World Lingos (long)

Mike a écrit:
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I think from the spread of humans that:

English
Chinese (Mandarin)
Arabic
Spanish
And to a degree Hindi/Urdu
will likely be the bases for a
future
international lingo, dominante
lingos..

With some major secondaries, such as Swahili, and one of
the MalayoPolynesians as well. French,Portugese. Looking at numbers
of speakerstoday, and future economic power. Russian likely
secondary for now.
What are the Lingua Franca of the regions of Earth?

So maybe an idea is to create a Conlang that has the "best"
of the major lingos of the near future. What do they have in common,
what do they have in difference, what lingo could be easy to learn for all
from the groups above, and what other possible world lingos for
international use is there?
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i vote for indonesian:-) a dozen of auxlangs have
tried/are trying to mix all like Vorlin, Dunya, etc. so why not make
your own project? but remember that what is dead
easy for one is the nightmare for another. if you want to
please everybody, you won't please nobody.
plus some ialists believe computers have to get it too.

knowing that any mandatory tag that doesn't exist
in a lang is likely to be considered as unnecessary
by that lang speakers (it's fine with a natlang but
stupid with a conlang)-- try and make something with
all that shebang (SVO word order set aside):

(i) many of those langs don't have mandatory tags to tell PoS
(ii) indonesian and some colloquial arabic langs don't have a tag
for genitive
(iii) many romance speakers can't possibly master the genitive-noun
word order
(iv) chinese, japanese, indonesian don't formally tell adpositions
from nouns and verbs, nor adjectives from verbs
(v) most romance speakers, all indonesians etc. can't easily
master the adjective-noun and adverb-verb word orders
(vi) chinese and japanese put adjectives, subclauses before
the headnoun or main phrase
(vii) most romance speakers can't possibly master subclause-head
word order
(viii) most english speakers can't tell transitive from intransitive
(ix) many english transitive-based verbs are intransitive-based
in asian langs.
etc.

now tell whether in a "best" lang:
(i) adjective, noun, genitive have tag,
(ii) if not, where do they stand- before, after the noun?
(iii) adjective are different from verbs
(iv) if not, and if no tag, how can you tell?
(v) if adj are made a subclause, where does it stand?
(vi) is "to break" derived from "to be broken" or reversely?
(vii) are there prepositions/postpositions?

fun! and it's only a starter. then you may consider phonology.
auxlang faq pages usually point at "reasonable compromises".
but if you make an IAL, there is little chance you can impose
an extra phoneme to native speakers of a natlang that doesn't feature it.
so you finally get something like a, u, i, C, T, S, P/B, G, m, n, l/r with
a limited range of final consonants and almost no consonant/vowel clusters.
boring.
however, PoS, word order and phonology questions are less
problematic than the phrase order.
many asian languages i know use a chronoexperience phrase
order in spoken language:
"that famous artist's daughter gave cookies that she made"
is usually expressed as:
"this artist is famous; he has a daughter; daughter made cookies;
she gave them."
switching to speak this way is usually a mind-twister
for westerners because they are trained to a different
phrase order. but this chronological way of expression is
certainly "simpler". it also explains why some asians can
get by without any PoS tags at all-- and can easily get around
most of the questions painstakingly dealt with by IALists.

but, hey, it's a lot of fun to conlang on these issues, knowing that no
alchemist will ever find a solution.

My conlang Tunu is an a priori "best IAL" dealing with all that,
a private collection of answers to the questions above and
many others, and i know that 90% of people's "best IALs"
are 90% different :-)

other conlangs do much better:
Josh Shinavier's Danoven just doesn't have any PoS tags.
Christophe Grandsire made a lang with no distinction
between noun and verbs.

most IALists don't even try this kind of discussion.
i think it's fortunate for the survival of auxlanging.

mathias