On 29 August 1992, I (Rick Harrison) posted the first draft of my essay 'Guidelines for the design of an international auxiliary language' in the conlang (constructed languages) mailing list. This is the discussion that ensued afterwards...
From: Jim Gillogly
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 92 21:04:06 PDT
As long as you're speccing a whole new project...
For a language intended to be easy for virtually everybody to pronounce, I think you really shouldn't keep 'r' and 'l' as separate consonants. The distinction is not at all familiar to Japanese, and, although that's only one language group, it's an important one. I'd say keep one liquid, but allow either pronunciation, or, as in Japanese, any pronunciation in between them.
Jim
From: trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 10:47:22 EST
Random thoughts.
Everything desirable can be undesirable for others.
Take phonology. Limiting the phonological inventory to what is as much as possible acceptable to all leads to few phonemes. Limiting consonant clusters leads to a (C)V language. So far so good, or so does it seem. Well, let's take such a real language: Rotokas (New Guinea). Five vowels: a e i o u, six consonants: g k p r t v. No consonant clusters, no closed syllables. To me it is a frightful tongue-twister.
ouokivuia ragai ibu iare avaraepa ogoevira ikauoro
eakepa viapau rera kaakau taparevora voari
When I try to utter those sentences (they are *real* Rotokas) my tongue trips all over itself like the proverbial millipede who was asked: which leg do you put forward first?
I need consonant clusters to be comfortable, but that is unfair to those whom consonant clusters make uncomfortable, and I am not sure that a compromise somewhere in-between is not taking the worst of two bad worlds. Perhaps a language that can be read out in different ways? Latin was such when it was an international language; each nationality would pronounce Latin as if its spelling followed the rules of their own languages. Not too desirable a state of affairs, but... image a IAL with three vowels, a e o, and consonant clusters. You're left with two good, serviceable, vowels with which its consonant-shy speakers can break up clusters if they so wish. Me, it's vowel clusters that make me trip, give me a spare consonant please to break up those clusters -- not [h], I run out of breath easily; not [x] I'd end up with a sore throat... a difficult customer.
through...
From: peora!glia.biostr.washington.edu!jsp (Jeff)
Posted-Date: Sun, 30 Aug 92 14:48:46 PDT
Apparently-To: jwt!bbs-hrick
" Each morpheme should name a single semanteme [unit of meaning]
Is there any objective test for this other than 'how my native language does it'? E.g., does 'vehicle' in English represent a single semanteme? Why or why not? What is the objective general procedure for deciding such a question?
From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 09:08:04 MDT
Howdy conlangers!
Kudos to Rick Harrison for his attempt to bring order out of chaos! I certainly agree with most of the points he made, and hope that he doesn't mind if I bring up a few minor disagreements and nitpicks.
First of all, a nasal is not a continuant. This is the same mistake that I made in one of my earlier essays, and someone kindly corrected me. Thus, your sentence:
" A syllable may end in a vowel or a continuant consonant. " (Continuants are nasals, liquids, and fricatives.)
should be corrected to read: 'A syllable may end in a vowel, a nasal or a continuant consonant. (Continuants are liquids and fricatives.)'
I disagree with your judgement against diphthongs. I might agree to avoid diphthongs articulated at two very close vowel positions, as in your example 'ou'. However, other diphthongs are easy to pronounce, highly distinctive, extremely efficient, and very common. Thus, I would definitely include diphthongs such as /wa/, /aw/, /ay/, /ya/, /oy/, /yo/, /we/, /wi/, and perhaps /ew/ and /iw/ (where /w/ and /y/ are semivowels).
I would not discard /d/ and /g/ just because of the Chinese and Koreans. Even though these sounds do not exist as phonemes in those languages, they DO exist as allophones, and both Chinese and Koreans seem to have little difficulty learning to distinguish them from their unvoiced counterparts. The only problem you may run into is in teaching Koreans /z/, since their language does not voice ANY of its fricatives, even allophonically. Keep in mind that, if you give every language veto power, you'll end up with next to nothing.
