Zompist Bboard Again

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 3:47 am A lot of what I got from the second text is stuff people already guessed

More: show

Just figured out from the statistics cog means 'middle'
Tapa - hill
nama - people
omninama - everyone

mici and on are grammatical, though I'm not sure of the meaning.

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 3:32 pmthe padre nuestro thing is commonly used to test drive conlangs and, well, it was in verse.

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 3:32 pmI think that the approach of having a set of languages one borrows from in order to make an IAL easy to understand prior to knowing it is probably only going to work if a) your set of natlangs is relatively small, and b) if they're related. it works for Interlingua (which I just unerstood effortlessly on first hearing, with only minor words giving me a "what?" moment), but it's not going to work for an IAL that borrows from classical persian, latin and oromo.

Of course, this begs the question just how close do the languages need to be for the results to be understandable a priori? at least we know that if you take the romance languages plus english it works, but i have a feeling it works too well... i.e. maybe you could do it with a broader set of languages while still being understandable. interlingua feels like it went the easy road lmao.

Qwynegold wrote: ↑Sat Jul 01, 2023 10:43 am Yeah, the difficulty here is the number of languages. I wanted to have representation from all over the world and not just European languages + Chinese. If all the languages here had an equal share, each language would only have 2.6% of the vocabulary. But in practice that isn't the case, because often times many languages have the same word. I just counted how many languages were the origin of each word in text 3, and got this result:
(snip)

This means that the average word has 2.3 source languages. But there was still relatively little recognizability. I think part of the reason is the smallish phoneme inventory and restrictive phonotactics in Omni-kan. Very few of the English words got recognized in this test.

I wonder if the way I've created the vocabulary at least helps when learning glosses. But I don't have a way of testing that.

elgis wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 4:58 am

More: show

Text 1:

- alam: known/knowledge ✗
- poste: after ✓
- mi: me/I ✓
- wakte: time ✓
- tapat: should/in front of/loyal/confide ✓ should
- wa: and ✓
- fahima: understand ✓
- omnis: all/every ✓
- iksakte: exactly ✓ exact

Text 2:

- piskos: fish ✗ the word for fish occurs somewhere, but it's not this word
- polus: sticks ✗
- kon: with ✓
- cigke: five/fifteen/fifty ✗
- mikros: small/tiny ✓
- postewakte: afterwards ✓

- wahit: one ✓
- wa: and ✓
- huwa: he ✗
- hiya: she ✗
- poste: after ✓
- koritore: corridor ✓
- tunel: tunnel ✓

Text 3:

- Nihogistan: Japan ✓
- Cogistan: China ✓
- tahun: years ✓
- tifisil: difficult ✓
- wino: wine ✓
- alkohol: alchohol ✓
- Sinto: Shinto ✓
- omniyalam: God ✗

Some of the words look recognizable, but with so many source languages, I can never be sure about their meaning.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 6:00 amit's a bit like the pük in Volapük is based on English "speak",

hwhatting wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 6:00 ambut if you have to be told that in order to get it, that means it doesn't really help in learning the language.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 6:00 amOTOH, as the world won't use an IAL anyway, except if someone becomes world emperor and imposes it, you can treat it as an art project and don't need to concern yourself with learnability.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 8:49 pmI would argue that including words from Akan does not mean that Akan is "represented." This seems to miss the point of an IAL, which is to convince people to stop speaking Akan at meetings. English, too, of course. All of those languages exist for when the meeting is over and everyone goes to the bar. That's when Akan is actually represented, not in the IAL.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 8:49 pmIf the purpose of the IAL is to be easy to understand, then it's not unfair or inappropriate to draw all of your vocabulary from a handful of mostly IE languages, if those languages are understood all over the world.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 8:49 pmBut that's all fine. My main criticism is, who the hell doesn't know who Jeffrey Henning is? If Richard Kenneway isn't your child's godfather, can you even call yourself a conlanger? Me and Hildegard Von Bingen used to do lines together.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Wed Jul 05, 2023 8:49 pmBut that's all fine. My main criticism is, who the hell doesn't know who Jeffrey Henning is?

If Richard Kenneway isn't your child's godfather, can you even call yourself a conlanger?

Me and Hildegard Von Bingen used to do lines together.

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 3:32 pm I think that the approach of having a set of languages one borrows from in order to make an IAL easy to understand prior to knowing it is probably only going to work if a) your set of natlangs is relatively small, and b) if they're related.

xxx wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 3:46 am

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Jun 19, 2023 3:32 pm I think that the approach of having a set of languages one borrows from in order to make an IAL easy to understand prior to knowing it is probably only going to work if a) your set of natlangs is relatively small, and b) if they're related.

I totally agree, it's the only case where it works,
and in fact for it to work well you have to keep only one language,
that of the two speakers...

in our imaginary country,
where there are no financial or loyalty constraints,

there can be nothing at stake in legislating on the great figures of the national story...