What do these languages have in common?

[Torco]

I know, now tell that to my former 9-year old self.

ikr, I used to spend most of my allowance on penny arcades when I was a kid, I just never ran into that particular game. Maybe I'm younger than you? or perhaps Salvador's penny arcades got mostly vintage material ?

[Ser]

Erm, I played it on an N64... Never seen it in arcades either. According to this, it was published in 1998 for the N64, so it was four years old then...

Oh, I just realized the image I gave wasn't the right one >< , but for some old-ass version of the game or sth. xD

[Apeiron]

But that's because you speak English, do you think I was relieved to learn English didn't have gender agreement? Nope, I thought things would just be impossible to translate from my native Spanish. It can be quite useful to have to make indirect references to gender all the time. Don't confuse "simplicity" with "closer to English" either. Just think of what it'd be for a language to not distinguish "he/she/it" (as Chinese does). Do you find the distinction between "he/she/it" useful? Why? Or why not? What about the distinction between "you" and "he/she/it"?

Did it turn out to be impossible to translate?

By gender agreement, i'm referring to having to know which version of "the" needed if the chair has is butch or femme. By number agreement i mean switching between is and are depending on how many of it/them there are. Do you guys call those something else? i want to get on the same page.

[Salmoneus]

Stop passive-aggressively reporting every post that doesn't directly reply to you. You aren't the centre of the universe, and you're not a toddler either. Stop wasting my time.

Yng: no, so far as I know he doesn't read the board, or indeed pay attention to anything that isn't himself. He just comes along every now and then to complain that we drive in parkways and park in driveways, and then throws a temper-tantrum when the thread drifts to something actually interesting.

[Qwynegold]

i'll go by which ever moves toward simplicity. Gender and number agreement don't contribute anything (as far as i can see), so i'll likely ditch them.

But that's because you speak English, do you think I was relieved to learn English didn't have gender agreement? Nope, I thought things would just be impossible to translate from my native Spanish.

My L1 has lots of agreement, but I didn't think about it at all when learning English.

[Trailsend]

i'll go by which ever moves toward simplicity. Gender and number agreement don't contribute anything (as far as i can see), so i'll likely ditch them. But first, i wanna know how they compare. i'm expecting this to be challenging. That's what makes it interesting to me. Plus, i'll learn a great deal along the way.

grrrraasdlkfjsdlkj

This really needs to be mandatory reading for anybody interested in making an auxlang.

Redundancy in information theory is the number of bits used to transmit a message minus the number of bits of actual information in the message. Informally, it is the amount of wasted "space" used to transmit certain data. Data compression is a way to reduce or eliminate unwanted redundancy, while checksums are a way of adding desired redundancy for purposes of error detection when communicating over a noisy channel of limited capacity.

Redundancy is not a bug, it is a feature! If you take all the redundancy out of your language, we will just have to add it back in to make the language usable!

[zompist]

Stop passive-aggressively reporting every post that doesn't directly reply to you. You aren't the centre of the universe, and you're not a toddler either. Stop wasting my time.

Quite so. Though sometime people are a little too quick with the "read the internets noob!" posts, they have a point, and when you annoy people it's smart to figure why, rather than deciding to annoy the mods instead. Besides, the question got answered, so focussing on other posts seems particularly pointless.

(Edit: just in case it's not clear, this is addressed to Apeiron, in support of Sal's mod comment.)

[Terra]

But that's because you speak English, do you think I was relieved to learn English didn't have gender agreement? Nope, I thought things would just be impossible to translate from my native Spanish.

What was the argument that you had in mind at the time (when you were a child/teenager, I assume)?

It can be quite useful to have to make indirect references to gender all the time.

Was it simply this?

Instead of adding roots, take some time to remove some: find ways to make the word out of other roots (like = love a little; ice = solid water; uncle = parent-sib; six = twice three), or double up (one word could serve for road, route, street, path, way, passage).

Some more that come to mind:
- die, kill
- learn, teach, lesson, school
- wood, tree, forest, branch, twig
- water, lake, ocean, snow, river
- friend, love (compare Latin "amícus and "amáre")
- between, middle, center, heart

This really needs to be mandatory reading for anybody interested in making an auxlang.

I think that it'd be interesting to perform an analysis on languages and their entropy per phone/syllable/mora, instead of their letters/characters, which is what I usually see/read.

For an auxlang, sure, having less phonemic vowels has the advantage in that more people could say the words, but having more will probably give an utterance more entropy.

But first, i wanna know how they compare. i'm expecting this to be challenging.

Understatement much? Realize this: You will have to make trade-offs. Sometimes there is no perfect answer to a problem.

Sure, excluding /?\/ from your consonant inventory is probably safe, but what about keeping /p/? It's not as common as you think. Both Japanese and Arabic have lost it. The former retains it only in geminated cases and loanwords, and the latter only in loanwords, if it's not already Arabized. In both cases it evolved into /f/. (Arabic experts feel free to correct me.) And if you do include it, should you include /f/ too then?

