Ial - New pages [en]

SyllablesList

Ant — Thu, 19 Jul 2012 20:48:15 GMT

Ant:

This is the list of all possible 180 syllables for the alphabet:

(A I U M N P T K S L)

A
I
U
AM
AN
IM
IN
UM
UN
AI
AU
AIM
AIN
AUM
AUN
MA
MI
MU
MAM
MAN
MIM
MIN
MUM
MUN
MAI
MAU
MAIM
MAIN
MAUM
MAUN
NA
NI
NU
NAM
NAN
NIM
NIN
NUM
NUN
NAI
NAU
NAIM
NAIN
NAUM
NAUN
PA
PI
PU
PAM
PAN
PIM
PIN
PUM
PUN
PAI
PAU
PAIM
PAIN
PAUM
PAUN
TA
TI
TU
TAM
TAN
TIM
TIN
TUM
TUN
TAI
TAU
TAIM
TAIN
TAUM
TAUN
KA
KI
KU
KAM
KAN
KIM
KIN
KUM
KUN
KAI
KAU
KAIM
KAIN
KAUM
KAUN
SA
SI
SU
SAM
SAN
SIM
SIN
SUM
SUN
SAI
SAU
SAIM
SAIN
SAUM
SAUN
LA
LI
LU
LAM
LAN
LIM
LIN
LUM
LUN
LAI
LAU
LAIM
LAIN
LAUM
LAUN
PLA
PLI
PLU
PLAM
PLAN
PLIM
PLIN
PLUM
PLUN
PLAI
PLAU
PLAIM
PLAIN
PLAUM
PLAUN
TLA
TLI
TLU
TLAM
TLAN
TLIM
TLIN
TLUM
TLUN
TLAI
TLAU
TLAIM
TLAIN
TLAUM
TLAUN
KLA
KLI
KLU
KLAM
KLAN
KLIM
KLIN
KLUM
KLUN
KLAI
KLAU
KLAIM
KLAIN
KLAUM
KLAUN
SLA
SLI
SLU
SLAM
SLAN
SLIM
SLIN
SLUM
SLUN
SLAI
SLAU
SLAIM
SLAIN
SLAUM
SLAUN

Here is the computer program used to generate it, useful if we make any change to the alphabet.

#!/usr/bin/ecl -shell
#|
Morpheme list generator in Common Lisp.

For the Optimal International Auxiliary Language project.
See: http://editthis.info/ial

This should work in any Common Lisp implementation
(e.g. ECL, CLISP, SBCL, ...)

Released under the public domain.
Author: Antonio Bonifati <http://ninuzzo.github.com/about.html>
|#

;;; Definitions BEGIN:
(defconstant +vowels+ '(a i u))
(defconstant +nasals+ '(m n))
(defconstant +liquids+ '(l))
(defconstant +consonants-before-liquids+ '(p t k s))
(defconstant +consonants+
(append +nasals+ +consonants-before-liquids+ +liquids+))
(defconstant +alphabet+ (append +vowels+ +consonants+))

(defun diphthongp (letter-list)
"Return T (true) if letter-list is a diphthong, NIL (false) otherwise."
;; Implement here your definition of diphthong.
(let ((first-letter (first letter-list))
(second-letter (second letter-list)))
(and (= (length letter-list) 2) (eq first-letter 'a)
(or (eq second-letter 'i) (eq second-letter 'u)))))

(defun vowel-start-syllables ()
"Returns the list of all possible syllables beginning with a vowel."
(append (vowels) (nasalize (vowels)) (diphthongs) (nasalize (diphthongs))))

(defun syllables ()
"Returns the list of all possible syllables."
(append (vowel-start-syllables) (prefix-consonant (vowel-start-syllables))
(prefix-consonant (prefix-consonant (vowel-start-syllables) '(l))
+consonants-before-liquids+)))
;;; Definitions END.

