Auxlang 2012: A New 'Anglo-European' Project

I am quite happily translating Chapter 4 of La Chartreuse de Parme into Lingwa de Planeta, my current auxlang of choice. The translation has now reached 4200 words. I love LdP for its excellent worldlang features which make it accessible with relative ease to everyone, without requiring the student to have any prior knowledge of European languages. Lingwa de Planeta is welcoming to all and is remarkably expressive.

However, I do look with great temptation from time to time at Sambahsa, an Indo-European auxlang with greater inherent precision than LdP but which is much more difficult to learn and much less accessible to those without good knowledge of at least one Indo-European language. Sambahsa is precise, concise, naturalistic and expressive; however one currently needs a brain the size of a planet to learn and use it successfully. This poses a problem.

Unfortunately, my brain is only the size of a large turnip, so every time I've tried to learn Sambahsa I've only gotten a short distance before giving up and concluding that I must wait until the documentation is so extensive that even turnip-brains such as myself will be able to learn it with relative ease.

Nevertheless when you look at wonderful translations in Sambahsa, you can sense that for those readers who are already fluent in an Indo-European language it could potentially deliver huge literary benefits; quite frankly it probably outperforms all other auxlangs in its suitability for writing sophisticated literary works in the Western tradition. For example, even well respected and highly naturalistic auxangs such as Interlingua seem like creoles (at best) compared to the withering power of Sambahsa; only Sambahsa would dare to have three incredibly irregular verbs, many regular but difficult verbs which undergo major stem changes, a fleet of articles and pronouns and declensions which would make a professional linguist swoon with joy, and vocabulary from Proto-Indo-European. I feel faint...

I blacked out for a while there. I've now regained consciousness.

Sambahsa's not for the faint hearted.

Having said all that, I still really want to learn Sambahsa and I still think that the ideal auxlang for global literary use lies somewhere on the axis formed by Sambahsa at one end and Lingwa de Planeta at the other.

Meanwhile I remain tempted to create my own auxlang.

However, I have now decisively learned:

(1) I cannot create a worldlang. I'm not a polyglot and lack the necessary knowledge. I tried it before with Bahasa Internasional and wisely stopped. To create the best worldlang would require a team of persons knowledgeable in its various source languages; it's not really a job for one person. Meanwhile I'm generally quite happy with LdP. Therefore the worldlang solution for me is to continue writing in Lingwa de Planeta and to continue being a part of its community. That's the best option for reaching readers in Asia, for example. Eventually the necessary bilingual dictionaries will arise.

(2) I still yearn however to use something like Sambahsa which, when used in the specialised niche of writing highly sophisticated literature in the Western tradition, has advantages over a true worldlang; Sambahsa is only part worldlang, it mostly stands firmly in the Indo-European tradition. The nineteenth- and twentieth century auxlangs do not deliver what I'm looking for in this regard. Occidental pointed the way but only Sambahsa continued the journey to a level almost sufficient to rival English or French.

(3) "Write what you know." That is the Golden Rule for writers. Hence, as noted above, I cannot create a worldlang because I'm not a polyglot. However, I do have good working knowledge of English, French and German, sufficient to design an auxlang aimed at writing literature in the Western tradition for those already fluent in a Western European language, providing I make the language closer in design to English than to French or German, because English is the language I know best. Fortunately I do not have to reinvent the wheel because I can stand on the shoulders of giants such as Olivier Simon, the creator of Sambahsa, and Edgar de Wahl, the creator of Occidental. Occidental failed partly because it requires too much knowledge of Romance-language idioms; Sambahsa does not suffer from that problem.

(4) I learn best by doing and by exercising creativity. Probably the best way for me to learn Sambahsa is to learn a little of its grammar at a time, apply those grammatical features to a different vocabulary, analyse how it all works, and modify the grammatical scheme somewhat to suit the different ecosystem. By 'different ecosystem' I mean a vocabulary derived entirely from English, French and German without the Proto-Indo-European words except as they already exist in those three modern languages, and a grammar considerably more influenced by English (especially the verbs) but retaining many Sambahsa-like characteristics. Meanwhile, since the vocabulary I will use is going to be heavily influenced by French, this project will help me to learn French, an ongoing goal of mine. So it's a win-win endevour.

The immediate objection might be: why bother?

My answer is: why not?

It seems like a good learning exercise, and it will be fun.

What I'm proposing is not another Occidental. I've tried Occidental extensively and it is not sufficient; compared to Sambahsa it feels very weak for literature and, like Interlingua, by comparison feels like a creole (at best). However Occidental has important lessons to teach me about the regular yet reasonably naturalistic formation of clusters of words around related concepts; for that it is a worthwhile reference, along with Sambahsa. Probably the best way to describe what I'm considering is that whereas Sambahsa is a "modern Proto-Indo-European auxlang", I am proposing a "modern Anglo-European auxlang" heavily influenced by English, French, and Sambahsa (mainly the grammar rather than the vocabulary), with considerable Germanic elements, and unlike Occidental not requiring any knowledge of Romance-language idioms. It will indeed be very unlike Occidental. The essential features are as follows:

• The project's working title is "Auxlang 2012". A better name will be chosen once the language has started to take on a recognisable form from which an appropriate name can be derived.
  
  
• Vocabulary will be from English, French, German. Words shared by English and French are preferred, but there will be a good smattering of German vocabulary also, mainly used in cases where there is no agreement between English and French and neither the English nor French word is well suited for the orthography and phonetic structure of the language. Except for rare exceptions like articles and pronouns, Sambahsa vocabulary will not be used, although of course the above process will result in many modern words which appear similar to their Sambahsa forms. The main influence of Sambahsa is to be on the grammar, not the vocabulary; in fact the influence of English on the vocabulary will be far more marked than the influence of Sambahsa.
  
  Generally speaking, where there is no agreement between French and English, many nouns will be French, many adverbs will be German, and many verbs will be English; however, English nouns will take precedence in technical fields in which English terms already dominate, such as aviation and computer science. Very special attention will be paid to making the language suitable for easy use by English-speaking scientists who might wish to write scientific abstracts in the language (but unlike Interlingua they will not need to know any Romance-language idioms to do so). The language will, overall, be very obviously more Germanic than either Interlingua or Occidental, and far easier for English speakers.
  
  
• Grammar will be heavily influenced by the brilliant design of Sambahsa, which has achieved such a wonderful combination of brevity and precision. However, some of this will be sacrificed in order to reduce difficulty; in particular a major design goal is to ensure that verbs can be very easily found in the dictionary (accordingly the verbs in Auxlang 2012, while they may undergo stem changes, will do so to a lesser degree and in a more limited and more regular fashion; for example there may be ablaut but probably not nasal infix changes). Verbs will be based on a simplification of the English scheme; the system of tense, aspect and mood will not resemble Romance languages at all. Adjectives will precede their nouns, as in English. There will be no adjectival agreement. There will be less declension than in Sambahsa. Plurals will generally be somewhat more regularly formed, although some irregularity may still be retained. The grammar will probably end up as a cross between Sambahsa and English; the most likely Sambahsa feature to remain at the core of the language (but in a more regular form) is the system of articles and pronouns, which is a highly successful system.
  
  
• Orthography will aim to be easier than Sambahsa but more difficult than Lingwa de Planeta. The language shall not attempt to be a worldlang, so it does not have to be capable of faithfully importing so many words as Sambahsa can, but its design will keep in mind the aim of allowing English- and French-speaking scientists to easily read and recognise technical words. Nevertheless the orthography must of course be vastly easier than English or French overall; to this end the stressed syllable of all polysyllabic words will always be marked with a grave accent. Furthermore, the language freely accepts the use of the acute accent as imported from French words; this means the language will be more difficult to type on a computer than Sambahsa but will be easier than Sambahsa and Interlingua to read aloud. There will never be any doubt as to which syllable is to be accentuated. The phonetic system shall allow a few more verb sounds than most auxlangs, and there shall at times be a distinction between short and long vowels, often indicated by doubling the following consonant to indicate a short vowel.
  
