Invented Human Languages (2010)
schott.blogs.nytimes.com
schott.blogs.nytimes.com
It's like it was before the creation of the electronic communication standards we now take for granted, but much, much worse. It's not that we're unable to exchange documents, it's that we cannot exchange even basic ideas with our fellow humans if they happened to be born somewhere else.
I'm a native speaker of English. So far I've spent two years in China studying Mandarin, and I'm still like a small child. Most people would never be willing to do what I've done. Or, if willing, they wouldn't have the opportunity. The situation for Chinese people learning English is just as daunting, if not moreso.
Our natural languages grew like crazed mushrooms. They don't obey sensical rules. They're full of exceptions. That's why they're so hard. But it doesn't have to be that way. We can and should create a language whose rules fit on a postcard. If I know how to say its words, I should know how to spell them, and if I see them written, I should know how to say them. The new language's sounds could be carefully chosen to be comfortable for a very large number of humans. Learning such a language would actually be doable in a reasonable amount of time. The benefits of being able to communicate with all our fellow humans go on and on.
Of course, people should go on speaking their native languages -- they're fun! Even if a miracle took place and a brilliant standard language were standardized tomorrow, I'd continue my language studies, because it's wonderful to be able to tell people that I consider them my family in their own language. But when necessary or helpful, we should be able to switch to the standard language.
It's an ongoing travesty. It really makes me sad that humans cannot get their act together enough to build such a desperately needed bridge.
There's already an existing project that fulfills so many of those criteria that it's going to be very hard to organize a new one from scratch. And the existing project already has a deep legacy of literature and culture. That project is the world's second most widespread language: Spanish.
Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common language based on common Indo-European roots.
Turns out that it's dang hard to design anything easier or more accessible to speakers of any European language than Spanish already is. The spelling and pronunciation are already completely regular and predictable. The grammar is straightforward and common to almost all European tongues. The vocabulary is mostly based on Latin with some Arabic variety thrown in, but it's been standardized over the centuries so that a lot of it has a simpler and more natural morphology. The sounds are a simple subset of what most languages already use.
It's a great second language: it's fairly easy, the world's second most widespread tongue, and spoken in warm countries with very friendly natives. It's not likely to provide you with many lucrative business opportunities, though. None of the world's financial capitals use it.
(Unfortunately this was almost 15 years ago and I didn't maintain my level.)
It's not hard as in "it can't be done" because it was done several times.
> And the existing project already has a deep legacy of literature and culture.
For an interlingua candidate I see this more as a drawback.
> That project is the world's second most widespread language: Spanish.
Yes, but the second most widespread language is still only about 6% of the population.
> Spanish has been destroying the dreams of Esperantists and others over the years who hope to build a more regular, orderly, and easy to learn common language based on common Indo-European roots.
I don't want to start a flame, but by many standards Esperanto is much more simpler and logical e.g. if we take conjugation system, irregular verbs, etc. Esperanto is not unpopular because it's not simple enough. It is; Likewise Spanish is not widespread because it's easier (in quite a few aspects) than English. The widespread of Spanish and English is due to historical and political reasons, that's it.
I can't say how deeply sad it makes me that we have this perception about creating languages -- that it's something you do if you want to have silly wacky fun in your fantasy book or movie.
No, the real tragedy of the public perception of artificial languages as nothing more than props for books and movies is that it blinds them to the fact that language creation can be fulfilling in many other ways. People create languages as experiments in psychology or logic, as a hands-on learning experience to better understand linguistics, or (and this is what I lean towards most strongly) as independent artistic creations that have aesthetic value in their own right.
Bilingualism (or multilingualism) isn't the problem, especially if the languages are acquired early. It's keeping a "standard language" (that's worthy of the name) standard. If people use it, it will change, and those changes will be local (geographically regional, or the internet equivalent). Artificial grammars are just about as real as Bishop Lowth's version of English grammar; a heavily-used constructed language will drift toward a grammar that actually makes human sense, with all of the quirks and foibles that implies. It doesn't take long for the divergence to become significant. A couple-three decades, and you'll have distinct dialects. A couple-three centuries, and they stop being completely mutually comprehensible. A little more time and you'll be looking around for the wreckage of the tower.
That was all before The Network. Those problems won't happen now.
[Edit: more details.]
It would be cool if we could take the existing English vocabulary but with Lojban (or whatever language) grammar. People who know English would be able to learn the language much faster. People who don't would still benefit somewhat by learning some English when learning it.
The Conlangery Podcast (http://conlangery.com/), which covers a mix of serious linguistics and artistic conlanging, with case studies of both natural and artificial languages.
The Language Construction Kit (http://www.zompist.com/kit.html), which was on HN a few days ago, and the associated Zompist Bulletin Board (http://www.incatena.org/).
Fiat Lingua (http://fiatlingua.org/), a monthly publication by the LCS on conlanging topics, and Speculative Grammarian (http://specgram.com/) a humourous journal of satirical linguistics.
And finally The Conlang Mailing List (archives as https://listserv.brown.edu/conlang.html). The members are generally friendly, international, possessed of a wealth of accumulated wisdom, and usually pretty good about explaining things and helping out newbies.