;;; Utility functions BEGIN:
(defun cross-product (list-1 list-2)
"Couple each element of list-1 to each element of list-2 and return the list of pairs so obtained."
#|
Here is another more Common-Lispy implementation using the loop macro:
(loop for elem-1 in list-1 append
(loop for elem-2 in list-2 collect (list elem-1 elem-2))))
|#
(mapcan #'(lambda (elem-1)
(mapcar #'(lambda (elem-2) (list elem-1 elem-2)) list-2))
list-1))

(defun diphthongs ()
"Return the list of all possible diphthongs."
(remove-if-not #'diphthongp (cross-product +vowels+ +vowels+)))

(defun vowels ()
"Return the list of all possible vowels."
(mapcar #'list +vowels+))

(defun consonants ()
"Return the list of all possible consonants."
(mapcar #'list +consonants+))

(defun nasalize (syllable-list)
"Nasalize syllable-list by adding a nasal at the end of each syllable and return the new list."
(cross-product syllable-list +nasals+))

(defun prefix-consonant (syllable-list &optional (consonant-list +consonants+))
"Prefix syllable-list with consonants from consonant-list and return the new list."
(cross-product consonant-list syllable-list))

(defun flatten (list)
"Return the flattened version of a list."
(if list
(if (atom list)
(list list)
(mapcan #'flatten list))))

(defun princ-symbol-list (symbol-list)
"Print all the symbols of symbol-list in a row on a fresh line."
(fresh-line)
(mapc #'(lambda (symbol) (princ symbol)) symbol-list))

(defun princ-syllable-list (syllable-list)
"Output syllable-list in a destructured human-readable form."
(mapc #'princ-symbol-list (mapcar #'flatten (syllables))))
;;; Utility functions END.

;;; Main program BEGINS:
(print +alphabet+)
(defparameter syllable-list (syllables))
(print (length syllable-list))
;;; Uncomment to print syllables with internal structure.
;(print syllable-list)
(princ-syllable-list syllable-list)
;; Main program ENDS.

Verbs

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:05:24 GMT

Ant: Created page with 'We should form transitive, intransitive and causative verbs in some completely regular, predictable and well-defined manner, so one does not have to memorize whether a verb is in…'

We should form transitive, intransitive and causative verbs in some completely regular, predictable and well-defined manner, so one does not have to memorize whether a verb is inherently transitive or intransitive.

Adjectives

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:04:42 GMT

Ion+anthos:

They are always invariable, both in gender and number.

TODO: to be decider whether they should precede or follow the nouns which they modify. In some languages (e.g. Italian), both position are possible with a subtle difference in meaning. We better make a simple about their position, I propose the noun comes first because is more important.

They could be stacked in any order, I propose the most important should come first (this should be a general syntactic criterion without exceptions, whenever order is free: what comes first is connsidered more important).

No Royal Order of Adjectives as in English. That adds nothing but more complexity requiring more memorization of rules.

Syntax

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:02:32 GMT

Ant:

That is the rules for combining words into grammatical sentences and recognise the ungrammatical ones, should be fully specified and as simple as possible, to ease the specification itself but also ease learning the language for humans first and, as a secondary objective, ease processing by computers. The latter is important for the World Wide Web, e.g. would power intelligent search engines to better locate information.

The order of elements in a simple phrase is strictly (that is always) Subject + Verb + Object (SVO). This has been chosen over other five possible order or no fix order at all, because of its several advantages:

* no need for inflections (e.g. nominative/accusative) or any other kind of marker words to tell the subject from the object: nominative and accusative have the same form, we take advantage of word order to distinguish them. Because a distinction must be made, this cannot be let ambiguous. We must make a sintactic distinction of any type, because there are some cases where semantics alone cannot disambiguate: ''the ball hit my foot'', ''my foot hit the ball'' both make sense.
* the verb in the middle separates subject and object, making them more distinct than other orders like VSO, VOS, SOV and OSV, which put the object right after the subject or vice versa.
* Unlike OVS, we prefer the subject too be the first to be processed by listeners brain. The most used verbal form is the active form, where the subject is also the semantic agent or a topic (e.g. your book is interesting, your book is the topic). Given the necessity to have a convenient fixed structure, it makes sense to have always the subject in sentence-initial position.

Another option could be trying to get to a compromise between ease of processing by humans and syntactic simplicity, wee should adopt an VSO structure as described by
[http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/syntax.html Rich Morneau: Designing an artificial language - Syntax]

TODO: This is the place to discuss pros and cons of each these two alternatives. We should make a definite choice soon in order to go on.