[clawgrip]

You are right that Japanese lost /p/ in its native and Sino-Japanese vocabulary except in geminates. However it would be a mistake to say that /p/ is not a living phoneme in Japanese. It occurs not only in a huge number of recent loan words (as you say), but it's also found frequently in native Japanese onomatopoeia and mimetic words, e.g. pichipichi 'tight fitting' or 'quick and full of energy', chupachupa (sucking, e.g. with a straw), patto 'suddenly; briefly'.

[Terra]

You are right that Japanese lost /p/ in its native and Sino-Japanese vocabulary except in geminates. However it would be a mistake to say that /p/ is not a living phoneme in Japanese. It occurs not only in a huge number of recent loan words (as you say), but it's also found frequently in native Japanese onomatopoeia and mimetic words, e.g. pichipichi 'tight fitting' or 'quick and full of energy', chupachupa (sucking, e.g. with a straw), patto 'suddenly; briefly'.

Thanks, I forgot about those.

[Rin]

English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.

For instance, what is the most common word order? Are they mostly agglutinating or gluten free? i'm wondering if there are user affordances i could use to my advantage, or traits to completely avoid. The order of the list indicates the relative weight they should receive. So if i'm choosing between word orders, i'd rather confuse Arabic speakers than French and Russian speakers.

My project is an International Auxlang that would be manageable by the speakers of those languages, or as many as possible.

Have you read the various essays by Rick Morneau? His Lexical Semantics is, imo, pretty much THE IAL to end all IALs.

[Skomakar'n]

You are right that Japanese lost /p/ in its native and Sino-Japanese vocabulary except in geminates. However it would be a mistake to say that /p/ is not a living phoneme in Japanese. It occurs not only in a huge number of recent loan words (as you say), but it's also found frequently in native Japanese onomatopoeia and mimetic words, e.g. pichipichi 'tight fitting' or 'quick and full of energy', chupachupa (sucking, e.g. with a straw), patto 'suddenly; briefly'.

Please tell me chupachupa is a Romance loan and not a coïncidence.

[Bob Johnson]

No? It's onomatopoeic.

[clawgrip]

Yeah, it's a false cognate, and is onomatopoeic, as Bob Johnson says. But it's a very convenient false cognate for the Chupa Chups company!

[Terra]

Inb4 someone spots a chupacabra in Japan. (chupayagi?)

[Astraios]

coïncidence

God killed a kitten because of you.

[Herr Dunkel]

coïncidence

God killed a kitten because of you.

He is, apparently, French.

[Pole, the]

*cöïncïdëncë

Mëtäl ümläüt rülëz!

[Thry]

coïncidence

God killed a kitten because of you.

He must have done it fore þe æstheticſ.

[Yuuri]

A native Russian ITT, am glad to answer your questions.

Sentence order
(1) VSO, Head initial, many prefixes, noun-adjective, possessed-possessor, prepositions
(5) SOV, Head final, lots of suffixes, adjective-noun, possessor-possessed, postpositions
Russian: 3???

Pretty so: SVO is prevalent (but other variants are pretty common too), LOTS of prefixes and suffixes, mostly adjective-noun, both variants of possessivity, prepositions only. The word order is determined mostly by the topic of the sentence, to accent some important information.

General phonetic inventory size
(1) very simple syllables, few different consonants and vowels, words have lots of syllables
(5) very complex syllables, lots of different consonants and vowels, words have few syllables
Russian: 2~3??

I'd mark Russian with 3+. Vowel system is simple, but most consonants have meaningful palatalized phonemes, for example. Most words tend to be polysyllabic due to the synthetic derivation. But syllables can be rather weird: the first one in встре-ча (a meeting) has 4 consonants and is open, пче-ла (a bee) has stop+affricate, so on.

- Russian has case marking (6 or 7 cases if I'm correct)

You are right. Traditionally Russian has 6 cases, but vocative (which is common in the informal everyday speech only) could be separated as the 7th.

Russian: 6 (an analysis with 5 vowels is popular too)

Please don't forget about unstressed allophones, they are crucial for the normative pronunciation.

[Imralu]

Russian: 6 (an analysis with 5 vowels is popular too)

Please don't forget about unstressed allophones, they are crucial for the normative pronunciation.

Please don't forget about unstressed allophones, they are crucial for the normative pronunciation.

Please don't forget about unstressed allophones, they are crucial for the normative pronunciation.

allophones

[clawgrip]

It's called tact.

It's called tact.

It's called tact.

It's called tact.

[Ser]

Russian: 6 (an analysis with 5 vowels is popular too)

Please don't forget about unstressed allophones, they are crucial for the normative pronunciation.

Since we're comparing languages, we're only considering phonemic analyses of the vowels. I've read analyses of Spanish vowels that go for like 14 allophones for the monophthongs (and only the monophthongs!), but that wouldn't be useful here.

[Thry]

languages, we're only considering phonemic analyses of the vowels. I've read analyses of Spanish vowels that go for like 14 allophones for the monophthongs (and only the monophthongs!), but that wouldn't be useful here.

God! For which variety?

[Yuuri]

Since we're comparing languages, we're only considering phonemic analyses of the vowels.

Thanks for the brief. My deep apologies to Mr. Es·nd·r Ajpṡop for my irrelevant comment.