2012/9/22 Risto Kupsala
<risto@hidden.email> >
Nice work!
This reminds me that I recently tried to figure out
which 10 languages should I know if I want to
maximize the probability of successful communication
with my first neighbour if I am sent to a random point
on the globe. Let me write them down for the first time:
1. English
2. Spanish
3. French
4. Arabic
5. Chinese
6. Hindi
7. Portuguese
8. ???
9. ???
10. ???
I don't know what to put in the remaining positions.
Maybe Swahili or Yoruba, because they are outside
your "cultural spheres". Or maybe Telugu, Farsi
or a Polynesian language...
On the other hand, as the learners of artificial
auxlangs would probably be idealistic people at most,
having a mix of roots from all continents and "races"
might be a point in favor of an auxlang.
I surely hope so!
We could also take into account that loglangs usually changes
the words' roots so much in order to fit their patterns that they
their origin usually becomes unrecognizable. I would never guess
that "ninmu" means "woman" judging by its appearance.
At most, the "mu" serves as an "a posteriori" mnemonic tip as it
resembles the roots of "woman" in Latin languages.
But it would make little difference to me if they had chosen Finnish,
Swahili or Japanese to base the word on.
Besides, if recognizability is the most important features of an auxlang,
I think we should be satisfied with Interlingua, the most successful
auxlang in this point of view.
By the way, your conlang is almost what I aspire as an auxlang.
I would only eliminate consonant voicing contrast and add some
sort of word-breaking detectability. However, I admit that these
requirements would significantly decrease the similarity between
your conlang's words and their cognates in natlangs.