ForbiddenList

From Ial

[edit] 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.