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What would a modern (i.e., based on cognitive science) constructed language look like?

de yyaann, 2016-majo-29

Mesaĝoj: 34

Lingvo: English

bartlett22183 (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-01 20:28:29

Concerning Esperanto forms which are very close acoustically, such as 'mi/ni' and '-as/-is' (depending on context), I wonder how much Zamenhof genuinely designed his language to be spoken and how much written. Certainly, in correct written forms there is no ambiguity in the way there can be in spoken forms.

erinja (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-01 20:52:15

I suspect that he did not think much about the possible confusion between sounds, and I am willing to bet that he picked the m and n as initial letters for these because they are common in European languages for "I" and "you" pronouns (moi, mi, me; nous, noi, nos, etc). Similar with vi (vous, voi, vosotros, voce) and li (lui, il, el). "She" often has another L pronoun (with a different vowel than the "he" pronoun) so for this, I wouldn't be surprised if he borrowed "sxi" from the English "she". And I wouldn't be surprised if "ili" was influienced by ils, ellos, elles.

robbkvasnak (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-01 21:10:51

I think that Otto Jespersen tried to construct a language based on structual linguistics (he called it Novial) but after a long time he pretty much resigned even trying to match up the pronunciation of single sounds and single "letters" (signs) since when different people pronounce two sounds together they tend to modify some sounds. Any language without some "slack" (Spielraum) becomes robotic hence "non-human", metalic.
Our brains are marvelous instruments for creativity and any language used by humans must remain human and creative. The desire to create a truly "scientific" language is the desire to devoid humans of humanity. Language is not math and never will be - though math may be explained in language, language may not and cannot be explained by math, at least not in its entirety and in its usage by all speakers.
Fuzzy brains are human - non-fuzzy brains are not.

lagtendisto (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-02 20:36:03

bartlett22183:Concerning Esperanto forms which are very close acoustically, such as 'mi/ni' and '-as/-is' (depending on context), I wonder how much Zamenhof genuinely designed his language to be spoken and how much written.
He simply didn't have these tools available which are available today. I.e. he had no computer, no digital recording facilities, no headset, no IPA-keyboard & no access to linguistic databases (retrieval of IPA coded assets; TTS).

bartlett22183 (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-02 20:40:06

erinja:I suspect that he did not think much about the possible confusion between sounds, {...trim for brevity}
Well, obviously we cannot go back in time to ask Z ridulo.gif , and in general I would agree with your estimate of why he may have picked this or that form for these or those pronouns or other terms. However, later persons have assessed that some of the features of Esperanto, especially the pronouns, are what they would call sub-optimal. The authors of Ido considered this, and they devised a variant pronoun system. (They had other considerations as well, such as in the second and third person pronouns.) I am not advocating Ido over Esperanto in all matters, make no mistake, but I myself consider that at least theoretically the Ido pronoun system is significantly superior to that of Esperanto in several particulars.

lagtendisto (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-02 20:42:11

robbkvasnak:Any language without some "slack" (Spielraum) becomes robotic hence "non-human", metalic.
I got your point but TTS technology is getting better and better. For my ear, Mandarin sounds staccato-like. But it seems to be prejudice by myself because I found again lot of Asian vocabulary (including Mandarin) inside some other conlang. There it is was included due its phonetic shortness. And there it doesn't sound that staccato like I heard it first time.

Sepe (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-04 04:12:26

Spanish and Portuguese speakers have no trouble telling apart estas and estos, which are words in those languages, pronounced much like their Esperanto homographs (very much exactly the same in Spanish dialects which don’t drop syllable-final s; the meanings differ, though). It isn’t necessarily any harder to distinguish unstressed vowels than their stressed counterparts, unless, of course, your native language reduces the former, like English does. Learn not to do it in Esperanto, just like it isn’t done in lots of other living languages, and you should be fine.

Zvoc47 (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-06 17:57:42

On Duolingo, I'd mistake mi estas with ni estas when having to hear a sentence and that's really annoying.

Kirilo81 (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-06 20:12:17

Using Esperanto at home on a daily base I can only confirm that the low redundancy with the personal pronouns is one of the biggest issues I have in Esperanto. The Ido system in this regard is without doubt superior to the one in Esperanto.
I can only speculate that Z wanted to have them marked uniformly and at the same time short, and he - rightly from a 19th century perspective - thought first and before all about the written use of the language, where there is no problem.

I cannot confirm any problem with estA/I/Os. As soon as you learn that all vowels have to be pronounced clearly also in unstressed syllables there will be no trouble.

yyaann (Montri la profilon) 2016-junio-06 22:17:32

I find it interesting that several posts in this thread argued that because some natural languages are "doing just fine" with very little redundancy, then the argument must be invalid.

English, with its messy spelling system, is also doing just fine.
Japanese, with its Byzantine writing system, is also doing just fine.
Russian, with its complicated case system, is also doing just fine.
Chinese, with its sophisticated tone change system, is also doing just fine.

But most Esperantists would argue that these aspects of natural languages are unnecessary in an artificial language.

Zamenhof wanted his language to be learner-friendly. That's why he didn't think these aspects were necessary either.

So maybe it's not unreasonable to think that the current knowledge on the human mind's reliance on redundancy would have been taken into account had Esperanto been created today.

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