Vocabulary

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:01:07 GMT

Ant: Created page with 'It'll be established ''a priori'', that is invented and not borrowed directly from existent languages. To begin with, we will study frequency lists from many languages and attemp…'

It'll be established ''a priori'', that is invented and not borrowed directly from existent languages.
To begin with, we will study frequency lists
from many languages and attempt to identify the most frequent underlying concepts and for each concept we will choose an English word to represent it along with an explanation and a frequency number. When we have this small vocabulary of carefully chosen most used root words in mundane (non-technical) conversation expressed in English, we will use a computer program to translate it randomly into the new language. Well, not completely at random. Words should have the desired syllable structure and respect some other constraints we will incrementally build into the program (e.g. using the most shortest morphemes available, avoiding similar words for related meanings, etc). So this lexicon generator will be developed incrementally. When the results of a generation are enough satisfying, the vocabulary will be converted in a set of dynamic web pages to make it easy to discuss and amend it manually and collaboratively. That will be the live vocabulary of the language, a reference for its first users. Initially ever-changing, it will stabilize in time until the first version of the standard will be released.

Words with similar meaning should not look similar. That does not help human memory. On the contrary it makes mixing up words easier.
Morphemes will be created randomly from a pool of all words having the syllable structure outlined above. Common words should generally be associated to shorter morphemes than less common one. When, everything else being equal, there is a choice between some candidates for a certain word, the one that has a resemblance with a natural language word will be chosen, but this choice is just a temporary convenience and can be reviewed in the future. Similarity to existent languages has the lowest weight in this project.

No synonyms. E.g. in English there are a heck of a lot of ways to say stupid (please contribute more ones for this list, I am not a native):

cretin, dim-witted, dolt, fool, git, idiot, klutz, obtuse, pillock, silly, stupid, sucker, twit

some less direct (because they have other unrelated meanings) are:

beastly, clod, dense, dopey, dumb, goof, goon, half-baked, lamer

It seems people are constantly looking for new original ways to say stupid. This is not an English problem, it happens in any language. And this is just an example for one meaning (stupid) amongst the many a language has. Such pollution of the vocabulary should be avoided: one meaning, one way to say it only, whether using a single or compound word or paraphrase or whatever, but please only one, else it will be a stupid language LOL Seriously an AL cannot afford to have synonyms. Nuances of meanings are traded for the sake of simplicity and ease of learning.

Morphology

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:00:09 GMT

Ion+anthos: /* Compound words */

== Forbidden syllables combinations ==

Juxtaposing of a syllable ending in n,m with another beginning with the same consonant is forbidden. E.g. kanna is not a valid combination, you cannot combine kan and na into kan-na, although kan or na is a valid syllables by itself. That is you can say nakan or kana. mm and nn are disallowed to avoid gemination (many speakers find lengthening consonants rather difficult).

== Loans ==

Bringing foreign words into the vocabulary is forbidden, because we want the language to remain neutral.

== Compound words ==

Every compound word must be made from meaningful constituents only, that is no affixes (prefixes or suffixs) without meaning should ever be used. No matter if it doesn't look pretty, we are not after beauty here.
Compound words are made up simply by juxtaposition. If the result is ambiguous, constituent words will have to be changed (also when they are used alone) to eliminate any out-of-context ambiguity without sacrificing regularity. In other words, the language lexicon must incrementally be devised so that all word combinations that are part of the vocabulary (not any possible juxtaposition of words) are not morphologically ambiguous. That is any compound words can be split into his constituents words in only one way: AB cannot yield C and D, but only A and B, where AB,A,B,C,D are all words with a meaning by itself.
Periodic automatic checks of the vocabulary will be perfromed to spot such problems.

