In the midst of everything else I am supposed to have been doing (read: this project is an overwhelm coping-mechanism of dubious benevolence!) I've been nurturing this IAL idea, which is getting unwieldy and a little bonkers - though not without some features that keep me hooked, so that I keep trying to tinker with them despite their manifest ill-suitedness to an IAL's typical design goals.
Since I have no idea where this is going, but could certainly use any help that might be offered, I'll present it here bit by bit. Part of the point is to force me to stop spending whole days spasmodically spamming my own documents with badly-explained notes sketching half-baked new features. Here I can overhaul it as I go along; also, I think putting it up here will help me be more conscious of the time I put into it - i.e. I will attempt to make one cogent post, then stop, and come back another day. I'm going to try to keep most of my updates bite-size, so apologies if not too much detail appears in the beginning.
Final note: some of this has been written with a general readership in mind. Some hasn't. If my tone seems strange, I may be testing out writing about the language for different imaginary readerships. I do not, for instance, hold that Lang e Zafe is currently "more graceful, flexible, powerful, relatable, and ‘natural’" than any other IAL or indeed than any other language on Earth - in its current form, it's a hot mess! But I'm thinking of how one could potentially promote the end result, seeing as the point of an IAL is usually to get people to use it. To that end, any comments on what works and what doesn't in terms of presentation, both for you personally, and thinking about a general readership, will be gratefully received.
Lang e Zafe (or Zaf for short) is named after the ‘linking particle’ common to Iranian languages, the ‘ezafe’. The immediately graspable idea of this linking particle has been extended to cover functions of the language not usually associated with IALs, in that noun case relationships are shown with a set of ‘articles’ known as zafa or ‘zafs’ (literally ‘links’). Demonstrating the use of the genitive case using the zaf e within the language’s name is intended to familiarise the learner with the centrality and usefulness of this feature and immediately break down any notions of grammatical case being difficult to learn or use.
Why design an IAL with cases? Cases can be extremely useful, telegraphic and concise means of conveying information. They also open doorways into powerful idiomatic and poetic means of expression. In themselves they need not be particularly complex features of a language, although exposure to languages like Latin, Greek, German and Russian may have convinced many language learners otherwise; indeed many English speakers are unaware that their language distinguishes two cases, where French, Spanish and Italian use only one.
How is this achieved? ‘Zafs’ are prefixing particles, or clitics, like Farsi’s e-, which can be intuited by users of prepositioning languages as analogues of familiar prepositions. For instance speakers of Spanish will easily link ‘de …’ with the function and behaviour of zaf e, while English speakers likewise can mentally substitute ‘of …’ — analogies which will hold far enough to aid initial acquisition. Zafs are written with a space between them and the root. They are formally called ‘articles’, because of pre-existing familiarity with that term from the grammatical teaching typically received in English-speaking schools.
Lang e Zafe has other relatively complex morphological features. For instance, its verbal system may distinguish up to three voices, four moods, four aspects and three tenses, and both synthetic and analytical forms are available for showing verbal agreement of both subject and object, yielding potentially thousands of forms for each root. However, the vast majority of the time, these are formed according to regular, simple rules, and the use of any particular feature is a choice rather than a requirement.
The Richness Principle
Lang e Zafe has a predictable, featural base grammar, sharing with IALs such as Esperanto, Ido, and Pandunia the principle of relative regularity (compared to most natural languages) to aid rapid acquisition of understanding and fluency. However, unlike many IALs, Zaf balances this with a ‘richness principle’ inherent in its design. In practice, this means that several valid options are often available to the user to achieve largely the same grammatical result.
This redundancy should serve to make the language more graceful, flexible, powerful, relatable, and ‘natural’ — and as a trade-off, somewhat more complex than many other IALs.