The essay doesn't state it explicitly, but you seem to be saying that polysemy is bad. I don't see how you can avoid polysemy, as long as you don't stretch meanings to the breaking point (say, by using the same word with different argument structures). The only alternative to polysemy will be a vocabulary that is so large that it is unlearnable, since you'll need a different word for every slight shade of meaning. Besides, humans use polysemy automatically, and I doubt if you could train people out of the habit. Also, by barring polysemy, you implicitly bar metaphor, since polysemy covers the mid-ground between literal meaning and metaphor. I can't imagine any language that disallows metaphor.
One point I feel you should have made (or should have stated more forcefully) is that an IAL must be as neutral as possible. An IAL that is heavily based on a few closely related natural languages (such as Esperanto, Ido, Glossa, Interlingua, Novial, etc.), will be MUCH easier to learn for some than for others. My personal feeling is that a credible IAL must be just as easy to learn for a Chinese or an Indonesian as it is for an Arab or an Italian.
Finally, I'd like to comment a little on the discussion of allomorphy. As best as I can discover, allomorphy exists in natural languages either because of historical accident, phonological rules or cultural requirements. For example, the English plural morphemes 's' and 'es' and Hungarian and Turkish vowel harmony all show what appear to be 'irregularities', but are actually based on phonological requirements. Some inflection in Arabic, French and Russian show irregularities that exist for both phonological and historical reasons. (English 'en' in 'oxen' is, of course, a historical hangover). And culturally, the use of different morphemes with essentially the same meaning are used to indicate register (i.e., relative status between speaker and listener), as in Japanese and Cambodian.
We don't see 'true' or 'unbiased' allomorphy simply because languages evolve, and if two morphemes initially have the same meaning, they will eventually drift apart and take on different meanings. This is a well-know linguistic phenomenon, and no language can avoid it.
Thus, I agree totally with Rick Harrison that allomorphy is definitely a BAD THING, and should be avoided in any IAL. However, I'm not sure that this restraint should apply to the loglans. Their main purpose, after all, is to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In order to do this, they've designed a language that seems to go against many linguistic universals. And introducing a new form of intentional allomorphy is just another example of the differences between loglans and natural languages. Thus, allomorphy may be OK for a loglan even though it is undesirable for an IAL.
Regards,
Rick
From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 09:33:51 MDT
Jacques Guy writes:
" I need consonant clusters to be comfortable, but that is
" unfair to those whom consonant clusters make uncomfortable,
" and I am not sure that a compromise somewhere in-between
is
" not taking the worst of two bad worlds.
I believe that a compromise IS possible. First, do not allow consonant clusters WITHIN a syllable - a cluster should only be allowed to straddle a syllable boundary. Second, syllables should be open, or should only be closed with nasals or continuants. Third, if a closing consonant is not a nasal, then it should be voiced/unvoiced the same as the first consonant of the next syllable. If it IS a nasal, then it should be homorganic with the first consonant of the next syllable.
Thus, syllable structure would be:
syllable ::= (C)V(V)(X)
C = consonant
V = vowel
X = L or N or F
L = liquid
N = /n/ before /z/, /s/, /d/, /t/, /j in judge/, /ch in church/
/m/ before /v/, /f/, /b/, /p/
/ng in sing/ before /g/ or /k/
F = /s/, /f/ or /sh in ship/ if the following C is unvoiced,
otherwise /z/, /v/ or /s in vision/, respectively.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with basic phonology, the above may appear somewhat daunting. If so, play with the combinations for a while, and you'll see that they make very good sense. Basically, they all reflect very simple rules of consonant harmony, most of which exist in English and which speakers of English use automatically.
