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Re: CHAT: another new language to check out

From:Trebor Jung <treborjung@...>
Date:Wednesday, June 30, 2004, 13:50
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

Replies

Aiola Research Group <argaiola@...>From ARG - on the Aiola language
Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>