I’m interested in learning about how different languages are structured, especially Esparanto/Ido and Lojban
I don’t think it will help you to communicate with orcas, but okay.
Esperanto/Ido are more regular that natural languages, simply because languages gradually collect things that are not strictly necessary, such as synonyms, different declinations for different classes of words, or taking one word from one language and then another related word from a different language. For example, in English, compare the etymologies of “see” and “visible”. But the concepts are related, so wouldn’t it be easier to just say “see-able” instead? If you remove these kinds of irregularities (each of them sounds like not a big deal, but those “not big deals” accumulate)… you end up with a language that is 10x easier to learn and remember, while being able to express the same concepts. But it’s essentially still the same thing, only simpler.
I am less familiar with Lojban, but I think the original idea was to make it more precise, kinda like a computer language. But the actual design decisions seem to me more like “Hollywood rationality” or “cargo cult”; making yourself superficially sound more like a computer does not necessarily give you the computer-like clarity or efficiency. For example, all nouns have to be exactly 5 letters long. Uhm, interesting, but what improvement exactly do you think is achieved by that? Or, the original version required you to specify all parameters for words, for example you couldn’t say “go” without specifying where from, where to, by what means, through what, and when (or something like that, maybe I got some of the parameters wrong), in given order. Uhm, interesting, but what if you do not want to specify some of those things; like, if you translate from English to Lojban, and the original text did not contain that information? So you say things like “I am going from unspecified to school through unspecified by unspecified at unspecified”. I guess it is nice to be reminded what exactly is unspecified, but if you talk like this all the time, it becomes pretty annoying. So the language was updated to contain something like prepositions, but reinvented badly—instead of specifying the relation, they specify the numeric order of the parameter—so the sentence now sounds like “I am going #2 school”, because the #2 parameter for “to go” is “where do you go to” (but for a different verb, the destination could be the #1 or #3 parameter, so you need to remember the exact order of the parameters for each verb separately). Ironically, if we follow the analogy with the programming languages, what we would need here is the named parameters from Python. (But that is basically reinventing prepositions.) And so on; it seems to me that the language design contains many ideas that sound impressive, but the actual use… uhm, I am not sure whether someone actually uses the language, so you would have to ask those.
But most likely, this will all be irrelevant for orcas. Their languages may be regular or irregular, with fixed or random word order, or maybe with some categories that do not exist in human languages.
But most likely, this will all be irrelevant for orcas. Their languages may be regular or irregular, with fixed or random word order, or maybe with some categories that do not exist in human languages.
Yeah I was not asking because of decoding orca language but because I want inspiration for how to create the grammar for the language I’ll construct. Esparanto/Ido also because I’m interested about how well word-compositonality is structured there and whether it is a decent attempt at outlining the basic concepts where other concepts are composites of.
It seems to me that the main lesson from constructed languages is that you can’t make everyone happy. Whatever choice you make, people who have “decades of experience designing constructed languages” will write scathing reviews; but the same thing will also happen if you make the opposite choice. Furthermore, language is inherently a social thing and network effect matters a lot—if your language is 10% better than an existing one, don’t be surprised if people refuse to switch to it, because the 10% improvement is not worth losing the community and resources that exist around the old one. (And that’s assuming that people would agree that the improvement actually is an improvement, which is very unlikely.)
Starting with phonemes: You choose a set of them, and then it turns out that there are people on this planet who have a difficulty distinguishing and pronouncing them (e.g. Japanese have a problem with L/R in Esperanto). But the fewer you choose, the longer will be your words. Is it okay to use diphthongs, or to have multiple consonants (how many?) after each other?
(Now this depends on your motivation. If you want everyone to be able to use the language, this matters. If you want to invent a language that a race of kobolds in your fantasy novel will use, it doesn’t matter.)
I think the rule “if you can naturally compose a word out of two or more existing parts, do not invent an extra word” is a good one. Makes the dictionary shorter and the language easier to remember. This is not as obvious as it sounds. Does “a tool for flying” refer to a wing, or an airplane? In Esperanto, it’s the wing. So I prefer to think of these things as mnemotechnic tools; sometimes the meaning is unambiguous, sometimes you have to specify “this construction refers to A, not to B”. Useful word-parts from Esperanto are “big”, “small”, “tool for X”, ” someone who is X”, “become X”, “make someone/something X”, “place for X”, etc. There is no separate category for words-used-as-modifiers; any of them can be used as a standalone word, it just happens that some of them are very useful for composing. But let’s not confuse the function with the form: you can achieve the same effect by agglutinating the words or just putting them next to each other, “smallapple” is not necessarily an improvement over “small apple”.
