Journey's end? LdP and Sambahsa

This should be an interesting and useful post, I think.

Really what this post is about is taking into account everything I've leaned over the past two years of voyaging amongst auxlangs and compressing it into one small diamond.

Language, I think, is a vast interconnected net of associated concepts which cannot be entirely understood by analysis at any one stratum alone (from the microscopic world of the grapheme, to the medium of the individual word, to the macroscopic worlds of the idiomatic expression and the sentence) because interrelationships exist within and between all strata simultaneously, and these are inseparable from our culture and from the nature of our brains and bodies. Like the myriad connections and relationships and associations and interactions which exist at all strata in the human world (from the infinitesimal world of neurotransmitters at the synapse, to the vast interconnected neural network of the brain, to the elegant musculature of the larynx, to the sublime physiology of the ear and the eye, to the intricate symphony of neuromuscular coordination that allows the hand to hold a pen and write, to the everyday world in which we shake the hand of a friend, to the worlds of the family and the town and the city and the province and the nation and the United Nations) language is connected and holistic and, in its human form, inseparable from our nature and our cultures. Art, science, culture, language, history, evolution, human nature are all intertwined with and connected to the languages we speak, write and read. Language is as mysterious and as vast in its interconnected structure as is the human brain and as is human history. Language is culture and biological human nature, inseparable.

So, no wonder I have not found it easy to try to understand language well enough to understand what the ideal auxlang would look like! Trying to understand that, as the lyrics of the pop song say, is like trying to throw your arms around the world. And, as the song suggests, you are going to wake up with a bad hangover.

The thing about a language is that once you've learned it, it seems easy. Once you've learned it, you've changed the structure of your brain because your brain actively adapts in response to studying the language. This is known as brain plasticity. Your perspective concerning the relative ease of a language compared to other languages is changed by the very act of learning a language. It's all circular.

Several thousand concepts, expressed in words, the grammatical relationship between words, and in other structures such as idiomatic expressions, must be learned in order to fluently use a language for literary purposes. These cannot properly or accurately be learned in total isolation from culture but must be related to culture; they are extensions of culture, one might say. Although some languages are easier than others, depending on the current structure of your brain, its inherent abilities, its age, and the languages you already know well, there is no short cut. Languages are hard. All of them.

Nevertheless, as long as we generally understand all of the above and thus do not fool ourselves into thinking that there will ever be an effortless auxlang, and provided we go into the endeavour of learning an auxlang on the basis of it being expected to take us about three to five years to learn to a good level of general utility, then we can arguably call certain auxlangs "easy" but only relative to more difficult languages, and bearing in mind that one man's meat is another man's poison (what is easy for a native speaker of Chinese may be difficult for a native speaker of English, and vice versa).

I don't think there is any way around needing a large vocabulary. No matter how many schemes we invent to try to form words out of regular constructs by compounding and by the use of affixes and the like, there is in this universe an infinite number of things to be named and an infinite number of concepts to be referred to. Certainly we should make an effort, when designing auxlangs, to use regular patterns which make the memorisation of vocabulary easy, but this need not be overdone; that is, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that an infinite number of things can be given names in the vocabulary of an auxlang without having to remember at least several thousand unique nouns such as "rose" or "petunia". We cannot go about the place saying "red-flower-with-thorns" instead of "rose" in any general-purpose language. So, it's an illusion to try to endlessly simplify vocabulary. Words are words. We need thousands of the little buggers. And there's no way around that in the long run.

The next logical step from the above paragraph is that although there may be a place for some a priori words and other a priori elements in a language, the majority of concept clusters need to be based upon a posteriori words; apart from anything else, since vocabulary is theoretically infinite in size, and ultimately any a priori scheme would need to be defined by its relationship to existing a posteriori vocabularies in other languages, we might as well just cut out the middle-man, save everyone a needless additional layer of pain, and use an a posteriori vocabulary. Since grammar is not entirely separable from vocabulary (everything is interconnected at multiple strata simultaneously, including both vocabulary and grammar), quite frankly we might as well use many a posteriori grammatical constructs as well (obviously we may wisely employ a scheme to simplify and make more regular these constructs, and the addition of some a priori grammatical constructs can also be worthwhile).

As far as what vocabulary to use, derived from which natural languages, that really comes down to the central question: who is going to use the language and for what purpose? Since we've already decided above that a posteriori vocabulary is best (albeit simplified and made more regular), it makes sense to choose source languages whose vocabulary will appeal to or be culturally relevant to the expected users. I'm interested in writing literature in auxlangs for global rather than regional consumption, in such a way that makes that literature easier for most people than the extensive difficulties of reading (silently or aloud) literary English. The most likely readers of that literature would be internet users from around the world who are well educated, probably already speak a European natlang for international communication (most commonly English) but as likely as not do not speak any European language natively. They will most likely be people interested in learning about many other cultures, present and past, like I am. Therefore the sensible choice of vocabulary would probably be divided about equally between English words (or words which are easily memorised by English speakers), and words from major non-European languages. In other words, a worldlang with a very significant, if not major, influence of English on its vocabulary but replete with a culturally diverse vocabulary of significant past and present world languages.

Just in case it is not clear from the above, Esperanto would absolutely not meet these vocabulary requirements! Neither would Interlingua and neither would any of the other major auxlangs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Those languages were invented when the world was a very different place.

Compared to the monolithic task of importing and documenting vocabulary, the other desirable features of an auxlang are relatively trivial to achieve except the first:

1. self-referential (dictionary and grammar written in the auxlang itself)
2. very easy pronunciation
3. very easy orthography
4. very easy dictionary use (quickly and easily find any word seen in a text)
5. relatively easy to memorise, at least compared to most natural languages
6. regular, logical grammar of moderate difficulty (the moderate difficulty is required in order to: retain very good precision when needed; minimise the need for the idiomatic expressions which a weaker grammar would unfortunately require; allow the idiomatic expressions of natlangs to easily be translated into plain language which is globally accessible regardless of cultural background)
7. extensible (able to accept an infinite number of new words and concepts in future, from diverse languages around the world, to express concepts from diverse cultures)

Putting this all together, my journey has very clearly and very definitely brought me to two languages: Lingwa de Planeta (LdP) and Sambahsa. These two languages are the destination of my two-year voyage amongst constructed languages.

The train has reached the final station. I've arrived. Two years of research paid off.

Welcome to the destination: "LdP-Sambahsa Station".

The answer to my literary needs lies somewhere on the continuum between LdP and Sambahsa. At present it appears that LdP will best meet my needs but I can always switch to Sambahsa next year if for any reason it doesn't.

LdP outscores Sambahsa on points 2, 3, 4, and 5 although even it is not as easy (intentionally so) as it potentially could be on these points. Sambahsa outscores LdP on point 6 and maybe 7 but at a cost of greater overall difficulty; this is by design.

And, most significantly, should neither LdP nor Sambahsa meet my needs then the solution would be simply to write in a modified dialect of one of these two languages (which essentially would merely represent a middle-ground between them, by slightly modifying one of the languages to be slightly more like the other). I think, in summary, that the best compromise for a global literary auxlang has already been invented in the form of these two languages; both are excellent approaches. There is nothing much to be gained by starting from scratch and reinventing the vocabularies; their vocabularies are already excellent, although with different regional biases.

Well, I'm off to see if they sell cups of tea at this station.

It's been a long ride...