A brief history of Esperanto, the language intimately tied to the common destiny of the working class.
Leizer Ludwik Zamenhof (1859–1917) created Esperanto to be a global second language. A Lithuanian Jew, Zamenhof grew up under Russian occupation and amid the tensions between Jews, Catholic Poles, Orthodox Russians, and Protestant Germans. He identified miscommunication as the main cause of this trouble.
First, Zamenhof tried to create a standardized Yiddish to unify Jews across the Russian Empire. In the end, he abandoned it in favor of a universal language, whose name means “the hoping one.”
Underlying this project was Zamenhof’s interna ideo, the belief that the language did not represent an end in itself but a step toward world peace and understanding.
He published his Fundamento de Esperanto in 1905, striving to maximize simplicity, efficiency, and elegance. The grammar has just sixteen rules, the spelling is phonetic, the nouns are genderless, and the verbs are regular and uninflected. He tested and expanded it by translating the Bible, Shakespeare, Moliere, and Goethe.
Esperanto shares some features with Yiddish and Ladino, Jewish lingua francas that had once helped erase borders. Some studies identify a Yiddish influence, though Zamenhof never mentioned one.
Esperanto’s vocabulary poses a problem for twenty-first century internationalists, because it comes solely from European languages. Aficionados have invented other constructed languages (conlangs), like Lingwa de Planeta, that include non-European words, but Esperanto continues to dominate the field.
Other conlangs like Ido, Interlingue, and Interlingua have remained tiny but resilient, but only Esperanto has truly stood the test of time. Today, just under one million people know a little of the language, and ten million have studied it. It has a stable but de-territorialized speech community.
The League of Nations supported the idea of an auxiliary language, and in 1954 UNESCO gave the Universala Esperanto-Asocio (UEA) “consultative status.” Various Protestant and Catholic denominations have tolerated the use of Esperanto as a liturgical language. The founder of the Baha’i Faith supported the idea of a conlang; some of its followers favor Esperanto while others prefer Interlingua.
Critics call Esperanto artificial and acultural. But the distinction between natural and artificial is hard to maintain in the case of languages. Pidgins are also “artificial,” arising at an identifiable time and place, but many evolve into creoles, indisputably natural languages. Many states standardize and legislate their official languages. Language reformers invented much of the phonology, morphology, grammar, and vocabulary of modern Chinese. And writers often shape and reshape their mother tongues, as a glance at Shakespeare’s neologisms — foul-mouthed, swagger, bedazzle — demonstrates. If words adjudged possible can become actual words, possible languages can become actual languages.
Further, Esperanto does not lack culture. Some two thousand denaskuloj, or native speakers, have been raised in it, thus creolizing it. More than one hundred periodicals appear in it, and there are thirty thousand Esperanto books and several full-length feature films.
Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language based on a mix of English, German, French, and Spanish. It has just 16 rules and each letter has only one pronunciation. It was created in 1887 by the Polish doctor L. L. Zamenhof. – WTF Fun Facts
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto
As I may have implied here sometimes, I’m rather lukewarm towards International Auxiliary Language projects, for practical and political reasons. However, that doesn’t mean that I cannot be interested by some of them in a purely linguistic and/or aesthetic angle.
On my French forum L’Atelier Philologique, I heard some years ago of the Kotava language, an a priori IAL launched in the 90′s by Staren Fetcey (Canadian linguist). It has some interesting features:
A system of agreement similar to noun class/gender but triggered only by the phonetic form of the end of nouns
7 descriptive affixes (small, big, medium, good, bad, excessive, insufficient) applicable to every open word class
Paradigmatic attitudinals and evidentials
It has some things I don’t like too, like a personal conjugation, allomorphs for the modal prefixes, no clearly defined phonotactics and an a priori logic pushed a bit too far sometimes (‘mother’ is gadikya).
Despite a relatively high volume of activity (40 translated novels and short stories), I have remarked that it is virtually unknown in anglophone corners of conlanging; the Wikipedia page about it was even deleted once for lack of notoriety. Several reasons for this: the official forum is closed to simple visitors and almost all the material is in French, with the consequence that activity is restricted to Canada, Western Europe and Western Africa.
But this state of affairs comes to an end, as there is now a translation of the official grammar in English, to which I had a hand. I hope it can foster a bit of interest among you. Let the critics flow!
An online dictionary (Ravlemak) exists, but only the French database is updated for the time being.
(Yes, there are certainly languages mistakes, as we haven’t had a native reader. Feel free to message theme –or me– for any errors)
So I was looking my BBS and thinking about expanded themes to include some language support for non English users. I can't say I'm great at anything but English myself but I remembered my Esperanto days and promptly looked into it. Sadly the same problems that plagued Esperanto over a hundred years ago still do starting with needing non standard characters or a way to stand in for them.
