Re: CHAT: EU allumettes (was: Re: THEORY/CHAT: Talmy, Jackendoff and Matchboxes

From: "Henrik Theiling" <theiling@...>

> Please no auxlang discussions here.  They are always the first
> step of flame-wars.
You're aware of the AUXLANG sister list aren't you? They created that list
in the mid 1990s because of the flamewars between the Esperantists and the
anti-Esperantists.

I'm getting back on that list to see if they're a row going on... seriously,
I need ideas for my own attempt at an IAL. I live in a country (the USA)
where the thirty or so Esperanto-speakers get beat up by chess clubs and
barbershop quartets.

> I fully agree.  If the languages don't fit on a matchbox, dear EU,
> make a law to make matchboxes larger. :-)
Or just rely on a small number of languages. I'd say German, French, English
and Italian at the most, since they're the top four among native-tongue
speakers (according to the last Eurobarometer survey).

Incidentally, Ahmed Tea of London marks its boxes in thirteen languages:
English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Czech, Portuguese, Polish,
Russian, Ukrainian, Qazaq*, Japanese and Arabic. But the fonts are still
legible in such small print (I do have 20/13 vision however). The box I have
here is larger than your typical small box of matches, but it's not huge.
It's a 20 gram package of ten bags.

*I might be wrong on this one; it's definitely a Cyrillic-alphabet Turkic
language, and it's not Uzbek. Could be Tatar, Kyrgyz or Turkmen.

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