Whilst bare functionality has a Spartanical appeal, personally I find that beauty, grace, and poeticism rarely reside in purely functional tools. I began to suspect that a perceived lack of these features may be holding the IAL movement back. The majority of the world’s language users are not logicians, linguists or Spartans: perhaps a language with a more natural level of redundancy — not too much that it becomes too difficult to use, but enough that it has a tangible depth — has a better chance of capturing the imagination of a wide range of potential learners.
In some cases, the richness principle adds possibilties for differentiating subtle pragmatic implications with ease. In other cases, L1 speakers of different languages may find one available approach more intuitive than another, and thus may avoid disadvantages in encountering typological departures from their native language(s). The crucial thing is that all uses of potential grammatical variations are valid, and remain under the umbrella of ‘standard Lang e Zafe’.
Despite deciding to use the richness principle in designing Zaf, I have limited myself to an important rule. Complexity must, where possible, be featural. This means, for instance, that whilst there are at least 200 possible simple pronouns and over 4,000 possible compound pronouns available to Zafists, each one is completely predictable (and parseable) from a set of just five elements and some very simple rules. In areas such as this, where great nuance is possible, but never required, I have specified a closed set of default forms (i.e. just eight core pronouns), which are all any speaker fundamentally needs. Because of the featural design, all that the Zafist needs to parse any unfamiliar ‘richness’ feature is a basic awareness of how the core elements with which they are already familiar can be combined.
The Yoda effect
On a visit to Japan, my wonderful, linguistically-gifted Japanese host K remarked that her British husband Steve was thought of as unusual within her circle of friends, as "one of the very few foreigners who don't sound strange when speaking Japanese". K explained her observation that in Japan, fluent L2 speakers of Japanese are relatively unusual compared to fluent L2 English speakers in the UK or USA, and may struggle more to be accepted by their speech community. In other words, Steve had had a harder time being accepted as "a fluent Japanese speaker" in Japan than K had had being accepted as "a fluent English speaker" in the UK, despite their comparable level of skill, due to cultural notions of how much deviation from a perceived linguistic standard was permissible within "normal", "fluent" speech.
Whether or not there is any wider truth to this anecdote, it led me to consider whether the level of diversion from any linguistic standard which is considered "normal" within a speech community may be highly culturally conditioned. What if a language were to be designed in which there was not a norm to conform to or deviate from, but rather a range of typological strategies available for any grammatical function, each as valid as all the others? Could such a speech community both function and maintain the feeling that they were all speaking 'one language'?
This 'language of many options' would not, in fact, necessarily feature more variation from a certain core set of features than other languages - no one speaks a pure 'standard' form of any language, after all, and certainly not all the time - but culturally, its speakers would be primed to accept a particularly wide range of structures as standard.
By way of illustration: most English speakers are familiar with 'Yoda-speak'. We can understand Yoda just fine. He certainly sounds "strange" to us, but semantically and pragmatically, he is able to communicate with us with nuance and grace. In Lang e Zafe, some speakers may choose grammatical strategies which seem familiar to them, but seem like 'Yoda-speak' to other users. Yet this is a fundamental, intentional part of the language's design: such differences are there to be embraced.
The principle design challenge in the creation of such a language is to allow enough complexity and diversity to present a usefully broad toolkit to a wide range of the world's language users, without allowing features to interrupt each other and breed confusion. [And my goodness, I am definitely not there yet!]
sasasha wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 2:25 pm
*snip three sections of notes*
certainly an intriguing mission statement; good fortune to you in shaping this IAL.
Whether or not there is any wider truth to this anecdote, it led me to consider whether the level of diversion from any linguistic standard which is considered "normal" within a speech community may be highly culturally conditioned. What if a language were to be designed in which there was not a norm to conform to or deviate from, but rather a range of typological strategies available for any grammatical function, each as valid as all the others? Could such a speech community both function and maintain the feeling that they were all speaking 'one language'?
it works for most languages - tv shows on, for example, BBC World and BBC International, can be viewed and understood and enjoyed inside and outside of the Anglosphere for the most part.
how well its understood. is another matter...my dad once told the family about how he held a conversation for half an hour with a British guy, before each of them realized he was talking something different than the other guy was.