I remembered Ido, well and Novial as well and went back to see what made the children of Esperanto "improved." For starters, and I didn't get past Ido, It uses the "standard" keyboard characters. So the base latin set will cover all your bases with no need for stand-in. It also dropped number agreement with adjectives. So - the blue dog isn't the blues dogs in Ido. or La blua hundo to plural is la blua hundoi. Oh yeah, they don't use j to make plural but an i. So, little changes from it's Esperanto roots and this too is nice as it keeps the language somewhat mutually intelligible. An Esperantist and an Idist should be able to follow each other with minimal effort. Ido is gender neutral as well if that's a concern something I've seen Esperanto tarred for.
Now the down side. When Esperanto schemed and Ido was born it took many of the power users but the base users of Esperanto stayed loyal to the original. This means that in our age there are just orders of magnitude more Esperantists than Ido users though that number seems to be improving.
The thing with Auxiliary conlang people seems to be wild infighting in the hunt for the "perfect." I'm all for innovation where it makes sense but this is like charging a battery to 100% when 80% would cover most all of your needs. There's so much pedantic petty nonsense in this community of language users that it's idiotic. Sort of like Leftist politics, 80% of them would have some irredeemable issue with the messiah, may he come swiftly and soon.
For the BBS it's going to be Ido, it does work better than Esperanto in a functional way, it's just as easy to learn, and it's close enough to be of usefulness just after learning a natural language. I still think it would be a fun grade-school 2nd language that you graduate out of. Something 4-6th graders might get some light exposure to then fall into a natural language for 7-12th grade. And as most people read it rather than speak it it's perfect for the BBS scene.
From Wikipedia
Ido (/ˈiːdoʊ/) is a constructed language derived from Reformed Esperanto, and similarly designed with the goal of being a universal second language for people of diverse backgrounds. To function as an effective international auxiliary language, Ido was specifically designed to be grammatically, orthographically, and lexicographically regular (and, above all, easy to learn and use). It is the most successful of the many Esperanto derivatives, called Esperantidoj.
I've had this idea for an auxlang, been working on it on and off. The guide is only half-done. But the idea is to lean into the actual problem of facilitating communication between actual speakers of different, actual languages. The current atemps always strike me as missing the point, prioritizing weird things, like recreating Indo-European, or coining words arbitrarily, or ripping them whole form from this or that language without consideration for cognates. And every attempt I've seen at making a universal phonology has been either too limited (Toki Pona), or too difficult (Esperanto).
What matters in a language is not that all the sounds can be pronounced to type, but that all the sound distinctions can be maintained, such that any listener understand what word you're trying to say. And again, what's important is that actual people can make these distinctions, which means multilingualism should be taken into account. Whether a sound distinction is common or rare among languages is irrelevant, what matters is how many people can make it. And the proliferation of European and Semitic languages means in practice many people around the world can make more distinctions than you'd otherwise expect. (Even in Japan, these days.)
And as far as vocabulary, people are going to be learning words they don't know either way. If the vocabulary is truly widely distributed in its cognates, then what good does it do someone to recognize 5% of the words if the other 95% are completely alien? Wouldn't it be better to construct words so they are as cognate as possible for as many speakers as possible? This would mean vocabulary that isn't plucks from any one language, but constructed to be proximate to the major language families, seeking to make the words similar enough to be recognizable to disparate languages, and thus easier to remember. (Think how Anglophones frequently learn "taberu" = "eat" from the similar sound to "table".)
The same applies to grammar: use the information people already have! We keep thinking about ease of learning in terms of an abstracted learner who knows nothing, but that person doesn't exist. Everyone comes to the table with preexisting language knowledge. Simplifying a grammar down to almost nothing undermines the reason we have complex grammar in the first place: compactness, clarity, and redundancy! Those are important for a language to actually be enjoyable to use, once you've learned it. The trouble is getting to fluency, but that is less a question of language complexity as it is of added complexity. If a language had an identical vocabular and grammar to yours, but all the sounds were changed, it would be pretty quick to learn. ("-lin" = "-ing" & "taku" = "jump" => "takulin" = "jumping".) The point here is that existing common grammatical strategies across major languages are an asset we should lean on when constructing the grammar of an auxlang, to minimize the learning curve while maximizing the practical usefulness of the auxlang as an actual everyday language.
So what does this look like in practice?
Sound Inventory: a, e, i, o, u, m, n, p, b, t, d, k, g, s, c, l, y, w
The idealized pronunciations are thus, but they could be anything else similar: [a], [e], [i], [o], [u], [m], [n/ŋ], [pʰ], [b], [tʰ], [d], [kʰ], [g], [s], [tʃ], [l], [j], [w]
While [a, i, u] is more universal, since almost all languages have at least a 3-way distinction, the vast majority of humans speak at least one language that makes at least a 5-way distinction, which means in practice it is the maximal set of easy distinctions for the vast majority of humanity (which is what we're going for, not the "most theoretically universal").