The painful part is, how do the words relate to each other? Is it like in English, where if you put several ambiguous words next to each other, the last one plays a role of a noun, and the previous ones play a role of adjectives? (That is, “a house cat” is a cat, which lives in a house, while “a cat house” is a house, which was built for cats.) Or is the word order quite flexible, and something else is used to figure this out? Maybe there are no ambiguous-role words, like in Esperanto where all nouns end with “-o” and all adjectives end with “-a” (so you would naturally say “doma kato” and “kata domo”, but if you happen to say “kato doma” or “domo kata” the meaning is still clear). This still leaves the problem of distinguishing the subject from object (because both of them nouns). Fixed word order? Preposition? Suffix? By the way, prepositions are generally a tricky topic when learning a foreign language, because there are just too many possible meanings we want them to use for, so the same preposition is used for several different meanings that are maybe metaphorically connected, but another language organizes this differently. For example, it is okay to use spatial metaphors for time, e.g. is “before” kinda the same thing as “in front of”? (Both would be “antaŭ” in Esperanto.) With spatial directions, does it matter whether something is near or far (“on” vs “above”), static or moving (“above” vs “over”, “in” vs “into”)? I think English is not even consistent here, or maybe that’s just my bad English, for example “on” + “above” vs “under”, or “in” + “into” vs “out”. This could be somewhat regularized by composing the prepositions (or suffixes, or whatever). Also, you can compose the prepositions with other things, for example in Esperanto: “en” = in, “ena” = inner, “eno” = interior, “ene” = inside (adverb), “enigi” = enter, “enigo” = insertion, “enigilo” = input device.
I think the composition system is done quite well in Esperanto, although I am sure it could be 10% improved. (Also, at some moment you get limited by the inherent ambiguity of human concepts.)
Sorry, I could go on forever… if you have a specific question about Esperanto, feel free to ask.
(I’m creating a language for communicating with orcas, so the phonemes will be relatively unpractical for humans. Otherwise the main criteria are simple parsing structure and easy learnability. (It doesn’t need to be super perfect—the perhaps bigger challenge is to figure out how to teach abstract concepts without being able to bootstrap from an existing language.) Maybe I’ll eventually create a great rationalist language for thinking effectively, but not right now.)
Is there some resource where I can quickly learn the basics of the Esperanto composition system? Somewhere I can see the main base dimensions/concepts?
I’d also be interested in anything you think was implemented particularly well in a (con)language.
In Esperanto, all nouns end with “-o”, adjectives end with “-a”, adverbs end with “-e”, verbs in infinitive end with “-i”, verbs in past/present/future tense end with “-is/-as/-os”, etc. This system allows you take almost any word and make a noun / adjective / adverb / verb out of it. And conversely, you can take a word, remove the ending, and use it as a prefix or suffix for something. So you have e.g. “-aĵ-” listed as a suffix, but “aĵo” (“a thing”) is a normal word, it is just used very often in a suffix-like way, for example “trinki” (“to drink”) - “trinkaĵo” (“a beverage”, that is a-thing-to-drink).
You can generally take two words and glue them together, like peanut butter = arakidbutero (which I just made up, but it is a valid word and every Esperanto speaker would recognize what is means), only with long words it is somewhat clumsy and with short ones which are frequently used it comes naturally.
You will probably like the “table words” (ironically, the page does not show them arranged in a table, which is what every Esperanto textbook would do). They consist of the first part, which in English would be something like “wh-”, “th-”, “some-”, “all-”, “no-”, and the second part, which is English would be something like “-person”, “-thing”, “-location”, “-time”, “-cause”, etc; and by combining you get “wh+person = who”, “wh+thing = what”, “wh+cause = why”; “some+person = someone”, “some+thing = something”, “some+cause = for some reason”, etc., only in Esperanto this is fully regular.
Uhm, one more thing which may or may not be obvious depending on which languages you speak: It makes things a lot easier if one written character always corresponds to one sound and vice versa.
I don’t think it will help you to communicate with orcas, but okay.