This 'language of many options' would not, in fact, necessarily feature more variation from a certain core set of features than other languages - no one speaks a pure 'standard' form of any language, after all, and certainly not all the time - but culturally, its speakers would be primed to accept a particularly wide range of structures as standard.
By way of illustration: most English speakers are familiar with 'Yoda-speak'. We can understand Yoda just fine. He certainly sounds "strange" to us, but semantically and pragmatically, he is able to communicate with us with nuance and grace. In Lang e Zafe, some speakers may choose grammatical strategies which seem familiar to them, but seem like 'Yoda-speak' to other users. Yet this is a fundamental, intentional part of the language's design: such differences are there to be embraced.
Just to clarify, as I'm not sure I understand as well as I hope I did....so, if I use, say, Strategy A in Lang e Zafe, is it because A is most similar to what my L1 does, or because I want to focus attention on the tenses of what I just said?
(or are both options possible?)
keenir wrote: ↑Tue Mar 23, 2021 5:13 pm
certainly an intriguing mission statement; good fortune to you in shaping this IAL.
Thank you!
it works for most languages - tv shows on, for example, BBC World and BBC International, can be viewed and understood and enjoyed inside and outside of the Anglosphere for the most part.
how well its understood. is another matter...my dad once told the family about how he held a conversation for half an hour with a British guy, before each of them realized he was talking something different than the other guy was.
Absolutely, yes. I had an embarrasingly long conversation with a farmer on the Isle of Mull in which I was nodding and smiling all the way through, throwing in the odd chuckle for good measure, only to realise he was trying to tell me with increasing consternation that a pine marten had eaten all his chickens in the night!
Something I'm taking inspiration from here is from the amount my partner's various-dialects-of-Mandarin-speaking colleagues seemed to ask each other to clarify exactly what they meant (assuming that this is generally widespread in China, and not just a strange feature of his workplace). I am thinking that "do you mean ...?" will have a monosyllabic lexeme and be presented to the learner as a common, non-intrusive feature of dialogue. (Again, trying to culturally condition speakers to accept variations in L2 speech from the outset.) The person asking the question will simply follow it with the sentence they suspect the other speaker to mean, expressed in their own way, which can be repeated until another monosyllabic tag meaning "yes, I meant that" moves the conversation on. I mean ideally it wouldn't be necessary to do this too much of course, but there's an intentionally straightforward infrastructure for it, at least.
You bringing up the media begs the question of what hypothetical LZ media would do to ensure widespread intelligibility. I guess a register would develop that would largely avoid some of the more out-there features, if it ever got to that point!
Just to clarify, as I'm not sure I understand as well as I hope I did....so, if I use, say, Strategy A in Lang e Zafe, is it because A is most similar to what my L1 does, or because I want to focus attention on the tenses of what I just said?
(or are both options possible?)
Both are possible - and other reasons are also possible Part of my interest in this idea is that speakers will be able to explore typologically different strategies, which they are unused to, if they wish, and hence learn a little about how other languages work. Probably most people will just do what is most natural to them, especially at first, but perhaps for interests of style or poetics or rhetoric, a speaker might decide to use a feature that is less intuitive to them.
(I'm maybe imagining a primer in book / app / website form, which actually has little asides to explain what the features currently being explained are based on, i.e. it will have a page or two skimming over how case relationships work in other languages, and when my five verbal 'themes' are introduced, each using a different theme vowel, I'll illustrate on the facing page a rough guide to the similar feature of Japanese that inspired this, etc.)
Though it should be obvious, it's worth saying that I'm not hoping to fit all the typological possibilities into one language - that would be unwieldy indeed, and contradict universals all over the place (not that I particularly care about that). I'm uncovering it as I go, trying to push the systems to admit as much variation as they can, but there are definitely limits. Still, I hope that the eventual results will be felt to have typological features in common with a considerable variety of languages. Also worth saying that I've unashamedly made some features up without researching precedent too much.
thank you.
