Auxlangs also remind me this XKCD comic about standards. Because there’s no such thing as “perfect auxiliary language”, and once people notice an issue with one, they might create another.
Myself included - I’m not ashamed to say that my first conlang was an auxlang. I handled vocab by importing it from “the big five” (Classical Latin, Attic Greek, Classical Arabic, Sanskrit, Middle Chinese [reconstructed pronunciation])… at least at the start, then I got a bit too recursive and went for Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Semitic and Proto-Sino-Tibetan instead. (It was still “old world-centric” though. In a hindsight I could’ve used Quechua and Nahuatl.)
All fine and stuff but for which century did you create this conlang? Was your plan to send it back in time?
It was one of those “I’m going to save the world!” auxlangs, so I made it for the then current year. (This was more than a decade ago.)
The reason why I picked those five languages as vocabulary sources was naive thinking - by including non-European prestige languages, I could make it slightly less Eurocentric; and by using classical languages only, I’d be a bit less biased than by using modern languages as vocab source.
Eventually the conlang evolved (or devolved) into a grammar toy. The “classical vocab” is still there, untouched; but now I can use it to explore a bit more potential features for other conlangs, such as verblessness and the likes.
verblessness
Elaborate. Isn’t the difference between verbs and nouns one of the few true universals? Why wouldn’t an auxlang have it?
When I decided to get rid of the verbs, the language was not an auxlang any more. I shifted the goals, from “this language should help people to communicate with each other” (auxlang) to “this language should have weird features, for fun and other of my future conlangs” (grammar toy).
Isn’t the difference between verbs and nouns one of the few true universals?
Yes, it is. And yet the conlang is still somewhat functional, albeit awkward to use; it does not work as an auxlang at all, but it’s still interesting IMO. Semantically speaking all utterances have an implicit “to have, to hold”, but it has null phonetic realisation, and the boundary between subject and object is given by the lack of preposition.
And the whole language is just three parts of speech: nouns, prepositions and encirclers. Encirclers are particles that always come in pairs, around a whole NP; they’re used for focus, topic, and disambiguation.
Easier shown with an example. I’ll place a “Ø” in the boundary between subject and object, just for easier parsing. No phonetic transcription because you can read it as in IPA.
[Sentence] garja Ø wejde modo trejes. wejde de ojno Ø berga de murto, wejde de dujo Ø akitano, wejde de treje Ø homo kon eri* dengowa ara kerta ire*, iro Ø nomen modo “Galli” de an* towo ke mego na*.
[Gloss] Gallia Ø division way three. division of one Ø Belgae of many, division of two Ø Aquitani, division of three Ø person with <topic> language as Celtae </topic>, <ref. to the topic /> Ø name way “Galli” of <disambiguation> you and I </disambiguation>.
[Sensible translation] Gallia is divided in three. The first division has many Belgae, the second division has Aquitani, the third division has people of Celtic language, which is named “Galli” by me and you.
It wouldn’t be too tough to take concepts from a limited vocab like toki pona, and do vocab words by ratio of total number of speakers. Boom, ial language that’s not eurocentric.
I fucking love Toki Pona. I’m not fluent yet, but I’ve already had so many great conversations online with people all around the world, that don’t speak English or Spanish, just using Toki Pona. Really think it should be taught in schools.
Same, I love it, and its variant !tokima@lemmy.ml .
There’s another problem: a language is not just a bunch of concepts, it’s an internally consistent structure. It’s hard (or at least sub-optimal) to mix certain features found in different languages, in a way that is equally easy for everyone regardless of L1 background to get it.
A good example of that would be the role of word order. It could be used for case, as in English, or for topic-comment, as in Russian; but if you’re doing it English style you’ll likely need articles too, and if you’re doing it Russian style you’ll likely want explicit case marks. No matter which one you pick, you’re making the language for either Russian or English speakers to understand.
Makes sense.
Heh, yeah, one of the major criticisms of Esperanto is that it is quite eurocentric, too much of a Romance language – essentially, being a easy language tailored for its own creator to learn, but not necessarily easy for “anyone” to learn.
Lojban does a better job at representing a wider spectrum of linguistic influences – but, still.
