem aumav pledveh, Osterreich ei hiebit pohrnt ieftin-ye id privilege os ne dadwtum recruts idsi armee.

In 1796, id milanese heir eet composen med dwogim-quar rudh-dun raskals, quoy comguardeer id urb con quar schungjin regiments magyaren grenadiers. Id lure iom mores eet extreme, bet passion baygh rare ; eti, ulter id deskhauristat os dehlge narre quant ei pleban, subpoena ruine hatta scheischaung, id sello pledveh os Milan eet dar submitten ad certain lytil monarchic kyehms qua ne siseer tik ses vexant. Mathalan, ei archiherceg, qui resis in Milan ed gouvernit nami iom Cesar, sien cousin, hieb enfallen id idee os torgue kwoid. Yinjier, forbohdt im nowngmins pehrne ir sepits hin Eys Hazrat hiebit plehn sien werdels.

Original French

Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la têtede cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, etd'apprendre au monde qu'après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaientun successeur. Les miracles de bravoure et de génie dont l'Italie futtémoin en quelques mois réveillèrent un peuple endormi; huit joursencore avant l'arrivée des Français, les Milanais ne voyaient en euxqu'un ramassis de brigands, habitués à fuir toujours devant les troupesde Sa Majesté Impériale et Royale: c'était du moins ce que leur répétaittrois fois la semaine un petit journal grand comme la main, imprimé surdu papier sale.

Au Moyen Age, les Lombards républicains avaient fait preuve d'unebravoure égale à celle des Français, et ils méritèrent de voir leurville entièrement rasée par les empereurs d'Allemagne. Depuis qu'ilsétaient devenus de fidèles sujets leur grande affaire était d'imprimerdes sonnets sur de petits mouchoirs de taffetas rose quand arrivait lemariage d'une jeune fille appartenant à quelque famille noble ou riche.Deux ou trois ans après cette grande époque de sa vie, cette jeune filleprenait un cavalier servant: quelquefois le nom du sigisbée choisi parla famille du mari occupait une place honorable dans le contrat demariage. Il y avait loin de ces moeurs efféminées aux émotions profondesque donna l'arrivée imprévue de l'armée française. Bientôt surgirent desmoeurs, nouvelles et passionnées. Un peuple tout entier s'aperçut, le 15mai 1796, que tout ce qu'il avait respecté jusque-là étaitsouverainement ridicule et quelquefois odieux. Le départ du dernierrégiment de l'Autriche marqua la chute des idées anciennes: exposer savie devint à la mode; on vit que pour être heureux après des siècles desensations affadissantes, il fallait aimer la patrie d'un amour réel etchercher les actions héroïques. On était plongé dans une nuit profondepar la continuation du despotisme jaloux de Charles-Quint et de PhilippeII; on renversa leurs statues, et tout à coup l'on se trouva inondé delumière. Depuis une cinquantaine d'années, et à mesure quel'Encyclopédie et Voltaire éclataient en France, les moines criaient aubon peuple de Milan, qu'apprendre à lire ou quelque chose au monde étaitune peine fort inutile, et qu'en payant bien exactement la dîme à soncuré et lui racontant fidèlement tous ses petits péchés, on était à peuprès sûr d'avoir une belle place au paradis. Pour achever d'énerver cepeuple autrefois si terrible et si raisonneur, l'Autriche lui avaitvendu à bon marché le privilège de ne point fournir de recrues a son armée.

En 1796 l'armée milanaise se composait de vingt-quatre faquins habillésde rouge, lesquels gardaient la ville de concert avec quatre magnifiquesrégiments de grenadiers hongrois. La liberté des moeurs était extrême,mais la passion fort rare; d'ailleurs, outre le désagrément de devoirtout raconter au curé, sous peine de ruine même en ce monde, le bonpeuple de Milan était encore soumis à certaines petites entravesmonarchiques qui ne laissaient pas que d'être vexantes. Par exemplel'archiduc ', qui résidait à Milan et gouvernait au nom de l'empereur,son cousin, avait eu l'idée lucrative de faire le commerce des blés. Enconséquence, défense aux paysans de vendre leurs grains jusqu'à ce queSon Altesse eût rempli ses magasins.

English (translated by Scott–Moncrieff)

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of gallantry and genius of which Italy was a witness in the space of a few months aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere rabble of brigands, accustomed invariably to flee before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to them three times weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one’s hand, and printed on soiled paper.

In the Middle Ages the Republicans of Lombardy had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their city razed to the ground by the German Emperors. Since they had become loyal subjects, their great occupation was the printing of sonnets upon handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta whenever the marriage occurred of a young lady belonging to some rich or noble family. Two or three years after that great event in her life, the young lady in question used to engage a devoted admirer: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the husband’s family occupied an honourable place in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from these effeminate ways to the profound emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the French army. Presently there sprang up a new and passionate way of life. A whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that everything which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous, if not actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one’s life became the fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after centuries of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one’s country with a real love and to seek out heroic actions. They had been plunged in the darkest night by the continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; they overturned these monarchs’ statues and immediately found themselves flooded with daylight. For the last half-century, as the Encyclopaedia and Voltaire gained ground in France, the monks had been dinning into the ears of the good people of Milan that to learn to read, or for that matter to learn anything at all was a great waste of labour, and that by paying one’s exact tithe to one’s parish priest and faithfully reporting to him all one’s little misdeeds, one was practically certain of having a good place in Paradise. To complete the debilitation of this people once so formidable and so rational, Austria had sold them, on easy terms, the privilege of not having to furnish any recruits to her army.

