After struggling with French for two years (a beautiful language), I recently decided out of frustration to take a short break. On a whim, I bought a Latin book. On another whim, I decided to look at constructed languages (also known as international auxiliary languages), and started to learn Esperanto. Where these whims came from, I have no idea. It just happened.
Then came another surprise. Learning Latin and Esperanto is improving my French! Esperanto is especially helpful in this regard; so much so that I started taking my online Esperanto classes in French instead of English. Esperanto is much easier to learn than French, although it is not a trivial undertaking. Meanwhile, reading Latin has been an unexpected joy. I only know a few words and yet already it is such a pleasure. To be able to read, without translation, words from two thousand years ago is very moving.
The wonderful, fun, easy Latin book I am learning from is Teach Yourself Latin, third edition, by G.D.A.Sharply. Highly recommended.
Anyway, I have decided to find out more about constructed languages, which allow us with a minimum of study to communicate with people from all over the world, and which have these remarkable, welcoming communities.
A great place to start learning Esperanto is: Lernu, which means ´Learn!´ in Esperanto. The lessons are free and very well done. I have found it is extremely helpful for me to learn French by doing the Esperanto lessons in French rather than in English. You can select your native language at the top-right corner of the Lernu website, then press the ´Ek!´ button to change to that language.
Meanwhile my current quest is to investigate two other, less popular but very interesting constructed languages, Interlingua and Lingua Franca Nova. My current challenge with these is to find good dictionaries that I can download and print out, to allow me to translate from English into those languages.
There are constructed languages to suit all tastes. Esperanto has the biggest community, is a beautiful (but imperfect) work of art as a language, and is the most practical choice if you wish to use a constructed language while travelling. On the downside, Esperanto is very hard to read at first and this can be a little daunting. Second biggest is Interlingua; it has a much smaller but still significant international community. On the plus side, it is very easy to read, almost without any study, for well educated speakers of English and for all speakers of Romance languages. This comes at a cost: it is much more difficult to write than Esperanto, because it is a far more irregular language in its vocabulary. The underdog, Lingua Franca Nova, has a tiny community, hardly anyone speaks it, but the language looks beautifully designed and at first glance would seem to have a great deal of literary potential. It appears to be the easiest of these three languages to learn (but you would really only learn it for fun, at this stage, since it might be years before many people speak it; bear in mind, however, that learning a constructed language might accelerate your progress in learning a natural language, just as I have found).
My plan is to write literature in at least one of these new languages, so I am learning several. Along the way I hope to make some new friends who share my passion for languages and for the written word.
Onward...
Update:
One Year Later
It is interesting to look back on this, my first-ever blog post. I would now like to warn the reader that, with the benefit of one year of experience investigating constructed languages, I no longer agree with many of the things I wrote here.
For example, I definitely would not describe Interlingua as "very easy to read, almost without any study, for well educated speakers of English"; this is merely an illusion one gains from reading extremely simple sentences and is absolutely not true for any significant text.
Similarly, I would not describe Esperanto as being particularly beautiful, at least no more so than any other language; the idea, the abstract concept, of auxiliary languages is beautiful as an idea but Esperanto itself, as a concrete implementation of that abstract idea, does not stand out from other auxiliary languages as being more beautiful than them.
Lastly, I would not describe the study of Esperanto as helpful if one wishes to learn French; on the contrary, the best results I obtained with regard to accelerating my apprehension of French came from translating French literature into Occidental. On the other hand, although not especially beautiful and not relevant to the study of natural languages, Esperanto is at least somewhat practical despite being surprisingly difficult to master.
Incidentally, the unexpected discovery of this one-year journey was that there are excellent, simple, relatively easy natural languages such as Indonesian and Afrikaans which have already demonstrated great success as regional auxiliary languages despite having vocabularies which are unfamiliar to most Europeans.
Hello:
ReplyDeleteI came across your blog, as I am interested in studying Latin and Esperanto, which are two languages that I have dabbled with, but have never been able to study in depth. I am also interested in studying Romanian, as I "know" all the western Romance languages. (I am a professional translator based in Italy - close to Switzerland - and I work into English).
I am now reading all your posts slowly, as I think they contain some useful suggestions.
