From Esperanto to ET: Artificial Languages in the Internet Era (2004)
bewilderingstories.com
bewilderingstories.com
English is also an interesting language, as it's a funny mix of other languages in it's history and shaped out fairly leanable (limited number of weird inflections, usage of an alphabet, etc.).
Furthermore English stopped to be strongly correlated to a single country during the colonization era and England's diminishing influence thereafter. This makes it well suited to be an accepted international language.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that in most cases the objective of these artificial languages used to be to create an independent and easy to learn language for human communication, but in reality a language that fulfills this purpose grew out of an existing language and at the same time it uproots is origins and becomes this collectively shaped something. History is full of irony indeed. :)
Esperanto has it's perks though, so I do encourage you to learn it. It makes learning other languages that much easier and the community is nice and global, though somewhat eccentric. ;)
It makes sense Esperanto, an evolution on [in this case the commonly used world-languages English & Spanish] contains loanwords from those languages, perhaps even on top of French/Latin/Greek/...
That's what I hinted at with "it's a funny mix of other languages".
>> It makes sense Esperanto, an evolution on [in this case the commonly used world-languages English & Spanish] contains loanwords from those languages, perhaps even on top of French/Latin/Greek/...
Latin and Slavic with some Germanic in between. Zamenhof (Esperanto was his brainchild) came form Poland and spent his life on this idealistic project of his.
Also Spanish, French, part of German and by analog of the previous combined English are to a great part derived from Latin, so kinda the same roots here.
* Most SF-like conlang: Lojban https://mw.lojban.org/papri/Lojban
* Most practical conlang: Elefen http://elefen.org/
* Most fascinating natural language: Piraha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Recent_co... http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/04/16/the-interpreter...
Good examples would be the immediately preceding examples of vocabulary simplification:
> the equivalents of “good,” “better,” and “best” would come out as “good,” “gooder,” and “goodest.”
Why not "good", "a-little-better", "a-lot-better", and "goodest" ? Using three steps in such comparisons is a cultural choice.
> “black,” “gray,” and “white” could be “black,” “semi-black,” and “anti-black.”
Why not "white", "semi-white", and "anti-white" ? Using black as the base form is a cultural choice.
Computer might be: ilo sona - device of knowledge
Even though there are some fundamental designed-in limitations in toki pona (for example, we don't officially have comparatives, relative clauses, or quotation! you can say "a is a little x and b is very x" or use a kind of formula with "x this: y"), it can be surprising how many things can be expressed reasonably well given the effort.
Or physical constants?
Or math?