Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük (2012)

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/truth-beauty-and-volapuk/

by tintinnabula • 4 years ago

28 35 4 years ago

publicdomainreview.org

isaacfrond• 4 years ago

Hilarious: From the article

A charming young student of Grük

Once tried to acquire Volapük

But it sounded so bad

That her friends called her mad,

And she quit it in less than a wük.

DiogenesKynikos2• 4 years ago

It seems that the major constructed languages are heavily influenced by Indo-European languages, but not other language families.

I find they lack creativity, and stick to all sorts of complicated grammatical structures that the creators took for granted. If you're trying to create a simple language, you don't need verb tense, you don't need the plural form, you don't need articles, definiteness, ...

You'd be surprised how much grammatical complexity you can strip out of a language without losing the ability to express the same meanings.

rimliu• 4 years ago

I guess you can make words simpler by using more of them. Not sure if that's preferable.

DiogenesKynikos2• 4 years ago

Chinese lacks tense, articles, plural form, and a lot of things that are taken for granted by speakers of Indo-European languages, yet it's fairly terse.

It turns out that you can infer a lot from context. "Cat catch three mouse yesterday" is completely understandable, even though it's been stripped of tense, articles and plural form.

tokai• 4 years ago

You know of Tokipona? It might interest you.

adrian_b• 4 years ago

You are right about the lack of creativity in grammatical structures, but I assume that wherever you have said "you don't need X" you have meant that you should not express X in the irregular ways typical for IE languages, but you should express X in a simple and regular way.

For example, a verb can be just a name of the action, without having multiple forms to express tenses, but then, whenever the action does not have the default tense and aspect, e.g. a present and habitual action, you must accompany the verb with some adverbial particle expressing the intended tense and aspect of the action.

In a similar way, a noun can have the meaning of one or more entities of some kind, of unknown gender. Whenever you have to express that there are 1, 2, few, many or another definite number of entities, or when you want to mention the gender, you should have to add to the noun a numeral or adjective expressing that information.

So you need to express tense, mood, aspect, number, gender, definiteness and so on, but it is possible to do this in a simpler and more systematic way than in any natural language.

Creating the large set of adverbial/adjectival particles that are required to express all these meanings, in such a way that all of them will be short, preferably monosyllabic, while being easy to pronounce and to remember, and while not suggesting undesirable meanings to the speakers of the most widespread natural languages, requires considerable creativity.

Simplifying the grammar would also get rid of a lot of redundancy that exists in the natural languages. In a time when the largest quantities of information are communicated in written form, that redundancy is no longer useful.

Nevertheless, in the original spoken form of the languages, the redundancy was more useful than today. For example, when listening to a story, one might already forget some details about what was said a little while before, so repeating a part of that information in the form of various kinds of agreements between words was more important than when reading the same story, when you can look back at the previous text line, when something is confusing.

vintermann• 4 years ago

You mean "The constructed languages over a 100 years old"? There have been countless constructed languages that strived to be less European, more logical/minimalistic after the first two big ones.

What sunk Volapük, and nearly sunk Esperanto too, was the creators' inability to leave good enough alone. They kept reforming it, to the frustration of the people who had actually trusted them enough to learn it (not a small investment, despite the PR). Esperanto at least was community-driven enough to reject Zamenhof's later reforms.

poulpy123• 4 years ago

Well all "major" constructed languages were made in the end of the 19th century or the beginning of the 20th

qwerty4561272• 4 years ago

Why won't we invent a new major conlang given all the advancements in the linguistics, neuroscience and related areas? Perhaps now we could base it on some objectively optimal solutions rather than just the creator's judgement.

samatman• 4 years ago

Conlangs have tiny communities so it's hard to make definite statements about popularity.

