On the contrary, I believe it’s possible to improve any existing language significantly. I’ve already have some idea to increase the rate of transmitted information, and that’s only me. When we get more brain power into this project, even better stuffs will invariably be found.
The obvious simplification gains would help people who are learning it for the first time, but they wouldn’t really help child learners so it only saves you one generation of teaching everyone English (or any other language).
Could you explain more? I don’t think I really grabbed what you said, but the great IAL will not necessarily simplify everything. On some facets, it will be more sophisticated. The goal is to have a much more efficient language, not just a simple one… And that has nothing to do with saving 1 gen of teaching everyone IAL, no?
When a child is learning their native language, they don’t have the same difficulties with irregular verb conjugations that second-language learners have. So getting rid of irregular verb conjugations would make it simpler for second-language learners. But once everyone has learned the language and is teaching it to their children as a native language, no one is better off because the language doesn’t have irregular verb conjugations.
On top of that, there’s evidence that irregular verb conjugations (and other irregularities) actually make a language easier for humans to speak, since they help with error-handling. Human hearing and speaking are lossy conversions, so redundancy helps decipher meaning. If you hear a word and think that it might be two different verbs, hearing either an irregular or regular ending can tell you which verb you actually heard. Noun class (like whether a word is “masculine” or “feminine” in Romance languages, but some languages have many more types) and grammatical cases are a couple other language attributes that can help with this.
When a child is learning their native language, they don’t have the same difficulties with irregular verb conjugations that second-language learners have.
They don’t have a difficulty understanding, but I think they keep making mistakes when talking… and the adults keep correcting them, day after day, and after a few years the kids finally get it reliably right. It just all happens at a small age and is quickly forgotten.
This is very interesting! Could you point me to some research links about irregular conjugations, noun class and other redundancy help with clarity in conversations? I’ve tried googling to no success. Anyway, if with “hear a word and think that it might be two different verb”, you were referring to homonyms, then I believe there’s at least a solution for that while not compromising the simplicity of a language.
But once everyone has learned the language and is teaching it to their children as a native language, no one is better off because the language doesn’t have irregular verb conjugations.
This is assuming that people will deliberately try to make their next gen use IAL as 1st language, which is absolutely not what an IAL is meant to be. The core idea is for a particular person to use native tongue when conversing with the family, tribe, and people in the same country in general. When they meet a foreigner, then they’ll both switch to IAL. So typically a child would learn their mother tongue exclusive for the 1st 3-4 years of life, and only starting to get IAL at age 2 at the earliest. Of course, there will be a few parents who teach their infants IAL, as the case with some Esperanto fanatics has shown. But I don’t think of this whole IAL endeavor as an individual race to be better off, i.e. “I have to learn this stuff to get ahead and step on that guy’s head” (terribly sorry if I’m misinterpreting your words here). I envision a great IAL as an excellent way to dramatically enlarge the cake, and therefore bringing bigger slices for everyone.
The relevant topic in linguistics is redundancy. This article (“The role of redundancy in language and language teaching”, Darian 1979) is a decent introduction to the topic, and it also talks about its role in language learning.
This article (“Redundancy Elimination: the Case of Artificial Languages”, Chiari 2017) seems quite relevant to your purposes (full PDF).
if with “hear a word and think that it might be two different verb”, you were referring to homonyms
I was referring more to if you hear a word that is similar to another but not identical, and then you’re trying to figure out which it was. If I say “John hit the ball”, you might hear instead “John hid the ball”.
One example in English is the redundancy in the plural ending. If I say “Alice read the three books”, there’s redundancy because the “-s” ending on “books” indicates that there are multiple books, while “three” also indicates that there are multiple books. If you mishear me and either hear “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the books”, you still know that there are multiple books. If we got rid of the plural ending in Englsih, you might hear either “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the book”, and then you don’t consistently know that there are multiple books.
Going further abroad, you can see an example with noun classes in German. You can compare “Er sah den Bär” (“He saw the bear”) versus “Er sah das Bier” (“He saw the beer”). In English, the only difference between the sentences is the vowel in the final word, so if you misheard that vowel then you’ll get a completely wrong idea. In German on the other hand, the articles are marked with the noun class (“Bär” is masculine while “Bier” is neutral), so you have two pieces of evidence to tell you what noun you heard.
If you start adding in adjectives which agree with the nouns, there’s even more evidence in German but still only the one bit of evidence in English. Compare “Er sah den schwarzen Bär” (“He saw the black bear”) versus “Er sah das schwarze Bier” (“He saw the black beer”).
Another feature of redundancy displayed in German is noun case. In German, you can say “Der Mann sah den Bär” or “Den Bär sah der Mann” to mean “The man saw the bear”. In English though, if you say “The bear saw the man” then you mean something different. This works in German because in both of those sentences “Mann” is marked as a subject while “Bär” is marked as an object.