Any compound word should be assigned a meaning as specific as given by its constituents, it does not matter how common or uncommon the meaning is. Regularity is more important. More words should be added, making the compound longer, to express more particular meanings. E.g. ItalianTeacher is ambiguous. ItalianLanguageTeacher and teacher from Italy are preferable. If a precise meaning cannot be captured exactly by a compound word, a unique word must be made. This is better than giving to a broad literal meaning of a compound word a rather specific one, which is not implied by all its constituents. The opposite should be avoided too, that is no specific literal meaning should be generalized into a broader one. Each compound word must be enough specific for its intended meaning but not more specific.
When you define compound words, try to think to one or more paraphrases a language learner would use for a word he misses and try to choose the smallest subset of words from such paraphrases which can capture the meaning of the new compound word as exactly as possible. Check out your choice by asking different people to guess the exact meaning from the compound word, because this is what want our vocabulary to be: logical and a breeze to learn. For instance the English word doorbell is a better choice than the Italian campanello, which means small bell. Using smalldoorbell or alike would be redundant: there are no big bells on door. This wiki is the place to discuss various solutions adopted by natural languages, take the clue from them and select the best one, sticking to our goals of uniformity, simplicity and specificity.
The goal is that our language users should be able to guess in vocabulary and to guess right most of the times. Do not forget it!
For this very reason, irregulaties, changes or modifications of roots (in inflected forms, plurals, etc.) must be avoided, for how slight they are. There should be only one way to do the same thing, stick to the Occam's razor.
The less a speaker has to memorize, the better it is. We want people to learn our language quickly, or it won't be adopted. Language beauty is not our goal, too. This is a mundane tool, not a piece of art, but that does not mean the whole thing will look ugly and dull, because even simplicity and regularity have their charm.

StressIntonationPhonology

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:59:21 GMT

Ant: Created page with '== Stress == In any polysyllabic word, the stress is always on the first vowel of the first syllable, that is to say on the first vowel (a syllable has always at least one vowel…'

== Stress ==

In any polysyllabic word, the stress is always on the first vowel of the first syllable, that is to say on the first vowel (a syllable has always at least one vowel). This helps to mark the beginning of each word in speaking, along with a small pause between one word and another. There cannot be phonemic differences based on stress and the stress does not need to be marked on words in writing, since there is such simple consistent rule: it always falls on the first vowel of each word, that is the first vowel of the first syllable.

== Intonation ==

Intonation is free: any speaker can use whatever pattern of intonation he desires, e.g. more emphasis can be given to one or more words in a sentence to stress them.

== Phonology ==

This is a perfectly phonetic language: there is a strict one-to-one relationship between each phoneme and grapheme, no exceptions allowed, including silent letters. This is to ease both writing and reading.

Syllables

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:56:43 GMT

Ant: /* One-syllable words */

A syllable may begin with a vowel, diphthong or with any single consonant, or with a consonant followed by l.

L is a liquid consonant, where liquid means articulated without friction. Because of that, the l can be prolonged like a vowel. Another common liquid consonant is r, but that has been discarded because of its difficulty of pronunciation for too a many speakers.

TODO: if you find the cluster consonant+liquid+vowel difficult to pronounce, please let me know. Try to say pla, tla, kla, sla, amla, anla.

A syllable may end in a vowel or diphthong, or a nasal consonant (m, n, both produced through the nose with the mouth closed). No other kinds of consonants are allowed at the end of a syllable, because they are not easy to pronounce for all speakers, especially if they happen to be at the end of a word. A syllable must have at least one vowel, because otherwise pronunciation is almost impossible. This is also true in much more phonetically-complex natural languages :)

Sequences of more than two vowels in a row (e.g. miau) cannot occur as well as all kinds of consonant clusters: they both may be difficult to pronounce for some speakers, especially couplings like pt, ks (an x sound), or even sts. We ban all consonants pair and triplets, not only in a syllable, but also between syllables, except for the liquid consonant l which may follow any other consonant. No consonant gemination occurs (e.g. there can be no double consonants that must be prolonged, because many speakers find it difficult).

Despite having excluded all troublesome phonemes combinations, the allowed ones are sufficient to produce 180 different syllables.

Natural languages can have a lot more syllables, but the cost is loosing ease of pronunciation and they do not take advantage of but a few combinations. Anyway, care must be taken in choosing words. E.g. very similar words (whether one-syllable words or longer)should not be used for related meanings, since doing so increases the probability of misunderstanding if there should be a typographical error in a piece of text or a loud bit of background noise during a conversation.

== One-syllable words ==

This is a list of all possible monosyllabic morphemes:

15 syllables beginning with a vowel:
a
am
an
ai
aim
ain
au
aum
aun
i
im
in
u
um
un

7*15=105 syllables beginning with only one consonant:
any of the first group prefixed with any of p,t,k,s,l,m,n

4*15=60 syllables beginning with two consonants:
any of the first group prefixed with
p,t,k,s + l

Note mla, nla cannot be found at the beginning of a word/syllable, only in separate syllables: (any vowel here)m-la, (any vowel here)n-la.

A [[SyllablesList|list of all the possible syllables]] is available.

