Re: THEORY: Re : Universal Translation Language

Tunu fella wrote:

> Come on, nobody exacts revenge here on
> anything. You know that most artlangers would be delighted to hail the first
> perfect IAL, and some of us (like you) are also log- and auxlangers.
I was just thinking of how the AUXLANG bunch were kicked out of CONLANG
because of their over-heated arguments; it would ironic if log/auxlangs
got blasted here in return. But of course you are right, except
there can't be just one perfect or final language.

> As for the simplest human language, i think all available auxlangs are just
> not worth a natlang i've learned. instead of treading on Esperantist path,
> one should consider the ingenuity of Asian languages and pidgins and stop
> speaking of "adjectives and adverbs" and try to make an easy system of 5 or 6
> resumptive pronouns
Jacques Guy described Tolomako, an extremely simple but ingenious natlang;
just one relativizing/resumptive pronoun, simple morphology and phonology,
terse and expressive all at once. Indonesian, Chinese, and English share
some SVO and isolating syntax features, which were emulated by Hogben
in his Interglossa auxlang. Basic English (and Newspeak) also arose from
a fascination with often-simpler non-Indoeuropean natlang grammar.

I don't feel comfortable without some kind of adjectives, though.
Ido's part-of-speech marking really simplifies the grammar;
prepositions are more plainly seen as "transitive adverbs",
which is unclear in English even though we use them that way:
"go up" versus "go up the stairs", rather than "ascend the stairs".
(Note the ambiguity in English from insufficient POS marking;
Ido may also fail in such cases.) But it's all those other particles,
having no polite part-of-speech, that I really mistrust ...

> Just one example among hundreds : it's just very disturbing that auxlangers
> never design a model of integration using all roles like : who know -
> know-ing - know-er - know-ed - know-ee, etc.
> why not rather stick to SVO order :
> one (he) know - one (he) be know - one (he) get know
> fact of know - fact of be know - fact of get know
> and stick an article meaning it is a lexie, not a subclause.
The sentence's word order becomes the word's morpheme order.
So the Latin-derived "ascend" feels almost pretentious
compared with "go up", being in the wrong order for English.
Using pre-verbal auxiliaries and post-verbal directions
and final syntax-indicators, a large number of words are
regularly deriveable, which seem logical enough to me.

> but some asian languages do well with collective, abstract, result and
> instrument words. they seem "illogical" at first glance but are very easy to
> learn. i mean nouns of instruments derived from each type of transitive or
> ditransitive verbs instead of fuzzy ones derived from one plain verbal root.
Ido/Novial had that same problem with "hammer" and "crown".
It isn't always enough to just add a vowel ending, one needs
more specific derivational affixes, as you say. So there's
"the hammer = martelilo" versus "the hammering = martelago"
and "-ero = one-who" etc. Something more complicated
like "to know/learn/tech/study" can be handled also ...
"vensavi = come-to-know = learn", or maybe the opposite
order, "savdontori = knowledge-giver = teacher".

I would not want to over-grammaticalize, encoding too much
into opaque codes. It seems there is a primitive, naive physics
that underlies language, a kind of baby-talk syntax that
really generates all the rest. Bierzwicka (sp??) analyzes
words down to this primitive level. Why not leave it visible
on the surface level, easier to learn and understand?
Might turn out a bit Ent-ish but that's OK ...

> How do you "inverse" a 2nd object of a ditransitive verb ?
> "me say it address you > you addressed it said you" ?
I can't do 3-case verbs (but R. Morneau can). I just break
ditrans into two serial halves, or call the 2nd a preposition:
"meso dici leso vade tuso" or something like that.
Ido forces use of "ad" or some other formal preposition,
but apparently could use transitive adverbs also/instead.
The advantage of inverse: instrumental "using XXX = tule XXX"
can flip to "used by XXX = tulue XXX", very common nowadays.