Re: Ayeri: Menan Coyalayamoena ena McGuffey

David J. Peterson wrote at 2005-04-06 11:33:58 (-0700)
 > Carsten wrote:
 >
 > > I began translating the first McGuffey Reader today, but I found
 > > that Ayeri's syntax is way more difficult than the English one.
 >
[...]
 >
 > Since no one's ventured a reply yet, I'll give you my thoughts.
 > First, though the words are longer and more morphologically
 > complex, they don't look all that tough.  I mean:
 >
 > Veneyin ang manimpiyà.
 >
 > That's a sentence with three elements.  That's not too bad.  Plus,
 > you're comparing Ayeri to an essentially *isolating* language,
 > English.  There's just no way to compare.  I mean, how can you beat
 > "He ran home"?  Three syllables, yet an entire sentence.  So I
 > think it should be natural that English sentences are shorter and
 > less morphologically complex than Ayeri, and that I think you
 > shouldn't worry about.  I *certainly* don't think you should
 > simplify the language.  Consider a real world.  Would you want to
 > teach children an entirely different form of the language?  They'd
 > end up learning too languages: Real Ayeri at home and on the
 > playground, and Simplified Ayeri in school.
 >



It's probably true that Carsten is overestimating the problems
presented by Ayeri here.  Whatever language is suitable for Ayeri
children in speech is probably going to be acceptable in text.*

What might be useful is to look at real-world evidence - children's
books in languages with more complex morphology than English.  One
might start with the International Children's Digital Library:

http://www.icdlbooks.org/

Of course, if you don't speak the language it can be difficult to tell
both what level a book is pitched at and how complex the sentences
are, but you can at least compare the length of words with the style
of the illustrations.


* Although even in English, the language in such works is simplified
  to the point of sounding distinctly unnatural.  "See Spot run", for
  example.  I'm not sure that keeping the grammar simple for children
  is actually the main reason for this, but it does suggest that
  children can learn to read a simplified subset of the language and
  go on to more natural texts without any particular trouble.

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