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Top | Miscellaneous | World Peace
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Yet another contrived language
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Ratings ( 20 )
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Idea by n8chz
Level (3)
Entered: 6/13/2000 7:24:54 PM
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Idea Description
The idea of a contrived spoken/written language is not new. The most widely known example is Esperanto, invented c. 1900 by Dr. P. Zamenhof (aka Dr. Esperanto). Other examples include Interlingua and Volapük. For about 100 years, Esperanto has been promoted with little success as a way to overcome coltural and language barriers that often cause problems between individuals and nations. Esperanto has the following desirable features:
- No irregular verbs. No grammatical irregularities of any kind.
- No phonetic irregularities of any kind. No guesswork involved in spelling what you hear or pronouncing what you read.
- A consistent and mnemonically friendly system of generating demonstrative pronouns, verb participles and many other useful constructions using prefixes and suffixes.
Unfortunately, I find the following Esperanto features undesirable, even mildly offensive in some ways:
- The mal- prefix (equivalent to the un- prefix in English) leads to possible cultural biases. For example, "bona" is Esperanto for "good" and Malbona" means "bad". Why not designate "mala" to mean "bad" and "malmala" to mean good? The choice of which antonym is to bear the prefix is entirely arbitrary. Note that "mal" means "bad" in French, so the potential for bias is further complicated by the choice of a root with negative connotations as a negating prefix.
- The -in suffix has obvious sexist implications.
- The use of diacritical marks makes computer encoding awkward. Not very awkward. The Esperanto-speaking community deals with this quite effectively by putting the letter 'x' after every letter which would be accented in classic Esperanto.
- Esperanto is a decidedly European language. Its root words are culled from an odd assortment of Romance, Germanic and Slavic languages. And a little Greek.
A more up-to-date approach to contrived language design is described (but not fully fleshed out) in Ursula LeGuin's SF novel "The Dispossessed". The people of the planet Anarres speak the Pravic language, which was invented by a troublemaker by the name of Odo (NOT to be confused with the Odo who is chief of security at Deep Space 9). Unlike Zamenhof, Odo assigned morphemes (words) to meanings using a random process, instead of borrowing them from existing languages.
I propose bring together as diverse a group of people as can be reached by brightidea.com and its participants, for the purpose of collaborating on the creation of a speakable and writeable contrived language. My interest is in participating in the process, not directing it. In that spirit, I suggest the following features:
- Use computer subroutines that call random number generators when a new root word is needed. The algorithm should access a database file (dictionary) to avoid returning strings that have already been assigned.
- Borrow the concept embodied in Esperanto's -ig and -igx suffixes. It is an elegant concept. These suffixes convert an adjective into a transitive and intransitive verb, respectively.
- Negate modifiers by spelling them (phonetically and orthographically) backwards. Facilitate this by making the word-generation subroutine able to generate non-palindromic strings on demand.
- To further facilitate the above, and also make learning the language easier, insist on a one-to-one mapping between letters and phonemes. For example, in Esperanto c, cx, and gx are phonetically equivalent to ts, tsx and djx respectively. Such ambiguities would best be avoided.
- Since we have a mechanism for generating a transitive verb, intransitive verb and antonym from almost any adjective, perhaps adjectives should have a central role in this language, much as do verbs in Semitic languages.
- Either use the 26-letter roman alphabet without diacritical marks (for the convenience of computer users) or invent an entirely new alphabet (for cultural neutrality).
- Use relational database technology to maintain the dictionary, especially during the critical early stages of development. Use distributed database technology to ensure that all project participants are working from the same dictionary. There would be advantages in avoiding redundant rood word formation.
- Work with, not against, any similar projects.
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GRANDMACMJ,
dydx,
kelly60,
Laszlo,
Sandik,
RayneStorm,
Tuggy,
RaeM,
mariya,
ashford,
robbudo,
dkw5334,
olomus,
jaeone,
goonsquad,
n8chz,
bella,
bishop,
insite,
ideaGuy,
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By Popular Demand
Suggested First By sktvm
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