In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of four and twenty rapscallions dressed in scarlet, who guarded the town with the assistance of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian Grenadiers. Freedom of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; otherwise, apart from the inconvenience of having to repeat everything to one’s parish priest, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good people of Milan were still subjected to certain little monarchical interferences which could not fail to be vexatious. For instance, the Archduke, who resided at Milan and governed in the name of the Emperor, his cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in corn. In consequence, an order prohibiting the peasants from selling their grain until His Highness had filled his granaries.

Stendhal novel in Lingwa de Planeta (LdP)

2011-01-10T21:57:00.004+10:00

Following on from my last post, here is an example of the first page of the great French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, by Stendhal, translated into LdP. For reference, below, please find the original French, an English translation (by Scott–Moncrieff), and my own Occidental translation (or read the whole chapter in Occidental). The LdP translation was kindly supplied by Dmitry Ivanov; it is a first draft and should not necessarily be considered precisely correct but it gives a good general impression of what such literary prose looks like in LdP. The bottom line is that LdP, like LFN, is of about the same overall difficulty as Occidental; that is to say, about as easy as you can get and still have a powerful literary language and undoubtedly much easier than Esperanto (be aware that not all of the vocabulary of LdP is recognisable to Europeans and that this is not by accident but by design; it is a world language not a European language).

Thanks also to Dmitry for pointing out that I had completely omitted the sentence Bientôt surgirent desmoeurs, nouvelles et passionnées. in my Occidental translation version 1.0! I shall have to add that in the next revision.

Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) (translated by Dmitry Ivanov)

Pa dey 15 (shi-pet) de mey yar 1796 (mil semsto-ninshi-sit) general Bonaparte fai zinsa inu Milano. Ta es in avana de suy yunge armee kel nodavem he trago ponta bli Lodi, diki-yen a munda ke afte mucho stoyar Kaisar e Alexander en-hev un sekwer. Ti Italia he vidi na miraklas de kuraja e de genialitaa in kelke mes he jagisi somni-she jenmin. Ot dey bifoo ke franses lai, Milano-jenta haishi opini li kom banda de rauber kel hev abyas de lopi wek bifoo trupas de Luy Imperiale e Regale Mahantaa. Amini, tak hi oni reporti tri ves per wik in syao gaseta, handa-sais-ney e printi-ney on gande papir.

In Mide Epoka, Respublikista de Lombardia pruvi-te ke li es sam kuraja-ney kom franses, e por to Doichland-ney imperatores he ruinisi li-ney urba. Afte bikam loyale subjen, li-ney zuy muhim dela bin tu printi sonetas on rose-tafeta-ney poshtuh al gaming de koy yungina do noble o riche familia. Dwa o tri yar afte toy gro-eventa in ela-ney jiva, sey yungina pinchanem pren-te un "latif admirer"; koyves nam de "chichisbeo", selekti-ney bay familia de mursha, okupi-te honor-ney plasa in gama-kontrakta. Ye gro-farka inter sey dulari-ney jivi-modus e glube emosiones kausi-ney bay turan-ney laisa de franse armee. Sun en-ye nove, pasion-ney jivi-modus. Pa 15 mey 1796 ol jenmin deskovri, ke olo bifooen respekti-ney es ridival e koyves henival. Tuy ke laste Osterraih-ney rejimenta departi, lao ideas krushi: tu riski jiva bikam moda-ney. Afte seklas de sobresatitaa oni vidi, ke fo felisitaa treba lubi janmalanda verem e treba fai heroike akta. Kontinuitaa de jalusa-ney despotisma de Karlo V (Pet-ney) e Filipo II (Dwa-ney) mah-sinki-te oni inu glube tumitaa; oni renversi statuas de sey monarkas e tuy gei inundi bay luma. Duran laste haf-stoyar, al ke "Ensiklopedia" e Volter fai-te riza in Frans, monahes krai-te a hao jenta de Milano ke tu lerni lekti, o tu lerni kwo unkwe hi, es ga vane pena: si oni sempre pagi shifenka a suy preiyuan e rakonti a ta fidelem om oli suy syao gunah, oni mog bi hampi sigure om pai hao plasa in swargalok. Dabe kompletem feblisi sey jenta, bifooen ga mahtaful e intele, Osterraih he vendi a li, ga chipem, den privilegia de bu furni rekruta a suy armee.

In 1796 Milano-ney armee komponi aus dwashi-char flaner in rude klaida. Li gardi urba pa hunta kun char magnifike rejimenta de magyar granater. Libritaa de maneras es extreme, bat pasion es muy rare. Krome nopriate deba de rakonti olo a suy preiyuan fo eviti ruining yo in sey munda, hao jenta de Milano subi sertene monarkike impeda, syao bat vexi-she. Pa exampla, arhiduko kel residi in Milano e guverni pa nam de imperator, hev profit-ney idea de komersi gren. Kom sekwitura, oni prohibi a kisanes tu vendi gren til ke Suy Gaotaa fulisi suy gren-depos.

