zompist bboard

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.

If you are planning to make an auxlang, shouldn't you have already researched those languages enough to know basic facts like that about them? It does not require all that much study to determine that sort of thing. You should already know, at least, that English has SVO word order and agglutinates moderately with derivation but not at all with inflection.

They're all solidly SVO but Arabic (which is still mildly SVO). Gluten levels vary widely. They all have rather large phoneme inventories and none have fewer than 5 vowels (arabic has 6). 4:2 head-last, which is not statistically significant.

Mimicking a subset of these languages doesn't look like a good approach.

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

aren't there enough o' these already?

Torco wrote:aren't there enough o' these already?

They are all fundamentally flawed. But MY project will be the BEST MOUSETRAP EVER!

The first four ones are Indo-European, so there may be many genetic similarities.
Other two, Arabic and Mandarin (the most popular of the Chinese languages), have numerous dialects.

linguoboy wrote:

Torco wrote:aren't there enough o' these already?

They are all fundamentally flawed. But MY project will be the BEST MOUSETRAP EVER!

yes! because making mandarin fit with IE langs is the best way

Torco wrote:

linguoboy wrote:

Torco wrote:aren't there enough o' these already?

They are all fundamentally flawed. But MY project will be the BEST MOUSETRAP EVER!

yes! because making mandarin fit with IE langs is the best way

You think you very clever not think oh!

Torco wrote:yes! because making mandarin fit with IE langs is the best way

Yeah, I once tried to make a fictional auxlang combining elements of Indo-European with Arabic and Mandarin but didn't get very far.

You should totally make the phoneme inventory something like Russian + /ʁ/ + tones.

It will be glorious.

Fictional auxlangs are awesome. Ones that are actually intended to be spoken by everyone one day are kind of sweetly naive.

Feles wrote:The first four ones are Indo-European, so there may be many genetic similarities.
Other two, Arabic and Mandarin (the most popular of the Chinese languages), have numerous dialects.

That's been a problem with that list. It doesn't specify dialects. So i'm hoping to learn what those genetic similarities are.

Has someone made a table with this information? Seems like a worth project.

Bob Johnson wrote:They're all solidly SVO but Arabic (which is still mildly SVO). Gluten levels vary widely. They all have rather large phoneme inventories and none have fewer than 5 vowels (arabic has 6). 4:2 head-last, which is not statistically significant.

Mimicking a subset of these languages doesn't look like a good approach.

i didn't think it would be easy.

i have my five vowels, a sad measly five. i have a good set of consonants that should be AuxLang friendly. Looks like SVO and head-last is the way to go.

Jabechasqvi wrote:You should already know, at least, that English has SVO word order and agglutinates moderately with derivation but not at all with inflection.

The first bit, i knew. The rest i'll have to research to know what they mean in context.

--

A big thank you to the useful replies.

i've reported the offtopic posts as such. Don't waste your time belittling me. Just move on to a thread more deserving of your awesomeness. It's a win-win scenario. i don't tell you guys to not make your artlangs, or make fun of the effort you put into them, or you personally.

How long have you been on this board? I ask only because reporting off-topic posts screams 'I do not have board awareness worthy of my post count'.

Rough ratings from about 1 to 5:

Morphological complexity (amount of agglutination)
(1) no verb conjugation, noun gender, plural, etc, lots of word types, lots of small tool words (isolative)
(5) extremely complex verb conjugation, sentences have few words, but words are longer (polysynthetic)
English : 2-
French: 2
Spanish: 2+
Russian: 3-
Arabic: 3?
Chinese: 1

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
English : 3-
French: 2-
Spanish: 2
Russian: 3???
Arabic: 1+
Chinese: 3+

Degree of fusion and irregularity (agglutinative vs fusional)
(1) entirely concatenative (adding word components together), little irregularity
(5) complex interaction between features, suppletive roots, verb conjugation tables, very irregular
English : 2
French: 3
Spanish: 3
Russian: 4
Arabic: 5
Chinese: 1

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
English : 4+
French: 4
Spanish: 2
Russian: 2~3??
Arabic: 2~3???
Chinese: 4+

Size of consonant inventory
English : 3+
French: 3
Spanish: 3
Russian: 3
Arabic: 3+
Chinese: 3+

