auxiliary language desiderata

On 29 August 1992, I (Rick Harrison) posted the first draft of my essay 'Guidelines for the design of an international auxiliary language' in the conlang (constructed languages) mailing list. This is the discussion that ensued afterwards...

From: Jim Gillogly
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Sat, 29 Aug 92 21:04:06 PDT

As long as you're speccing a whole new project...

For a language intended to be easy for virtually everybody to pronounce, I think you really shouldn't keep 'r' and 'l' as separate consonants. The distinction is not at all familiar to Japanese, and, although that's only one language group, it's an important one. I'd say keep one liquid, but allow either pronunciation, or, as in Japanese, any pronunciation in between them.

Jim

From: trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 10:47:22 EST

Random thoughts.

Everything desirable can be undesirable for others.

Take phonology. Limiting the phonological inventory to what is as much as possible acceptable to all leads to few phonemes. Limiting consonant clusters leads to a (C)V language. So far so good, or so does it seem. Well, let's take such a real language: Rotokas (New Guinea). Five vowels: a e i o u, six consonants: g k p r t v. No consonant clusters, no closed syllables. To me it is a frightful tongue-twister.

ouokivuia ragai ibu iare avaraepa ogoevira ikauoro

eakepa viapau rera kaakau taparevora voari

When I try to utter those sentences (they are *real* Rotokas) my tongue trips all over itself like the proverbial millipede who was asked: which leg do you put forward first?

I need consonant clusters to be comfortable, but that is unfair to those whom consonant clusters make uncomfortable, and I am not sure that a compromise somewhere in-between is not taking the worst of two bad worlds. Perhaps a language that can be read out in different ways? Latin was such when it was an international language; each nationality would pronounce Latin as if its spelling followed the rules of their own languages. Not too desirable a state of affairs, but... image a IAL with three vowels, a e o, and consonant clusters. You're left with two good, serviceable, vowels with which its consonant-shy speakers can break up clusters if they so wish. Me, it's vowel clusters that make me trip, give me a spare consonant please to break up those clusters -- not [h], I run out of breath easily; not [x] I'd end up with a sore throat... a difficult customer.

through...

From: peora!glia.biostr.washington.edu!jsp (Jeff)
Posted-Date: Sun, 30 Aug 92 14:48:46 PDT
Apparently-To: jwt!bbs-hrick

" Each morpheme should name a single semanteme [unit of meaning]

Is there any objective test for this other than 'how my native language does it'? E.g., does 'vehicle' in English represent a single semanteme? Why or why not? What is the objective general procedure for deciding such a question?

From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 09:08:04 MDT

Howdy conlangers!

Kudos to Rick Harrison for his attempt to bring order out of chaos! I certainly agree with most of the points he made, and hope that he doesn't mind if I bring up a few minor disagreements and nitpicks.

First of all, a nasal is not a continuant. This is the same mistake that I made in one of my earlier essays, and someone kindly corrected me. Thus, your sentence:

" A syllable may end in a vowel or a continuant consonant. " (Continuants are nasals, liquids, and fricatives.)

should be corrected to read: 'A syllable may end in a vowel, a nasal or a continuant consonant. (Continuants are liquids and fricatives.)'

I disagree with your judgement against diphthongs. I might agree to avoid diphthongs articulated at two very close vowel positions, as in your example 'ou'. However, other diphthongs are easy to pronounce, highly distinctive, extremely efficient, and very common. Thus, I would definitely include diphthongs such as /wa/, /aw/, /ay/, /ya/, /oy/, /yo/, /we/, /wi/, and perhaps /ew/ and /iw/ (where /w/ and /y/ are semivowels).

I would not discard /d/ and /g/ just because of the Chinese and Koreans. Even though these sounds do not exist as phonemes in those languages, they DO exist as allophones, and both Chinese and Koreans seem to have little difficulty learning to distinguish them from their unvoiced counterparts. The only problem you may run into is in teaching Koreans /z/, since their language does not voice ANY of its fricatives, even allophonically. Keep in mind that, if you give every language veto power, you'll end up with next to nothing.