German can have the object before or after the verb, letting you emphasize either the subject or the object by putting it in the first place. English always has to have the subject before the verb and the object after the verb though, since otherwise it’s unclear which noun is supposed to be the subject. English in turn lets you emphasize a noun by putting extra stress on it.
English has redundancy built into the word order while German has the redundancy built into the noun cases. If you look at the history of Germanic languages, you can actually see quite clearly that word order became stricter in English at the same time that it lost noun classes and case. The speakers of Middle English stopped using noun classes or case but needed some extra source of redundancy, so they started to say their sentences only in a certain order. (source: “Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic”, George Walkden 2014)
It’s even more obvious looking at Romance languages. Latin had a free word order, few prepositions, and six cases while the modern Romance languages have a relatively strict word order, many prepositions, and no cases. (Note that they’re all the same because they all evolved from Vulgar Latin which happened to have changed that way; there’s no fundamental rule that free word order always evolves in that way).
Thank you! The links you provided are valuable. I can’t access the full Darian article, but with Chiari there seem to be some issues with her approach. She tried to defend redundancy, but by only citing previous (very old) works and providing some comparison examples between languages. IMHO, if one is to prove something, she’d have to set up experiments. Like, recording people having conversations using a conlang with little to no redundancy, compared to using a natural redundant tongue. Then asking them to rate the level of clarity after the talks, and combining it with analysis of the recorded videos, etc. Then repeating the experiment with different pairs of language… In other words, her article is not convincing at all. Granted, maybe the presence of numerous grammatical errors in that supposedly professional linguistic paper contributes quite a bit to undermine her message.
Nevertheless, as her article suggested, the lack of any constructed language with absolutely zero redundancy may point to it being necessary for speaking. I have nothing against redundancy and try to hold a stance of ‘blank slate’ when it comes to IAL ideas and opinions. The goal is to build an IAL as easy to learn and effective as possible, and if some redundancy can help, then I can see no reason not.
The problem is that, not many linguists are also “LWer”s. They can be quite biased toward their own studied tongue and can’t see some brilliant ways which other languages employ to solve their own one’s problems. Case in point, your Germanic examples help me open my eyes to a lot of interesting stuffs. Yet at the same time, I can already formulate some ideas to eliminate a few of those issues, inspired by my native tongue. It’s just that my linguistics knowledge is too limited right now to correctly express them. Well, that’s why getting serious education on the topic is the 1st step of my plan :)
On the contrary, I believe it’s possible to improve any existing language significantly. I’ve already have some idea to increase the rate of transmitted information, and that’s only me. When we get more brain power into this project, even better stuffs will invariably be found.
Could you explain more? I don’t think I really grabbed what you said, but the great IAL will not necessarily simplify everything. On some facets, it will be more sophisticated. The goal is to have a much more efficient language, not just a simple one… And that has nothing to do with saving 1 gen of teaching everyone IAL, no?
When a child is learning their native language, they don’t have the same difficulties with irregular verb conjugations that second-language learners have. So getting rid of irregular verb conjugations would make it simpler for second-language learners. But once everyone has learned the language and is teaching it to their children as a native language, no one is better off because the language doesn’t have irregular verb conjugations.
On top of that, there’s evidence that irregular verb conjugations (and other irregularities) actually make a language easier for humans to speak, since they help with error-handling. Human hearing and speaking are lossy conversions, so redundancy helps decipher meaning. If you hear a word and think that it might be two different verbs, hearing either an irregular or regular ending can tell you which verb you actually heard. Noun class (like whether a word is “masculine” or “feminine” in Romance languages, but some languages have many more types) and grammatical cases are a couple other language attributes that can help with this.
They don’t have a difficulty understanding, but I think they keep making mistakes when talking… and the adults keep correcting them, day after day, and after a few years the kids finally get it reliably right. It just all happens at a small age and is quickly forgotten.
This is very interesting! Could you point me to some research links about irregular conjugations, noun class and other redundancy help with clarity in conversations? I’ve tried googling to no success. Anyway, if with “hear a word and think that it might be two different verb”, you were referring to homonyms, then I believe there’s at least a solution for that while not compromising the simplicity of a language.
This is assuming that people will deliberately try to make their next gen use IAL as 1st language, which is absolutely not what an IAL is meant to be. The core idea is for a particular person to use native tongue when conversing with the family, tribe, and people in the same country in general. When they meet a foreigner, then they’ll both switch to IAL. So typically a child would learn their mother tongue exclusive for the 1st 3-4 years of life, and only starting to get IAL at age 2 at the earliest.