Size of vowel inventory
English : 4+
French: 5
Spanish: 3-
Russian: 3-
Arabic: 3-
Chinese: 3+

Size of suprasegmental inventory (length, accent, tones)
English : 3
French: 1
Spanish: 2
Russian: 2
Arabic: 3
Chinese: 5

Syllable complexity
English : 5
French: 5-
Spanish: 3
Russian: 5
Arabic: 5?
Chinese: 3-

Voiceless/voiced consonant distinction
English : 5-
French: 5
Spanish: 4
Russian: 5-
Arabic: 4+
Chinese: 1

I didn't include a distinction on dependent vs head marking because some languages are highly debatable and changing at the moment (Arabic, French), but in general:
- Russian has case marking (6 or 7 cases if I'm correct), Arabic used to have case (3 cases) but lost it, English arguably has 2 cases (Bob vs Bob's), other ones don't have case
- English, French, Spanish and Chinese have a fixed word order. Arabic is mostly fixed. Russian is variable.
- Arabic has verb conjugation by subject (including gender) and has distinct active and passive forms. Spanish and Russian have verb conjugation by subject. French has some verb conjugation by subject left, English has less left still. Chinese has no verb conjugation.
- If you count clitic pronouns as inflexions, French and Spanish become languages with complicated polypersonnal agreement.
- None of these languages have inflection of nouns by possessor, though Arabic has the construct state for some nouns.

Jabechasqvi wrote:If you are planning to make an auxlang, shouldn't you have already researched those languages enough to know basic facts like that about them? It does not require all that much study to determine that sort of thing. You should already know, at least, that English has SVO word order and agglutinates moderately with derivation but not at all with inflection.

I literally can't believe that you wrote this.

MadBrain wrote:Rough ratings from about 1 to 5:

Woah. Awesome, thank you.

Also browse http://wals.info/ .

Feles wrote:Also browse http://wals.info/ .

Oooh. Bookmarked and saved to Delicious. Thank you!

MadBrain wrote: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
English : 3-
French: 2-
Spanish: 2
Russian: 3???
Arabic: 1+
Chinese: 3+

I think I'd give Chinese a 4.5 here. Pretty much everything except being SVO, not SOV.

Size of vowel inventory
English : 4+
French: 5
Spanish: 3-
Russian: 3-
Arabic: 3-
Chinese: 3+

I don't even... what? What do those numbers mean?

Another tackle at vowel inventories, going for monophthongs only, generous analyses of the standard(s) in each case), though an analysis with the diphthongs would be needed too:

i u I U @ e: E o: O { A
i: u: I U @ 8: e: E o: O { Q A:

English: 13 (RP), 11 oral (GA) (could also be 11 and 10, or even 9 and 8, depending on your stance on /iː ɪi̯, uː ʉu̯, eː ~ eɪ̯, oː ~ oʊ̯/)
French: 11 oral and 3 nasal (France), 12 oral and 4 nasal (Quebec)
Spanish: 5
Russian: 6 (an analysis with 5 vowels is popular too)
Arabic: 6
Chinese: 5 (an analysis with 2 vowels plus a "zero vowel" is popular too)

Syllable complexity
English : 5
French: 5-
Spanish: 3
Russian: 5
Arabic: 5?
Chinese: 3-

Unless you're taking into account Moroccan Arabic or nearby dialect, Arabic syllables are CV(C) (most formal language), CV(C)(C) (formal language, also many Egyptian dialects), (C)CV(C)(C) (most dialects). So I think it fluctuates between 2~5.

- Russian has case marking (6 or 7 cases if I'm correct), Arabic used to have case (3 cases) but lost it, English arguably has 2 cases (Bob vs Bob's), other ones don't have case

Arabic cases are still well alive in the formal language though.

- English, French, Spanish and Chinese have a fixed word order. Arabic is mostly fixed. Russian is variable.

Spanish and Arabic, fixed word order? With all that SVO, VSO, VOS, etc.? Colloquial French has some relatively extensive dislocation too.

- None of these languages have inflection of nouns by possessor, though Arabic has the construct state for some nouns.

Standard Arabic has the construct state for all nouns when they're the possessed.

Apeiron wrote:

MadBrain wrote:Rough ratings from about 1 to 5:

Woah. Awesome, thank you.