DiphthongsHiatuses

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:52:59 GMT

Ion+anthos: /* Diphthongs and hiatuses */

== Diphthongs and hiatuses ==

A diphthong is a combination of two different vowel sounds that can be pronounced one after the other, without interruption between the first and the second. In other word the articulation of the first vowel moves seamlessly to the other.

Conversely, a hiatus is a group of two near vowels that separate.

If you only have three vowels a, i, u, you can glide from a to i or u, which gives you two diphthongs: ai and au. But note i-a, i-u, u-a and u-i are all hiatuses, that is these vowel combinations can only be articulated separatedly and thus they belong to separate syllables. In our language this remains true even if i,u are preceded by a consonant, e.g. ti-a (this is not a one-sylllable /tja/ sound, there is not j or y sound and even if there were we would have written tja, not tia).

No more than six two-vowel combinations are possible with three vowels.

For instance,Spanish has diphthongs, hiatus and syllable division( strong vowels: a, e, o and weak vowels: i,u). Two strong vowels beside are called hiatus(e.g. in the word correo the last vowels "eo" create a hiatus). A strong vowel and a weak vowel next to each other are named a diphthong (e.g. puerto, "ue" build a diphthong).

Alphabet

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:51:16 GMT

Ant:

== Alphabet ==

For our international Auxiliary Language (AL), we better borrow from the Latin/Roman alphabet, only because it is already well-known and, even if a few people are not familiar with it, it is supported by all existent writing systems (including computers). The alphabet could be:

a i u m n p t k s l

The proposed order of letters is mnemonic: first the three vowels, then the seven consonants. It also helps to remember the main points of the strict syllabic structure of the language, which are described in more details below. In the same syllable: after a vowel only an m or an n can come. P t k s are the only other consonants that can comee before the liquid l (again in the same syllable).

BTW, order matters, e.g. in paper dictionaries.

TODO: decide about the order of the consonant group p t k s, establish an order for this group that makes sense.

This very short alphabet is a trade-off between something easy for everyone in the world and something comprising all unmarked (voiceless) phonemes, for allowing one to talk at length without stressing his vocal cords.

These sounds, other than being the most unvoiced, are already present in at least 22 of the 25 world's major languages, according to [http://www.rickmor.x10.mx/phonology.html Rick Morneau researches].

But I want to hear your opinion too. Please leave a comment for this page if you do not know one or more phonemes from this list and you find it difficult to learn it.

No breath-consuming aspirated letters, like the English h. Only ten letters, just as the decimal digits 0..9. Our AL wants to be maximally pronounceable. Conciseness is not a goal.

I hope nobody would reckon such a choice as non-neutral. Apart from these familiar signs, our language has nothing to do with other natural languages that use a similar alphabet, e.g. a lot of Western European languages.

On the contrary, in the future, these writing signs could be changed, e.g. for something easier to handwrite or recognize with the sense of touch, but associated phonemes will remain the same, because they are the easiest sounds for almost everybody.

BTW, the s has always an /s/ sound, not a /z/ sound, that is same voiceless sound like the s of cats, not like the s of dogs.

When declaiming the alphabet, consonants are pronounced adding i, always i. All vowels are normally short, a speaker can optionally make some vowels longer, as he wishes, but no phonemic distinction exists between long and short vowels. Anyway it is recommended to pronounce all vowels as short vowels.

Note in particular there is no r. This is a frightful consonant that gives a lot of problems to many speakers, even in natural languages. E.g. I can only utter the r as the French r, although I am Italian I was never able to learn the Italian r and I am not the only one who has trouble with this consonant.

Moreover the sheer fact that there is no single way to pronounce the r is a source of irregularity. I rather want pronunciation to be uniform between all speakers.

There are no e and o vowels, because they are slightly more marked and have a closed and open variant which adds undesired variation and complexity. There are neither diacritical marks nor vowel mutations, because they are difficult both to type and to pronounce.

If we wanted to reduce word length, but still have rather common phonemes, we could introduce some slightly more marked sounds in the alphabet. The best choices are: e, o (which gives us five vowels) and b, d, y. Three more consonant for a total of ten. In some languages e.g. German, j has the same sound as y, e.g. German ja has the same semivowel y of yes, so this is the sound we associate to y. This semivowel is useful to allow the creation of consonant clusters, e.g. kya.