Esperanto/Ido are more regular that natural languages, simply because languages gradually collect things that are not strictly necessary, such as synonyms, different declinations for different classes of words, or taking one word from one language and then another related word from a different language. For example, in English, compare the etymologies of “see” and “visible”. But the concepts are related, so wouldn’t it be easier to just say “see-able” instead? If you remove these kinds of irregularities (each of them sounds like not a big deal, but those “not big deals” accumulate)… you end up with a language that is 10x easier to learn and remember, while being able to express the same concepts. But it’s essentially still the same thing, only simpler.
I am less familiar with Lojban, but I think the original idea was to make it more precise, kinda like a computer language. But the actual design decisions seem to me more like “Hollywood rationality” or “cargo cult”; making yourself superficially sound more like a computer does not necessarily give you the computer-like clarity or efficiency. For example, all nouns have to be exactly 5 letters long. Uhm, interesting, but what improvement exactly do you think is achieved by that? Or, the original version required you to specify all parameters for words, for example you couldn’t say “go” without specifying where from, where to, by what means, through what, and when (or something like that, maybe I got some of the parameters wrong), in given order. Uhm, interesting, but what if you do not want to specify some of those things; like, if you translate from English to Lojban, and the original text did not contain that information? So you say things like “I am going from unspecified to school through unspecified by unspecified at unspecified”. I guess it is nice to be reminded what exactly is unspecified, but if you talk like this all the time, it becomes pretty annoying. So the language was updated to contain something like prepositions, but reinvented badly—instead of specifying the relation, they specify the numeric order of the parameter—so the sentence now sounds like “I am going #2 school”, because the #2 parameter for “to go” is “where do you go to” (but for a different verb, the destination could be the #1 or #3 parameter, so you need to remember the exact order of the parameters for each verb separately). Ironically, if we follow the analogy with the programming languages, what we would need here is the named parameters from Python. (But that is basically reinventing prepositions.) And so on; it seems to me that the language design contains many ideas that sound impressive, but the actual use… uhm, I am not sure whether someone actually uses the language, so you would have to ask those.
But most likely, this will all be irrelevant for orcas. Their languages may be regular or irregular, with fixed or random word order, or maybe with some categories that do not exist in human languages.
Thanks!
Yeah I was not asking because of decoding orca language but because I want inspiration for how to create the grammar for the language I’ll construct. Esparanto/Ido also because I’m interested about how well word-compositonality is structured there and whether it is a decent attempt at outlining the basic concepts where other concepts are composites of.
Ah, thanks for clarification.
It seems to me that the main lesson from constructed languages is that you can’t make everyone happy. Whatever choice you make, people who have “decades of experience designing constructed languages” will write scathing reviews; but the same thing will also happen if you make the opposite choice. Furthermore, language is inherently a social thing and network effect matters a lot—if your language is 10% better than an existing one, don’t be surprised if people refuse to switch to it, because the 10% improvement is not worth losing the community and resources that exist around the old one. (And that’s assuming that people would agree that the improvement actually is an improvement, which is very unlikely.)
Starting with phonemes: You choose a set of them, and then it turns out that there are people on this planet who have a difficulty distinguishing and pronouncing them (e.g. Japanese have a problem with L/R in Esperanto). But the fewer you choose, the longer will be your words. Is it okay to use diphthongs, or to have multiple consonants (how many?) after each other?
(Now this depends on your motivation. If you want everyone to be able to use the language, this matters. If you want to invent a language that a race of kobolds in your fantasy novel will use, it doesn’t matter.)
I think the rule “if you can naturally compose a word out of two or more existing parts, do not invent an extra word” is a good one. Makes the dictionary shorter and the language easier to remember. This is not as obvious as it sounds. Does “a tool for flying” refer to a wing, or an airplane? In Esperanto, it’s the wing. So I prefer to think of these things as mnemotechnic tools; sometimes the meaning is unambiguous, sometimes you have to specify “this construction refers to A, not to B”. Useful word-parts from Esperanto are “big”, “small”, “tool for X”, ” someone who is X”, “become X”, “make someone/something X”, “place for X”, etc. There is no separate category for words-used-as-modifiers; any of them can be used as a standalone word, it just happens that some of them are very useful for composing. But let’s not confuse the function with the form: you can achieve the same effect by agglutinating the words or just putting them next to each other, “smallapple” is not necessarily an improvement over “small apple”.
