Re: [engelang] The future of languages. - engelang messages

25.9.2012 23:41, Leonardo Castro wrote:

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...

That is an interesting thought. First it is necessary to define "successful communication". Being dropped to somebody's house would require completely different vocabulary than meeting someone in a desert, for example. Elementary second language skills might not be enough in some situations...

Your list is about right. Russian should be added because of the huge land (and sea) area. Indonesian is spoken in a large area, too. Swahili is spoken in a much larger area than Yoruba, though both are used in officially English and French speaking countries (whatever that means in practice).

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.

Maybe changing words is a way to unroot them. If you borrow words in unchanged form, then you could be borrowing all the nuances and unwritten usage restrictions with it. That is especially a danger in a language like Interlingua where the words come from a small set of related source languages. It borrows the words and the semantics, and they might not be very good for global auxiliary language.

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.

Thank you. Eliminating consonant voicing contrast would be harmful for word recognition/mnemonicity, which already probably is not as high as I hope for. Word-breaking is somehow done with stress, but that is unreliable because people often apply their native language accent also in speaking foreign languages. But that's a trade-off for having more "real" vocabulary.

-- 
Risto Kupsala