Original French

Le 15 mai 1796, le général Bonaparte fit son entrée dans Milan à la têtede cette jeune armée qui venait de passer le pont de Lodi, etd'apprendre au monde qu'après tant de siècles César et Alexandre avaientun successeur. Les miracles de bravoure et de génie dont l'Italie futtémoin en quelques mois réveillèrent un peuple endormi; huit joursencore avant l'arrivée des Français, les Milanais ne voyaient en euxqu'un ramassis de brigands, habitués à fuir toujours devant les troupesde Sa Majesté Impériale et Royale: c'était du moins ce que leur répétaittrois fois la semaine un petit journal grand comme la main, imprimé surdu papier sale.

Au Moyen Age, les Lombards républicains avaient fait preuve d'unebravoure égale à celle des Français, et ils méritèrent de voir leurville entièrement rasée par les empereurs d'Allemagne. Depuis qu'ilsétaient devenus de fidèles sujets leur grande affaire était d'imprimerdes sonnets sur de petits mouchoirs de taffetas rose quand arrivait lemariage d'une jeune fille appartenant à quelque famille noble ou riche.Deux ou trois ans après cette grande époque de sa vie, cette jeune filleprenait un cavalier servant: quelquefois le nom du sigisbée choisi parla famille du mari occupait une place honorable dans le contrat demariage. Il y avait loin de ces moeurs efféminées aux émotions profondesque donna l'arrivée imprévue de l'armée française. Bientôt surgirent desmoeurs, nouvelles et passionnées. Un peuple tout entier s'aperçut, le 15mai 1796, que tout ce qu'il avait respecté jusque-là étaitsouverainement ridicule et quelquefois odieux. Le départ du dernierrégiment de l'Autriche marqua la chute des idées anciennes: exposer savie devint à la mode; on vit que pour être heureux après des siècles desensations affadissantes, il fallait aimer la patrie d'un amour réel etchercher les actions héroïques. On était plongé dans une nuit profondepar la continuation du despotisme jaloux de Charles-Quint et de PhilippeII; on renversa leurs statues, et tout à coup l'on se trouva inondé delumière. Depuis une cinquantaine d'années, et à mesure quel'Encyclopédie et Voltaire éclataient en France, les moines criaient aubon peuple de Milan, qu'apprendre à lire ou quelque chose au monde étaitune peine fort inutile, et qu'en payant bien exactement la dîme à soncuré et lui racontant fidèlement tous ses petits péchés, on était à peuprès sûr d'avoir une belle place au paradis. Pour achever d'énerver cepeuple autrefois si terrible et si raisonneur, l'Autriche lui avaitvendu à bon marché le privilège de ne point fournir de recrues a son armée.

En 1796 l'armée milanaise se composait de vingt-quatre faquins habillésde rouge, lesquels gardaient la ville de concert avec quatre magnifiquesrégiments de grenadiers hongrois. La liberté des moeurs était extrême,mais la passion fort rare; d'ailleurs, outre le désagrément de devoirtout raconter au curé, sous peine de ruine même en ce monde, le bonpeuple de Milan était encore soumis à certaines petites entravesmonarchiques qui ne laissaient pas que d'être vexantes. Par exemplel'archiduc ', qui résidait à Milan et gouvernait au nom de l'empereur,son cousin, avait eu l'idée lucrative de faire le commerce des blés. Enconséquence, défense aux paysans de vendre leurs grains jusqu'à ce queSon Altesse eût rempli ses magasins.

English (translated by Scott–Moncrieff)

On the 15th of May, 1796, General Bonaparte made his entry into Milan at the head of that young army which had shortly before crossed the Bridge of Lodi and taught the world that after all these centuries Caesar and Alexander had a successor. The miracles of gallantry and genius of which Italy was a witness in the space of a few months aroused a slumbering people; only a week before the arrival of the French, the Milanese still regarded them as a mere rabble of brigands, accustomed invariably to flee before the troops of His Imperial and Royal Majesty; so much at least was reported to them three times weekly by a little news-sheet no bigger than one’s hand, and printed on soiled paper.

In the Middle Ages the Republicans of Lombardy had given proof of a valour equal to that of the French, and deserved to see their city razed to the ground by the German Emperors. Since they had become loyal subjects, their great occupation was the printing of sonnets upon handkerchiefs of rose-coloured taffeta whenever the marriage occurred of a young lady belonging to some rich or noble family. Two or three years after that great event in her life, the young lady in question used to engage a devoted admirer: sometimes the name of the cicisbeo chosen by the husband’s family occupied an honourable place in the marriage contract. It was a far cry from these effeminate ways to the profound emotions aroused by the unexpected arrival of the French army. Presently there sprang up a new and passionate way of life. A whole people discovered, on the 15th of May, 1796, that everything which until then it had respected was supremely ridiculous, if not actually hateful. The departure of the last Austrian regiment marked the collapse of the old ideas: to risk one’s life became the fashion. People saw that in order to be really happy after centuries of cloying sensations, it was necessary to love one’s country with a real love and to seek out heroic actions. They had been plunged in the darkest night by the continuation of the jealous despotism of Charles V and Philip II; they overturned these monarchs’ statues and immediately found themselves flooded with daylight. For the last half-century, as the Encyclopaedia and Voltaire gained ground in France, the monks had been dinning into the ears of the good people of Milan that to learn to read, or for that matter to learn anything at all was a great waste of labour, and that by paying one’s exact tithe to one’s parish priest and faithfully reporting to him all one’s little misdeeds, one was practically certain of having a good place in Paradise. To complete the debilitation of this people once so formidable and so rational, Austria had sold them, on easy terms, the privilege of not having to furnish any recruits to her army.

