Re: Futurese

On Wednesday 01 May 2002 14:17, Javier BF wrote:
> Well, sorry for not starting to explain it all in detail.
> I'm accessing the Internet through a cybercafé and every
> minute I spend costs me dearly, so please don't make me
> waste my money writing a long essay comparing my proposal
> with others; just read my proposal and make the comparison
> yourself, I do beg you.
        I'm sorry for your situation, but that's life. Auxlangs are a dime a dozen,
and most of them don't have more than a handful of speakers, if that. Any
just about every one of them claims to be easy to learn, easy to use, and
what not. As I said, the problem with auxlangs is that There Can Be Only One.
This implies that, whether you like it or not, your auxlang WILL be compared
to others. Tough cookies. :)
        I would dearly love to read your proposal and stop wasting your time asking
questions, but there has been no significant proposal thus far. So far, in
addition to answering my stupid questions and the more insightful questions
of others, you've posted the phonology, a defense of the phonology, three
sentences, and three glosses to those sentences. I'm sorry, but I am not a
Star Trek Universal Translator. If you want serious consideration of your
auxlang, we are going to need a little more to work on. In other words,
either sink a couple of euros into making a large proposal, or sink euros
into answering all our piddly little questions. Your choice. :)

> >        Ok, that's fine. But is creating an auxlang the solution?
>
> As I wouldn't like ANY national language (not even my
> native Spanish) to be used as lingua franca, the solution
> in my opinion is to use an neutral auxlang.
        Hmm..."national" languages. But what's wrong with an "international"
language being a lingua franca?
        I'll do you a favor: I'm going to ask you some questions that I don't want
you to answer, just think about. And when you get around to writing a more
in-depth proposal, then you can answer them in the prologue.
1. What significant advantages does an auxlang have over an international
natlang (natural language) as an IAL? You've already stated that you don't
believe that an IAL will bring about world peace, happiness, etc. The world,
in the meantime, is happily communicating internationally in English. English
is not a perfect language by far, but it seems to be meeting the needs of a
billion or so people. So what can top that?
2. Are these advantages significant enough to overcome the major difficulties
inherent in an auxlang (no native speakers, microscopic amount of users, no
literature, no prestige, no influence, etc.)
3. Are you being "patronizing" in deciding that because you don't want a
natlang as an IAL, you should be the one to create an IAL for billions of
people, when a vast majority of them show no indication in abandoning the
current lingua franca of the world?
4. Lastly, this is all academic unless you have a proposal for how this could
be implemented at an international level. Here on the CONLANG list, you have
fiat; you can wave your hand and say, "let it be so," and it is so. Before
you continue spending euros at the internet cafe, consider whether you have a
plan to make sure those euros do more than just a.) provide hours of amusing
entertainment and b.) keep the internet cafe in business.

> O.K. Everything agreed. But it seems you haven't noticed
> that [a] and [?a] are going to be allophones of /a/. I
> just placed the glottal stop in the phoneme chart to
> round it up, because it is not completely ignored in
> the phonology of the language: it will serve to distinguish
> CVC VC from CV CVC.
        That's not phonemic variation, though. Phonetic, yes, but your chart did not
seem to be a proposal of phonetic possibilities, but rather phonemes. Since
it is possible to distinguish between CVC VC and CV CVC with other means than
a glottal stop, you don't need it on the chart.

> The primary task of the preglottalized allophones is to
> keep CVC-VC sequences that way, because if no glottal
> stop is placed before the second vowel, the pronounciation
> will tend to become CV-CVC, thus making the result
> ambiguous, as it could be interpreted both as CVC VC and
> CV CVC, which correspond to two totally different morpheme
> sequences.
        This occurs even with a glottal stop, especially in rapid speech. Context
disambiguates, assuming that your base vocabulary is not overcrowded within
phonemic space.

> Mmm... I'd say not exactly, since what I understand by
> "focus" is not the rheme but the emphasized element.
        There are as many definitions of "topic" and "focus" as there are linguists.
Perhaps more. One of them MUST match your definition! ;>
        :Peter