For the time being, apart from complimenting you on your useful effort, I just wanted to comment on two minor points.
Firstly, I notice you use the "-ise" spelling, which I believe is standard in Australia, while the other Commonwealth countries, including the UK,oscillate between "-ise" and "-ize", with Canada normally using "-ize" coupled with British spelling. (I am English by birth and education, but having worked in North America, I try to use whichever spelling system is most appropriate for the end user).
I also note that you use the verb form "gotten", which surprised me, as I thought it was mainly American.
Lastly, in an early post you refer to the "verbose spelling" of Italian, which is rather unfair as Italian has a semi-phonetic system. The double consonants actually reflect a difference of pronunciation. Double consonants are longer and more intense. There is thus a difference between "cane" = "dog" and "canne" = "canes" or between "polo" = "pole" and "pollo" = "chicken". The Italian system is a bit complicated in its rendering of the English sounds "ch" vs. "k","g" as in "get" vs. "j" and "sh", but the system is coherent. Its main defect is that, unlike Spanish, it does not show the accented syllable, so you don't automatically know that, for instance, "Bergamo" is pronounced "Bérgamo".
Portuguese, for example, had a truly verbose spelling system back in the 19th Century: "theatro" vs. modern "teatro".
That concludes my comments for today.
Knarf Issor
@Knarf Issor: Hello and thanks for your very interesting comments. It is an honour to have a professional translator reading my humble blog. Please bear in mind that I began as a monolingual Australian struggling to slowly learn other languages, and it is quite difficult for me! :-)
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you raise the matter of my use of "-ise" instead of "-ize" when I write in English; actually to be honest this is a matter which has been troubling my conscience for quite some time and I even went through a brief period of using "-ize" before reverting back to "-ise". The reasons for this are complicated: partly because I am learning French and aesthetically prefer "-ise", partly because if I am going to reform my English spelling then I have a lot of decisions to make and I have not had time yet to consider all the choices and possible combinations (go to American spelling, such as "color"; go to Oxford English spelling, preferring "-ize" but retaining "colour"; follow precisely the Canadian model, or try to champion a new modern Australian model), but mostly because being a professional person living and working in Australia I might make unintentional spelling errors in my workplace if I use an unconventional spelling in my other writing. So, for now, I am sticking with conventional Australian business spelling, because by doing so I can always later automatically convert my texts to a different spelling system.
Thanks for your points about Italian spelling. Recently I become more aware of some of these facts, which led me for example to consider that possibly when pronouncing Interlingua words it might be good to intentionally pronounce double consonants differently to single consonants, making them longer and more obviously drawn-out. Curiously, I've noticed this makes some Interlingua words easier to pronounce! In particular I think there is a strong case to be made that "rr" should be an (unfortunately difficult) long, trilled R whereas "r" should be a very short but still rhotic 'flapped' R; similar, I believe, to the difference between "carro" and "caro" in Spanish. Incidentally, I now always write Interlingua literature using an acute accent, like Spanish, to show the accentuated syllable of irregularly stressed words. See:
http://sites.google.com/site/joyofliterature/home/literature/le-cartusia-de-parma
Spelling is a really tricky subject, isn't it? In the end, I prefer the simplest possible spelling for auxlangs designed to be EASY (such as the excellent Lingwa de Planeta) and have learned to live with difficult spelling for auxlangs designed to be NATURALISTIC (such as Interlingua). I would like eventually to see an official spelling reform of Interlingua but probably only inasmuch as its source languages have reformed their spelling and not beyond that. My opinions about this have changed, often unpredictably so, over time.
Good luck with Romanian! I too would love to learn that language if I had enough time, partly because I wonder if its vocabulary could form the basis of a useful auxlang; another language which similarly intrigues me is Maltese, although maybe less so than Romanian.
By the way, for LdP, see:
http://sites.google.com/site/joyofliterature/home/literature/lingwa-de-planeta-parma-ney-monastir
All the best,
Robert
P.S. My opinions have changed significantly since I last updated this post.
Hi Robert:
ReplyDeletePart 1:
I should mention that I am not a literary translator. I simply work as a free-lance (in Switzerland), mainly in the legal and business fields. However, I do have extensive experience in all fields of translation, including early machine-aided translation using SYSTRAN - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systran - back in the early 80s (as a "post-editor" at Xerox).