Regards,
Rick
From: ltb.bso.nl!maxwell (Dan Maxwell)
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 19:15:48 +0200
Re: IAL criteria
I think Rick H. has taken another useful step forward in attempting to establish a list of criteria which should be found in any ial. It's easy to be skeptical about this, of course. I believe the members of IALA (International Auxiliary Language Association) made the same attempt 40-60 years ago and I don't think much of this list even got used in Gode's Interlingua, the one language that came out of this association. Well, we probably know more now about languages and language than they did then.
In general, I agree on the criteria set up by Rick H. and the additional remarks made by Rick M. Here are a few more comments.
As Rick H. proposes that only the three major word orders of transitive sentences (SVO,SOV,VSO) should be allowed. This seems to ignore the fact that even English and lots of other 'basically' SVO or SOV languages use one or more of the other orders on occasion, eg, 'This book I liked'(OSV) or German 'Dieses Buch mochte ich' (OVS). Maybe you mean that one of the big three should be the 'basic' order, however that is defined. There is probably a lot more to say about word order, eg, if you allow some sentence types to have more than one word order, which subsets of the set of all the logically possible word orders do you allow?
On the allomorphy controversy: I'm going to side with the two Ricks. Allomorphs should be avoided in a conlang. Lojbab made the interesting point that we talk differently in a noisy environment than otherwise, but I doubt that this is sufficient reason for recognizing specific allomorphs in a conlang. If this is done, it should be based on input from various languages as to what kind of allomorphs have developed naturally from what kind of basic forms, but I gather that most of the designing of loglangs was done by speakers of English.
In general, we need to try to face the objections made by some linguists who refuse to take an interest in conlangs, namely that this kind of work is 'unscientific'. For this reason, I was glad to see the following passage in one Rick's recent postings:
'There is evidence that this type of structure closely approaches the built-in, instinctive linguistic tendencies of the human brain -- in other words it approximates what is 'burned into the ROM chips' of our computers. The particular phonemes and combinations which are learned relatively late by children also tend to be relatively rare in the world's languages, tend to be among the first sounds to disappear in aphasics, and tend to be absent in glossolalia:'
These facts, if they are such, give some scientific basis to Rick's proposals. I think they probably are facts, on the whole, but Rick or somebody ought to do some research (more detailed that quoting the general statements made by Marina Yaguello) before implementing the associated ideas in a conlang. Aren't there some graduate students out there looking for a thesis topic?
Dan M.
From: east-anglia.ac.uk!jrk (Richard Kennaway)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 20:18:21 +0000
j.guy@AU.OZ.trl (Jacques Guy) writes:
" eakepa viapau rera kaakau taparevora voari
"
"When I try to utter those sentences (they are *real* Rotokas)
"my tongue trips all over itself like the proverbial millipede
"who was asked: which leg do you put forward first?
Same here. Perhaps the guidelines should also restrict vowel clusters? To me (a typical English speaker?) long vowel sequences seem like an undifferentiated morass, which needs to be nailed down with frequent consonants, or a blur of colours which needs to be outlined in black ink by consonants.
--
Richard Kennaway SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ,
U.K.
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk
From: 'Edmund Grimley-Evans'
Subject: IAL desiderata
Message-Id: <920831.AA12698@GENESIS.NRED.MA.US>
" Some languages use tones to distinguish syllables which
are otherwise
" identical; for example, in Chinese _ren_ means 'a person'
when
" pronounced with a rising tone, but means 'to recognize
/ identify' when
" it has a falling tone. This sort of tonal distinction occurs
in a
" minority of natural languages and makes those languages
more
" difficult for others to learn. Therefore, the IAL should
not use
" tones in this manner.
This is untrue.
(1) The *majority* of the world's languages use tones.
(2) Chinese children learn to pronounce the tones before they learn the consonants and vowels properly. It is *not* unconditionally true that tones 'make ... languages difficult ... to learn'. It may be more difficult to learn tones from a book, but if you're not learning from a book it's easier to learn tones than to learn just about any other sound. Ask any blind person who has learnt Chinese as a foreign language if you don't believe me!
From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 14:27:33 MDT
Howdy conlangers!
A discussion of tone languages on conlang list? Who would have thought it possible! :-)
'Edmund Grimley-Evans'
" (1) The *majority* of the world's languages use tones.
Yes, indeed. But NOT in the way that Rick Harrison was talking
about. Using your over-broad definition, even English would be
considered a tone language, since all languages use tone (i.e.,
pitch and pitch contours) for some purposes. However, only a small
minority of the world's major languages use tone to make PHONEMIC
distinctions. This fraction does get larger if you include more
obscure languages (if memory serves, most tonal languages seem
to be in the Niger-Khordofanian family of Africa, especially the
Bantu languages). Also, keep in mind that many of these (especially
African languages) have only one or two non-neutral tones, and
use them for syntactic, rather than lexical distinctions. But
even if you were targeting your conlang at existing tone-language
speakers, you would still face serious problems, since different
tone-languages use tones differently, and knowing one system does
not necessarily make it easier to master a different system.
" It is *not* unconditionally true that tones 'make ... languages
I disagree with this even if you use your over-broad definition
of a tone language. And when you narrow down the definition to
include only conventional 'tone languages', you're going to have
an even more difficult time convincing anyone.
I've studied both Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. The tonal distinctions
were, by far, the most difficult things that I've ever encountered
in my language studies. And even after I thought I had mastered
the tones of specific words, I constantly found myself forgetting
them, and slipping into the wrong tones. It ain't easy, buddy!
Actually, this difficulty shouldn't be surprising, since the use
of tones to make phonemic distinctions is very foreign to the
way I normally speak. And language-teachers have long known that
learning how to make distinctions that you are not used to making
is one of the most difficult aspects of language-learning.
Rick Harrison was correct - stay away from tones if you want to
make your IAL as easy to learn as possible!
Regards,
Rick
From: uunet.UU.NET!cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan)
Rick Harrison writes:
" One factor which complicates the learning of languages
such as French
Gender has its uses. A good example (due to Quine):
He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it into
the sea.
The English doesn't make clear what went into the sea. A French
version, however, is unmistakable:
Il retira le manuscrit de la serviette et le (la) jeta dans
le mer.
'le' means 'le manuscrit' and 'la' means 'la serviette', no ambiguity.
Now of course it is annoying to have to learn the gender of nouns
painfully one by one, but Rick chooses the hard cases German and
French to make his point! In Spanish, Italian, and Russian, morphology
pretty nearly determines gender, and the above advantage is still
preserved.
Lojban (toot, toot) has ten 'genderless' pronouns corresponding
to 'he/she/it', which can be used to talk about up to ten things
at a time, but which must be explicitly assigned to their referents.
However, it is also correct to use letters of the alphabet as
pronouns, and then they are assumed to refer to the most recent
referent beginning with that letter. It would therefore be accurate
to say that Lojban has 17 grammatical genders: the 'b' gender,
the 'c' gender, the 'd' gender, ..., each with its gendered pronoun.
--
John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
From: trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy)
The variety of opinions about the desirability of tones strikes
me. I am for all purposes musically tone-deaf -- a misnomer, but
never mind. I can sing only off-key, out-of-tune, the screech
of an owl is sweeter music than my singing. Yet I had relatively
little trouble mastering the four tones of Mandarin. Why? Thinking
back, I'd chalk it up to my mother tongue, French, in which intonation
plays a much smaller part than in English. E.g.: I did it = Je
l'ai fait; *I* did it = C'est moi qui l'ai fait, or: Celui qui
l'a fait, c'est moi, etc., etc. So that, for instance, the third
tone did not so strongly instinctively convey the interrogative
sense it does in English.
That said, it is a pity that there is much, very probably valid,
reluctance towards tones. Tones are good for speech recognition,
I'm told by a colleague here who's into it (and consonants are
bad, especially nasals and voiceless stops), and speech recognition
is fashionable.
Now for 'et al', which is about clusters of vowels, or consonants.
