Zompist Bboard Again

in Conlangland you don't need money to work,
no superiors to respect,
no laws, no great elders to impose,
just one credo to follow: "Do what thou wilt ".

for the record, i also do not know what is an Jeffrey Henning.

(...)and in fact for it to work well you have to keep only one language,
that of the two speakers(...)

no? like, interlingua, for example, is fantastically successful at being intelligible by a bunch of people... any speaker of spanish is able to grok it, at least, plus I suspect anyone who speaks any romance tongue (perhaps other than romanian?). do english speakers understand interlingua? I don't know.

anyway, yeah, the closer the target set of languages (i.e. the set of languages whose speakers you want to be able to understand the IAL in question) the likelier the success, and at some threshold point the likelyhood becomes zero such that, for example, the set [mandarin,mapuche,yoruba,english,russian,ojibwe,sindarin] is almost certainly in that zone of zero chance: but there are plenty of reasonably likely sets, like, for example, [russian, ukrainian,serbocroatian] is probably a thing an IAL can be made for such that people from those languages can understand it well enough.

something tells me that an IAL is only understood by people whose languages are close enough to be understandable to each other...
in other words, by those who wouldn't need this IAL...

the attraction of recognizing Esperanto was that it put the roots of European languages on a simplified mechanism for the elites, to whom it was addressed, who knew these languages...
and it was this mechanics, bordering on philosophical languages with its reduced lexicon and codified combinations, that made it a success, not the advertising masterstroke of European roots...
but this publicity stunt still works...

apart from the biblical Pentecost, no language will ever be understood by all mankind without having studied it...


as for Jeffrey Henning, he ran the Langmaker.com reference site for conlangers in the 90s/2000s...

You're kind of right, but not quite. I can't actually understand portuguese, I can only sort of understand it, for example, but if I'm right me and a portuspeaker would understand interlingua more easily than we would understand each other. same with catalan, same with italian, same with asturian. ultimately an IAL, if its this sort of "aims to be easily understandable for speakers of (insert set of languages here), aims to leverage the lexical similarities between many languages.

I wonder if someone has tried to make an IAL with generative models... an AIIAL

Torco wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 8:18 am for the record, i also do not know what is an Jeffrey Henning.

He's best known for creating Langmaker, which was the premier site for sharing conlangs in the 2000s.

But I mentioned him because he liked to create IALs, with enormous lexicons based on natural languages.

there are plenty of reasonably likely sets, like, for example, [russian, ukrainian,serbocroatian] is probably a thing an IAL can be made for such that people from those languages can understand it well enough.

It's been done, alongside Germanic and Romance examples. There are literally hundreds of proposed IALs created in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Of course, people creating ad hoc mixtures goes back to antiquity. Once in Brazil a guy tried talking to me in Portunhol. I didn't know Spanish at the time, so it took me awhile to figure out what he was doing. ("Why is he saying 'we others'?")

I only understood something about years, rice and satin (the 'gohan' part made me think 'hey, maybe Nihogistan is from Nihon, which means Japan!) Only fluent in English, taking French, have a smallish bit of Spanish, took a few Duolingo Japanese lessons one time.