The essay doesn't state it explicitly, but you seem to be saying that polysemy is bad. I don't see how you can avoid polysemy, as long as you don't stretch meanings to the breaking point (say, by using the same word with different argument structures). The only alternative to polysemy will be a vocabulary that is so large that it is unlearnable, since you'll need a different word for every slight shade of meaning. Besides, humans use polysemy automatically, and I doubt if you could train people out of the habit. Also, by barring polysemy, you implicitly bar metaphor, since polysemy covers the mid-ground between literal meaning and metaphor. I can't imagine any language that disallows metaphor.

One point I feel you should have made (or should have stated more forcefully) is that an IAL must be as neutral as possible. An IAL that is heavily based on a few closely related natural languages (such as Esperanto, Ido, Glossa, Interlingua, Novial, etc.), will be MUCH easier to learn for some than for others. My personal feeling is that a credible IAL must be just as easy to learn for a Chinese or an Indonesian as it is for an Arab or an Italian.

Finally, I'd like to comment a little on the discussion of allomorphy. As best as I can discover, allomorphy exists in natural languages either because of historical accident, phonological rules or cultural requirements. For example, the English plural morphemes 's' and 'es' and Hungarian and Turkish vowel harmony all show what appear to be 'irregularities', but are actually based on phonological requirements. Some inflection in Arabic, French and Russian show irregularities that exist for both phonological and historical reasons. (English 'en' in 'oxen' is, of course, a historical hangover). And culturally, the use of different morphemes with essentially the same meaning are used to indicate register (i.e., relative status between speaker and listener), as in Japanese and Cambodian.

We don't see 'true' or 'unbiased' allomorphy simply because languages evolve, and if two morphemes initially have the same meaning, they will eventually drift apart and take on different meanings. This is a well-know linguistic phenomenon, and no language can avoid it.

Thus, I agree totally with Rick Harrison that allomorphy is definitely a BAD THING, and should be avoided in any IAL. However, I'm not sure that this restraint should apply to the loglans. Their main purpose, after all, is to test the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In order to do this, they've designed a language that seems to go against many linguistic universals. And introducing a new form of intentional allomorphy is just another example of the differences between loglans and natural languages. Thus, allomorphy may be OK for a loglan even though it is undesirable for an IAL.

Regards,

Rick

From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 09:33:51 MDT

Jacques Guy writes:
" I need consonant clusters to be comfortable, but that is
" unfair to those whom consonant clusters make uncomfortable,
" and I am not sure that a compromise somewhere in-between is
" not taking the worst of two bad worlds.

I believe that a compromise IS possible. First, do not allow consonant clusters WITHIN a syllable - a cluster should only be allowed to straddle a syllable boundary. Second, syllables should be open, or should only be closed with nasals or continuants. Third, if a closing consonant is not a nasal, then it should be voiced/unvoiced the same as the first consonant of the next syllable. If it IS a nasal, then it should be homorganic with the first consonant of the next syllable.

Thus, syllable structure would be:


     syllable ::= (C)V(V)(X)



     C = consonant

     V = vowel

     X = L or N or F

     L = liquid

     N = /n/ before /z/, /s/, /d/, /t/, /j in judge/, /ch in church/

         /m/ before /v/, /f/, /b/, /p/

         /ng in sing/ before /g/ or /k/

     F = /s/, /f/ or /sh in ship/ if the following C is unvoiced,

         otherwise /z/, /v/ or /s in vision/, respectively.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with basic phonology, the above may appear somewhat daunting. If so, play with the combinations for a while, and you'll see that they make very good sense. Basically, they all reflect very simple rules of consonant harmony, most of which exist in English and which speakers of English use automatically.