So... how do you plan to tackle an auxlang out of that when the languages are so different? E.g. should verbs have agreement with their subjects? Five of the six do, but they vary wildly on how much they do it, from Arabic full-on person-number-gender agreement to the meagre 3rd person singular present of English.

Thanks. i'll add that to my document.

Sinjana wrote:So... how do you plan to tackle an auxlang out of that when the languages are so different? E.g. should verbs have agreement with their subjects? Five of the six do, but they vary wildly on how much they do it, from Arabic full-on person-number-gender agreement to the meagre 3rd person singular present of English.

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.

Apeiron wrote: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. 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"?

It looks like you haven't read the Zompist's LCK, so I'll copy-paste the relevant parts:

People ask, what is gender for? Gender is remarkably persistent: it’s persisted in the Indo-European, Semitic, and Bantu language families for at least five thousand years. It must be doing something useful.

A few possibilities:

• In a gendered language like Spanish, adjectives agree in number and gender with nouns: los toros poderosos ‘the powerful bulls’. This helps tie adjectives and nouns together, reducing the functional load on word order and adding useful clues for parsing.
• It gives language (in John Lawler’s terms) another dimension to seep into. In French, for instance, there are many words that vary only in gender: port/porte, fil/file, grain/graine, point/pointe, sort/sorte, etc. Changing gender must have once been an easy way to create a subtle variation on a word.
• It allows indefinite references to give someone’s sex.
• It offers some of the advantages of obviative pronouns (see below): one may have two or more third person pronouns at work at the same time, referring to different things.
• It can support free word order without case marking, as in the Swahili example above.

port/porte "port/door", fil/file "thread/line (queue)", grain/graine "grain/seed", point/pointe "point (a dot)/point (of a spear, pen, etc.)", sort/sorte "fate/kind (of sth)".

Is it simple enough?

Maybe you’re making an auxlang, or a pidgin, or an interlanguage for talking to AIs, or something else where simplicity is a virtue. In that case the thing to watch for is borrowing complexities from English (or other natlangs) that you don’t really need.

• Check your verb conjugations... do you really need each dimension of inflection? Do you need time and aspect?
  
  Do you need cases and adpositions? How small a set of adpositions could you make work? (Some creoles get by with two.)
  
  Do your pronouns need different roots in the plural? Do you need the third person at all? (You can use deictics instead: this, that.)
  
  Do your nouns need plurals?
  
  Can you bag the adjectives, by making them nouns or verbs? Lots of languages get by without articles, too.
  
  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).
  
  Subclauses add complexity— why not prohibit them? Pronouns are one approach:
  I met the man. He caught the fish.
  “It was easy.” He said that.
  
  If something is signalled on every word, consider not doing that. Common culprits in auxlangs: number, part of speech.
  
  The defining characteristic of human languages, in some tellings, is the ability to talk about anything. But maybe you can give up on that. Maybe you just can’t use the language to talk about computers, or crafts, or agriculture— think of all the terms you’d save!

Less radically, you can ruthlessly combine categories, in the manner of the Australian avoidance languages. These are languages that were required for all conversation with taboo relatives, such as mothers-in-law. One word in the avoidance language often corresponded with half a dozen in ordinary language— e.g. nyirrindan in Jalnguy stood in for seven Guwal words used for different kinds of spearing or poking. You might have only one word for all sorts of small omnivores, or all older relatives, or all ways to hurt someone. It’s less precise, but it works and it sure cuts down on words.

(Hey, while I’ve got the book open, here’s a cool word from Guwal: banyin means ‘get a stone tomahawk and bring it down on a rotten log so the blade is embedded in the log, then pick up both tomahawk and log by the handle of the tomahawk and bash the log against a tree so that the log splits open and the ripe grubs inside it can be extracted and eaten.’)

Serafín... RAMPAAAGEEEE

Torco wrote:Serafín... RAMPAAAGEEEE

¿? (The first thing that comes to my mind anyway... Damn, I used to play it a lot with a cousin of mine back in the day.)

Sinjana wrote:

Torco wrote:Serafín... RAMPAAAGEEEE

¿? (The first thing that comes to my mind anyway... Damn, I used to play it a lot with a cousin of mine back in the day.)

my gods, bro, that looks deliciously kitsch.

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