Re: R: Re: Uusisuom's influences

On Sun, 1 Apr 2001, Mangiat wrote:

> Then it's not exactly the language I'd choose as model for an AUXLANG.
> Here's why:
>
> 1_ It's difficult to learn. Ok, every language is difficult to learn, but,
> as someone said, 'if you can master Finnish, then you can learn almost
> everything'. Then why should anyone rely on a Finnish inspired artificial
> language, when there out there are about 5000 natural languages, most of
> whom do have a simpler syntax?
Well, as they say, "simple" is relative.  That being said, however, what
are the statistics on various traits--are most languages in the world
today agglutinating?  Isolating?  Inflecting?  etc.

(I seriously doubt you'll get anything really useful out of such
statistics, but I do find myself curious.)

> 2_ It has a difficult phonology (yessirs, and here's why): Ok, it lacks word
> initial and final clusters, and allows very few within the same words. OTOH,
> it has a quite complicated vowel system: there are, indeed, 8 vowels (/a/,
> /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /y/, /Y/, and /&/), and they can be either short or
> long. While short/long vowels are not that rare amongst real langs, the only
> European langs I can think of which do have geminated consonants are Italian
> (only Central-Southern varieties; my dialect completely lacks them), Finnish
> (Estonian? Saami?) and some German dialects. It has vowel harmony.
Huh.  I actually find vowel harmony easier to deal with (at least what
little of it I've seen in Turkish), mainly because (except in some?
loan-words) it narrows the vowel-possibilities in a given word.  OTOH
figuring out the different endings in Turkish can be a pain.

> This has, however, a dark side, as well. Picking up vocabulary from Finnish
> and Lithuanian means using roots known by almost 10 mio. people, to say the
> least, while at least a fifth of the world population speaks a language
> whose roots have inspired Euroclones' vocabulary (English, French,
> Spanish...).
Heh.  And if they don't speak one of those languages, there's a good bet
they have loan-words floating around in their native tongue, e.g.

bbang in Korean (from Portuguese? pan--whatever it is that's cognate with
French pain)
terebi in Japanese and Korean
etc.

> Funny to notice, I find beautiful conlangs terrible auxlangs... this is,
> anyway, probably due to the naturalness many conlangs aim to. And I love
> naturality, while auxlang *have* to be so neutral that they become bland,
> without an own spirit, losing naturalness.
:-)  Me too--which is why I'm on this list.  I don't know enough
linguistics or languages to understand a lot of the features and
discussions and conlangs, but I like studying languages because of their
quirkiness (okay, the participles in Latin give me some trouble, but
that's my problem, not Latin's!), their individuality, what they tell me
about the culture (or conculture, if applicable) of those who might speak it.

YHL