A problem with b and d is that they are too similar to their unmarked equivalents p and t respectively. If we want our consonant to be quite diffferent from each other, a quite unmarked and well-known candidate is f, so another proposal is to add the set: e, o, f, j and to discard b and d. This means 14 letters in total.

The only problem with f is it is rather breath-consuming, as you can realize by utting a hand before your mouth. If we extend the alphabet to include letters that can be pronounced in slightly different ways, we could accept all variants as equivalents and let the user choose. E.g. both close and open e or o, and both labiodental or bilabial f.

What do you think about extending the alphabet as proposed? Do you have a better proposal? I prefer to have an easier pronunciation although there are slightly longer words on average, which is not only a con. For instance, a pro is it gives listeners more time to understand and speakers more time to think before speaking!

VerbTenses

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:47:39 GMT

Ion+anthos:

No need to indicate tense all the time. As in Chinese, tense is usually indicated only when it cannot be determined from context. This rule makes our language easier for Chinese. Yet speakers of other languages like English have no difficulty at all in learning to use verbs without marking them for tense. Chinese express time reference through adverbials, time phrases like "now", "before now","after now", "yesterday", "tomorrow" and so on.

ForbiddenList

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:45:14 GMT

Ant:

== Forbidden things list ==

This list is still incomplete. Please contribute. What do you find difficult in the foreign languages you are learning? Or, if you are a foreign language teacher, what do your students find more difficult? Share your experience here. It will help us to design the easiest auxiliary language for everybody.

Reading this don'ts list is mandatory for everyone who wants to collaborate to the project. Failing to do so will invariably result in someone else pointing you to this page if you ever try to do something we consider a useless complication. Remember that a feature or rule that may look easy for you, especially if you have the same thing in your mother tongue, may be troublesome for other speaker of other languages who don't have it.

Be objective: humbly recognize that unnecessary complexity you are used to, actually looks simple to you. Do not let this deceive you, by thinking it would be the same for anyone.

* Genders (and any associated sexist feature of languages). They are arbitrary in most cases and thus require a huge memorization effort with no added benefits.
* Pitch contours, vowel length, consonant gemination (e.g. doubling), aspiration or tones to make phonemic distinctions, that is distinguish words or syllables which are otherwise identical giving them a different meaning as in Chinese. You better avoid such complications alltotegether, even if they do not have any phonemic value.
* Sounds that are difficult for people from different language backgrounds to pronounce.
* Any irregularities in the derivations of words.
* Unpredictable spellings. The AL should be perfectly phonetic: there must be a biunivocal correspondance between each phoneme and each grapheme and no silent letters or letters that change their sound depending on the context.
* Diacritical marks (such as diaereses, umlauts, acute and grave accent marks over vowels, circumflex signs over vowels or consonants, cedilla under consonants, etc.)
* Consonant clusters difficult or impossible to pronounce for everybody.
* Sequences of more than two vowels: triphthongs, etc.
* Mandatory tenses, that is when tense can be determined from context.
* Noun/adjective agreement.
* Honorific inflection.
* Inflected verbs.
* Consonant and vowel harmony.
* Mandatory gender distinctions. The best is to have no genders at all.
* Polysynthesism.
* Cases (accusative, etc.)
* Words that happens to be the same or very similar or familiar to a word with the same meaning in only one or two natural languages, unless there is a regularity in our language itself that justifies the choice of this particular word as easy to learn for everybody or there is no other good reason to change the word for a better one. If there is a choice between a set of candidate morphemes for a word, everything else being equal, we may prefer a morpheme that has a distant resemblance with some natural languages (if that happens), in order to somewhat ease informed memorization, but no more than that: we rarely or better never borrow words from existing languages. They are indeed so different between each other and so complex that every borrowing would inevitably give an advantage only to some people and probably confuse the issue and complicate the language for all others. Given our simple alphabet literal loans are rarely possible and translitteration would be ugly. This AL is not an Arlequin-language and most natural languages do not borrow words if there is already a native word for that meaning, why should we do it? Let's design our morphology and vocabulary better than any other natural language instead. Citing Rich Harrison:

... the English preposition ''about'' (when it means ''pertaining to''), the noun ''topic'' (that which is pertained to), the adjectives ''relevant'' and ''irrelevant'', and the verb ''to pertain to (something)'' could all be expressed as derivatives of a single basic morpheme in an optimal IAL.