The stops make a distinction between 3 places of articulation, and 2 qualities. Don't let the letters fool you, this is not IPA. p/b could just as easily be distinguished with [p/b] as with [pʰ/p]. What matters is that one is sharp and the other isn't, and many languages have ways to distinguish this, including between stops and fricatives ([f/b]). You need to scour the earth for small languages to find cases where this can't be done, and most of those people speak a trade or imperial language anyway. Similarly with the m/n distinction, one is a labial nasal, the other a non-labial nasal, and assimilation is encouraged. The s/c distinction is between a forward fricative, and a sharper, retracted fricative, which means any distinction matching that would work: [s/ʃ], [s/ts], [ʃ/tʃ], etc. The lone l here is all liquids and flaps, since many, many languages have at least one, but it's rarer to make distinctions among them.
With this set of distinctions, the Semitic languages, the Indo-European languages, most every other African language, the Sino-Tibetan languages, most Dravidian languages, and many others besides, can be mapped onto this sound-set. It's only with corner-cases like Japanese that it gets difficult, lacking an si/ci distinction, though with the increase in loan-words I suspect those most interested in learning an auxlang would be able to make it.
Vocabulary:
Words are constructed to be as similar to as many languages as possible, with the most common languages weighted more. To make the process easier, known proto-languages are included, with the assumption that their roots represent cognates to a wide range of modern languages. For example: "time" = "simpo," from "tempus," "tiempo," "time," "shí," and "sa'at." "Female" = "wani," from PIE "gwē̆nā," Sanskrit "janī," Mandarin "nǚ," English "woman," and Malay "wanita." The words are not simple adoptions of any one word, but constructed false cognates of many words from unrelated languages with similar meanings to the target word. (Note: I've found this hardest with the Sino-Tibetan languages. Finding words in the proto-lang is hard, and the modern languages have few false cognates with other languages, and such short words that it's difficult to fudge it. As a result I've found that I've occasionally had to overweight a word for Mandarin to ensure the dictionary isn't biased against Sino-Tibetan speakers.)
Grammar:
The word order is head-initial SVO, the obvious choice that most auxlangs use. SVO is about as common as SOV, and importantly it's used primarily or secondarily by most major languages, such as most modern Indo-European languages under some circumstances, the Sino-Tibetan languages, and others. Many SOV languages are also marked, which makes speakers more comfortable with alternate word orders than analytic speakers. This brings up a question: to mark, or not to mark? Marking is useful, but cumbersome. The choice of SVO makes an analytic grammar easier, which is also easier to learn.
However, with all the different ways people speak, and with people constructing complex sentences in a second language, parsing errors for listeners will be common. Thus the grammar is optionally marking, with particles/prepositions. Another way to say this is that the language is highly pro-drop, like informal Japanese. This gives speakers a tool set to clarify their meaning, in a way they are likely familiar with, without burdening them with unnecessary syllables for obvious sentences. (And of course there's no grammatical gender!) This pro-drop attitude goes even farther with noun/adjective/verb distinctions, and so speakers usually should only distinguish between them in how they're used in the sentence. Thus, a word can be used as a noun, adjective, or verb, without changing or marking it.
One of the most common language features in real languages that is rarely used or used well in constructed languages, especially auxlangs, is reduplication. Using reduplication to strengthen or multiply the meaning of a word is possibly the single most intuitive things humans do with language, and thus emphatic and plural reduplication are included. Additionally, many languages allow for ditransitivity under at least some circumstances, with the indirect object coming before the direct object. Even in marked languages the indirect object tends to come first (like in many Japanese sentences). English, Malay, and Mandarin all do this, and object pronouns are similarly ordered before verbs in Romance languages. So it makes sense to make use of that pre-existing habit for this language: "She drove home the child" and "He read me the book" would be valid sentences.
At this point those in the know might notice this is sounding a lot like Malay/Indonesian, and that's not a coincidence. Malay developed as a lingua franca because of its effectiveness as a lingua franca, not as an imperial language. It's not even the native language of the dominant ethnic group in Indonesia! So it makes sense that it already possesses many of the features a modern lingua franca (i.e. an auxlang) would need. (It's ease of learning and use is why I love it so much.)
Example: "lisen-mundia dandán kala nagión, dan kayen tomi iki." = "Lisen-Mundia (the world-language) will unite all nations, and make us one."
There are other things to think about of course, like auxiliary verbs, subordinate clauses, number, etc. (I created a hybrid milliard system: it goes "thousand, million, milliard," but then "trillion, quadrillion, etc." afterward, since those numbers are rare anyway--"milliard" would just seem like a funny word for "billion" to the non-milliard counters). But it gets the idea across. I think an auxlang like this is what would be needed if it were to ever compete with the well-established Esperanto, let alone exceed it. I've yet to see an auxlang that is both enjoyable to learn, and enjoyable to use. Usually one is sacrificed for the other, if either is actually achieved at all. (Toki Pona is fun, in the way a toy is fun, but the need to construct huge strings of words for every concept, with many combinations overlapping, is not fun. Why would I want to express myself in a language that takes 10 syllables to say what other languages can say in 3-4? An ideal auxlang should be a language of art and science and politics, not a toy, and Toki Pona was never intended to be more than a fun thought-experiment anyway.)
