2nd intro

**UltIntLang** · Subject: 2nd intro October 30th 2006, 2:25 pm

Message #2
Thu Jun 15, 2006
lojbaner wrote:

I'm stevo.
I speak Esperanto and several European natlangs. I'm learning unusual conlangs, including Latejami, Klingon, Lojban, Ithquil.

Esperanto as a IAL does have several drawbacks.
1) The accents are a nuisance, but using the x-code is an easy fix. Unicode and other new technologies are making this a problem of the past, but accents are a nuisance. Period.
2) The issue of sexism is valid, but minor. There are word-arounds for this also.
3) The European bias: I don't think this can be avoided in Esperanto. The entire core vocabulary, as well as most of the new international vocabulary is European-based. It can't be avoided in Esperanto. The bias itself is not a good thing, though.

An ultimate international language (or universal language) should be easy to learn and use, require only the basic 26 English letters (as the de facto standard) to write, be comprehensive in its scope, and be unbiased as much as possible (or have the biases made explicit, if they are unavoidable).

Esperanto doesn't fare too well with these criteria.

The issues of ease of learning and bias can be solved by using a strategy found in Rick Morneau's Latejami (a machine translation interlingua).
Latejami is an ad hoc language, built from scratch, with very simple, but comprehensive, grammar, and a vocabulary that is built from a relatively small number of morphemes (200-300). Its phonology is easy, at least for most Europeans, and it uses no special marks, except a type of parentheses for indicating borrowed words.

http://www.eskimo.com/%7Eram/Latejami/

Trying to please or satisfy everybody with a language derived from an existing natlang is impossible. I believe that only an a priori language, such as Latejami, can solve that. On the other hand, if there were a handful of international languages, say Esperanto for Europe, and something similar for each major language family, then perhaps the problem would be closer to a solution than it is now.

stevo

**UltIntLang** · Subject: Re: 2nd intro October 30th 2006, 2:52 pm

Message #3
Thu Jun 15, 2006
ultintlang wrote:

I had a quick look at that Latejami website. You know it better than I do, of course, but to me it looks kind of vague and difficult to grasp. It even says in many places '[word] has the vague meaning of...'.
Having said that, it is of course worth looking into.
Of the languages you know of, what aspects are good or useful? And
what bad points are there, especially in Latejami?

I was thinking of something earlier, and some questions came to mind
that might be interesting to find the answers to:
- What is the earliest known language?
- How many language families are there? Which is the oldest? Which is
the biggest? Which is the smallest?

**UltIntLang** · Subject: Re: 2nd intro October 30th 2006, 2:58 pm

Message #5
Thu Jun 15, 2006
lojbaner wrote:

Quote:

I was thinking of something earlier, and some questions came to mind
that might be interesting to find the answers to:
- What is the earliest known language?
- How many language families are there? Which is the oldest? Which is
the biggest? Which is the smallest?

Interesting perhaps, but are they relevant to the topic at hand?
stevo

**UltIntLang** · Subject: Re: 2nd intro October 30th 2006, 3:18 pm

Message #9
Thu Jun 15, 2006
ultintlang wrote:

Quote:

Interesting perhaps, but are they relevant to the topic at hand?

Well, apart from the general languages connection, it might help to decide certain things, like, for example, where word roots should come from.
Granted, it has nothing much to do with Latejami. My apologies. Razz

**UltIntLang** · Subject: Re: 2nd intro October 30th 2006, 3:42 pm

Message #12
Thu Jun 15, 2006
lojbaner wrote:

Quote:

Well, apart from the general languages connection, it might help to decide certain things, like, for example, where word roots should come from.
Granted, it has nothing much to do with Latejami.

I guess my point is that word roots are best chosen arbitrarily, with no connection between them and any existing language. That sounds like it would be harder to learn, but it's equally hard (or easy) for everyone. There would be no favored group, as there is with Esperanto and all natlangs. Another of Ido's mistakes was to make the vocabulary even more Romance-oriented than Esperanto already is, e.g., Ido "ucello" replacing Esperanto "birdo".
Lojban consists mostly of words derived from the six main world languages by a strict algorithm (once the source-language equivalents were determined), and instead of being equally easy for all the speakers of those six languages, it turned out to be a horrible mash of words equally *difficult* for everyone. Lojban's saving grace is its grammar.

I favor the Latejami scheme, because it provides at least a root for all concepts, by using classifiers that partition the concept space without gaps. It's similar to some of the old a priori systems, such as Leibniz's, but it's workable.

stevo

**UltIntLang** · Subject: Re: 2nd intro January 3rd 2007, 12:59 pm

Message #20
Sat Jun 17, 2006
darlington_wx wrote:

Hi Stevo
I'm having a little difficulty grappling with what you say [above]. First you propose that roots should not be drawn from any language, so that learning would be "equally hard (or easy) for everyone". But you then go on to decry that Lojban is "equally difficult for everyone". It seems you are trying to draw a contrast, but I struggle to find the difference. Can you help?

Thanks
Norman