The painful part is, how do the words relate to each other? Is it like in English, where if you put several ambiguous words next to each other, the last one plays a role of a noun, and the previous ones play a role of adjectives? (That is, “a house cat” is a cat, which lives in a house, while “a cat house” is a house, which was built for cats.) Or is the word order quite flexible, and something else is used to figure this out? Maybe there are no ambiguous-role words, like in Esperanto where all nouns end with “-o” and all adjectives end with “-a” (so you would naturally say “doma kato” and “kata domo”, but if you happen to say “kato doma” or “domo kata” the meaning is still clear). This still leaves the problem of distinguishing the subject from object (because both of them nouns). Fixed word order? Preposition? Suffix? By the way, prepositions are generally a tricky topic when learning a foreign language, because there are just too many possible meanings we want them to use for, so the same preposition is used for several different meanings that are maybe metaphorically connected, but another language organizes this differently. For example, it is okay to use spatial metaphors for time, e.g. is “before” kinda the same thing as “in front of”? (Both would be “antaŭ” in Esperanto.) With spatial directions, does it matter whether something is near or far (“on” vs “above”), static or moving (“above” vs “over”, “in” vs “into”)? I think English is not even consistent here, or maybe that’s just my bad English, for example “on” + “above” vs “under”, or “in” + “into” vs “out”. This could be somewhat regularized by composing the prepositions (or suffixes, or whatever). Also, you can compose the prepositions with other things, for example in Esperanto: “en” = in, “ena” = inner, “eno” = interior, “ene” = inside (adverb), “enigi” = enter, “enigo” = insertion, “enigilo” = input device.
I think the composition system is done quite well in Esperanto, although I am sure it could be 10% improved. (Also, at some moment you get limited by the inherent ambiguity of human concepts.)
Sorry, I could go on forever… if you have a specific question about Esperanto, feel free to ask.
Cool, thanks, that was useful.
(I’m creating a language for communicating with orcas, so the phonemes will be relatively unpractical for humans. Otherwise the main criteria are simple parsing structure and easy learnability. (It doesn’t need to be super perfect—the perhaps bigger challenge is to figure out how to teach abstract concepts without being able to bootstrap from an existing language.) Maybe I’ll eventually create a great rationalist language for thinking effectively, but not right now.)
Is there some resource where I can quickly learn the basics of the Esperanto composition system? Somewhere I can see the main base dimensions/concepts?
I’d also be interested in anything you think was implemented particularly well in a (con)language.
(Also happy to learn from you rambling. Feel free to book a call: https://calendly.com/simon-skade/30min )
There is a website for learning Esperanto, lernu.net; it has a section for grammar; the relevant chapters are: prepositions (spatial, temporal), “table words”, word class endings, suffixes, prefixes, affixes. The division feels somewhat artificial, because most of the prefixes/affixes/suffixes are also words on their own.
In Esperanto, all nouns end with “-o”, adjectives end with “-a”, adverbs end with “-e”, verbs in infinitive end with “-i”, verbs in past/present/future tense end with “-is/-as/-os”, etc. This system allows you take almost any word and make a noun / adjective / adverb / verb out of it. And conversely, you can take a word, remove the ending, and use it as a prefix or suffix for something. So you have e.g. “-aĵ-” listed as a suffix, but “aĵo” (“a thing”) is a normal word, it is just used very often in a suffix-like way, for example “trinki” (“to drink”) - “trinkaĵo” (“a beverage”, that is a-thing-to-drink).
You can generally take two words and glue them together, like peanut butter = arakidbutero (which I just made up, but it is a valid word and every Esperanto speaker would recognize what is means), only with long words it is somewhat clumsy and with short ones which are frequently used it comes naturally.
You will probably like the “table words” (ironically, the page does not show them arranged in a table, which is what every Esperanto textbook would do). They consist of the first part, which in English would be something like “wh-”, “th-”, “some-”, “all-”, “no-”, and the second part, which is English would be something like “-person”, “-thing”, “-location”, “-time”, “-cause”, etc; and by combining you get “wh+person = who”, “wh+thing = what”, “wh+cause = why”; “some+person = someone”, “some+thing = something”, “some+cause = for some reason”, etc., only in Esperanto this is fully regular.
Also, see Wikipedia. More sources: Reta Vortaro (index of English words); some music to listen.
Uhm, one more thing which may or may not be obvious depending on which languages you speak: It makes things a lot easier if one written character always corresponds to one sound and vice versa.
Cool, thanks!
(Off topic, but I like your critique here and want to point you at https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7RFC74otGcZifXpec/the-possible-shared-craft-of-deliberate-lexicogenesis just in case you’re interested.)