Re: THEORY: Aymara

I've since gotten some more information on this.  There is apparently
a local tradition among the Aymara that their language is in fact a
conlang.  It is a matter of immense cultural pride, and that may be
part of the reason the language survived despite the near-complete
domination of the people by the Incas.

There really is a Bolivan programmer who has used Aymara, very
successfully, as an interlanguage for machine translation.

Who knows?  Stranger things have happened in the history of the
universe than a people adopting an out-and-out conlang as a natural
language.  (For example, people sitting down and inventing from
scratch a system of government in all its details, and writing it down
in a Constitution...)

I still haven't managed to confirm the UFOs bit though. ;)

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                       edheil@postmark.net
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Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:

> > Date:         Sun, 21 Nov 1999 14:29:48 -0700
> > From: Ed Heil <edheil@...>
> >
> > Has anyone here ever heard of a crackpot theory that the Andean
> > language Aymara has mysterious syntactical structures that somehow
> > violate normal ideas of the way languages work and suggest that it
> > might be a conlang (a conlang probably constructed by UFOs no less!)?
>
> I've heard (read, rather) that some people think it might be, or have
> started out as, a conlang. I've also read that some people think it
> would make a good interlanguage for computer translation.
>
> However, the reason given for both beliefs was that it is very simple
> in syntax, regular in morphology, and 'orthogonal' in the programming
> language sense that any feature that can be marked on words of a
> certain class, can be marked on all of them. (Pronouns are just like
> other nouns, and so on).
>
> So it's the absence of the 'normal' amount of odd structures (for a
> natlang) that makes it stand out. (Well, some more than others. In
> Hittite, for instance, even 'to be' is regular).
>
> Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT
marked)