Other than Esperanto, Interlingua, and some fictional languages, there's pretty much just Lojban and Toki Pona, neither of which are at all based on Indo-European languages.

zubi• 4 years ago

The article nicely points out that the decline of Volapük is connected to reform attempts that originated from within. It also mentions that Esperanto had similar issues and some people went ahead to create a derivative language Ido. What it doesn't mention is that why Esperanto continued evolving while Volapük fell apart. One reason usually attributed to its longevity is that Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, became aware of human tendency to "improve" or reform constructed languages and saw it's been happening to Volapük. So he simply added into the Esperanto manifesto that the rules of Esperanto are "untouchable". So, he stated, that if you attempt to change parts of the language, you cannot call it Esperanto any longer, in an attempt to prevent diversion from the common roots of it.

psychoslave• 4 years ago

I bet like you that this have been a strong factor, although other things like how its community structured into associations, organizing yearly gathering (when possible) and maybe the amount of available literature/songs certainly all plaid a role.

Also, what you point is not the whole light about Zamenhof and Esperanto reform attempts: at some point he did try to (reluctantly) bring some reform himself, but it was rejected by the community[1]. And this was only 6 years after Esperanto was released into the wild.

I can’t help but think about how tab was frozen into Makefiles "a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base"[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reformed_Esperanto [2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/20292/why...

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

Anyone interested in this would probably enjoy In the Land of Invented Languages[1]. It covers not only Volapük, but many other artificial languages, from Esperanto to Klingon.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Land-Invented-Languages-Adventures-Li...

rob74• 4 years ago

I admire anyone who sets out to invent a language... but of course, there are two categories: the "true" invented languages, which are intended to sound as "foreign" as possible to human ears (Klingon, Tolkien's languages, ...) and languages like Volapük and Esperanto, that were based on common roots of various languages in order to sound more familiar (at least to people who already speak a European language).

flenserboy• 4 years ago

Another book you may enjoy in this vein is Umberto Eco's The Search for the Perfect Language — https://www.amazon.com/Search-Perfect-Language-Making-Europe....

zenbit• 4 years ago

If you read German I highly recommend "Die Bienen und das Unsichtbare" by Clemens Setz.

virgil_disgr4ce• 4 years ago

I strongly second this recommendation. I loved this book.

rsfinn• 4 years ago

Written by the author of this article (Arika Okrent).

Koshkin• 4 years ago

I wish they also invented new alphabets. The need for diacritics (and letter groups) indicates a non-ideal choice of the alphabet. Vietnamese is a good example of that, closely followed by Polish and Finnish. (English, on the other hand, has no diacritics, and therefore the Latin alphabet seems like a perfect fit; Russian is another example of a good match.)

gnulinux2• 4 years ago

Very misleading, English doesn't have diacritics but it has copious amounts of digraphs like ch, sh, tch, eu, oe, oo etc... All of which may represent a different sound (being a Germanic language, English has a huge variety of vowels).

Some Latin-based alphabets such as Turkish and Eastern European specifically attempted to solve this problem (e.g. use [Ç] instead of [ch] in Turkish or [Š] instead of [sh] in Czech et al). You may not consider digraph usage a problem, but historically, for some reason, many alphabet designers went this route.

So, from this perspective it doesn't hold true English seems the most suitable for Latin alphabet.

I think quite the opposite, Latin alphabet completely lacks the resources English needs to present its vowels consistently.

avgcorrection• 4 years ago

English arguably has 14 distinct vowel sounds while the Latin script has six vowel. So it seems like a bad match.

Spanish has a few more letters and more accents. But the correspondence between spelling and pronounciation is amazing. And you always know which syllable to stress thanks to the acute accents on the vowels.

EDIT: Sibling comment mentioned Turkish. Turkish also has very regular spelling apparently (my impression and what someone has told me). And they apparently needed those extra letters in order to achieve that.

gnulinux2• 4 years ago

Depends on how you define regular really but Turkish alphabet also doesn't map 1-to-1 with IPA sounds we can transcribe Turkish language with. Of course, this very much depends on regional accent, but overall Turkish accents are pretty consistent that they present both /c/ and /k/ sounds yet they're both transcribed as [k] since it's obvious which sound should be produced for a native speaker (depends on the vowel). Similar anomaly exists for [g] where there are palatal and velar varities.