I agree that I had a head start with languages, as I was born in England (which makes me a "Pom"/"Limey" rather than an "Eyetie"/"Wop"). But my mother came from an Irish family ("Micks") and my father from a North Italian family, which is important linguistically, as my grandparents spoke the dialects of Parma and Piacenza, which you can see in: http://eml.wikipedia.org/wiki/PP.
Note how different they are from standard Italian (which derives from the Florentine of Dante and friends), cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_language#History.
My grandfather actually spoke French better than Italian, as he left his home at the age of 20 and went to Paris. He later moved to London, where my father was born. My father was a seaman on ocean liners. (He did his first world cruise at the age of 17 on the Belgenland). He spoke numerous languages, including some Japanese, and Romanian, so I have all his books in that language.
All this, as I said, gave me a head start. I later married a person from Galicia in N-W Spain, which has its own language: http://gl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portada, which may be described, if there are no Galicians (or Portuguese around), as a remarkably pure Portuguese (i.e. it preserves mediaeval words that Pt has replaced with words taken from French, such as "folga" instead of "greve", meaning a workers' "strike"), but spoken and written with a Castilian accent (they have the "theta" sound).
I 'm telling you all this to put my linguistic cards on the table, as though we were playing stud poker. Your background as a monolingual speaker of English makes you, unlike me, the ideal person to evaluate auxlangs from the standpoint of the English-speaking world.
Re "-ise" vs "-ize", etc., I would like to use OED spelling, but my Swiss customers are more royalist than the Queen, and they insist on "British" spelling with "-ise" (as does the EU).
I tried to solve this problem automatically by choosing "Australian" as default for English in Word documents, but it doesn't work, as the program accepts both "organisation" and "organization". So I'll go back to "Canadian", which also accepts "color" and "colour". (This is not BS, as I am seeing it before my eyes: on the line above neither word is underlined while in your AUS text "'color" receives the same treatment as Fr. "couleur").
Re Italian spelling, etc., I wanted to add that some of its defects can be explained by the fact that it is an old system going back the time of Dante, while Portuguese, for example, has only recently adopted a standard system for the entire Lusophone world. (I should mention that my eldest daughter now lives in Brazil, where she teaches English and Italian, and has been joined by her Florentine husband and her two children, who will soon be speaking perfect Brazilian Portuguese. Incidentally, she speaks English with a strange "attenuated London" ("Estuary" ?)/Australian accent. The London comes from my father and the Aussie from her first "love", who said she spoke "like an Aussie without the aitches". Another interesting case study).
Part 2:
ReplyDelete"Revenons à nos moutons". Although people don't realise it, Latin also had double consonants and the Italian pronunciation mostly derives directly from that. The difficulties of Italian in rendering "j", "ch", etc. are due to the change in the pronunciation of Latin as spoken by Yulius Kaesar to that spoken by Mediaeval churchmen, i.e. the ecclesiastical pronunciation which has been preserved until the present day by the Roman Catholic Church and was the starting point of the Italian system of spelling created by Dante and friends.
Re the pronunciation of "rr" vs "r": yes, that's how it's pronounced in Italian too, which differs from Spanish in having maintained a whole battery of pronounced doubled consonants, cf. It. "gatto" vs Sp. "gato", some inherited and some replacing Latin combinations like "ct", which becomes "tt" in Italian (and "t" in Brazilian, while it has been reinstated in modern Spanish: . "atto", "ato", "acto").
Re the use of the acute accent like Spanish to show the accentuated syllable of irregularly stressed words in Interlingua, I think that would be a good thing in Italian too, as even TV and Radio speakers constantly make mistakes with names of people and places. For example, near where I live there is a place called "Ambivere", which is pronounced... wait for it ... "ámbivere".
Re phonetic vs non phonetic spelling systems. The problem with phonetic systems is that they divide languages, which, with a non-phonetic system, would be unitary. Just think of rhotic and non-rhotic English. Similarly, Galician written as Portuguese is Portuguese, just as European Portuguese written with a truly phonetic system would be different from Brazilian.