Regards,

Rick

From: ltb.bso.nl!maxwell (Dan Maxwell)
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 19:15:48 +0200

Re: IAL criteria

I think Rick H. has taken another useful step forward in attempting to establish a list of criteria which should be found in any ial. It's easy to be skeptical about this, of course. I believe the members of IALA (International Auxiliary Language Association) made the same attempt 40-60 years ago and I don't think much of this list even got used in Gode's Interlingua, the one language that came out of this association. Well, we probably know more now about languages and language than they did then.

In general, I agree on the criteria set up by Rick H. and the additional remarks made by Rick M. Here are a few more comments.

As Rick H. proposes that only the three major word orders of transitive sentences (SVO,SOV,VSO) should be allowed. This seems to ignore the fact that even English and lots of other 'basically' SVO or SOV languages use one or more of the other orders on occasion, eg, 'This book I liked'(OSV) or German 'Dieses Buch mochte ich' (OVS). Maybe you mean that one of the big three should be the 'basic' order, however that is defined. There is probably a lot more to say about word order, eg, if you allow some sentence types to have more than one word order, which subsets of the set of all the logically possible word orders do you allow?

On the allomorphy controversy: I'm going to side with the two Ricks. Allomorphs should be avoided in a conlang. Lojbab made the interesting point that we talk differently in a noisy environment than otherwise, but I doubt that this is sufficient reason for recognizing specific allomorphs in a conlang. If this is done, it should be based on input from various languages as to what kind of allomorphs have developed naturally from what kind of basic forms, but I gather that most of the designing of loglangs was done by speakers of English.

In general, we need to try to face the objections made by some linguists who refuse to take an interest in conlangs, namely that this kind of work is 'unscientific'. For this reason, I was glad to see the following passage in one Rick's recent postings:

'There is evidence that this type of structure closely approaches the built-in, instinctive linguistic tendencies of the human brain -- in other words it approximates what is 'burned into the ROM chips' of our computers. The particular phonemes and combinations which are learned relatively late by children also tend to be relatively rare in the world's languages, tend to be among the first sounds to disappear in aphasics, and tend to be absent in glossolalia:'

These facts, if they are such, give some scientific basis to Rick's proposals. I think they probably are facts, on the whole, but Rick or somebody ought to do some research (more detailed that quoting the general statements made by Marina Yaguello) before implementing the associated ideas in a conlang. Aren't there some graduate students out there looking for a thesis topic?

Dan M.

From: east-anglia.ac.uk!jrk (Richard Kennaway)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 20:18:21 +0000

j.guy@AU.OZ.trl (Jacques Guy) writes:
" eakepa viapau rera kaakau taparevora voari
"
"When I try to utter those sentences (they are *real* Rotokas)
"my tongue trips all over itself like the proverbial millipede
"who was asked: which leg do you put forward first?

Same here. Perhaps the guidelines should also restrict vowel clusters? To me (a typical English speaker?) long vowel sequences seem like an undifferentiated morass, which needs to be nailed down with frequent consonants, or a blur of colours which needs to be outlined in black ink by consonants.

--
Richard Kennaway SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
Internet: jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk uucp: ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk

From: 'Edmund Grimley-Evans'
Subject: IAL desiderata
Message-Id: <920831.AA12698@GENESIS.NRED.MA.US>

" Some languages use tones to distinguish syllables which are otherwise
" identical; for example, in Chinese _ren_ means 'a person' when
" pronounced with a rising tone, but means 'to recognize / identify' when
" it has a falling tone. This sort of tonal distinction occurs in a
" minority of natural languages and makes those languages more
" difficult for others to learn. Therefore, the IAL should not use
" tones in this manner.

This is untrue.

(1) The *majority* of the world's languages use tones.

(2) Chinese children learn to pronounce the tones before they learn the consonants and vowels properly. It is *not* unconditionally true that tones 'make ... languages difficult ... to learn'. It may be more difficult to learn tones from a book, but if you're not learning from a book it's easier to learn tones than to learn just about any other sound. Ask any blind person who has learnt Chinese as a foreign language if you don't believe me!