In 1796, the Milanese army was composed of four and twenty rapscallions dressed in scarlet, who guarded the town with the assistance of four magnificent regiments of Hungarian Grenadiers. Freedom of morals was extreme, but passion very rare; otherwise, apart from the inconvenience of having to repeat everything to one’s parish priest, on pain of ruin even in this world, the good people of Milan were still subjected to certain little monarchical interferences which could not fail to be vexatious. For instance, the Archduke, who resided at Milan and governed in the name of the Emperor, his cousin, had had the lucrative idea of trading in corn. In consequence, an order prohibiting the peasants from selling their grain until His Highness had filled his granaries.

Occidental

Traductet de Robert Winter

Version 1.0 (publicat 5 januar 2011)

Ye 15 may 1796, Generale Bonaparte fat su intrada ad-in Milano al cap de ti yun armé quel hat recentmen transeat li Ponte de Lodi e hat docet al munde que pos tant mult centennies César e Alexander havet un successor. Li miracules de bravore e de genie, de queles Italia esset un testimon, in quelc mensus avigilat un dormient popul; ancor un semane ante li ariva del Francéses, li Milanéses opinet que ili esset nequó plu quam un bande de brigantes, acustomat a sempre fugir avan li truppes de Su Imperial e Reyal Majestie: admínim ti esset raportat a les, tri vezes por semane in un micri jurnale, tam micri quam un manu, impresset sur sordid papere.

In li medievie, li Republicanes de Lombardia hat pruvat que su bravore egalat li bravore del Francéses, e ili meritet vider lor cité rasat til li terra per li imperatores de Germania. Pos ili hat devenit 'loyal subjectes' lor principal afere esset li printation de sonettos sur nas-linettes de tafta alquande evenit un maritage de un yun fémina qui apartenet a alcun nobil o rich familie. Du o tri annus pos ti grand epoca in su vive, un tal fémina typicmen prendet un 'servient cavaliero': quelcvez li nómine de cicisbeo, selectet per li familia del marito, ocupat un honorabil loc in li contrate de maritage. It esset un grand distantie ínter ti-ci efiminat mores e li profund emotiones incitat per li subit ariva del francesi armé. Un tot popul decovrit, ye 15 may 1796, que omnicós quel it antey hat respectat esset supremen ridicul e quelcvez odiosi. Li departe del ultim austrian regiment marcat li cade del ancian idés: riscar su vive devenit secun li moda; on videt que por esser felici pos centennies de nauseant sensationes, it esset necessi amar su país con un real amore e serchar heroic actiones. Ili hat esset plongeat ad-in un profund nocte per li continuation de invidiosi despotisme de Carolo V e de Philippo II; ili renversat lor statues, e subitmen ili esset inundat de lúmine. Durante un demí-centennie, durante que li Enciclopedie e Voltaire expandet se in Francia, li monacos criat ad li bon popul de Milano que aprender a leer, o aprender alquó, esset un mult ínutil pena, e que in payant exactmen su decesim a su pastor e racontant fidelmen a le omni su micri ofenses, on vell presc certmen haver un bon loc in paradise. Por totmen acompleer li debilisation de ti popul, antey tant formidabil e tant rational, Austria hat vendit a les, ínexpensivmen, li privilegie de ne deve furnir alquel recrutes a su armé.

In 1796, li milanés armé consistet de duantquar rascales vestit in rubie, queles gardat li cité junt con quar magnific regimentes de hungar grenaderos. Libertá de mores esset extrem, ma passion esset mult rar; altrimen, ultra li ínplesentesse de dever racontar omnicós a su pastor, por evitar ruine mem in ti-ci munde, li bon popul de Milano esset ancor subjectet a cert litt monarchic impedimentes queles sin dúbite deve har esset vexant. Por exemple, li archi-duc, qui residet in Milano e guvernat in li nómine del imperator, su cusino, hat havet li lucrativ idé de mercar granes. In consequentie: un ordon quel prohibit li paisanos de vendir lor grane til que Su Altesse hat plenat su granieres.

I see the light: Occidental, LFN, LdP all accessible!

2011-01-09T17:10:00.009+10:00

Le marquis professait une haine vigoureuse pour les lumières: ce sont les idées, disait-il, qui ont perdu l'Italie; il ne savait trop comment concilier cette sainte horreur de l'instruction, avec le désir de voir son fils Fabrice perfectionner l'éducation si brillamment commencée chez les jésuites.

