Introducing Lapsi (reply to Andreas)

Hei Andreas,

Hyvatko? (How are you?)

You are absolutely correct to say that quantifying a language's relative
difficulty is very hard indeed. That said, you are also correct to point out
that Finnish is understood by non-Finns to be an extremely difficult
language to master.

Lapsi, however, is different to Finnish. No consonant gradation, no strict
vowel harmony rules, no myriad (and often obscure) cases and case usage.
Adjectives have a prescribed ending (mostly -inen), as do abstract nouns
(-jan), tools (-oje), diminutive (-een), verb infinitive (-taa) etc. Tense
is also very regular in Lapsi, even more so than Finnish (for example, even
the verb 'ontaa' - to be is regular in Lapsi).

Another nice feature of Lapsi is its use of compound words (same as Finnish,
and other languages such as Japanese). This helps reduce the vocab-learning
burden for beginners to the language.

Examples:

hukse (hair) + suopa (soap) = huksesuopa (shampoo)
kiroje (book) + koppi (building) = kirojekoppi (library)
loppo (apple) + kalto (garden) = loppokalto (orchard)

Varijanilla,

Daniel
daniel44@btinternet.com



----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <and_yo@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2001 8:32 AM
Subject: Re: Introducing Lapsi


> Daniel44 wrote:
>
> >I chose Finnish as a role model for an IAL as I know that many people
have
> >spoken of Finnish's many obvious pluses, including writer Tolkien and
> >linguist Marco Pei. A recent EU survey suggested that Finnish children
> >learned to read and spell their language more quickly and easily than
> >children from any other native language in the European Union.
>
> Why do I experience a nagging suspition that this has more to do with the
> relative quality of school systems than with the relative difficulty of
> languages?
>
> While quantifying language difficulty may be strictly impossible, I'm
> convinced there must be better ways one could try to achieve it than to
look
> at how quickly children acquire basic reading and writing competense.
Also,
> since learning to speak a language fluently is much harder than acquiring
> said competense, one may wonder if it's even relevant.
>
> Also, I guess that the greatest troubles for a foreigner learning Finnish
> would be the many cases and the phonolgical weirdities like consonant
> gradation and vowel harmony - things that Finnish schoolchildren will have
> no problems with.
>
>                                                  Andreas
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp