It’s dead here, though. If you’re interested, let’s discuss further via PM.
Long try
Karma: 43
The IAL can always be used at schools if Ukrainian & Russian kids want to talk.
With it around, there would be no decree to force Ukrainian tongue on Russian kids, and people in general. The Russians get what they want—to freely speak Russian in their areas. The Ukrainian government gets what it wants—stability, and the ability of smooth economic exchanges & other activities between regions of the country.
What are you talking about? Something “the same” something “than” something? I don’t understand. At all. And no one should be ‘forced’ to speak IAL as 1st tongue, let alone children at school. The very nature of IAL is secondary—if something is forced, it’s not a true IAL.
The root cause of the Russo-Ukrainian war (and the long term solution)
Your opinion is correct. Coordination is actually 1 of the hardest things for a successful IAL. That’s why before talking about how to choose the best design, we’ll have to solve the coordination problem.
The most salient thing I’ve observed from conlang fora is that practically all of the constructed tongues there are built by individual authors. Most of them are full of themselves, and thus, as you precisely put it, believe that their language is so impressive every single one on Earth should run over and beg to learn. Those biased people are not the kind I’d want to invite into the great IAL project.
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 :)
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.
Thank you JP. There’s a high chance that I don’t have the Scout mindset yet, so finding the truth is hard. But to my defense, until now no comment whatsoever has been able to point out a cons of IAL, nor express the concern about the cost. So probably it’s true that the IAL scenario is (very) desirable. The negative score of the post doesn’t speak much: it can be a high karma member overwhelming lesser members, or it may simply reflect their opinion about my mindset, not the idea of IAL.
What you wrote about a crisp language that helps prevent misleading ideas is what I’d forgotten to include in the main post—it’s actually 1 of the goals of the excellent future IAL! If other veterans have explicitly mentioned it, then that means the problem with current languages is significant, and improving it is very possible.
You don’t get this feedback from having 1% of a thing built perfectly. You get much more feedback from having 100% of a thing built really haphazardly.
That’s an insightful advice. My plan, I think, more or less align with that view. I may attempt with something similar to Toki Pona—that is, a simple project not with IAL in mind. I’m a bit afraid that if I did a miniature version of the IAL, I would be anchored to it, seeing it in all glory and thus not be able to cooperate properly with fellow linguists & scientists & experts in other fields when it comes to the real deal. Something like the first-born child almost always has the most love. Meanwhile, my vision of the great IAL is that it must be a big collaboration right from the very start. But I’m not too worried, because I do have ideas of smaller projects that will test my enjoyment for elements needed for IAL.
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?
… Uh, I don’t really get your example with tomato. In that case, the cost is relatively small and the benefit is also just marginal. The Probability of getting everyone in the world to buy a tomato is decent—say, 50% - because it’s easy and many of us already bought it in our life. It’s quite different from IAL, yes?
Therefore I couldn’t follow your line of argument. Could you provide examples or elaborate more on ‘effective paths to big gains’?
Absolutely! My plan does heavily involves designing an IAL, but it will NOT ever be an one-man project. Instead, it must seek help from all talents from a wide range of disciplines.
Thank you! I think that’s a better formula. But I don’t understand the phrase after “especially if...”
Do you have 1st hunch about what kind of outside funding sources a project like this can more likely draw from?
Huh? Also from Wikipedia, I read that “English has between 450m & 2B speakers”, so an unbiased figure should hover around 1B.
My imaginations consider a great IAL, one that has many advantages over English. So while they do still apply to English, the magnificence of each facet is limited. Taking the snowball effect into account, it’s like putting a handicap of −75% on Benefits. Why settle on something inferior?
Besides, there’s a reason why English can’t ever be a true IAL—which I may address in the next part of the series. To put it in your scenario, it’s likely the question: if everyone in the world spoke English as a second language, then what first tongue are the Americans, British and Australian… speaking?
Your last sentence perfectly describes the main obstacle a supposed IAL will face in the process of emerging into global usage. It must prove way more effective than the next candidate in order to persuade.
immigration law is a stronger barrier to travel and work permits than languages are.
That’s true. However, I’d say that if the total difficulty is 100%, then immigration law contributes around 55% and language barrier 45%. If you can eliminate the latter, then you effectively make it twice as easier to do it.
Moreover, IMO immigration law is kinda ephemeral. Trump was elected and put up some barriers. Biden then went razed them down. Meanwhile, something as basic as language is much more rooted—the US hasn’t changed its official language since its birth.Western education itself without the signaling value is able to change the lives in developing countries doesn’t have a good base.
I didn’t emphasize Western education anywhere in my post. Chances are you’re biased against Eastern education?
Whether education is about signaling or not, isn’t it just better to have more education? I think we can agree on this point.When it comes for example to China, the way contracts are enforced seems to be much more central than the wording of the contracts when it comes to trust.
Agree! I hadn’t thought about it thoroughly enough, now that you mentioned it. How about a different point? Companies always have to spend resources on the translation process when dealing with foreign partners—in your example, China. But now they don’t have to do it anymore, and thus have more capital to spend on other projects.
English works for that purpose and most fields get centered in a way that makes the important communication English.
English can do the job at an ‘huh, OK’ level. It was patchily built throughout many centuries with not-for-scientific-research mindset. Not to mention when scientist actually go to their colleague’s foreign lab for collaboration, they will face even more difficulties, because in every-day purposes, English is also far from great.
The ’Why’s of an International Auxiliary Language (IAL part 1)
A few, but overall it doesn’t change very much.
Ah, I see. All of your explanations led to 1 thing: imperfect information. Fogged Markov tiles or coin-like tokens are ways to confuse AI and force it to ramp up the brute power exponentially without much effort from the puzzler &/or much effect in game. And since it doesn’t know the info, it can’t accurately calculate the value of that info, that’s why AI sucks at scouting.
Coincidently, I’ve already invented a board game that incorporates imperfect info to beat AI back in 2016. I guess I’d need to put some more into it.
I have to say, appropriate user name at that.
No, I’m not against that trading money for valuable stuffs part. And while the game can be digital, it does not hurt to have some physical sets for the human elements.
Hi! I don’t frequent LW anymore; today I just logged in to find some forgotten material, and found your comment. 1 year is quite late, but better than never, right?
All you said is true; I agree with most. I’ll follow this comment up with a PM, hopefully you’ll get notified so we can continue privately.