From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 14:27:33 MDT

Howdy conlangers!

A discussion of tone languages on conlang list? Who would have thought it possible! :-)

'Edmund Grimley-Evans' writes:

" (1) The *majority* of the world's languages use tones.

Yes, indeed. But NOT in the way that Rick Harrison was talking about. Using your over-broad definition, even English would be considered a tone language, since all languages use tone (i.e., pitch and pitch contours) for some purposes. However, only a small minority of the world's major languages use tone to make PHONEMIC distinctions. This fraction does get larger if you include more obscure languages (if memory serves, most tonal languages seem to be in the Niger-Khordofanian family of Africa, especially the Bantu languages). Also, keep in mind that many of these (especially African languages) have only one or two non-neutral tones, and use them for syntactic, rather than lexical distinctions. But even if you were targeting your conlang at existing tone-language speakers, you would still face serious problems, since different tone-languages use tones differently, and knowing one system does not necessarily make it easier to master a different system.

" It is *not* unconditionally true that tones 'make ... languages
" difficult ... to learn'.

I disagree with this even if you use your over-broad definition of a tone language. And when you narrow down the definition to include only conventional 'tone languages', you're going to have an even more difficult time convincing anyone.

I've studied both Mandarin Chinese and Vietnamese. The tonal distinctions were, by far, the most difficult things that I've ever encountered in my language studies. And even after I thought I had mastered the tones of specific words, I constantly found myself forgetting them, and slipping into the wrong tones. It ain't easy, buddy!

Actually, this difficulty shouldn't be surprising, since the use of tones to make phonemic distinctions is very foreign to the way I normally speak. And language-teachers have long known that learning how to make distinctions that you are not used to making is one of the most difficult aspects of language-learning.

Rick Harrison was correct - stay away from tones if you want to make your IAL as easy to learn as possible!

Regards,

Rick

From: uunet.UU.NET!cbmvax!snark.thyrsus.com!cowan (John Cowan)
Subject: In defense of grammatical gender
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 12:08:47 EDT

Rick Harrison writes:

" One factor which complicates the learning of languages such as French
" and German is the need to memorize the gender of every noun. The IAL
" should either treat all non-living things as neuter or should entirely
" discard grammatical reflection of gender.

Gender has its uses. A good example (due to Quine):

He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it into the sea.

The English doesn't make clear what went into the sea. A French version, however, is unmistakable:

Il retira le manuscrit de la serviette et le (la) jeta dans le mer.

'le' means 'le manuscrit' and 'la' means 'la serviette', no ambiguity. Now of course it is annoying to have to learn the gender of nouns painfully one by one, but Rick chooses the hard cases German and French to make his point! In Spanish, Italian, and Russian, morphology pretty nearly determines gender, and the above advantage is still preserved.

Lojban (toot, toot) has ten 'genderless' pronouns corresponding to 'he/she/it', which can be used to talk about up to ten things at a time, but which must be explicitly assigned to their referents. However, it is also correct to use letters of the alphabet as pronouns, and then they are assumed to refer to the most recent referent beginning with that letter. It would therefore be accurate to say that Lojban has 17 grammatical genders: the 'b' gender, the 'c' gender, the 'd' gender, ..., each with its gendered pronoun.

John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan

From: trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata: tones et al.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 10:03:17 EST

The variety of opinions about the desirability of tones strikes me. I am for all purposes musically tone-deaf -- a misnomer, but never mind. I can sing only off-key, out-of-tune, the screech of an owl is sweeter music than my singing. Yet I had relatively little trouble mastering the four tones of Mandarin. Why? Thinking back, I'd chalk it up to my mother tongue, French, in which intonation plays a much smaller part than in English. E.g.: I did it = Je l'ai fait; *I* did it = C'est moi qui l'ai fait, or: Celui qui l'a fait, c'est moi, etc., etc. So that, for instance, the third tone did not so strongly instinctively convey the interrogative sense it does in English.