Dautabel! (lit. "you have been so kind" -- thank you)
Last edited by sasasha on Tue Mar 23, 2021 7:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.
N.B. This is just yet more rambling about mission statement, aimed at general readership. I'm putting it here in case the mission statement is of interest in and of itself. Again, I have no idea if I can live up to these claims! Again, it's an experiment in presenting a conlang to potential learners.
The Real Why
I do not expect that at any point in the future, except perhaps in some miserable Beckettian endtime, all humans will speak the same language. Nor do I think anything is to be gained from seriously attempting to make that long-standing fantasy a reality. Learning another language well as an adult is a huge effort, one which tends to be best inspired by necessity — and any conditions I can think of which would necessitate every human to use all the same words do not much appeal to me. Moreover, linguistic diversity is intrinsically valuable to humankind, and language encroachment and death are serious issues of the globalised world which deservedly attract scientific attempts to remedy.
Why, then, have I set out to make an International Auxiliary Language? One answer is: for enjoyment. Just as endangered languages contain something of value for the human experience, so too constructed languages can add to the tapestry of human expression. In this sense, any constructed language is a piece of art; a tool for thought and communication, designed to add to, rather than reduce, the planet’s linguistic diversity.
Another answer is that while the world’s best-known IALs and conlangs may not offer the globe-encompassing social, political and business advantages that their early proponents dreamed of, ironically they do offer cosy, community-focused rewards. Whether through Esperanto, Klingon, Lojban, Quenya, Pandunia, Dothraki, Ba Kom or Verdurian, conlang speech communities are linked by a very particular bond. It’s one of those rarified pleasures of the internet age to be able to communicate instantly with someone on the other side of the world using a constructed language without ever knowing if you have a natural language in common.
This happened to me for the first time through the 20-year old, minimalist, self-described “cute, little language” Toki Pona, in whose 123 hyper-flexible words I found myself speaking to an Italian man who spoke as little English as I spoke Italian, and who kindly offered me a place to stay on his farm during my holidays after twenty minutes of enjoyable conversation. I had a sense then of what the point of all this IALing could be: this one wholesome connection, unique and valuable in its own way, would not have happened without the language we had both set out to learn and which alone had connected us. It symbolised to me the real achievements of the IAL movement: personal, miniature, but inspiring nonetheless.
Finally, learning any language is a way to learn about language. Most (or all) IALs borrow from real world languages — some heavily from a single family, others more widely — each word a wormhole into linguistic and sociological insight. Learning the etymologies of words in any IAL is an obvious way to increase awareness of world languages. Lang e Zafe draws on a wide range of world languages spoken on all inhabited continents, and grammatically its influences are particularly widespread. In studying it one will inevitably learn a little more about the world we live in — and not just the corner of it each of us happens to inhabit.
Lang e Zafe is not, in one sense, really an International Auxiliary Language, since it has no realistic designs to become the or one of the chief languages of international communication. However, not enjoying this as a realistic possibility, and yet embracing several design principles that might be appropriate if it did, positions it comfortably among most IALs. The label itself is perhaps not so significant. Toki Pona has never styled itself as an IAL, and yet facilitates a surprising volume of conversation throughout the world every day. What draws increasing numbers of users to Toki Pona is arguably the way it captures the imagination: you can really communicate with just 123 words? In standing out from more traditional IALs, Lang e Zafe attempts to do something perhaps as curious.
You can really have a language which works as well if you use it like Mandarin, as if you use it like Russian? You can really have a language that works... however you like?
(Not sure which of these 'thoughtbites' best conveys the concept; both are disingenuous to a degree, but represent the direction I'm trying to go in. I think maybe the second is snappier?)
Part of my interest in this idea is that speakers will be able to explore typologically different strategies, which they are unused to, if they wish, and hence learn a little about how other languages work. Probably most people will just do what is most natural to them, especially at first, but perhaps for interests of style or poetics or rhetoric, a speaker might decide to use a feature that is less intuitive to them.