THEORY: Aymara

> 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)