>Richard wrote: "I am from the Aiola Research Group which has been developing
>a new international language (Aiola) for the past 9 years. We have just
>launched a website and can't wait to see what people think of our language.
>I encourage you to check out our site and we look forward to corresponding
>with you all.
>
>"The address is: www.aiola.org."
>
>I checked it out, and am looking at the page with key terms for things like
>It's nice to meet you!, going out, and at the beach. It looks just like all
>the other IALs, and some things have been stolen from them. I can't
>understand why people enjoy recreating something that's already been
>created - in this case, practically reduplicating it. It's very perplexing.
>And I read the FAQ and such pages, and the part about "familiarity" bugs me.
>I mean, how do you think Chinese or Arabic speakers will feel when
>confronted with this language? It boasts "familiarity", but only to the
>"all-important Westerners whose languages are superior to all others"
>8-)8-)8-) When do you come from, the 17th century when practically everyone
>thought this way?? 8-) You should've included at least some Chinese, Arabic,
>or Hindi! I notice Slavolinguophobia, too. (Not trying to start a flame war,
>I'm just stating the facts.)
>
>OK, now to some specific problems I have with this 'language' (really a
>dialect of Esperanto, Ido, and all the other gazillions of proposed IALs):
>
>"Word endings mark a word's part of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb,
>preposition)."
>A nice example of the parochialism of this project. Do you guys realize
>there are *alot* of langs without adjectives, adverbs, and/or prepositions?
>E.g. Japanese, Arabic, Yoruba, ... Why not use verbs, like in Lojban for
>adjectives, and why not derive prepositions from nouns, e.g. 'in/at' <--
>'location', where 'in/at' itself is a verb too?
>
>-oi marks plural nouns. Have you looked at Chinese or Japanese (etc.) which
>make number optional?
>
>-as marks present tense and -is marks past tense. Again, Chinese, Vietnamese
>(etc.) make this optional.
>
>Words like <aspektare> 'to look', <crimpo> 'shrimp', <komprenare> 'to
>understand', and <strado> 'street', are too consonant-heavy. Another problem
>with E-O. The fact that alot of people on this planet find clusters like
>/sp/ and /kt/ difficult to pronounce.
>
>Why didn't you consider non-European languages to include in this project?
>Like Japanese, Arabic, and Chinese? And in those language programs, were
>their native speakers of non-European languages? Why not ask some speakers
>of say, Korean, to try Aiola out, and carefully examine their feedback, and
>revise Aiola accordingly? This would prove Aiola's suitability as an IAL,
>rather than making ridiculous claims about its simplicity, regularity, and
>lack of ambiguity.
>
>"Aiola has three articles (including the null article): the definite (la)"
>Why do you even need this? Use demonstratives. Alot easier for, e.g.,
>Slavs...
>
>"Articles do not contract when followed by a vowel." If you got rid of <la>,
>you could allow allomorphic variation of <lo>, which would make speaking a
>little faster (not much, but still... :P).
>
>I notice <dotro> means 'daughter'. The least you could do is design a better
>kinship-term system rather than copying European languages. It would be nice
>to be able to express things like 'my older brother', cf. Japanese,
>concisely.
>
><luntcumo> 'lunch food' is IMO a bad choice for compounding, because of the
>difficult consonant cluster. Cf. Esperanto <dorm-c^ambro>. And for
>compounds, I think saying something like 'food for lunch' would make things
>less ambiguous in compounds like 'French teacher'.
>
>The interrogative words could be placed at the end of the sentence, cf. 'You
>are Richard' ~ 'Who are you?' = 'You are who?'. And for more efficient
>vocabulary, I would use nouns meaning 'person', 'place', 'reason' etc. for
>the interrogative words 'Who?', 'Where?', and 'Why?', with a question marker
>(Latenkwa does this:
http://www.eskimo.com/~ram/lexical_semantics.html#S19_0
>.
>
><glacikremo> 'ice cream' is an idiomatic compound and IMO should've been
>avoided.
>
>Future and present could be incorporated into one (optional) tense, the
>nonpast; conditional is not a tense, it's a mood.
>
>Since when have numbers been nouns in an IE lang??
>
>And why all those gendered pronouns? No need. Just invent optional male and
>female affixes. Nice to see the inclusive ~ exclusive 1st person plural
>distinction tho! (Y) But why can't you pluralize <vu> 'you-sing.' regularly,
>thus <vui>? Or make it <vo>, cf. <voi> 'you-plur.'.
>
>T
>
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