IAL Re: another new language to check out

[Note: I'm not sure how close this discussion is getting to the kind of
discussion we don't want on CONLANG.   For that reason, I've given
this e-mail the IAL tag, and this introduction, so if you'd rather delete
it, you can go ahead.]

Jim wrote:

<< Jim Grossmann:
> 7. If you really want to Aiola to be as good as it can be, do the
> following:
> a)         Get every member of your group fluent in Aiola.
> b)         Get every member of your group writing at least a paragraph in
> Aiola every day.
> c)         Conduct all internal ARG communication-written and spoken-in
> Aiola.
> d)         Make sure that some of your group members are bilingual or
> multi-lingual. Have these group members form Aiola chapters in other
> countries, so that Aiola can be actually used within your international
> organization among people without a common natural language.
> f)         Come up with intelligent plans for promoting the use of Aiola
> for recreation, commerce, and other purposes in groups outside the ARG.>>
And And responded:

<<Why would this make Aiola (or any IAL) *good*? You say that Aiolans
shouldn't fret that Aiola does pretty much what the other twenty
thousand IALs do. But it strikes me that the one and only decent
reason for working on a new IAL is if its design is genuinely better
than other IALs (and natlangs for that matter).>>

I think Jim's point was that, in reality, no IAL's going to cut the
mustard as far as design goes.   The only way to have a successful
IAL is to have a *commercially* successful IAL, and I think he was
trying to explain how to make Aiola commercially successful, and
I don't think he's far off.   To use your Police Academy analogy, let's
say Director X is so excited about his "film", and he can't wait to show
it to you, and what he comes up with is Police Academy 38, which he
calls, Living at the Edge of Eternity, for some reason.   Director X is
so genuinely enthusiastic that you don't want to point out to him that
his "film" probably wouldn't even be allowed to go straight to video,
since video would be disgraced by it.   Instead, you give him some
successful marketing strategies, get him in touch with all the right
people, tell him who to bribe (and with what), get him in the door to
all the right parties, and whatnot.   Thus, rather than Living at the Edge
of Eternity going straight to video, it gets a lot of publicity, and has a
huge opening day...and then falls on its face, like The Day After Tomorrow,
or others whose names none of us probably remember.

<<Nonrhetorically, I want to ask why people create IALs -- the
question poses itself particularly acutely wrt Aiola when I
see the effort & resources that appear to have gone into it
(judging from what the website says).>>

This reminds me of another IAL I came across today with exactly the
same production.   Let me see if I can remember the name so I can post
the url...

Ha!   Just looking around, I found another one.   *Top notch* website:

http://www.unish.org/index.html

Man, this is a joke.   We should come up with a grand listing of all the
fancy IAL's out there.

Came across another site, which has a very true remark in it:

http://home.usadatanet.net/~bassim/language.html

The second paragraph reads, "Esperanto is a language derived from the
European languages and culture.   As such, it does not qualify to be the
universal language."   I wish all would be IALists would read that and take
it as their credo.

Okay, I'm obviously not going to remember the name of this IAL, but it's
website was gorgeous, with a flash intro and everything, and it had a
correspondance course that they expected you to pay real money for, etc.
I wonder if they've made any money that way...   Of course, it looked just
like Esperanto.

<<Presumably IALs are created mainly for fun,>>

I don't agree with that.   Or, at least it's not true of most of the IAL's 
that I
know of.   Anyway, behind all this nonsense is still the troubling trend that
English is becoming (if it isn't already) the universal language.   I may not
be a pro-IAL guy, but I still think that the status of English is a problem,
natural or not.   I mean, think about the internet.   Is it a coincidence 
that
HTML and everything is English?   Sure, it may have gotten started here,
but if HTML and all that jive were invented first in, say, Japan, do you 
think
it would've all been in Japanese--either in the orthography or with a 
romanization
system?   I don't think it would've lasted.   Someone somewhere would've
forced it to be in English--or English speakers would've created their own
version that would eventually take over, anyway.   I find this troubling.   
So
in that respect, I at least agree in sentiment with the IALists.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Replies