That said, it is a pity that there is much, very probably valid, reluctance towards tones. Tones are good for speech recognition, I'm told by a colleague here who's into it (and consonants are bad, especially nasals and voiceless stops), and speech recognition is fashionable.

Now for 'et al', which is about clusters of vowels, or consonants.

{CV(V)} I can cope with, it's when it becomes {(C)V(V)} that my tongue and my ear lose all sense of direction.

Of consonant clusters, I somehow feel that a stop preceded by a homorganic nasal is acceptable to about everyone, provided the combination is flanked by vowels on both sides, e.g. ambo, anta, etc. Next would be perhaps stop+liquid with a vowel following: tra or tla, bla or bra. And close, very close behind, stop+sibilant: tsa, dza, psa of pfa.

Finally, an important piece of trivia. In 1974 I was in Lolovuevue (Lepers' Island a.k.a. Omba, Aoba, or Oba, in Vanuatu). There, 'Jacques' became 'Saghi' (gh = voiced velar fricative), logically enough once you had noticed that a motor vehicle was 'taraghi', from Pidgin 'trak', itself from English 'truck'. I had a particularly sharp old man for my main informant. One day, I don't know what got over me, I asked me to 'spell out' the Pidgin word 'antap' ('on, above'). Without the slightest hesitation he said:

a - ndra - vu

'Antap', I believe, he had 'stored' as 'andravu', three perfectly good syllables of his mother tongue, which, in that language, would be pronounced as, indeed, 'andravu', but which he *unfailingly* pronounced 'antap' in Pidgin. (There is no such word as 'andravu' in the Lolovuevue dialect or at least, I never came across one). I said an 'important' piece of trivia because I think it reflects something we have wired-in, or close to it, and is very important and should constantly be kept in mind when we attempt to specify the desirable properties of a constructed language. I haven't given any further thought to the matter, to tell you the truth, and I do not know even vaguely what to make of it, nor how.

From: trl.OZ.AU!j.guy (Jacques Guy)
Subject: Re: In defense of grammatical gender
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 13:47:13 EST

Since John Cowan takes this opportunity to insert a plug for Lojban, allow me to insert a plug for those languages of the Cannibal Islands I am so fond of quoting and which I hold provide a solid skeleton for a conlang with syntactically-enforced unambiguity.

He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it into the sea

I'll spare you the easy but unfamiliar stuff, and give you the Pidgin:

Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem, hem i sakem long solwota.

It's only in the minds of English (or French, or Italian, or...) that that sentence can be ambiguous. The object of sakem ('throw' in which you may have recognized the English 'chuck 'em') is the same as that of 'tekemaout' in this Pidgin, as it would be in the corresponding sentence in a native language. How would you say that he threw the briefcase into the sea then? Let's try together:

You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem, sakem kes long solwota.
I say: Pretty good, but not quite there yet. Try again.
You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,
nao hem i sakem kes long solwota. (pastaem = first; nao = now)
I say: Getting there! What's that briefcase he threw?
You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,
nao hem i sakem kes blong hem long solwota.
I say: Bull's eye! And do you know how you would say that if you were
thinking in, say, Sakao, Akei, whatever, instead of English? Here:

Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem. Tekemaout pepa finis nao, hem i sakem kes blong hem long solwota.

That repetition of the verb of the previous sentence is only a stylistic feature: there's more than one way to catch a pig (I made it up, they have no such saying).

From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: IAL desiderata: tones et al.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 07:04:11 MDT

Jacques Guy writes:
" Yet I had relatively little trouble mastering the four tones of
" Mandarin. Why? Thinking back, I'd chalk it up to my mother tongue,
" French, in which intonation plays a much smaller part than in
" English.

I also learned French (Quebecois) at my mother's knee, but had a terrible time with the tones of Mandarin and Vietnamese. Perhaps Quebecois is different enough from your native dialect to explain our diverging experiences with Mandarin. Or perhaps it's due to something else.

