Ask Slashdot: What Would a Constructed Language Have To Be To Replace English?

Loren Chorley writes: The idea of constructing a language capable of replacing English has fascinated me for a long time. I'd like to start a project with some of my own ideas and anyone who's interested, but I'd really like to hear what the Slashdot community thinks on the topic first. Taking for granted that actually replacing English is highly unlikely, what characteristics would the new language need? More specifically: How could the language be made as easy as possible to learn coming from any linguistic background? How could interest in the language be fostered in as many people as possible? What sort of grammar would you choose and why? How would you build words and how would you select meanings for them, and why? What sounds and letters (and script(s)) would you choose? How important is simplicity and brevity? How important are aesthetics (and what makes a language aesthetic)? What other factors could be important to consider, and what other things would you like to see in such a language?

Comments

Re:Easy grammar

[Locke2005]

I hear it is double plus good!

Re:Easy grammar

[Rei]

For fun. Why not humor the submitter?

To the submitter: Okay, I'd start with saying, "don't reinvent the wheel more than necessary". So for example, consider IPA as the writing system. Or if you want to invent a writing system to be optimized by a given set of rules, at least consider using the IPA forms as your basis.

Consider who your target learners are. Is it the whole world? Any particular weighting that you want to apply with certain native tongues? Check and see what phonemes and linguistic rules are common in the languages by whatever weighting you want to apply.

When doing your weighting to decide what phonemes to use, don't only consider "whether the language has it", but also "how easy is ot for people to learn who don't know how to do it. For example, among the sounds in Icelandic that aren't in English there's the "ll" lateral plosive and the alveolar trill "r". The "ll" is nothing like anything found in English, yet given a simple description most English speakers can pronounce it perfectly. On the other hand, some people struggle for years and never manage to learn a trilled "r".

That is, all to say, an ideal language takes research not just on what phonemes people use, but what phonemes are easy to learn.

Then there's one of the biggest issues, which is intelligibility. You want the most diverse array of phonemes possible without being likely for the listener to confuse two similar ones together. Again, research would pay off big here.

The exact same rule applies to vocabulary / grammar, and this is unfortunately one thing that constructed languages usually suffer from relative to evolved ones. If English had the word "dog" like it is now, but the word for cat was "dawg" with only a slightly different pronunciation, these two common everyday words would lead to a lot of confusion. This normally gets steadily selected out either with pronunciation shifts or the adoption of alternative words.

If you really want to get into it, you could write an evolutionary algorithm to optimize your vocabulary and/or grammar to maximize the auditory difference between different common words and word phrases. The goal is to keep that signal to noise ratio up to maximize understandability. :)

One I'd recommend is something that Icelandic does: having a simple, universal stress rule. That is, the first syllable of every word, and the first part of every compound with at least one syllable between them, is stressed. And when I say stressed I mean literally double the length of the others. What this does is make it so that even a beginner can tell exactly where one word or part of word ends and the next begins.

A couple things that English speakers often attack about other languages you should think about instead of just readily dismissing them:

1. Genders. It seems archaic, right? But there are practical reasons. For example, consider the sentence:

"I used a backhoe to drag a box but it was ruined in the process"

Which is ruined, the backhoe or the box? In Icelandic it's obvious because a backhoe is feminine but a box is masculine. Sorting words into differing groups adds some clarity to sentences. It comes at the cost of increasing the amount of knowledge needed for each word (this is usually done by breaking words into patterns, such as "if it ends with these letters, it's in this group"). You could, for example, have such a grouping (calling it something other than gender), but have the rules for determining whether a thing is in a particular group be really obvious. Taking a direct from English example, if we wanted many groups, one for each last phoneme in the word, the above could become:

"I used a backhoe to drag a box but itoe was ruined in the process."

Now it's obvious to a "native" speaker of our constructed language that the particular word for "it" refers to the backhoe.

The other thing English speakers often complain about is declensions. But once again, they're another example of giving additional info