So borrowing from existent languages often means borrowing irregularities we do not want.

Rick also hints at how a regular and uniform vocabulary could be established collaboratively:

The semantic space covered by each morpheme should be defined as clearly as
possible, and the definitions should be simultaneously written in several
natural languages, as well as in the language which is being created.
* Synonyms: if two or more words can be used interchangeably, we only need one word. One meaning (or set of strictly related meanings), one word and vice versa. Very near meanings can always be specified by adding more words (e.g. using compound words or paraphrases.
* All kinds of allomorphy and suppletion, that is one morpheme having two or more variant forms. There should be only one way to do the same thing in any context and no irregularities, e.g. one way to turn a noun into plural that always works.
* Inflection (e.g. noun/adjective declension and case tags). We rather take advantage of simpler, fixed word order (SVO is the best). E.g. no plural for adjectives, only for nouns.

* Metaphors, which are very common in many languages(e.g. He gave me a cold look.)
* Words use for more politeness(small children would say:"I want ice cream !" no "I would like to have an ice cream")
* Distinguish between formal and informal form
* Phrasal verbs ( formed from two or three parts e.g. put up with)
* Prefixes and suffixes without a precise meaning or with an ambiguous meaning. We can always create short affixes with meaning, so why confuse the issue?
* Portmanteau words ( formed by joining part of one word with part of another)
* Subject-verb agreement, no collective nouns referring to group of people ( collective nouns are often followed by a plural verb even when the noun is singular)
* Irregularities in forming diminutive forms of nouns and adjectives.
* Capitalization should not be imposed on all nouns as in German. Some people find it difficult to tell a noun from another kind of word. If at all, only proper names should be capitalized.

ProjectGoals

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:38:26 GMT

Ant: Created page with '== Summary of this project's goals == Create a language as much as neutral, simple, regular, easy for everybody in the world, adults and children as possible. A language for pr…'

== Summary of this project's goals ==

Create a language as much as neutral, simple, regular, easy for everybody in the world, adults and children as possible.

A language for practical communication, both in person and on the internet. To ease access to information and science.

A democratic replacement for English and its many difficulties and oddities, which is not imposed but comes directly from the community, just as things like the web, linux or wikipedia have.

WhyNotEnglish

Ant — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 13:23:39 GMT

Ion+anthos:

Why not (put your favourite language here)?

The truth is it is not possible to force all people to speak one language and trying doing that would even be unfair, a sort of a violence. But it is both possible, practical and desirable to have a simple international language to facilitate communication on a global level, something which is now feasible thanks to the Internet.

There are other kinds of standards on the Internet that need to be unique for it to work well and agreement had to be reached in one way or another. We also need a unique human language so that everybody can actually understand and harness Internet's power.

The reason why we don't have a common human language for the Internet yet as we have the HTTP or HTML protocols for computers is just that many people know and use English, although only at an elementary level. But still too many people find English difficult and are completely excluded and the majority of those who know English just understand simple English sentences in writing, no more than that.

So we actually have an international language, English, but it is a very bad choice for this role, like any other natural language. It is too difficult and gives an advantage to US citizens who do not have to make any effort, to the disadvantage of all others. This is why I think that there could be a way to organize a constructive reaction against English or any other kind of language imperialism and have a much better, neutral language.

This is an optimization-problem. People actually spend years just to learn a bad English, when it could be possible for them to learn well a much simpler language in one or two months only, that is to reach the same same level of communication ability that they reach in years of English usage and practice. Well, actually only very few reach that. With this super-simple international auxiliary language, everybody would be fluent enough for its purposes.

While listening to English pop songs of far-famed around the world pop singers, one can get the impression that English is a simple language. The songwriters use most of time the same words repeated ten times in three minutes and it is not possible to not remember them.A thought cross one's mind:"take English easy!" Well-nigh each second person describe her/himself as easy-going person while creating a profile. There are also numerous internationalism in our tongue languages and many come from English, at present.I could make a long list of international words like computer, disc, spam, also golf,hotel,sauna, studio, taxi and many others.
The difficulty appears when we need English for example for a job. Having the job interview with the part of it in English behind us, we realize that our languages skills are not enough for our future employer. This kind of experience make us learning English harder and in fact takes years of private lessons or courses till we achieve the good knowledge of the language.