Above is the first sentence of Chapter 2 of Stendhal's great French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme. I have recently finished translating the entire first chapter into Occidental, my first major literary achievement in any constructed language, which was a great relief as I was beginning to think I had wasted a year playing around with all these constructed languages for nothing, which would not have been a fun fact to contemplate considering how short life is. Apart from the obvious benefit of a producing a decent literary translation, this had the ancillary benefit of vastly improving my comprehension of written French, which to me is a very important ancillary benefit and which in itself makes it all worthwhile.

Anyway, as a result of doing all this translation my fundamental grasp of how languages work, my fundamental understanding, has greatly improved. Accordingly the penny has just dropped inside my brain and everything has lit up; I find myself bathed in light and suddenly able to see clearly, if you will pardon the expression. (You can see I've been reading too much Stendhal.)

I get it: Occidental, Lingua Franca Nova (LFN), and Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) (listed in descending order of maturity and stability but all worthy of equal respect) are actually all about the same degree of difficulty as each other, and are all very significantly easier than every other constructed language I've looked at except Idiom Neutral (IN), which is similar. And, what is more important, they all work; they simply each have a different style and a different emphasis. They are like different flavours of ice-cream: all tasty and all good in different ways. Now, please bear in mind that ease is not the only criteria on which to judge a language, and depending on what your literary needs are as a writer you may prefer a more challenging language such as Sambahsa, but I digress.

Anyway, back to the point at hand, which is that the light really has dawned on me and suddenly it seems clear that Occidental, LFN, and LdP are all similarly easy and much easier than most other languages while still remaining adequately expressive for international literary use. In particular I absolutely stand by my contention that they are way easier than the Big Three (Esperanto, Ido and Interlingua), which are all so difficult I've given up on them in bitter-sweet disgust and I generally do not recommend writers use them; in my opinion unless you have a specific need to directly reach the communities who speak those languages (which range in size between small and microscopic), you are better off learning a natural language instead; that is, if you are going to step up to that level of difficulty you might as well go all the way and just learn a natural language (my recommendations are Afrikaans or Indonesian, which are probably about the same level of difficulty as Esperanto); also I contend that if you truly find Interlingua extremely easy and you can effortlessly use it fluently then this is probably because you already speak a natural Romance language. Quite seriously, all joking aside, learn basic Italian first if you want to be able to write well in Interlingua; not the other way around. This is not necessary with Occidental, which is vastly easier than Interlingua. Again I digress, but I should again mention here that Sambahsa is an exception to these recommendations; although difficult it has many merits and for anybody even remotely interested in the history and geographical dispersal of Indo-European languages it is worth some study and it will probably end up being used in an Avatar-like movie one day, however I do not recommend it for ordering coffee at airports.

By the way, I am entirely serious about my recommendation of learning Afrikaans or Indonesian instead of Esperanto, Ido, or Interlingua. We can forget Interlingua right away because Occidental provides pretty much the same benefits and is vastly easier, so that leaves Esperanto and Ido. Well, I quite seriously suggest that Afrikaans and Indonesian are not greatly more difficult than Esperanto and Ido. Now, the first complaint I can hear in my mind from Esperantists and Idists is that the vocabulary of Afrikaans and Indonesian is not internationally recognisable. Hmmm. Stop right there. That is exactly the kind of prejudice to which we speakers of European languages automatically have a tendency to fall victim; in fact if your native language is Chinese or Swahili then the vocabulary of Esperanto, Ido, Afrikaans and (with the exception of a few words here and there) Indonesian will be equally foreign to you. But all are languages written in the Roman alphabet with nearly phonetic spelling and few or no diacritics (except Esperanto) and well suited to use on the internet, so we are on a level playing field here. And furthermore millions of people speak Afrikaans or Indonesian (actually more than a hundred million people for Indonesian) and both are already completely proven auxiliary languages in the real world, used by people of very diverse cultural backgrounds to communicate with each other in every sphere of life (from literature to business to family to government). So, if you are a writer I seriously suggest you consider writing your next novel in Afrikaans or Indonesian if you were considering writing it in Esperanto or Ido, assuming that for some crazy reason like me you are obsessed with the idea of writing for an international audience in a language readers can easily learn without requiring your work to be translated into their native languages.

Now, if you find the idea of writing a novel in Afrikaans or Indonesian for an international audience absurd, because readers will not recognise the vocabulary, then I suggest you do the following in this order: (a) take a look at Occidental as if you are writing for those who speak a European language it is readily comprehensible with minimal study; (b) if you don't like Occidental then take a look at LFN and LdP since they are similarly easy to write in and similarly accessible to readers, although not as immediately comprehensible to Europeans as is Occidental, but arguably more accessible with study to non-Europeans; (c) realise that there is no difference between requiring your readers around the globe to learn Afrikaans or Indonesian than requiring them to learn Esperanto... anybody likely to agree to do one would be likely to agree to do the other.

Anyway, personally I am currently learning both Afrikaans and Indonesian and will be reading a Harry Potter book in both languages, to get a feel for their literary potential for a writer whose native language is English.

But again I digress...

Phew! That was a long digression!

The point, and I do have one, is that I have finally realised that now that I have successfully translated over 5000 words of Stendhal's novel into Occidental, probably it would not be much of a problem for me to do the same either in LFN or LdP and that perhaps I should even do so as another useful exercise. Again remember, if you are a writer, all these kind of exercises increase your skill; writers paint with words. Painters will paint in different styles. Writers should paint in different languages. Even if your goal is only to publish in English. Read and write in other languages too! It helps to grow as a writer! And constructed languages give you a uniquely accessible opportunity to do so.