  A final e at the end of a word, coming directly after a consonant, will mostly be silent as in French; however, final consonants will always be pronounced even without any e, unlike French. Also unlike French, the pronunciation of vowels will never be strongly nasalised.

To get started, I am experimenting with translating a list of 1000 common words in seven languages from langsites.com, which describes itself as "a site for language-lovers" where "knowledge is free and 100% recyclable!" I am eternally grateful for this wonderful website, apparently created by professional conference interpreter Brian Huebner.

Having nearly gone insane searching unsuccessfully for a decent trilingual word list for English, French and German (at least 1000 words long), finally by luck I stumbled across the aforementioned list. Voilà, pas de problème. Thus saved by the gods,I have continued with some tentative ideas as below.

The tentative Auxlang 2012 words are shown in green. Note the use of the grave accent to indicate the stressed syllable; further note that mostly the stressed syllable is as would be found in English (this language is not intended to be yet another a Romance clone; Auxlang 2012 is more closely related to Sambahsa and Frenkisch than Interlingua, and it makes no attempt to be comprehensible to Romance-language speakers without prior study). The other thing to note is the "Plural / past" column, which shows either the plural or the simple past tense forms, as appropriate; the influence of English is very obvious here. The verbal system is not a Romance one!

Anyway, that's all for now. Further details as I figure them out...

I'm not proposing this as any kind of great auxlang to solve all the world's problems, I'm just having some fun experimenting with a literary and scientific auxlang which might be worthwhile for some limited purposes. Auxlang 2012 is not intended to be a serious competitor to Sambahsa, Lingwa de Planeta, or any other language. It's just a hobby!

The other major reason for embarking on this project is to use my skills as a software architect and software developer to experiment with generating extensive self-referential documentation for the language. For example, after the 1000 "seed words" have been defined (each seed word being defined in the 7 natural languages: English, Greek, French, German, Arabic, Italian and Spanish as per the aforementioned list) I will then write software to generate a large monolingual dictionary, defining all other words using only the seed words and a few additional grammatical words (or at least coming as close to doing so as possible). That is, the computer will generate a large dictionary which will make it possible for readers to easily find every word in a text such as a short story or scientific abstract. The design philosophy will be to write both the grammar and the dictionary in the language itself, and have the computer auto-generate as much of that documentation as possible.

Accordingly, you will notice the language will have, somewhat like Occidental, a rather rigid yet logical system of word formation which is highly regular and less naturalistic than Sambahsa and Interlingua. For example, you will notice that the word for "actor" and "actress" is acter; there will not be sometimes -or and sometimes -er to represent a person who carries out a particular activity or profession, instead it will always be -er. Furthermore, I see no need for male and female forms of such nouns which describe people; obviously modern English usage is a major influence here. And so on.

Well, this should be lots of fun...

ENGLISH	AUXLANG	FRENCH	GERMAN	Plural / past
abdomen	àbdomen	ventre m.	Bauch m.	àbdomens
belly	vènter	ventre m.	Bauch m.	vènters
above	ùber	au-dessus de	über	ùber
absent	àbsent	absent	abwesend	àbsent
accept	accèpt	accepter	annehmen	accèpted
accident	àccident	accident m.	Unfall m.	àccidents
accompany	acòmpany	accompagner	Begleiten	acòmpanyed
accomplish	acòmplish	accomplir	Vollbringer	acòmplished
accuse	accùse	accuser	anklagen	accùsed
actor, actrice	àcter	acteur, actrice	Schauspieler -in	àcters
add	add	ajouter	hinzufügen	àdded
address	addrèsse	addresse f.	Adresse f., Anschrift	addrèsses
administrative	administratìf	administratif	Verwaltungs-	n/a
adventure	avènture	aventure	Abenteuer	avèntures
adventurer	avènturer	aventurier, aventurière		avènturers
adventurous	avèntureus	aventureux, aventureuse		n/a