Re: OT: babel and english

On Mon, 20 Aug 2001 10:01:18 -0400, bjm10@CORNELL.EDU wrote:

>I nominate "Uk".  Uk is, without a doubt, the world's simplist auxlang.
>It contains two, and only two, phonemes.  /@/ and /k/, which are only
>permitted to form the word /@k/.   All words are uk.  All ideas are uk.
>Indeed, all auxlang is uk.  Uk has the additional feature of distilling
>the purest essence of the IAL, that being stupidity, into its most
>concentrated form.
>
>As the Manifesto of Uk (or to give it it's uk title:  uk) says:
>
>
>uk
>uk uk
>uk uk uk uk uk uk
>uk
Simple? How is this simple? To begin with, this VC phohotactics is WEIRD!
We demand an EASY CV or our polynesian section wont play.

Then there is the hideous question of the semantical difference
between /space/ and /carriage return/. Just for instance, is

uk
uk uk

the same as

uk uk
uk

or - as I guess - they are completely differnet semanthemes?

It is clear that no IAL is really "Auxiliary", since there will be always
someone that thinks it isn't helpful. So I propose a completely new concept:

IDL - International Disturbing Languages

which are useful tools to hinder peace efforts and foster war, misery and
famine (yes, we already are being sponsored by weaponries and other
military-industrial corporations). Some features that IDLs must convey:

- ethymological orthography;
- vocalic /r/ and /l/ and maybe /t/ (why not?);
- lax/tense opposition and tones;
- nasal dyphtongs;
- diacritics. Lots of diacritics;
- consonantal drift;
- huge consonantal clusters (/rtkcmtv/ for instance);
- declensions combined with a messy prepositional system;
- grammaticalized aspect;
- more than 50 different phonemes, with incoherent allophones;
- clicks;
- inflecting agglutinative particles and isolating stems, combined in
polysinthetic periphrastic dementemes;
- much more evil things that I can't remember now (take this as a menace).

A great thing is that while IALers fight each other on which language will
most properly promote peace and justice, IDLers (no pun intended) shall
always agree among them, because any newly added technical complication
will always turn IDL more difficult and unpronounceable.

Dr. Desperanto