Re Romanian. As I said, I am trying - I am now in my sixties - to catch up with my father. As to whether Romanian could provide a useful vocabulary for an auxlang, the problem I think is that its Slavic element is related to Bulgarian, rather than to more central Slavic languages, such as Slovak, while its Germanic element is more limited than in the Western Romance languages, e.g. Rom. "razboi" vs It. "guerra" = "war". Romanian also contains some words from Hungarian, Turkish and Greek, which are absent in the West, not to mention its pre-Latin element, which has similarities with Albanian (from Dacian ?, Thracian ?, Thraco-Dacian ?).
Re Maltese, your countryman Prof. Geoffrey Hull - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Hull - has written some interesting things on that language. I am the creator of the Wiki article (under the name Lombard (= Frank) Beige (= Rossi), which means Reds, and we don't want any political bias do we?).
Part 3:
ReplyDeleteI would like to suggest as a possible source of vocabulary for world-oriented auxlangs the Arabic element in Spanish, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_influence_on_the_Spanish_language, which is partly shared by Portuguese and Valencian, but not by Galician and Catalan, as their regions were not part of Al-Andalus, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Andalus. Between them, Spanish and Arabic have hundreds of millions of speakers. Spanish is the language spoken over the largest continuous land area, from Tierra del Fuego to Miami, while Arabic is spoken from Morocco to Iraq.
I would like to conclude by saying that I am following your lead, in the sense that I have changed my original list of languages from:
Romanian, Latin and Esperanto
to:
Romanian, Latin using Latino Sine Flexione as a learning tool, and Lingua Franca Nova and Interlingua instead of Esperanto.
I too find Esperanto difficult to learn fast, although I am well aware of its merits, whereas, for me, with my linguistic background, Interlingua and LFN are both "transparent", at least as a passive user. The difficulty for me will be to use these languages actively, without automatically conjugating verbs or adding plurals to adjectives, etc.
I apologise for the length of my message, but I see we have many shared interests.
@Anonymous: Hi Frank,
ReplyDeleteMy apologies if I am addressing you by the wrong name; I take my lead from Part 2 of your comment above. Anyway...
Wow! Thanks for your fascinating three-part comment. I am especially impressed by your suggestion of using the Arabic vocabulary as found in Spanish as an inclusion to the vocabulary of a world-oriented auxlang. As you are probably aware, the jargon used to describe such a language is 'worldlang'. My favourite worldlang is Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) but another language of great interest is the amazing Sambahsa, based on modernised and simplified Proto-Indo European, which as a concession to possible worldlang use has added a good sprinkling of words from around the globe. I urge you to investigate Sambahsa immediately as I think it will be of great interest to you:
http://sambahsa.pbworks.com/
Sambahsa has a complicated but logical and consistent scheme of verb conjugation (including ablaut and other features); it is probably about the maximum difficultly practical for an auxlang but has many positive features which arguably make the difficulty worthwhile. Interlingua also has conjugation but in extremely simplified form. LFN and LdP have none.
The history of this blog is basically the story of me making a complete fool of myself in public! You will find I jumped erratically from one language to another, continually made lists of languages which I had supposedly settled on, then changed those lists, then went around again several times over, then gave up on auxlangs in disgust, and finally started again and am now happily a user mainly of Interlingua and LdP (but also dabble in Sambahsa and Frenkisch).
From a literary point of view, I have decided to hedge my bets by choosing one naturalistic language (Interlingua) which Romance-language speakers can probably easily read, and one easy worldlang (LdP), which everybody else can probably learn reasonably easily. The real breakthrough for me came when the penny finally dropped and I realised that truly mastering any language, even an auxlang, for an average person like me probably takes around five YEARS and that one should not set oneself up for disappointment by expecting to somehow miraculously become fluent in merely five MONTHS! The main benefit of auxlangs is that five years of study yields true mastery instead of merely poor or adequate conversational skills, and it is a level playing field.
Anyway, as I say, this blog is the long and embarrassing story of me making a fool of myself in public, but at least it has a happy ending in that, in the end, I am now getting productive literary use out of auxlangs at last, and hopefully along the way a few good discussions and ideas emerged.