I think the concept of language fitting an alphabet is flawed. As I mentioned in my sibling comment, although GP considers digraph usage more natural than diacritics, many alphabet designers preferred the opposite. I.e. they turned English digraphs into their own diacritics. Does this make the modified alphabet more suitable for the language? I don't know if there is an objective way to answer that. If there is, let me know. Realistically, any of the worlds' languages would be usable with any of the alphabets.

projektfu• 4 years ago

New alphabets are a huge barrier to overcome in learning a language. I studied Japanese at the college level for two years and never could keep the kana straight. (Kanji are a lost cause for me as well). I forget Cyrillic pronunciations all the time and my head gets jammed by things like P meaning R. My lips have to move while reading. But in every Latin-script language I have worked on it has been a non-issue for this native English speaker.

It would take a while to learn to read in rot13. Now, add in that I am learning the language, and learning Spanish in rot13 would be hard for me.

chmod775• 4 years ago

English, on the other hand, has no diacritics, and therefore the Latin alphabet seems like a perfect fit.

English as commonly written using the Latin alphabet is objectively an awful fit, because one cannot tell how a word is pronounced from how it is written. One has to memorize the proper pronunciation of hundreds (if not thousands) of words beforehand in order to correctly read a text aloud.

Almost all languages have a few words like that (usually at least some loanwords), but English is quite extreme compared to languages like German, where pronunciation can be trivially inferred from spelling in almost all cases.

So even if written English doesn't have diacritics, it certainly could use some to give readers more information on how something is supposed to be pronounced.

ebzzry3• 4 years ago

Plej verŝajne, neniu el vi ĉi tie komprenos ĉi tiun mesaĝon rekte, sen tradukiloj. Tamen, por oni kiuj povas kompreni min, mi devas diri, ke Esperanto vivas tial, ke la lingvo estas permesita por kreskiĝi nature. Jes, mi jam pruvis, ke la lingvo povas esti uzita en teĥnikaj konceptoj. Vidu mian profilon.

klez2• 4 years ago

My very rusty Esperanto seems to still be able to get the gist of what you said (and I also understood the little I read of an article on your website).

My trouble is that whatever material I used to learn it (mainly Kurso de Esperanto and a course on lernu!) seemed to be completely detached from the way most people seem to actually write. Lots of suffixes I've never seen used in the learning material are abundantly used in the real world.

All of this to say, where do I go to learn a bit better?

elsjaako• 4 years ago

My feeling is that the courses teach you the grammar pretty well, but you have to read (with a dictionary ready) to get more of what you are asking for.

ebzzry3• 4 years ago

One of the best books for that are Esperanto Learning and Using the International Language by David Richardson and Complete Esperanto by Tim Owen.

demetrius• 4 years ago

Plej verŝajne, neniu el vi ĉi tie komprenos ĉi tiun mesaĝon

Vi ne estas tiom unika, kiom vi pensas ;)

You're not as unique as you think ;)

Jes, mi jam pruvis, ke la lingvo povas esti uzita en teĥnikaj konceptoj.

Ĉiuj lingvoj povas esti uzataj por teĥnikaĵoj, ĉu ne? (Nu, eble krom toki pona)

All languages can be used for technical things, aren't they? (Well, maybe except tiki pona)

ebzzry3• 4 years ago

As one may have already noted, that was precisely my goal. When I said no one, I meant it in the metaphorical sense. It’s not actually about uniqueness, but more of being less in numbers.

tragomaskhalos• 4 years ago

In Bodmer's "The Loom of Language", a fabulously arch smorgasbord of linguistic delicacies, his withering analysis of Volapuk concludes that what really did for the language was the decision to use it exclusively in what turned out to be its last international conference. This brought all its flaws and difficulties into sharp relief, whence the schisms began.

Bodmer is not much kinder towards Esperanto, deeming it inferior to Peano's Latine Sine Flexione ("Latin without inflections"), for which he claims "an educated person can read it quite easily", a statement that reveals as much as any other that he was writing in the '40s. The book is full of little bon mots like this, I'm gutted that I've lost my copy.

Trüth, Beaüty, and Volapük (2012)

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