By the way, if you REALLY like the idea of using tones in conlangs, check out Jim Carter's conlang 'Guaspi'. I believe that info on it is available from the PLS.

Regards,

Rick

From Mark E. Shoulson
Tue, 1 Sep 92 10:22:55
Subject: In defense of grammatical gender

Me, I think grammatical gender as masc/fem is more trouble than it's worth: makes for difficulties when speaking in general (even if you have a neutal pronoun), what do you use for animals (who definitely have a sex, but are usually called 'it' anyway). Personally, I very much like the method used in Okrand's Klingon (and numerous natlangs as well, of course), wherein there is no distinction between male and female (which strikes me as a terribly trivial distinction to bake deeply into a language), but there *is* a distinction between sentient and non-sentient objects. Sentience is usually far more important to a speaker than the physiological make-up (or worse, arbitrarily assigned category) of the person/thing in question. The criteria suggested for sentience is ability to use language. A servicable definition, and broad enough to allow fudging for grey areas (there are always grey areas).

That's actually one of the things I sort of miss in Lojban (not that it should be changed: it would break Lojban's model and world-view). Since it doesn't distinguish between sentient and non-sentient, there's no distinction between, say, 'Who came here' and 'what came here'. Note that most natlangs which lack a neuter for use with objects still retain separate words for 'who' and 'what', the distinction usually being person (sentient) vs. thing (non-sentient). English-speakers would very likely be much less uncomfortable with collapsing 'he' and 'she' into one pronoun than they would collapsing 'who' and 'what'. Even in modern parlance, people are averse to using 'it' as a gender-neutral (as opposed to neuter) pronoun, as it somehow seems 'insulting', though it wouldn't be too bad a stretch conceptually to go from neuter to neutral.

If I were building my own conlang (something I probably ought to do, just for kicks) (with a different purpose than Lojban or Esperanto or anything, of course), I would put in pronouns for sentient and non-sentient as my 'genders', along the lines of Okrand's 'ghaH/'oH' and 'chaH/bIH'.

~mark

From: inel.gov!mnu (Rick Morneau)
Subject: Re: In defense of grammatical gender
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 07:55:31 MDT

Howdy conlangers!

Many thanks to Jacques Guy for providing us with some fascinating examples of disambiguation from a South Pacific pidgin.

Jacques writes:
"
" He removed the manuscript from the briefcase and cast it
" into the sea
" ...
"
" You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem, sakem kes long
" solwota.
" I say: Pretty good, but not quite there yet. Try again.
" You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,
" nao hem i sakem kes long solwota. (pastaem = first; nao =
" now)
" I say: Getting there! What's that briefcase he threw?
" You say: Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes blong hem pastaem,

Your very first example seemed to do the job quite well. So I don't understand what you gain by all the remaining examples. I especially don't understand the use of the words 'pastaem', 'nao' and 'finis'. I would have thought that the sequentiality of the events was obvious and would not need disambiguation.

Also, why did your translation contain 'blong hem'? The original English sentence used 'the', not 'his'. In other words, I would think that the sentence

Hem i tekemaout pepa long kes, sakem kes long solwota.

handles the original English sentence unambiguously. Am I missing something here?

Incidentally, this method of handling anaphoric reference is surprisingly common among the world's languages; i.e., simply use the head noun of a phrase as a 'pronoun' that can refer back to the entire phrase. We even do it in English a lot, even though we do not consider it as truly anaphoric. It may not seem very efficient, but Zipf's Law is not as well enforced among the world's languages as most conlangers seem to think. Consider languages such as Indonesian (with over 100 million speakers) that form the plural of nouns by reduplication. For example, the Indonesian word for '(college) student' is 'mahasiswa'. The plural 'students' is 'mahasiswa-mahasiswa'. Indonesians don't seem to mind the obvious inefficiency at all.

Perhaps we should adopt the motto: Down with Zipf's Law! :-)

Regards,

Rick

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