So how about these flavours of ice-cream?

Occidental: Blueberry with added liqueur. Rich and complex naturalistic flavour, with the most difficult spelling of any of the easiest group of languages. This difficult spelling is much easier than that of Interlingua but still will be very difficult for Asian writers and was driving me nuts enough to force me to take a second look at LFN and LdP. Which is when the light illuminated me: for blueberry ice-cream, the moderately difficult spelling of Occidental is just right. Take away the doubled consonants, for example (my chief complaint) and instantly you lose much of the at-sight comprehensibility to Europeans. In other words, it wouldn't be blueberry any more. It would be some other flavour, a flavour which would not be so palatable to Europeans, a flavour which they could not read so effortlessly. Same goes for the difficult Romance-language idioms: much easier than Interlingua but still difficult, you could not eliminate all of these and still have the familiar complexity which blueberry flavour represents and which Europeans can read almost at sight because that is how their languages are. And, overall, Occidental is still one of the very easiest languages to write in if you already speak English; after all, it beat all other comers. It was the language which succeeded for me and which allowed me first, before all other languages, to translate 5000 words of classic literature to a good standard of translation. Rich, sophisticated literary after-taste: handles complicated idiomatic expressions, if you want them, with ease. That's the liqueur component. Call it sophistication: capture some of the nuances of French, for example, but in a way which is internationally comprehensible and which does not take years to learn. You cannot write Occidental like LFN or LdP; you have to write it full-on, sophisticated, and in the style of natural European languages.

LFN: Vanilla. A Romance creole. Wonderfully simple spelling of the kind that makes you dance around the room rejoicing and which spelling would be vastly easier for Asians to learn than that of Occidental. And still a very effective literary language but simpler, less nuanced, and more accessible to younger readers and to non-European readers. Modern, modern, modern... backed up with great documentation and a great dictionary online. You cannot write LFN like Occidental; you have to write it like a creole. This does not mean it is not a powerful language; but you write it vanilla, not blueberry with liqueur. One very strong point of LFN: it sounds very beautiful, it has a consistent, believable sound which is a strong selling point (even for those who don't like simple spelling: you cannot see the spelling when you are listening to the spoken language). Sure, you will lose many small nuances and subtleties of meaning when writing in a creole, but you have to remember most such nuances (say, in Occidental) would be completely lost on many international readers anyway (as in English novels).

LdP: Vanilla with choc chips. Something midway in flavour between a creole, Italian, English, Russian, Chinese and Indonesian. Elements of (and words from) many languages: these represent the chocolate chips, but most of the vocabulary is still vanilla (easily recognisable words of Latin origin). The grammar is, frankly, more difficult than LFN, and also still in evolution, but on the other hand it strongly advocates facultative precision, which means if you remember to keep it simple and actively avoid complexity then you can keep it simple. Only after I started to study Indonesian did I really understand this: now I get it. For example, unlike LFN, you do not even have to decline nouns to indicate the plural if you don't want to. And unlike LFN there is no definite article (here, think of Russian or Indonesian and you will know what I mean). You cannot write LdP like Occidental but you can write it rather similarly to LFN; LdP is like LFN with a sliding, adjustable complexity control: all the way from so simple that nearly everything is determined from context to so precise that you cannot remember which of the myriad available grammatical particles to use. But here's the thing: stop trying to write LdP like English, let go of the complexity, and start using context. Start writing LdP like Indonesian. Ah, and it starts working really well. And when you occasionally need great precision, you have it. Only drawback with LdP (there's an example of dropping the definite article, rather than saying The only drawback...) is it is very young so the vocabulary is still small and the language is still a bit of a moving target, but nevertheless very good.

So, at the end of the day, I have realised that I could probably write in any of these three languages with a bit more practice (not just in Occidental alone) providing I simply follow this golden rule:

Do not fight the flavour of the language!

You see, I was thinking of creating a new Occidental dictionary with all the doubled consonants removed, and so on; no, no no. That would be fighting against the flavour of the language. Occidental is a passive, at-sight language aimed at European readers. The cost is more difficult spelling and it is a bit harder to write at times than LFN. But don't fight it. Simply use the kind of expressions and grammatical constructs that are common in modern European languages, while avoiding jargon and avoiding excessively cryptic idiomatic expressions, and all will be well. In other words, when writing Occidental, don't try to keep it simple. Occidental is not about bare-bones simplicity. Write it blueberry, not vanilla, and all will be well and it will not be too hard (that is, unless you do not already speak a European language, and preferably two).

Ditto for LFN and LdP, except they are plain vanilla and vanilla with chocolate chips respectively: they respond well to simplicity (and are easier to learn than Occidental if you do not already speak at least one European language). Do not try to write them in a complex manner. Rethink your writing to obtain 80-90% of the same meaning but with only 50% of the complexity. Don't try to imitate the complex tenses found in Occidental: stick to the simple tenses. Possibly even write your story in the present tense instead of the past tense. And so on. Keep it simple. You don't want weird and complicated ingredients in vanilla ice-cream: it doesn't need pepper or anchovies or indeed blueberries, and leave out the liqueur. Then rejoice in the beautiful and artistic simplicity of vanilla: accessible to all and with a spelling so simple it is worthy of rejoicing. Now, to be honest, I think Occidental is better for Stendhal than LFN or LdP if your audience is European, but LFN or LdP is better for Stendhal if your audience speaks no European language. And if you were writing for an audience which speaks a creole, like Papiamento, LFN is perfect and will be well received by that audience. And so on.