{CV(V)} I can cope with, it's when it becomes {(C)V(V)} that my
tongue and my ear lose all sense of direction.
Of consonant clusters, I somehow feel that a stop preceded by
a homorganic nasal is acceptable to about everyone, provided the
combination is flanked by vowels on both sides, e.g. ambo, anta,
etc. Next would be perhaps stop+liquid with a vowel following:
tra or tla, bla or bra. And close, very close behind, stop+sibilant:
tsa, dza, psa of pfa.
Finally, an important piece of trivia. In 1974 I was in Lolovuevue
(Lepers' Island a.k.a. Omba, Aoba, or Oba, in Vanuatu). There,
'Jacques' became 'Saghi' (gh = voiced velar fricative), logically
enough once you had noticed that a motor vehicle was 'taraghi',
from Pidgin 'trak', itself from English 'truck'. I had a particularly
sharp old man for my main informant. One day, I don't know what
got over me, I asked me to 'spell out' the Pidgin word 'antap'
('on, above'). Without the slightest hesitation he said:
a - ndra - vu
'Antap', I believe, he had 'stored' as 'andravu', three perfectly
good syllables of his mother tongue, which, in that language,
would be pronounced as, indeed, 'andravu', but which he *unfailingly*
pronounced 'antap' in Pidgin. (There is no such word as 'andravu'
in the Lolovuevue dialect or at least, I never came across one).
I said an 'important' piece of trivia because I think it reflects
something we have wired-in, or close to it, and is very important
and should constantly be kept in mind when we attempt to specify
the desirable properties of a constructed language. I haven't
given any further thought to the matter, to tell you the truth,
and I do not know even vaguely what to make of it, nor how.
From: trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy)
Since John Cowan takes this opportunity to insert a plug for Lojban,
allow me to insert a plug for those languages of the Cannibal
Islands I am so fond of quoting and which I hold provide a solid
skeleton for a conlang with syntactically-enforced unambiguity.
He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it into
the sea
I'll spare you the easy but unfamiliar stuff, and give you the
Pidgin:
Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem, hem i sakem long solwota.
It's only in the minds of English (or French, or Italian, or...)
that that sentence can be ambiguous. The object of sakem ('throw'
in which you may have recognized the English 'chuck 'em') is the
same as that of 'tekemaout' in this Pidgin, as it would be in
the corresponding sentence in a native language. How would you
say that he threw the briefcase into the sea then? Let's try together:
You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem, sakem kes long
solwota.
Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem. Tekemaout
pepa finis nao, hem i sakem kes blong hem long solwota.
That repetition of the verb of the previous sentence is only a
stylistic feature: there's more than one way to catch a pig (I
made it up, they have no such saying).
From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Jacques Guy writes:
I also learned French (Quebecois) at my mother's knee, but had
a terrible time with the tones of Mandarin and Vietnamese. Perhaps
Quebecois is different enough from your native dialect to explain
our diverging experiences with Mandarin. Or perhaps it's due to
something else.
By the way, if you REALLY like the idea of using tones in conlangs,
check out Jim Carter's conlang 'Guaspi'. I believe that info on
it is available from the PLS.
Regards,
Rick
From Mark E. Shoulson
Me, I think grammatical gender as masc/fem is more trouble than
it's worth: makes for difficulties when speaking in general (even
if you have a neutal pronoun), what do you use for animals (who
definitely have a sex, but are usually called 'it' anyway). Personally,
I very much like the method used in Okrand's Klingon (and numerous
natlangs as well, of course), wherein there is no distinction
between male and female (which strikes me as a terribly trivial
distinction to bake deeply into a language), but there *is* a
distinction between sentient and non-sentient objects. Sentience
is usually far more important to a speaker than the physiological
make-up (or worse, arbitrarily assigned category) of the person/thing
in question. The criteria suggested for sentience is ability to
use language. A servicable definition, and broad enough to allow
fudging for grey areas (there are always grey areas).