Of course, there will be a few parents who teach their infants IAL, as the case with some Esperanto fanatics has shown. But I don’t think of this whole IAL endeavor as an individual race to be better off, i.e. “I have to learn this stuff to get ahead and step on that guy’s head” (terribly sorry if I’m misinterpreting your words here). I envision a great IAL as an excellent way to dramatically enlarge the cake, and therefore bringing bigger slices for everyone.
The relevant topic in linguistics is redundancy. This article (“The role of redundancy in language and language teaching”, Darian 1979) is a decent introduction to the topic, and it also talks about its role in language learning.
This article (“Redundancy Elimination: the Case of Artificial Languages”, Chiari 2017) seems quite relevant to your purposes (full PDF).
I was referring more to if you hear a word that is similar to another but not identical, and then you’re trying to figure out which it was. If I say “John hit the ball”, you might hear instead “John hid the ball”.
One example in English is the redundancy in the plural ending. If I say “Alice read the three books”, there’s redundancy because the “-s” ending on “books” indicates that there are multiple books, while “three” also indicates that there are multiple books. If you mishear me and either hear “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the books”, you still know that there are multiple books. If we got rid of the plural ending in Englsih, you might hear either “Alice read the three book” or “Alice read the book”, and then you don’t consistently know that there are multiple books.
Going further abroad, you can see an example with noun classes in German. You can compare “Er sah den Bär” (“He saw the bear”) versus “Er sah das Bier” (“He saw the beer”). In English, the only difference between the sentences is the vowel in the final word, so if you misheard that vowel then you’ll get a completely wrong idea. In German on the other hand, the articles are marked with the noun class (“Bär” is masculine while “Bier” is neutral), so you have two pieces of evidence to tell you what noun you heard.
If you start adding in adjectives which agree with the nouns, there’s even more evidence in German but still only the one bit of evidence in English. Compare “Er sah den schwarzen Bär” (“He saw the black bear”) versus “Er sah das schwarze Bier” (“He saw the black beer”).
Another feature of redundancy displayed in German is noun case. In German, you can say “Der Mann sah den Bär” or “Den Bär sah der Mann” to mean “The man saw the bear”. In English though, if you say “The bear saw the man” then you mean something different. This works in German because in both of those sentences “Mann” is marked as a subject while “Bär” is marked as an object.
German can have the object before or after the verb, letting you emphasize either the subject or the object by putting it in the first place. English always has to have the subject before the verb and the object after the verb though, since otherwise it’s unclear which noun is supposed to be the subject. English in turn lets you emphasize a noun by putting extra stress on it.
English has redundancy built into the word order while German has the redundancy built into the noun cases. If you look at the history of Germanic languages, you can actually see quite clearly that word order became stricter in English at the same time that it lost noun classes and case. The speakers of Middle English stopped using noun classes or case but needed some extra source of redundancy, so they started to say their sentences only in a certain order. (source: “Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic”, George Walkden 2014)
It’s even more obvious looking at Romance languages. Latin had a free word order, few prepositions, and six cases while the modern Romance languages have a relatively strict word order, many prepositions, and no cases. (Note that they’re all the same because they all evolved from Vulgar Latin which happened to have changed that way; there’s no fundamental rule that free word order always evolves in that way).
Thank you! The links you provided are valuable. I can’t access the full Darian article, but with Chiari there seem to be some issues with her approach. She tried to defend redundancy, but by only citing previous (very old) works and providing some comparison examples between languages. IMHO, if one is to prove something, she’d have to set up experiments. Like, recording people having conversations using a conlang with little to no redundancy, compared to using a natural redundant tongue. Then asking them to rate the level of clarity after the talks, and combining it with analysis of the recorded videos, etc. Then repeating the experiment with different pairs of language… In other words, her article is not convincing at all. Granted, maybe the presence of numerous grammatical errors in that supposedly professional linguistic paper contributes quite a bit to undermine her message.
Nevertheless, as her article suggested, the lack of any constructed language with absolutely zero redundancy may point to it being necessary for speaking. I have nothing against redundancy and try to hold a stance of ‘blank slate’ when it comes to IAL ideas and opinions. The goal is to build an IAL as easy to learn and effective as possible, and if some redundancy can help, then I can see no reason not.
The problem is that, not many linguists are also “LWer”s. They can be quite biased toward their own studied tongue and can’t see some brilliant ways which other languages employ to solve their own one’s problems. Case in point, your Germanic examples help me open my eyes to a lot of interesting stuffs. Yet at the same time, I can already formulate some ideas to eliminate a few of those issues, inspired by my native tongue. It’s just that my linguistics knowledge is too limited right now to correctly express them. Well, that’s why getting serious education on the topic is the 1st step of my plan :)