The Name Game

Names are a nuisance, especially for auxlangers. Consider the following:

Petrus Peter Pietro Pedro Pierre Pyotr

What do they have in common? They all begin with "p" and have an "r" further on. If we increase the level of abstraction, we can add more. But from a practical standpoint, what do you call someone whose name derives from Greek Petros?

Natlangs have trouble with this too, and there is no single answer. Do you translate the name—"Pedro" in Spanish, "Pyotr" in Russian, and so on—or simply reproduce the original? The original is more likely most of the time, but it may create problems: How do you write (or pronounce) "Shakespeare" in Esperanto, for example? Do you write it as in English, with perhaps the pronunciation in parentheses? And which pronunciation? The British themselves don't pronounce the "r," at least not in the Esperanto fashion, yet Ŝekspiro is common enough. In Inlis I'd use Shekspia, I suppose.

Anyway, the modern, somewhat smug answer seems to be, "Just use the original form."

How clever!

How ignorant!

What if the original form is obscure or problematic? Do we use "India" or "Bharat," for example? "Bharat" is well-known in its own area, but among the target demographic so is "India" (or anyway "Indi-"), and without the troubling "bh-" sequence. It's good to honor the local name and pronunciation, but it's only ethically required, I think, if we mean to replace the original: if the goal is to supplant the languages of India, we may as well retain "Bharat" as an epitaph. But if we work to leave the original languages in place, it's not so pressing.

You can also see this in the Bible. Zamenhof retained more Hebraic forms a lot of the time. Thus "Isaiah" (a wonderfully variable name anyway) becomes "Jesaja," and "Judah" becomes "Jehuda." (Yes, I know: this assumes an English standpoint. Guess what language we're using right now.) And then there's the matter of YHWH, however you want to pronounce it.

About all you can do is try to find a rule or guideline you can follow consistently. I'll give an example next time.

Inlis: Grammatical Overview

[I don't know what I was thinking. Though this is only an overview, it's still hard to fit in enough detail to justify the title. I ought to list the personal pronouns, verbs, and such, but that would require a post on individual features. I may get to that eventually, but I need to resume the other topics I had already begun. I'll limit myself to a post or so per month on Inlis.]

There have been a lot of changes since I first unveiled Inlis, and more changes lie ahead. Unfortunately I don't have time to just sit down and elaborate the system properly, and there have been long stretches of inactivity.

It's a pity Interglossa isn't better known; I could explain Inlis in terms of Interglossa both quickly and easily. (No, Glosa isn't close enough to Interglossa for this: Inlis is closer to Interglossa than Glosa is.)

To begin with: no flexions. Once you learn a word, you're done with it. Ia ("ear") never becomes *ias; bi never becomes am, was, etc. (though these forms do exist: "arm," "wasp").

Like Interglossa, Inlis has functional classes for its words, though the divisions are different. I've combined "amplifiers" and "substantives" as "general words," which can function as modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) and noun phrase cores (nouns as such), but never as verbs. Prepositions as such are few and function only as prepositions and modifiers. Verbs are also restricted and have no other function.

Basic Structure
One of the things that bothered me about Interglossa, despite Hogben's criticism of Latino Sine Flexione's lack of proper syntactic markers, is that word functions were largely unmarked, making parsing unnecessarily difficult. So in Inlis, I've built in some markers. They constitute a few of the major divergences from Interglossa.

Noun phrases are marked in the standard language. Hogben does this too: Inlis da is almost the same as IG u(n), though it isn't always singular. Da is not a definite article! It just marks the beginning of a noun phrase. The end of a noun phrase is marked by a preposition, a verb, or some other element that just won't occur in a noun phrase, including the end of the sentence. Am I rigorous about this? No. Making the system completely self-parsing would be a pain for everyone. I want something that will seem fairly natural and simplify the parse.

Pronouns and names are not marked, so a sequence such as da mi is incomplete: it begins a possessive, such as da mi buk ("my book"). Similarly, da Frans gavan ("the French government") and da Laplas transfom ("(the) Laplace transform").

(Yes, adjectives precede nouns, and I prefer to render names phonemically. Realistically, we'll see names written out as in English with pronunciation in parentheses. That also means "Moscow (Moskau)" instead of "Moskva." Sorry, Dmitry.)

Verb phrases are marked by verbs. (Who knew?) As in IG, there aren't many real verbs, though they produce predictable (non-idiomatic) phrasal verbs. These are always verbs, too: unlike IG verboids, they are never nouns or modifiers. They do have predictable corresponding general words: bi has bien, hav has havin, and so on. Most verbs have two related meanings, one literal (triggered by a following noun phrase) and one more figurative (followed by one or more general words not preceded by da or its equivalent). Thus

Mi mek da haus I make/build a/the house.
Mi mek klin da haus I clean (make clean) a/the house.

Next we'll look at the name game in auxlanging.

Levels of maturity

I'm talking about linguistic maturity, here. Auxlang users may sit around all day wearing pajamas and picking their nose for all I care. I'm trying to gauge reasonable literary projects for the better-known auxlangs and their learners. Essentially, the breakdown will be something like this:

New user/auxlang: anecdotes, proverbs, etc. (a paragraph or so)

Stable beginner (basic grammar/vocabulary, nothing fancy): flash fiction (a page or two)

Intermediate (moving beyond basics into optional gimmicks): short stories and novellas (about 10-100 pages; may include abbreviated novels)

Mature (advanced gimmicks generally well established: odd word order, etc.): novels without major linguistic complications (not Tom Sawyer, for example)

Advanced (can handle most anything)

Now let's get controversial:

Esperanto: Mature to advanced. Active users (verkistoj) are often "mature."

Ido: Intermediate to mature. Primary problem is slow lexical growth--not a linguistic failing but a flaw in Idist culture. Theoretically resolvable.

Occidental: Intermediate. This is a user-base problem; Occ is capable of advanced usage, but it lacks coherency and user base.

Interlingua: Mature to advanced. The Latin/Romance schism is a problem, but it can also be harnessed for literary purposes.

Lingua Franca Nova: Intermediate at best. Syntactic issues and user-base problems.

Lingwa de Planeta: Stable beginner (more or less) working toward intermediate status.

Sambahsa: Anomalous; the language itself is probably advanced, but the user base (apart from Dr. Olivier Simon himself) is both small and ill-equipped. This puts it on a par with some revival projects, such as Idiom Neutral, but with a better corpus.

So if you're interested in producing novels (original or translated), your best bets are Esperanto and Interlingua, though Ido and perhaps Occidental are also worth considering. If you'd rather pioneer with shorter works, try one of the less mature auxlangs.