That's actually one of the things I sort of miss in Lojban (not
that it should be changed: it would break Lojban's model and world-view).
Since it doesn't distinguish between sentient and non-sentient,
there's no distinction between, say, 'Who came here' and 'what
came here'. Note that most natlangs which lack a neuter for use
with objects still retain separate words for 'who' and 'what',
the distinction usually being person (sentient) vs. thing (non-sentient).
English-speakers would very likely be much less uncomfortable
with collapsing 'he' and 'she' into one pronoun than they would
collapsing 'who' and 'what'. Even in modern parlance, people are
averse to using 'it' as a gender-neutral (as opposed to neuter)
pronoun, as it somehow seems 'insulting', though it wouldn't be
too bad a stretch conceptually to go from neuter to neutral.
If I were building my own conlang (something I probably ought
to do, just for kicks) (with a different purpose than Lojban or
Esperanto or anything, of course), I would put in pronouns for
sentient and non-sentient as my 'genders', along the lines of
Okrand's 'ghaH/'oH' and 'chaH/bIH'.
~mark
From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Howdy conlangers!
Many thanks to Jacques Guy for providing us with some fascinating
examples of disambiguation from a South Pacific pidgin.
Jacques writes:
Your very first example seemed to do the job quite well. So I
don't understand what you gain by all the remaining examples.
I especially don't understand the use of the words 'pastaem',
'nao' and 'finis'. I would have thought that the sequentiality
of the events was obvious and would not need disambiguation.
Also, why did your translation contain 'blong hem'? The original
English sentence used 'the', not 'his'. In other words, I would
think that the sentence
Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes, sakem kes long solwota.
handles the original English sentence unambiguously. Am I missing
something here?
Incidentally, this method of handling anaphoric reference is surprisingly
common among the world's languages; i.e., simply use the head
noun of a phrase as a 'pronoun' that can refer back to the entire
phrase. We even do it in English a lot, even though we do not
consider it as truly anaphoric. It may not seem very efficient,
but Zipf's Law is not as well enforced among the world's languages
as most conlangers seem to think. Consider languages such as Indonesian
(with over 100 million speakers) that form the plural of nouns
by reduplication. For example, the Indonesian word for '(college)
student' is 'mahasiswa'. The plural 'students' is 'mahasiswa-mahasiswa'.
Indonesians don't seem to mind the obvious inefficiency at all.
Perhaps we should adopt the motto: Down with Zipf's Law! :-)
Regards,
Rick
Back to Language Arts Outpost home page
" difficult ... to learn'.
Subject: In defense of grammatical gender
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 12:08:47 EDT
" and German is the need to memorize the gender of every
noun. The IAL
" should either treat all non-living things as neuter or
should entirely
" discard grammatical reflection of gender.
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata: tones et al.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 10:03:17 EST
Subject: Re: In defense of grammatical gender
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 13:47:13 EST
I say: Pretty good, but not quite there yet. Try again.
You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,
nao hem i sakem kes long solwota. (pastaem = first; nao = now)
I say: Getting there! What's that briefcase he threw?
You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,
nao hem i sakem kes blong hem long solwota.
I say: Bull's eye! And do you know how you would say that if you
were
thinking in, say, Sakao, Akei, whatever, instead of English? Here:
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata: tones et al.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 07:04:11 MDT
" Yet I had relatively little trouble mastering the four
tones of
" Mandarin. Why? Thinking back, I'd chalk it up to my mother
tongue,
" French, in which intonation plays a much smaller part than
in
" English.
Tue, 1 Sep 92 10:22:55
Subject: In defense of grammatical gender
Subject: Re: In defense of grammatical gender
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 07:55:31 MDT
"
" He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it
" into the sea
" ...
"
" You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem, sakem
kes long
" solwota.
" I say: Pretty good, but not quite there yet. Try again.
" You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,
" nao hem i sakem kes long solwota. (pastaem = first; nao
=
" now)
" I say: Getting there! What's that briefcase he threw?
" You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,