All the best,
Robert
P.S. I also recommend that you may wish to visit the various auxlang Yahoo groups, traditionally the home of many interesting discussions. For example:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/auxlang/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/lingwadeplaneta/
and so on. The Page F30 blog also features many interesting posts concerning auxlangs, including Latino sine Flexione:
http://www.pagef30.com/
Hi Franck !
ReplyDeleteI'm Olivier, the inventor of Sambahsa. For Latin, you may be interested by this good old primer : http://www.scribd.com/doc/26576306/Assimil-Le-Latin-Sans-Peine
Hi Olivier and Robert:
ReplyDeleteYes I already downloaded that book as I was reading through the posts. Thank you.
I will certainly look at Sambahsa.
I will now try to apply some of the suggestions to learning Latin and Romanian, using Interlingua as a key to understanding and Latino Sine Flexione as a tool for understanding Latin grammar.
I will be back with comments in the near future.
Bye for now.
Frank / Knarf
Hi Robert:
ReplyDeleteI promised to report back on my Latin studies and I will, but for that I'm going to relocate to your "Bye Bye Latin" post. *
Before leaving this space, thanks for sending me to "F30", which covers many on- and off-topic [for this blog] subjects in which I'm interested, including:
- Latin and Latin Sine Flexione;
- Romania / Moldova;
- French in Canada.;
- The possible connection of Japanese to Korean;
- The Lusophone World.
I intend to become a regular reader of F30.
Concerning the last point, before leaving this space, I wanted to mention that Prof. Geoffrey Hull, from Australia, whom I mentioned above, has also worked on the Tetum language of East Timor.
Tetum is an Austronesian language with a Portuguese component which is so large that it is semi-comprehensible through the latter language.
Part of East Timor's problems are apparently due to its location between two giants, Indonesia to the north and Australia to the south. To paraphrase the well-known quotation of the early 20th Century Mexican President Porfirio Díaz: "Poor Timor, so far from God and so near to Australia" ...
For Galician written as Portuguese see: http://www.academiagalega.org/
Bye for now
Frank / Knarf (my space name)
* Monday, 2 August 2010: Round 3: Latin Vocabulary: Latin is eliminated
Hi Robert:
ReplyDeleteBefore leaving this space, I have a technical question.
Whatever your intentions were you started this blog, I think you have created a true reference work on IALs and related subjects.
My problem is that I would like to search in the blog to find, for example, all your references to Latino Sine Flexione, but, unlike F30, you don't have a search function or a detailed index.
Are you thinking of adding them?
I think your users would find it useful.
Bye
Frank / Knarf
@Frank: Thanks, Frank. That is very kind of you to say. I am glad to hear that you are finding this blog to be a useful reference.
ReplyDeleteThere are two ways you can search the blog:
1. Use the search box in the extreme upper-left corner of the page, next to the orange "B" icon. It is a white box with a small magnifying glass on its right margin. If you enter your search term, for example "Latino sine Flexione" and then either click the magnifying glass or hit your Enter/Return key, then all blog posts which contain that term will be shown. This is not the most convenient method, since you then have to manually page your way through all the blog posts returned.
2. Alternatively, leave the blog and go to the Google search page at www.google.com. Then do a search by typing in exactly the following:
latino sine flexione site:joyoflanguages.blogspot.com
What that means is that Google will search for "latino sine flexione" but only at this blog (joyoflanguages.blogspot.com; note that you do not enter the http:// part of the address). This is probably the most convenient way to search, because the results are just a standard Google search result.
Thanks again for your kind words, and I hope this helps.
All the best,
Robert
Hi Robert:
ReplyDeleteFirst a correction. I Left out "when":
"Whatever your intentions were when you started this blog, I think you have created a true reference work on IALs and related subjects."
I tried both methods and they work. Thank you.
The Google search gives 6,730 results for LsF, but only 2 for Timor, 4 for Sambhasa, 7 for Danish, which is of course even more useful.
You have no references to Chavacano, a Spanish creole language spoken in Zamboanga city, Philippines, so here is a song entitled "Porque" by the singer "Maldita" that I already sent to F30.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsaCFIMdPC4&feature=related
Bye
Frank / Knarf