I have also changed my mind about the public being unwilling to accept languages which look too simple or which appear like pidgins or creoles. Frankly, who cares what the public thinks? If you write well somebody will read it and that is all that matters. If enough of us start using languages with simple spelling, for example, eventually simple spelling will catch on. And in the meantime we can just present the works as audio-books, which sound fine.

Let's go for it!

Here are some small samplers of ice-cream flavours. It is refreshing to realise that, after all, I think I could probably write successfully in any of these three languages and that they are all approximately of the same easy level of difficulty but with that difficulty distributed in different ways and requiring different styles.

Please forgive my errors. Corrections welcome. Words in italic are my own inventions (the vocabulary of LdP is still rather small but growing).

From La Chartreuse de Parme

Chapter 2, Original French

Le marquis professait une haine vigoureuse pour les lumières*: ce sont les idées, disait-il, qui ont perdu l'Italie; il ne savait trop comment concilier cette sainte horreur de l'instruction, avec le désir de voir son fils Fabrice perfectionner l'éducation si brillamment commencée chez les jésuites.

English

The Marchese professed a vigorous hatred of the Enlightenment*: “It is ideas,” he used to say, “that have ruined Italy”; he did not know quite how to reconcile this holy horror of instruction with his desire to see his son Fabrizio perfect the education so brilliantly begun with the Jesuits.

Occidental

Li marqueso professet un vigorosi odie por li Elucidament*. “It es idés,” il dit, “queles ha ruinat Italia”; il ne savet qualmen conciliar ti-ci sant horrore de instruction con su desir por vider su filio Fabrizio perfecter li education tam brilliantmen comensat che li Jesuites.

LdP

Markisa deklari-te vigorful hena de Epoka de Lumisa*. “Ideas hi,” lu shwo-te, “he ruini Italia”; lu bu jan komo salamisi sey gran dashat de talim kun luy yaosa de vidi ke luy son Fabrizio perfektisi toy eduka tanto briliantem starti-ney she jesuitas.

LFN

La marci ia declara un odia enerjios per la Lumina*. “El es ideas,” el ia dise, “cual ia ruina ja Italia”; el no sabe como reconsilia esta teror santa de instrui con se desira per vide se fio, Fabrizio, perfeti la instrui cual ia comensa tal briliante a casa de jesuitas.

* Thanks to Olivier (see comments, below) for pointing out that les lumières was probably Stendhal's attempt to get around the censors when what he perhaps really wanted to say was les Lumières. The latter refers to the Enlightenment; accordingly I have updated all the parallel translations and I have chosen the form li Elucidament for Occidental, which I think looks sufficiently weird to suggest to the reader that it is not merely a noun meaning "elucidation" or "illumination" but probably refers to that period in history known as the Enlightenment. Written out in full one could write li Epoca del Elucidament.

*Thanks also to Dmitry for helping me to correct the LdP translation; I'm still a tiny bit confused but I'm guessing Epoka de Lumisa is reasonable. My capitalisation here is an attempt to compensate for the lack of a definite article or other marker to indicate this does not refer to any old epoch of illumination but refers directly to that period of history known as the Enlightenment.

Postscript: as is not unusual in my strange journey, much of which has been fuelled by enthusiasm, I probably got a little carried away with over-enthusiasm when writing this post. Specifically, I underestimated the difficulty of making a sophisticated literary translation like this one in any language, no matter how easy that language may seem; in fact my attempts to complete this particular translation in LFN and LdP later faltered and failed quite quickly. The moral of the story: to get anywhere with any language, for serious literary use, you have to specialise in it and that takes at least some months of dedicated study.

You cannot in fact just flit quickly from language to language. I am adding this note as a caution to other writers: pick a language you like and stick to it for a few months. If you still don't like it, then do the same with another language, until you find one that suits you. Do not, like I over-enthusiastically assumed when writing this post, assume that you can successfully jump from language to language with hardly a care in the world. It isn't that easy.

Also, I suggest you judge your results purely on just that: results. Look at what works for you and what does not work (look only at the bottom-line: the number and quality of pages you have managed to write) and don't over-analyse the reasons why you did or did not succeed, for that way lies madness. Keep it to a simple question: Did it work for you or not? That's all. For whatever reason, Occidental has worked well for me and has been more productive for me than other languages; to make my efforts with other languages as productive would take study time and cannot be achieved with only minor or trivial effort.

Occidental audio-book released

2011-01-06T20:36:00.002+10:00

Following on from my last post, I am very happy to announce that a complete audio recording of the first chapter of the novel The Charterhouse of Parma, translated into Occidental, is now available for free download.

If you are interested in learning Occidental this will hopefully be a great resource for you, as there is very little recorded speech in Occidental available today.

Here are the links:

The Charterhouse of Parma, Chapter 1
Li Cartusie de Parma, Capitul 1

Download the written chapter (PDF)!
Download high-quality audio recording (MP3)!
Download low-quality audio recording for slow connections (MP3)!

The duration of the recording is approximately one hour. The first 12 minutes are an introduction in English, followed by the reading in Occidental of the first chapter of the novel, which lasts for 47 minutes!

The reading is far from perfect, as I am a beginner at Occidental, but it suffices as an auditory introduction to the language.

When I am much more experienced at Occidental I will record it again, at which time the quality of the pronunciation will be greatly improved. I would welcome new recordings, so please feel free to record and release your own versions!

You can also read the complete text of the translated chapter in an earlier post.

5000 words translated into Occidental!

2011-01-05T22:21:00.006+10:00

I have just posted here, and also on my Occidental blog, a translation of the first chapter of the French novel, La Chartreuse de Parme. In English, that's The Charterhouse of Parma. In Occidental, that's Li Cartusie de Parma.

But never mind all those links. Just go directly to the link below to view and download a reference document which contains the translation plus an extensive introduction in English and a useful glossary:

The First Chapter of the Charterhouse of Parma

Update: an audio recording of this translation

has now been released!

Download the written chapter (PDF)!
Download high-quality audio recording (MP3)!
Download low-quality audio recording for slow connections (MP3)!

So what? Who cares? I hear you ask.

Ah, well, here's the thing: My translation is 4944 words of Occidental, translated from about 5088 words of the original French. So, in round figures, let's call it 5000 words. Now, first of all, this is a staggering achievement for me personally. There is no way I could translate 5000 words into French or German despite having spent years studying those languages; by comparison I've been studying Occidental for a few months at most. (It was only quite recently that I returned to Occidental after spending most of the year on other languages. Also, I have had professional instruction in French and German. I taught myself Occidental at home, with help from one or two kind folks on the internet.) This is sophisticated and literary writing we are talking about, not some basic translation. So what this means is that a constructed auxiliary language really can deliver results, and there really is a future for literature in a language like Occidental. More to the point, this means I have not wasted a year of my life after all; putting all this time into studying constructed languages has finally paid dividends.

So what? Who cares? I hear you ask again.

Okay, here's the second thing. For whatever reason, Occidental has been mostly a dead language for several decades, with very few people using it since the mid-20th century. There is currently only a tiny community of users, perhaps a few dozen people, and one or two small regular publications. Even back in the heyday of Occidental, just before the Second World War, when the language was relatively popular and had quite a few users and generated quite a bit of international interest, to the best of my knowledge it was rarely used for fiction, rarely used for prose literature. Accordingly it is possible that my 4944 words of Occidental, the complete first chapter of Stendhal's great novel, might be the longest piece of prose fiction ever publicly translated into the language! To the best of my knowledge, for example, there has never been a complete novel written in Occidental or translated into Occidental. At the very least I am probably one of very few people in the world who have written a long prose translation in the language in the past 50 years.

So, there you have it:

(1) a massive milestone for me personally: the first time in my life I have ever been able to translate a whole chapter of a novel into a language other than English; this proves auxlangs work

(2) perhaps even a significant milestone for the Occidental-language community, as this translation can serve as a reference work for other writers and hopefully as inspiration for others to continue writing literature in this language

In other words...

... my year has finally paid off.

By the way, this is not about trying to churn out massive amounts of content or get the most Wikipedia articles written or something along those lines. This is not about quantity. It is about quality. It is better to have one good chapter translated to a good standard than ten novels translated to a poor standard; the former helps the language to grow, the latter just causes confusion.

Many thanks to Dr Olivier Simon and Dave MacLeod who have provided invaluable assistance to me directly, and to Steve Rice and others who have indirectly assisted me by means of the dictionaries or other helpful documents which they have composed and which allowed me to get this far along the proverbial road. And I am still peddling furiously to get up this hill...

The view from here is good at last. I feel like I have ridden a somewhat dodgy bicycle laboriously to the top of a mountain and am now looking around at the landscape below, realising that there are so many new places I can explore. The bicycle that I have been peddling so laboriously (namely Occidental) will now easily glide down the mountain and pick up speed. Maybe we can get an international literary community going, using Occidental, making literature accessible to international readers with less study required than is the case with natural languages. This here bicycle isn't so dodgy, after all...

A note for writers interested in learning a European language: making this translation from French to Occidental has enormously improved my comprehension of written French. I strongly recommend that if you are struggling to improve your comprehension of any of the major Western European languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch...) that you consider making a translation into Occidental of a work in one of those languages. Making a translation really forces you to think. Making that translation into a third language instead of English really forces you to think even more, especially if you accept the challenge of dismantling the idiomatic expressions somehow into plain language which can be internationally understood. This has a synergistic effect on learning, because it really forces you to think about the true meaning of expressions. It really works.

I am now exhausted. I'm taking a break for a while to enjoy the view.

Onward? Not just yet. Time for a picnic.

P.S. Exciting footnote: this publication will shortly be followed by an audio-recording of the complete translation for your listening pleasure. This will allow readers to get a sense of what the language sounds like; it sounds good, and is very literary and expressive. It has a bright future, I think.

Update: the audio-recording has now been released!